The South African Psychoanalytic Confederation (SAPC) brings together under one organisation, groups of clinicians from diverse professions whose therapeutic work with individuals, couples, families, groups and communities is informed by psychoanalytic theory and praxis. The concept of the (psycho)analytic attitude draws together the diverse approaches of the SAPC membership into a collaborative organisation.

 

Our membership is involved in continuous ongoing training through reading groups, case presentations, ethics presentations, workshops, training courses and consultations with our own ethics committee. This is in line with widespread international practice and arises from the profession seeking to maintain its own high standards of ongoing training and the commitment of practitioners to therapeutic excellence. The SAPC is founded on the belief that our common analytic attitude unites us as professionals across our diverse backgrounds and provides a widely acknowledged way of theorizing as well as informing the intervention or treatment plans used for people suffering from psychological distress.

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Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be defined as a specific body of knowledge and a method of treatment that concerns itself with the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental processes as well as with the relationship between the clinician and the patient or group. It is a therapeutic process which helps patients understand and resolve their problems by increasing their awareness of their inner and outer worlds and these worlds influence over relationships, both past and present. Psychoanalytic treatment is concerned not merely with symptom alleviation but with self-discovery and the re-integration of projected, split-off and repressed parts of our psychological life. It aims for deep-seated change in personality as well as emotional and interpersonal development. As such it offers unique but essential insights into human life both on an individual level as well as on a societal level.