Turi: Today. We’re thrilled to be talking. Omar Kholeif is a friend of mine and has just recently curated a show at the shutter art foundation and the UAE. It’s actually where he’s the director of collections and the senior curator that, but the show that he, um, that he’s just put on was called art in the age of anxiety.
Um, beautiful book produced on the back end of the exhibition, which I’ll link to in the show notes. But I was struck by this idea that we live in an age of anxiety. It talks to a notion that I adore, which is that we live in what William Reddy called emotional regimes, that history isn’t charted only through economics or politics. We don’t just live in the Elizabethan age or the age of the great depression, um, uh, economic depression. We live in, we live in emotional epox too. Um, and, um, I like that obviously, because as we continue to look at where our opinions come from, Um, this idea that we have to think of those opinions also as the children of a particular time, animated by particular feelings and concerns, um, uh, helps us understand what opinions are made of.
So that on the one hand, and on the other hand, I perhaps, because we’ve been locked down pretty much all of us for a year now, I was also struck by the idea that anxiety should. The dominant note of our time. So that’s why I’ve asked Omar to join us, to help us work through some of these ideas. Omar, thanks so much for being with us.
Omar: It’s lovely to be here, but I’m very disappointed. I must say, because you’ve articulated almost verbatim. The first few things I was going to say.
Turi: We’re going to have to disagree. Um, very fast then we’ll come up with something new. Um, oh my let’s let’s let’s kick off though. But by, by trying to ask what this thing is, this idea of an age, can we define an age?
Is there a purpose in defining this notion of an age of whatever it may be, whether it’s anxiety or, um, or, or anything.
Omar: when you were introducing the session, you made a very interesting point that is actually quite controversial, which is that, what does it mean to think of an age as opposed to, uh, in relation to, uh, colonialism or imperialism or, uh, the notion of a reign, but actually to think of it from an emotional perspective, which is actually like to actually say a biological thing, the idea of a feeling and.
The concept of an age, you know, I’m a historian. And the way that we look at look at the world is it’s supposed to be old, neat chunks. But the reality of course, is that that is not the case. And an age essentially is something that began with an event and ended with one. But as we all know, The notion of an age has shifted so much since we’ve been alive.
So to go from the ice age, which is that in a kind of environmental thing that lasted for thousands of years, which is in the realm of the scientific. To the stone age, the iron age, pre-history these notions that are actually really fueled by the notion of economic progress. Then into things such as the Victorian age, the first world war, the second world war. Uh, these are things that actually use what I call memory crevices, which are kind of ruptures or pieces of. In memory to try and create solidarity around a moment in history. So for example, the great depression can be used as a moment to induce a feeling that then creates a sense of pride around those who survived that, that horrible epoch, but the re, but the reason I think that we talk about ages is four because of one purpose.
And it’s called the age of enlightenment, which is my least favorite age, because. That is, uh, an epistemic virus. Eurocentric notion of what later was to become the modern age. And it argued for rationality. It argued that for, for, not for reason, but for rationality and rationality is literally the exact opposite.
Well, the world that we live in today, which is a world that is fueled by heightened emotion, by the concept of anxiety in all of its forms and manifestations, the way that we consume and engagement of the world. About rationality, but yet we are expected in the workplace, whether it’s remote or not, wherever you are in a situation where you’re executing or operating with in the field of governance or legality to exercise.
Rationality. And if you don’t, you’re seen as what Freud once called his, the, the history hysterical, uh, subject and which was used in the late 19th century as a mechanism, by which to put down, for example, women. People of color and those from socioeconomic backgrounds that didn’t fit into the neat fold of the landed Gentry. So I’m very against the concept of, um, the way ages have been historically defined that I’m really for this new idea that actually we, as citizens should take back. This idea of how we construct the age, not the historians, but actually we collectively create almost a manifesto about what the age of now looks and feels like and feels like is the kind of pivotal world word here.
Turi: But of course, for an age to exist, it needs to exist for lots of people. I’m struggling. The by, um, another kind of age, which is literally about age. We talk about generations. We talk about baby boomers and gen Xers and millennials and gen Z ads. Well on the assumption that there’s a lived experience, that’s shared by a large group of people and it makes sense to bundle them together into that lived experience so that we’re talking in terms of generations, but now too. And when you describe the age of anxiety, the point has to be surely that it is a dominant, emotional note felt by lots of people. So how do you go about figuring that out? How do you go about figuring it out and testing up those ideas and also articulate.
