UC Berkeley

In contemporary South Africa, spatial segregation, racism, and economic exclusion remain trenchant features of everyday life twenty-five years after the end of apartheid. Based on twenty months of ethnographic research in the township of Khayelitsha and Cape Town more broadly, this dissertation tracks different post-apartheid approaches to mental health care, which attempt to address these ongoing legacies. Through extensive fieldwork at a community-based organization that provides therapeutic support in isiXhosa, I argue that therapeutic practices by black South Africans de-stabilize and experiment with the normative confines of the psychotherapeutic encounter. Rather than treat individual psyches, therapists’ practices are oriented toward the relational space between generations, a political therapeutic driven by the affective force of the therapists’ own history of struggle toward a different future for black youth, who continue to be marked by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid (what I call “generational care” throughout the dissertation). Second, I argue that normative psychology continues to assume a nuclear family configuration as the norm against which all pathology is judged and therapeutic interventions practiced. I suggest this is particularly so for theories of attachment and infant development, which assume that only a particular configuration of the family—biological parents who unconditionally care for a child in the same physical space as them—is productive of “stable” subjects later in life. By following the history of psychiatry in South Africa, narratives of care from mental health professionals working on the Cape Flats, as well as policy and research agendas, I track how discourses of “cultural difference” evade processes of racialization and consequential racisms in normative psychological theories and interventions. I argue that different practical and conceptual therapeutic experiments are necessary, ones that imagine forms of care adequate to the lived afterlives of the settler-colonial project, and particularly ones for those related outside the nuclear family form.