Black Hamlet

"This is not a very well-known book, though it was at the time. Wulf Sachs was the first practicing psychoanalyst in South Africa. He found not just a black man but a divining healer whom he persuaded to lie on the couch and be analysed. For Sachs this was a great moment when he would look into the mind of religious, spiritual and traditional Africa. Of course he never really does. He becomes more and more opaque really as the sessions go on. What does emerge is the incredibly awkward power relationship between the white man and the black man. Again, just at an intellectual level, it’s a wonderful story of a white intellectual trying to penetrate black South Africa and trying to understand it with all its enormous entanglements and complications. It’s beautifully and painfully written. It’s still in print but at the moment it has a pretty specialised audience but I think it deserves a larger audience. Well, I guess because psychoanalysis requires many things one of which is a willing patient. The relationship between these two men was so complicated and so ridden with power and so much was happening between them outside of the room that it didn’t make for a good relationship between analyst and patient."