In this interview, the third in this column in which I try to learn more about the lives and work of IAPSP members from different parts of the world, I am pleased to dialogue with Amanda Kottler from Cape Town, South Africa. She is, among her other affiliations, a founding member of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self Psychology Group, and Emeritus Council Member of the IAPSP. Amanda recently participated in the IAPSP 34th International Conference, held in Los Angeles, CA, where, at a plenary Panel, she presented her clinical work with a patient, IAPSP She also more recently presented, with Koichi Togashi, at the IARPP 10th Anniversary Conference held in March in New York. Their paper was entitled: ” I Am Afraid of Seeing your Face: Trauma and the Dread of Engaging in a Twinship Tie.” She has published extensively. In what follows I focus on her experience as a self psychologically informed therapist, and a teacher of Self Psychology in South Africa.

I’m very interested in learning whom you would like me to feature in future columns. Please send your comments and suggestions to me at annetterichard@cooptel.qc.ca.

Interview with Amanda Kottler

Annette: Hello Amanda! I’m very happy to do this interview with you and I am curious to know more about your work and your life in South Africa, a part of the world which I’ve never seen, but of course heard a lot about. First, can you tell me when and how you became interested in Self Psychology?

Amanda: Hello, Annette. This feels like both a privilege and an adventure, which I am happy to begin with you!

I first became consciously aware of Self Psychology in 1989 when I was at the tail end of a 2-year Masters programme in Clinical Psychology. I acquired some incredibly exciting notes from an ad hoc, unadvertised lecture that the late Peter Thompson had given whilst visiting relatives in Cape Town. Shortly after this I joined a reading group of already practicing Clinical Psychologists who were equally excited about the discovery of Self Psychology! I remember feeling somewhat tongue tied at these meetings as the ideas expressed in Kohut’s work just “felt right” to me – they sat so comfortably in my “tummy” without seemingly needing to go to my brain at all! I later realized that for an honors thesis in Social Anthropology, 3 years earlier I had used the work of someone who had been supervised by George Atwood, without realizing who George was at the time! This and many other odd sorts of connections between Self Psychology and my life, which perhaps I can chat to you about later, intrigued me.

Annette: It looks like you did readily find your home within Self Psychology … Please tell me more about those uncanny connections.

Amanda: I suppose the biggest and most meaningful connections came out of my reading Chuck Strozier’s biography of Kohut. It explained so much (again mostly in my “tummy”) of why Self Psychology spoke so powerfully to issues of difference, marginalization and otherness. Discovering that Kohut had hidden or denied the fact that he was Jewish was profoundly personal for me as were some of the differences that he clearly struggled with. I was born in a geographically beautiful, tiny, (Canadian) copper mining town in Uganda, which was my home for 16 wonderful years. My parents were “nationalized” British Citizens who had both been born in South Africa, two countries that were alien to me. My mother’s grandfather (an Ornstein from the United Kingdom) was in fact the first Rabbi in the area I now live in but her father had married “out” and been ostracized as a result so she was not raised according to the Jewish faith or tradition. My father’s parents, both Jewish, came from Lithuania. They also gave up any connection to being Jewish, so my father knew little about the practices. He did however know about the prejudices and forbade any of us to tell anyone we were Jewish. Since I knew nothing about what it meant to be a Jew this was not difficult for me. However, in spite of my father’s wish to keep it hidden, our family was known in very derogatory terms as “those Jewish South Africans”.

Annette: You seem to have had a powerful twinship selfobject experience in reading Strozier’s biography of Kohut. I also better understand how the twinship selfobject concept, along with issues of difference, marginalization and otherness became the focus of most of your subsequent work and publications. Before we talk more about this work, let’s go back in time. Could you tell us how you came to live in South Africa, your parents’ birth country, from Uganda? How did you find living in South Africa at the time, presumably in the midst of the apartheid regime?

Amanda: My father’s work took him first to what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe and then to Uganda. Although a geologist/mining engineer he always wanted to farm but was not able to buy land in Uganda. He decided, close to retirement, to return to South Africa in the hopes of ultimately retiring to a farm. He was transferred by the Canadian copper mine that he worked for to what was then South West Africa, now Namibia. From there, I went to college to complete my schooling in Johannesburg, South Africa. I lived pretty much alone in Johannesburg which was a huge and scary city for the ” country bumpkin ” that I was! I was 16 at the time and extremely apolitical – I was much more focused on trying to survive emotionally!

