Description
How do we understand and aid meaningful social change? What tools do we need to work in the community, make sense of what we do, and sustain our work through difficult challenges? This original volume takes the debate in a refreshing new direction.

It shows that using a psychodynamic approach as a tool gives us radical new ways to tackle difficulties and difference. The emotional costs of living in a conflictual and rapidly changing society are not adequately represented through reference to psychiatric symptomatology, or through statistics which count numbers of 'victims'.

Case studies explore the multiple layers of trauma and conflict in communities and organisations, and the complexity of responses called for. Divides along race, class, culture, gender, language, age, disability, and political lines are discussed extensively, and the power of the 'expert' social service professional is debated from a range of perspectives.

The book emphasises how important it is to thoroughly understand the context for community work. While looking at one clinic's efforts to aid positive transformation in a range of South African contexts, it also reflects on the process of change within the clinic itself! It shows how change in others cannot happen without change in ourselves. It asks you, the reader, to engage and challenges you to think deeply and on multiple levels about community-based practice and what it means both for communities and for agents of change.


Contents
Foreword by Prof. Linda Richter
About the Authors
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction
LESLIE SWARTZ, KERRY GIBSON AND TAMARA GELMAN

2. Healing Relationships Between Psychologists and Communities: How Can We Tell Them if They Dont
Want to Hear?
KERRY GIBSON

3. From Idealism to Reality: Learning from Community Interventions
CAROL STERLING

4. Black Students Experiences of Training at a White Institution
RUCKSANA CHRISTIAN, MOLEFI MOKUTU AND MATSHEDISO RANKOE

5. Providing a Containing Space for Unbearable Feelings
RIKA VAN DEN BERG

6. The Consultation Relationship: Reflections on a Psychological Consultation Partnership
ANASTASIA MAW

7. Too Close for Comfort: Emotional Ties Between Nurses and Patients
HESTER VAN DER WALT

8. Disability and Psychotherapy: an Ideologically Charged Relationship in Community Mental Health Service Provision
BRIAN WATERMEYER

9. The Good Enough Community: Power and Knowledge in South African Community Psychology
MARK TOMLINSON AND LESLIE SWARTZ

10. Psychoanalytic Community Psychology: Crossing Worlds or Worlds Apart?
CAROL LONG