Omar: I basically basically concept or thinking of an age of emotion or a time of emotion is really about de territorializing it from any specific place. Because that I think is, uh, is, is, is not reflective of the fact that we’re all interconnected at this particular point. And I think the way that, uh, one of the things that I’m working on now as a kind of manifesto for the age of anxiety, what, what are its constituents. And what, what are the rules, uh, that define or, or make up this period? The different trends in emotional age and, uh, one that is demarcated by simply a historical event or simply, uh, uh, A political event or a social event is that it actually takes into account the whole physical body of the individual.
And it considers this concept of feeling emotional effect, which is actually why I was interested to talk to you because I felt that when we talk about opinion and the fact that in an age. Of the digital that none of our opinions are really our own because they’re constantly coming through for so many fields of vision that actually it’s true that perhaps intellectually, we may be. Seduced into thinking that we know more than that, then we know, or engaging in certain things that we don’t ness or beliefs that we don’t necessarily understand, but you cannot deny the Xpress part of an emotion. And what does it mean when an emotion ripples across geographies and expanses, and lots of people start to feel the same way and then start sharing those emotions.
Turi: Okay. So your conjecture here is that at some point with the arrival of the platforms and the proliferation. New cough people have called fake news. We enter into a new kind of epoch, which is defined by emotion. An example of this would be the black lives matter movement, which you diverticulum you’d suggest is qualitatively different from previous protest movements we’ve seen in the past, including for example, the Arab spring, because the visuals. And the emotions around it are of a different kind of quality. Is that right? So help me understand what is different, say between the black lives matter protest movement and, um, yeah, I was praying on the Arab spring.
Omar: I mean, I’m an Egyptian, I was there in the first for 18. I mean I’m in Egypt when I was in her square during the first 18 days of the Egyptian revolution, my grandfather actually passed away in those first 18 days in the square, uh, after an event happened there. And it was an incredibly important visual moment in terms of thinking about the capacity potentially for social media to create. A platform that could elicit change. But my, my, the way that I have kind of lived that in, in my writing is that there was a very much a kind of flattening of, of, of that historical moment in that there was very little expression of the singular individual, the singular voice speaking out.
Well, for example, and also beyond that, those ones. Those were, uh, protests that were about claiming space, public space against injustice, but there was no plan or let’s call it manifesto. That they wanted to necessarily arrive to because it was such a fragmented the group without a mission. So black lives matter obviously existed many years before for the death of George Floyd during the pandemic. And what I think is very different is here the singular act. Let it be known that, you know, I lived in south Los Angeles at a time when the Rodney king events happened and, and this is something that I’ve watched and we’ve all watched black bodies be. Destroyed and those I’ll be persecuted, but here an image of a single beat was able to foster a visual culture that cut through and across every class of being so rapidly that you wake up one morning and you don’t even know.
I didn’t even know about George Floyd’s deffer, who you was. Oh, I see. As a black squares on Instagrams and peoples the NA um, names change too in solidarity with black life. And then what that then propelled was. Also a mobilization movement because the numbers are also a lot more in terms of the social media penetration that exists now from in those 10 years, it’s much, it’s a much larger one. It’s a much more visual one. Think about Twitter versus Instagram. Instagram is. Is a visual medium pitcher was originally about 140 characters was what it was originally intended to be, uh, a kind of affordable platform. So what we’re seeing is a, a different kind of visuality emerge that is intended to spur mass emotional reaction so much so that even in the midst of a global pandemic that had killed all of these hundreds of thousands of lives.
At that point, it was creating protests in the streets. In countries all over the world, of course, the U S being the predominant, uh, exemplary in that case, but literally doing to the state Capitol and re carving and renaming streets and lobbying in a time when, you know, people should say, well, we need to focus on the pandemic now and here that the thing was you have made us consider the notion of a life. Essentially, I mean, essentially the Arab spring was, uh, uh, uh, uh, catalytic. Series of events that were not interconnected that were not done in con in consortium of each other. It was literally a ripple fire. And there was no feeling in so much as it was not about an individual life or the notion of a life.
Yeah. Well, the death of George Floyd is representative of, is that a black. Uh, black life matters. It is about literally thinking about being embodiment of what it means to be oppressed, what it means to be a person that has feelings that might have mental illnesses that might have been on drugs that might have had all sorts of things, but you should not persecute that person, what you did was unjust. And so that’s the way it is manifested is actually through a public trial. That has folded out from social media into a much broader mainstream media where we’re actually seeing what is a cultural shift whereby you know, those who murdered Rodney king were not persecuted. We will see what happens now, but the idea is that the people who will be, will be persecuted and that will continue to be the case. Now, of course, the difference. And the problematic of that example is the Arab uprisings that began late 2010. You know, those still are formerly colonized countries that are complicated in their media structures. You know, there was a day when Mubarak switched off the internet, as it were. This is happening in the west.