You ask how I found living in South Africa? I have thought a lot about that and am going to give you the short answer first: growing up: ” not much different from living in Uganda ” as an ex-patriot colonial and very similar to what is depicted to have been the case in America, in the movie “The Help.” Have you seen it?

Annette: Yes, I’ve seen it. A very powerful movie about having an outsider status in one’s own country. Please tell me more about that, if and how this experience contributed eventually to your interest, as a clinical psychologist, in issues of difference, marginalization and otherness.

Amanda: I am fascinated, but not surprised (because of some of the conversations we have had over the years) that you pick up on the ” outsider status in one’s own country,” But, I am coming from another perspective. As a child growing up in Uganda, in spite of my ” outsider ” status (South African and Jew) I nevertheless experienced myself as belonging to what would have been understood as the dominant insider group (white ex-patriots). Looking back there is much guilt associated with this — it’s called ” white guilt ” in South Africa today. To return to your question though, there is no question that the complexity of supposedly being an insider (by appearance) but unconsciously aware, at least initially, of being Other is most certainly why I find the multiple and contradictory nature of difference, marginalization and otherness absolutely fascinating as a clinical psychologist.

Annette: Fascinating indeed that I inverted the perspectives like that! Being myself a French Canadian, even more so as an Acadian, I identify, consciously at least, with the outsider’s perspective. But, are we not always both the insider’s dominant one to the marginal other, for example, the aboriginal in Canada, and the disadvantaged outsider of a dominant other? Could you tell me more about how this sense of ” the multiple and contradictory nature of difference ” affects your clinical sensibility and led you to be interested for instance in Kohut’s twinship selfobject concept?

Amanda: To answer your second question first, I will tell you about my joyful discovery of: Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. New York: Metheun. It liberated me in many ways – from the constraints of my family’s view that one could not change ones mind about even the most basic, trivial issues, and about the pressure of trying to fit in with what was considered to be “normal” by what I always believed was the dominant group. I discovered that the self was not unitary, systems were not linear and there wasn’t only one dominant group. I discovered that there are in fact multiple groups and that the so-called norms each espouses are almost always contradictory. I wrote about this in a chapter in Buirski, P. and Kottler, A. (2007) (Eds.) New Developments of Self Psychology Practice. New York: Jason Aronson. In that chapter (Twinship and “Otherness”: A Self Psychological, Intersubjective Approach to “Difference”) I describe the confusion felt by my patient, Franco, about how to “be” as a homosexual man. Influenced by the dominant norms portrayed in a movie about gay men, he felt he needed to talk with a lisp and present himself in an effeminate way, but this didn’t sit well with the way in which he enjoyed traditionally male pursuits of, for example, particular sports and DIY jobs with his stepfather. And yet he also loved wearing jewelry. I describe in that chapter how I had travelled a similar (and very different) path twenty six years earlier and how this enabled me to work with the dilemma he faced, i.e. to which dominant norm was he going to adhere, and to which not and how he was going to live with the contradictions within each. These ideas have profoundly influenced my clinical sensibility and my belief that as humans we are always needing to negotiate between and around these multiple and contradictory “discourses” (to borrow from the language of the book I mention above), or put differently, simultaneously, between the differences and similarities we encounter in others. These ideas inevitably drew me to Kohut’s thoughts on what he called “twinship.”

To shift slightly to your first question, I think that you are right, but if I understand your question correctly, I think that many people, Kohut included, were not able to “hold” those two contradictory positions simultaneously. My sense, from everything I have read about Kohut and from the theory he developed, is that his predominant experience of himself was as the “marginalized outsider “. I believe that this is why he developed a theory that brilliantly addresses issues of difference and feelings of marginalization or of being a “misfit”. It is my increasing belief that Kohut’s unfinished work on the issue of twinship at least in part, came out of a series of extremely painful, personal experiences of “otherness”. This speaks to me personally and I find endless evidence of it in my work, i.e. patients struggling with mostly shameful feelings of being other in a multitude of ways, not only relative to race, gender, class, sexuality.

Annette: This is very interesting. What a wonderful introduction to your chapter! As we are getting to the end of our time together, let me shift to your professional community in South Africa and your connection to the larger IAPSP community. I understand you’re a founding member of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self Psychology group, a new affiliate to the IAPSP. What are some of the ways that your own group have been working together and how are you getting support and stimulation from this affiliation?

Amanda: These questions could be answered very directly and factually, but if this is where we are going to end I feel I need to share some of the complexities of the context within which our group exists.

