Love in a time of violence: of caring and of shame

This paper explores violence in intimate relationships by focusing on one low-income community in the Western Cape, South Africa. In this community, like elsewhere in South Africa, many intimate relationships (including parent-child, intimate partner relationships and friendships) seem to be characterized by anger, rage and also violence. I discuss how the psychological concepts of shame, guilt and the compulsion to repeat can serve to illuminate the seemingly inevitable link between violence and care. The paper also shows how contextual factors such as class, gender and race are not only central in the link between violence and shame, but also shape the form violence assumes and at whom it is directed. While my starting point is always the ways in which violence is represented in the individual stories, in my analysis I focus on how it ultimately is material and ideological conditions that shape the lives of individual storytellers.

Short biography

Professor Lou-Marié Kruger obtained a M.Soc.Sci. (Political Studies) from the University of Cape Town (1989) and a M.A. and PhD (Clinical Psychology) from Boston University (1996). She completed an American Psychological Association accredited internship for Clinical Psychology at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School in 1996. Appointed as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology of Stellenbosch University in 1996, she, amongst other things, coordinated the postgraduate Masters programme in Clinical Psychology and Community Counselling for 13 years. In her research, she focuses on the emotional worlds of low-income South African mothers, utilising mainly psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodern theoretical frameworks. A runner-up for the national award, Distinguished Women Researcher, in 2016, she also was awarded a B-2 rating by the NRF in 2017. She sees herself in the first place as an action researcher and her research and clinical work will culminate this year in the opening of a community mental health care clinic, the Banghoek Care Clinic, in the Dwarsrivier Valley. Her book, Of motherhood and melancholia: notebook of a psychoethnographer, in which she tries to describe and understand 18 years of clinical and research encounters in the valley, will be published by UKZN Press in September 2019. After being appointed as the first female full professor in the 100 years history of the Psychology Department at Stellenbosch, she also became head of the department in 2019. Professor Kruger has had a small part-time private practice in Stellenbosch for more than 20 years.