This is happening in the free world. Uh, this is happening in the land of the Freeman and the home of the brave, where there is a first amendment, right. To speak out. So that’s where it becomes quite difficult. But what is interesting is that you can hear a single human being is used to anchor. The notion of identity in and of itself is it becomes about race. It becomes about what a kind of, what does a certain kind of man of a certain kind of heightened color of his can make you feel? Watching footage of a person in a shop through video cam footage acting unusually. How does that make you feel? I mean, I’ve never seen so much body cam footage in my life.
What does it mean to see a man? Any man kneeling on someone’s name? And to see that expression on their face, circulate in that manner. And it’s a really much, it’s, it’s almost as if the Arabs was like a wide shot and this is a closeup. And when you get to the closeup, as we know in cinema, that’s when the true effective moment happens between the audience and the subject. Cause the gaze becomes, you know, in, in a psychoanalytic term to en to invoke someone like Laura Mullen. That’s when the emotional transference happens, that recognition of self and the other. So that’s how I would differentiate them. Great.
Turi: Um, Omar you’ve described this age of anxiety. You’ve described this age as one of anxiety. How do you see that anxiety? Where do you see it?
Omar: Well, I think that. To be quite Frank. I believe that the age of anxiety is essentially code for an age of mental instability in mental illness of a sort in that our antiquated brains. We’re not crafted to deal with the sheer visual reality pressures and. Frameworks of existence are here now. And what that creates is in some people, it can manifest as true mental disorders from, you know, I had this, uh, qualified psychiatric disorder, but there is a broader sense of actually what, uh, political scientists will Davis cold, which is a constant feeling that we are all living in the nervous.
And he begins will Davis wrote this book called nervous states a few years ago now. And he began it with an anecdote that I remember very clearly, which actually I should pay tribute to him in this moment, in that he talks about this moment, when this let’s call him B list, pop star polymers was in Selfridges and treated that there was a bomb. Attack on salvages. They went on Twitter, it went quite wild. People were going manic and crazy in the shop. A part of the street was very quickly shut down and it spread to news media. And in that introduction and how I remembered myself having heard that and thinking, oh gosh, I really know. I got really anxious, not because I feared there was a bomb because I didn’t care about that.
My anxiety was, yeah. That it would be someone of a Muslim name or an Arab name because I would then be racially profiled in the street. And then I would be afraid to leave my house. And so, but what he’s kind of positing there, is that the way. The information flows so quickly and it links back to the concept of being allowed to spread fake can use and not actually be kind of held up for it. You know, that person is still exists and there’s not been, uh, I don’t know, canceled as it were, um, is that we ingest so much information. And with that, we are so much aware of the different consequences, a singular. Can create for us. And that mix has all feel very unstable all the time. And really for me, the age of anxiety begins from this idea of thinking of a life where every opinion at every decision is formed frou. What is governed by, from a headline in an RSS feed.
It’s the fact that we are emotionally affected by these things. We start to fear all of these little fragments of information. If we think of, in my case, my grandparents generation, who are no longer alive. In our lifetime. It is a known fact that according, well, this is a known fact that could be me using a Facebook reference. Right. But according to various datasets, we in our generation from generation Z, Y and X are potentially, if we are. Like you and me, people who spend eight to 12 hours on our phone a day, or on our laptop consuming three times as much visual and written data, then they would have consumed in their lifetimes in a day. Now that’s not an across the board example, but my grandfather never had a computer. Never had a phone. He only went to libraries. He only wrote pen to paper. He watched the news for half an hour and that was. But what does it mean? Imagine a world where literally from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them, there is data being literally funneled into you.
Turi: Um, mom, we’ve gone through this idea that an age exists and that there is a structural difference. Qualitative difference between an economic or political age and an emotional one we’ve asked who gets to define the age. And how many people does it need to feel it for it to be real? We’ve talked about how anxiety plays out and how, um, how anxiety manifests itself in this very particular digital environment in which we all exist. How do we fix it? What’s your manifesto to, um, to fix this age of anxiety, to get us out.
