THE TRAUMA OF THE BREAKDOWN OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN STATE AND ITS IMPACT ON OUR ETHICAL STANDARDS

ABOUT

The 2-hour workshop will look at the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma and in particular, explore object relations theory and the impact of trauma on the mind. Sue Levy will focus on trauma as an attack on attachment, the breakdown of symbolic function, and superego impairment and this will be understood in the overall context of the Perversion of Loss.

Sue Levy is a South African Training Analyst living and working in Johannesburg. She has a specialist background in Trauma. She worked in London for 12 years, first at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and then at Chelsea Westminster Hospital. She was an external lecturer on Trauma at the Tavistock Clinic in London and is the co-editor with Alessandra Lemma of the text The Perversion of Loss: Psychoanalytical Reflections on Trauma.

In South Africa, she heads up the SAPA (South African Psychoanalytical Association) Ububele Low Fee Clinic based at UBUBELE a Johannesburg-based African Psychotherapy Centre. She teaches and supervises Psychoanalysis and also Applied Psychoanalysis. She is actively engaged in the work of transformation in SAPA, in particular in relation to race and racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa.