South African Psychiatry - November 2018

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REPORT DEADLY MEDICINE THE MARK OF THE LIFE ESIDIMENI DECANTING Megan Jones The two-day “Deadly Medicine: The Mark of the Life Esidimeni Decanting” conference was held on 10 and 11 August 2018 at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) in Forest Town. The event was organized under the auspices of GRASP (Groups for Reading and Study of Psychoanalysis) by GRASP members, together with the clinical team that participated in the Life Esidimeni (LE) Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process. (This team had interviewed some of the families of the mental health care users who had died during the Marathon Project and had contributed to the psychoanalytical expert testimony report). Opening: Coralie Trotter (conference organizer), Jabulile Hlatswayo (a family member of the deceased), and members of the Mzansi Youth Choir during the memorial ceremony. (Photographer: Louise Gubb) The conference was opened during the memorial ceremony held the preceding evening – a paradoxically but appropriately rejuvenating gathering for the families of the surviving, deceased, and missing LE victims. Through poetry, photography, song, ritual, and dialogue, an attempt was made to create further bridges among the conscious experience of the trauma, the evidence led during the ADR, Judge Moseneke’s resulting arbitration report, and the still unknown aspects of what really transpired over the past few years. THE EMOTIONAL AND Megan Jones PSYCHOLOGICAL AIM WAS TO HONOUR THOSE WHO HAD LOST THEIR DIGNITY AND HUMANITY DURING THE DECANTING AND TO CONTINUE OPENING UP A SPACE IN WHICH FURTHER INTEGRATION OF THE MARATHON PROJECT’S DEVASTATION COULD TAKE PLACE. The JHGC was a fitting home for the memorial ceremony and conference given that the centre’s broad mandate is to “teach the consequences of prejudice, racism, antisemitism, homophobia and xenophobia and the dangers of indifference, apathy, and silence to freedom and democracy” (“Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre; About”, n.d., para. 3; my italics). Mounted prominently on a wall in the foyer is a quote by Italian Jew, writer, and chemist Primo Levi, reminding us of our all too human propensity to recurringly abandon our humanity and disavow plentiful evidence of our parallel potential for othering and cruelty. Following Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, he wrote prolifically about his experiences; writings which seven decades later have perspicacious bearing on the LE tragedy. 30 * SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHIATRY ISSUE 17 2018
REPORT FOR LEVI, THE WORST VILLAINS IN THE HOLOCAUST WERE NOT NECESSARILY THE PEOPLE WHO PHYSICALLY KILLED THEIR VICTIMS, BUT THOSE WHO DEGRADED THOSE HUMANS DEEMED BY THEM UNDESIRABLE TO “THINGS”. 1 LEVI CONSIDERED THE “DESTRUCTION OF THE VICTIM’S HUMANITY AND DIGNITY” – A FORM OF PSYCHIC MURDER – AS AN EQUAL OR EVEN GREATER ATROCITY TO PHYSICAL MURDER, A SLAUGHTER WHICH IS THEN ALL TOO EASILY RATIONALISED ONCE VICTIMS HAVE BEEN STRIPPED OF THEIR HUMAN STATUS. 1 Levi’s intellectual genius allowed him to write extensively about aspects of the dehumanization, torture, and cruelty of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. However, by 1986, depressed and burdened by the cumulative weight of his persistent witnessing of human-induced devastation, he penned the quote now displayed in the JHGC’s entrance: “It happened, therefore it can happen again … and it can happen everywhere” (Levi, 1989). One year later, Levi committed suicide. Fellow Holocaust survivor and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel astutely diagnosed the aetiology of Levi’s tragic death in his penetrating observation: “Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later, crushed by a sadness from which he could no longer escape, not even with the incredible strength of reason, with which he had cast light for everyone [on the Holocaust experience]”. 2 I would tentatively hypothesise that whilst Levi could hold in mind, symbolise, and narrate many facets of his own and his society’s harrowing experiences, other fragments of this trauma had been banished from his conscious mind and buried in the unconscious aspects of his psyche-soma. Thus dissociated from awareness, these unbound and unintegrated residues of horror would have been inaccessible to the psychic work which proffers the potential of metamorphosing “ghostly deformed horror[s]” into something with “shape and meaning”. 3 milieu in which the Marathon Project emerged also impinges upon our capacity – as individuals and as a society – to engage in the prerequisite psychological work to transform and then represent the Decanting’s insufferable and ineffable pain: the wreckage from this event is strewn across the landscape of our country’s still festering apartheid and colonial past: 24 years into democracy, the inequities and terrors of our socio-political history continue to impinge on the availability of requisite resources to process trauma. These deficits manifest in both the external physical world (e.g. lack of access to resources to meet basic biological and human needs; absence of adequate health and mental health services; continuing threats to physical and psychic safety), as well as within each person’s intrapsychic landscape (e.g. absence of secure attachments; compromised capacities to mentalise and symbolise). During the later stages of the arbitration, Judge Moseneke, struggling with the incomprehensibility of the gratuitous devastation, imploringly asked: ‘What was this about? You know I sat here for weeks and I still deeply worry and wonder what was this Marathon Project about. What were you trying to do? Why did you go along with that plan that was bound to prove murderous?’. 4 Psychoanalytic thinking’s transition from couch to courtroom, and the attendant redirection of gaze from the intrapsychic to the nation’s psyche and the realm of human rights and social justice, demonstrated this discipline’s arguably unique value in “understanding the human mind” and its potential to explicate “a trail of events that [otherwise would have defied] comprehension”. 5 For the South Africans who survived or witnessed what is considered to be the worst human rights crime in our nascent post-apartheid society, the imperative redress is not solely financial. Redress necessitates the provision of safe opportunities for the sensorial, unbound, and unbearable shards of horror to be shared, witnessed, and potentially rendered available for conscious consideration and integration. For the fortunate, the possibility may also then emerge for mourning, meaning-making, and the re-establishment of a continuity of being. The above described necessary psychic redress is a prodigious ask for a number of reasons, two of which link to constituent features of the LE tragedy: (1) it having been an entirely avoidable human induced disaster, and (2) the obfuscating and perverse absence of full disclosure and lack of coherent explanation for its reckless inception. Sadly, the Candle Lighting Ceremony accompanied by the Mzansi Youth Choir. (Photographer: Louise Gubb) SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHIATRY ISSUE 17 2018 * 31
Page 1 and 2: ISSN 2409-5699 ABOUT the discipline
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South African Psychiatry - November 2018

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