The South African Psychoanalytical Association (SAPA), 2020
/The South African Psychoanalytical Association (SAPA) is a nonprofit organization that has dramatically increased the reach of psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalysis for people with histories of apartheid, racism, and trauma in South Africa. SAPA successfully established the first psychoanalytic society accredited by the International Psychoanalytical Association on the African continent and helped deconstruct racist barriers within psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical training. Through clinical, applied, and community work, SAPA has enhanced access to psychoanalysis across all economic and demographic boundaries for South Africa’s people.
SAPA was established as a Study Group of the IPA’s in 2009 and achieved Provisional Society status in 2017. Through clinical, applied, and community work, SAPA has enhanced access to psychoanalysis across all economic and demographic boundaries for South Africa’s people. Forging against long-held views that “psychoanalysis is a ‘Eurocentric’ theory, based in cultural and social conditions that bear very little resemblance to [African’s] own,” SAPA has begun to change this attitude towards psychotherapy and reduced barriers to cost that also limited access to treatment.
Following apartheid in 1948, South Africans who wanted to train as psychoanalysts had to study abroad an opportunity only accessible to those who had the socio-economic status and means necessary. A result was that trainees often remained abroad. Overcoming significant systemic racial and economic obstacles, SAPA graduated its first “homegrown” psychoanalysts in 2016. Currently the organization has 23 analysts (15% black), 25 candidates (33% black), an unprecedented achievement of analyst diversity in Africa and around the world.