Omar: Well, my argument is that we don’t need to fix anything. We just need to know how to handle it. I believe that in a time and an age of anxiety, that every rational decision that we make needs to be measured up against the emotional impact that it creates. That we need to accept in the age of anxiety that we may always be wrong. And I think that’s really important because essentially I have an opinion, you have an opinion. That’s fine. The only way to end conflict. And I’m talking about conflict from every level is to be able to admit that you were wrong. Doesn’t mean that you’re not smarter than the other person. It just means that in that instance, you messed up and cause how do we move on otherwise?
Turi: Yeah, no, I fully fully agree. And I think one of the things which is. Um, super hard and super valuable is learning to deal with ambiguous evidence. Um, and th th that, that comfort with uncertainty is, um, I think one of the trickiest things. Build into a culture and a culture at a moment of stress, economically pandemic, et cetera. Thanks so much for joining us.
Turi: we’re over the moon to be talking to Jonathan Sklar. Jonathan’s an independent psychoanalyst, a fellow at the British psychoanalytical society. He was on the board of the international psychoanalytic association and is chair of the independent psychoanalysis trust. He is most recently. The author of dark times, which looks at the rise of nationalism. And there are ton of totalitarian potties in Europe, as well as the rise of the outright and white supremacy, all from a psychoanalytic perspective. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us.
Jonathan: Sorry. I’m delighted for this opportunity. I’m looking forward to this.
Turi: I am too. Um, Jonathan, we. With this podcast on opinion are interested in where opinions come from. And we’ve looked at them from almost all perspectives, how we inherit them, how they form part of our culture. We’ve looked at them from evolutionary perspective. We look to the biological causes behind some of our behaviors.
We’ve looked at our cognitive processes, our psychological motivations, the emotions that drive our engagement with the world and our understanding of it. But today what we want to do. Is to take a different approach and to look at what psychoanalysis can teach us about politics, about the arc of history and about how we build our values. We couldn’t be in better hands. And with Jonathan here, Jonathan, can I ask as a starter for you to help us understand what psychoanalysis is?
Jonathan: Psychoanalysis, as I’m sure is well known, was discovered by Freud, um, about. One person listening to the unconscious of another person, uh, and about having a dialogue together, which is very different from any other dialogue in terms of, um, teaching friendship Roy’s idea early on was one was sitting in a railway carriage looking out of the window and he was looking at the different vistas as the train went on. And that was what the patient was asked to say, whatever is in your mind, just describe it, whether you think it’s, uh, important, uh, interest. Utterly irrelevant of the thing you don’t even want to talk about. The invitation is to do that. And Freud’s point was that if you actually do that, you will find yourself in a place you’ve never expected to be in both the analyst and the analyst.
And that might be a very interesting place to be albeit one that might be full of, uh, Torrid matters.
Turi: And I ask you how does it psychoanalyst think of nationalism when you look at, when you look at the rise of nationalism and say hungry or the rise of the personable among us and I’m in France or whatever it might be, what’s your psychoanalyst’s response diagnostic.
Jonathan: I suppose I am interested in the rise of hatred in many, many countries in Europe as well. There’s a considerable rise in anxiety and tension and people hating other people. Um, there’s far less debate going on. Um, things quickly settle into an us and them. Um, as if, um, yeah. Nationalism comes from the nation states in medieval times, you know, the nation states had the boundary roundish.
Um, mainly it was about, um, citizens sprung up, which were perceived as being with civilization was civic tasks. If you go 50 miles out into the countryside, that’s dark. That’s where the mythology is that there are amongst as the, in the dark. Because that’s not civilization. The civilization is in, is in, uh, the castle. Um, all the civilization is in, uh, the country with its defenses. We’ve always been an island. So we’ve got these wonderful island defenses. Well, that doesn’t help us very much these days. In fact, there’s a line of demarcation, uh, down, down the water is causing. Irreparable harm to Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, the UK, and the, um, there’s a fantasy.
If you like drawing a line in the water to say, well, this is where our demarcation is and how upsetting that is just as a fantasy structure to the actual people. I suppose I’m also interested in how, in terms of memory getting lost things, getting buried, um, I’m not surprised that, um, um, racism and antisemitism are hugely on the rise. Let’s keep it in Europe for the moment. Um, Nonces are on the rise in Europe. I mean, what’s happened. Um, did they go away? No, I don’t think they ever did go away. I think they went deep, deep, underground. They held on to the Nazi ideas in the silence. Um, and then now coming up into the sunshine. Um,
Turi: why is that happening now?
