Manifestations of shame in psychotherapeutic dialogues with politically silenced rape survivors in Cape Town, South Africa

Shame is pervasive, and contagious. Shame is ashamed of itself. Shame activates shame. The mystifying dualism of shame is that it is at once an isolating, intimately intra-psychic phenomenon seeking concealment, yet remains deeply embedded in a visual and public interpersonal space where the self is violently and unexpectedly exposed to the critical gaze of the Other. The source of shame can therefore never be completely in the self or in the Other, but is a rupture of what Kaufman (1989, p. 22) calls the “interpersonal bridge” binding the two.

The pervasive and potentially paralysing nature of shame and its particular relevance to a South African research context became no more apparent to me than in the course of interviews that I, as a researcher (white , middle-class) have had with rape survivors (coloured, working-class). This research had as its original aim to delineate the network of discourses in which the rape of women is embedded. However, I have come to understand that our co-constructed shame which permeated the research significantly affected my emotional and intellectual investments, and contoured my interpretations of the narrative which unfolded between myself and the research participants.

Such recognition of this noxious affect is especially pertinent in the South African context, marked by a myriad of class, gender and race differentials between researcher and researched. Here, skewed power dynamics continue to mark intellectual relations between researcher and researched (Bennett, 2000) and “deeply entrenched and racialised divisions between communities continue to shape the negotiation of power” (Swartz, 2007, p. 177). Within this context (significantly determined by class formations developed through the formal structures of colonialism and apartheid) shame is inherently linked to the politics of knowledge production and the limitations of our own positionings within such unequal power structures. I attempt not only to understand the role of shame in the research relationship which unfolded, but to consider the way in which it was intrinsically linked to the representations of our multiple and constantly shifting identities within this space, as overtly marked by the “intersectionality” of class, race and gender (Burman, 2006).

, Bystanders No More: Psychotherapeutic Dialogues for the Politically Silenced, New York, U.S.A.