First, the facts: Over the last 20 or so years, we have for the most part been a vibrant group. In 2011 we had 82 paid up members, almost all of whom are “white.” At times our membership and attendance has dropped substantially. Our conferences (10 so far) attract most of our new members who join “Introductory Groups”. These are facilitated by more experienced members of the “bigger group” which meets about 9 times a year to discuss theoretical / clinical issues. It has been a challenge in the past to find a presenter and a focus for these meetings. Due to issues of experience, confidence and boundaries, for many years, whoever was willing and able to present would do so, often on whatever was their current interest. Failing this, members responsible for organizing the evening would invite outside speakers or often, draw on the resources that, as our group’s “International Representative”, I have gathered over the years, including audiotapes, CDs, and people!

The energy and direction of our group depends very much on the committee, some of whom have “burned out” over the years and left the group. Others have taken a break, sometimes coming back to serve additional terms. This is true of some of the members of the current committee, which is an extremely energetic one with a great Chair (Cathy Aaron). This committee is trying to address some of the problems we have had as a group, and to grow it.

Annette: Amanda, the fact that the great majority is “white.” is that a factor in the complexities you’re facing as a group? And could you tell us more on the difficulties in getting an energetic leadership going?

Amanda: Your two questions are, perhaps not so obviously, interconnected. I’ll attempt to explain this. First, yes a ” white ” majority is a problem. Our group needs to be more representative of the broader population and the fact that it is not speaks volumes (silent and sometimes not so silent). In spite of the fact that apartheid laws no longer exist in South Africa, racism and othering is still alive and very well. This needs to be addressed in our work and in ourselves to enable us to work with it. Second, our group functions within a context that is brutal in many ways and our members are differently exposed to this. Some work directly with the trauma, some indirectly, and some have experienced it directly, others not. To greater or lessor extents and for different reasons, I believe our entire population suffers from what is being termed CSD (Continual Stress Disorder). How much psychoanalytic theories can contribute to working in this context is an important question and remains a source of tension in our group. I think this has indirectly affected the energy of the committee and the group.

A number of years ago at a conference where we tried to look into this issue, a few significant black psychologists said they had no interest in joining our group because the theories we drew on (i.e. from outside of South Africa) were irrelevant to our local context. Psychoanalytic theory has historically been considered white, middle class, patriarchal and ethnocentric. I subscribed to this belief very strongly in my own training in the 80s, noting the lack of consciousness in relation to e.g. issues of gender, race and sexuality, which at the time was my main research focus. However, as psychoanalytic theories and their contemporary application have shifted with some powerful voices coming in from the margins, so have I.

It is not only black psychologists who advocate this belief. So there is a tension in the group about how much value, support and stimulation we can draw from affiliations outside of South Africa. This resistance to ” outsiders ” has negatively influenced the value given generally to the psychoanalyts who have visited our group.

I personally don’t believe this attitude is useful to sustain or grow our members as confident practitioners and theoreticians, partly because it has put far too much focus, and pressure on a few of the original founding members. I believe that to survive as a useful, sustainable organization which is relevant to our entire population – white, black, male, female, gay, straight, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, married, single, physically disadvantaged, poor or rich, we need to be willing to learn to share and to integrate ideas globally. Our geographical location makes this very difficult but with technological changes, there are greater opportunities available.

Annette: This is a very challenging situation, indeed, which could potentially contribute to theoretical and clinical developments in the Self Psychology field. What are some of the directions you believe should be taken?

Amanda: Our current committee believes, as has been a longstanding dream of my own, that we need to have a training that is established from within the Self Group. (Thus far this has had to be facilitated from outside of the Self Psychology group because of the tension I have mentioned). Ably and energetically led by Cathy Aaron, this is a focus of our current committee. To do so, we plan to draw on our valuable local resources and design specifically South African electives. But, we will also draw on the work and advice of equally respected people from within the Self Psychology Community in Europe and the US, including our mentors Arthur Gray and Amy Joelson.

We believe this will achieve one of our main goals, i.e. growing our current and future generations of contemporary Self (and Relational) Psychologists in South Africa, thereby creating a sustainable group that can exist without its founding members! It is my hope that this will also facilitate the kind of international recognition that might help our home grown ideas to usefully influence psychoanalytic theory as it continues to develop in ways that make it applicable to working with the multiplicity of populations that need the kind of help that I believe contemporary Self Psychology is well placed to provide.

Annette: Thank you very much Amanda for your openness in sharing with us your life and work as a self-psychologically informed psychotherapist in South Africa. It has been a very informative and pleasant conversation with you. I feel enriched by it.