Jonathan: I think because, uh, there’s the fragmentation of, um, the holding, uh, other society by its leadership. Um, so my, I gave for my book, I, I went to also to have a, uh, an event too. Talk about dark times. And, um, my friends were ranged. It said, um, I’m very happy. We’ve got the anti-fascists leave on the door. I said, walk. Oh yes. Because you know, there are announces in Oslo. We don’t want them to come in. So I was really quiet, uh, snobbish. Anyway, it was time to stop. There was several seats left.
So I told my friend, well, there’s some people at the door. They haven’t got tickets, but they come in. So she said yes. And to my astonishment at some point, uh, a man put his hand up to ask the question. He said, um, I do think the Holocaust happened. And he said something else and my mind went blank. I couldn’t hear what he said. And then I took another question and then suddenly I sort of realized what had been said. And I went back to him and said, well, if you had said that in either Germany or the UK, that would be called hate speech and it would be prosecuted. And to my amazement in the room, there was a thorough rate. No, we don’t have that.
Anyone can say anything. And that was interesting because, um, after, um, the murder of all those young, young socialists Um, what parliament, the Norwegian parliament did in a way to stymie, right. Mick was, um, to say, when you can say anything, I mean, quite the opposite of the UK and Germany and say they do. So I just agreed with several people in the room saying, um, it’s not to be discussed that there was, uh, there was, or there wasn’t a Holocaust or concentration camps, because this is like fake news. He came up to me afterwards and thanked me very much for the discussion. I took quite know what that means, but there I was meeting a Nazi. Um, yeah. So
Turi: I suppose the question I’m trying to ask clumsily is, um, I think he’s called William ready. Had this notion of emotional regimes, you had this idea that there were periods in history which have a certain emotional quality to them. Um, some shine Reagan, for example, um, sort of the, yes, we can.
Barack Obama, um, clearly we’re in an age of rage today, um, and have been for, uh, for, have been for a while. Um, If E-box have emotions and your work is an emotion. Um, how I suppose the question I’m coming to is this the rise of racism, the rise of authoritarianism? Where do you ascribe it? Where’d you where’d you see it from that micro human to the macro social. Okay.
Jonathan: I’ve got a thought about. Some of the things that need to be done. I think that in the rage, and I agree with you, I think we are in an age of rage, which is terribly worried for all sorts of things. Um, there is no sense of warming. People are in a state of rage because something’s been lost. Something’s missing something’s wrong. Um, I’ll give you a little example, outside many courthouses in many little towns in, um, in the south, the south states of the us, um, outside those courthouses, usually a big tree and the tree, the tree is really quite old. It’s been there for a long time, a couple of hundred years. And on that tree, Um, black bodies were hanging as in that famous jazz song, Southern Southern fruit, strange fruit holiday holiday. Um, I would like to see a plaque put up on those trees with the names of all the, all the black people who were hunter. And they carried on hanging them, you know, well into the 20th, late 19th century, early 20th century, um, as a place that, um, the grandchildren of some of those people are probably still living in those little towns can see that something is that representing that pain, that loss.
And it’s there as part of the design guys to the place. Uh, give you a link to Berlin. If you step across the threshold with many shops in Berlin, there’s a line of little grips at the bottom, as you step over, which said, uh, in this shop, um, Mr. Curran and his family lived, it was such and such a shock, and they were all sent as a certain date to a concentration camp. So you step over the threshold and it’s. It’s a one way of dealing with the age of rage would be to put alongside it the age of knowledge of what had happened and warming.
Turi: I don’t think the rage that we’re seeing today. Yes. Of course, it’s the rage of, um, the oppressed and the historically oppressed. But what we’re seeing played out across electoral maps in Europe and in the U S is also the rage of the once dominant. And you see this with this tremendous push push back against the cancel culture, the tremendous pushback that we’ve seen in the U S and the UK against statues being taken down statues of slave owners, statues of Confederate generals, et cetera, the rage that’s playing out. In our politics explicitly is that, um, the one’s dominant.
How do you deal with them mourning? Because there is morning that there is mourning of globalization as morning of the dominant positions that they once had. That that seems to me what we’re seeing playing out in politics. Jonathan: I think that’s another strand of the morning that needs to be done. I think that it needs to be for the victims, but it also needs to be, uh, uh, for the dominant, uh, white culture that is, um, has never wished for, uh, noticing that there’s anyone else that sort of matters nearly as much as the whites.
The white population. I think that that has to be faced and looked at not to say that, um, uh, they have no place since, uh, in a modern society, but. Yeah. Something about the American constitution, you know, bring us, bring us your, your poor and your affliction. We’ll let them in. We’ll let them in, in, uh, into the U S today. Um, yes, that was part of the narrative, but it wasn’t all America because of slavery and slavery gave immense power. To the slavery now it has to be let go of, so that’s very, very difficult because if you’ve been, uh, in, in, in, in the dominant clique and you’ve got the wealth from that, um, and ownership and your pride and your position in society, um, to let go of that is severely difficult.
What will you give in place? Usually, well, we could actually have a more creative life. We could have a society that actually can, um, integrate people. There’s nothing special about the color of somebody’s skin. It’s got nothing to do with, uh, vitality and intelligence and creative life whatsoever. Um, These are the very, very difficult things that need to be faced again and again and again, and fought about. And perhaps best governments might be able to, we’ve looked five was doing in his first hundred years as well. The remarkable, um, if he, I hope he
Turi: has a hundred years, I think it’s first a hundred days still.
Jonathan: That was my wish he has exactly one can have wishes. Um, What’s a good wish, but if everyone can rise up, uh, and have a better, a better life, you can be looked after better. We better for everybody, you know, I’m dreaming, I’m a psycho, I hadn’t this streaming on about such a thing about having, you know, uh, uh, A good loving family structure when there wasn’t one in a way I’m talking biblically about, well, there was cave and there was Abel one son killed the other son siblings from the very beginning of biblical terms. Uh, there was hatred.
Turi: So if, if hatred is, is bait is baked into our psyche and there’s all sorts of very good evolutionary justification is for the competitiveness that we feel towards each other and yeah. In group favoritism and out-group hatred and all these various different things. What would your psychoanalytic recommendations be at a policy level? You you’re you’re you’re business is, is, is trying to help individuals see inside themselves. What are your recommendations for societies to do the same?
Jonathan: Well, if I can continue my dream about that, I would like there to be. Um, group system published. I’d like that to be, uh, groups of philosophers who might be interested in, um, looking with groups of psychoanalysts about how to look at the philosophy of life. Um, I’d like there to be sociologists doing something similar. I’d like education, something similar. Um, It kind of lists something similar to establish to re-establish, uh, an idea that, um, facts do matter. That truth does matter. Um, and even though all over the place, um, false news is in the ascendancy. I would like to build in various, um, Uh, groups that would, um, would speak against all that because you know, the fakeness that is coming into various societies, I think is profound.
It can be long lasting and it’s, it’s severe. It’s a sort of illness. You know, most people, I think if the left to get on with it and they know something about their history, you want to have a creative life, but to have a creative life, to have, we have a sort of make one’s dreams come true to work hard. Um, uh, you actually have to have a basis of truth. And the, for truth to be sized away at one’s ankles truth. No, I knew what the truth is. You don’t and if you’re an expert, you certainly do. I think that needs to be. Really, really rebalanced. And I think that those governments that are not dictatorships need to take the lead on that and psychoanalyst might be able to have some part to play.
Um, I was involved some years ago when. Two of my colleagues trained in London. Sikeros went back to South Africa. There’s no psycho analysis in South Africa that they’d all fled over the years. And I said to my friends, look, I’ll join you once a year. Let’s have a psychoanalytic conference. And we did so yeah, after year three or four, we had the minister minister of education opening it. It was like, people would say to me, Are you crazy? So Africa it’s had such torments with, uh, with all the, uh, the apartheid long decades. We need, we need schools. We need universities, we need houses. We need jobs. We need toilets. Are you saying that psychoanalysis is needed in South Africa? I said for sure, because you’re sitting on a powder keg of trauma.
I mean, trauma going back to the beginning of what I said, transgenerational trauma, the black, uh, trauma too, through the generations, but so are the whites by being in charge, um, And now some years later there’s a thriving psychoanalytical society, and it’s doing all sorts of outreach in, um, nursery schools in kindergartens and social work. Um, getting people to understand that history matters.
Turi: Jonathan, what a, um, potent place to stop. This has been a fascinating conversation. You’ve, um, you’ve dealt with my insistence that you psychoanalyze all of history and all of society and most of global politics, um, remarkably patiently. So thank you for that. Um, and it’s been a great pleasure to talk to you. So thank you for joining us.
Jonathan: I have had the most, uh, Wonderful discussion with you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’ve enjoyed it very much.