Reconciliation as therapy and compensation: a critical analysis

Therapeutic discourses on ‘healing’ the individual, social and political legacy of apartheid violence were intrinsic to South Africa’s reconciliation process. In its public performance of reconciliation and throughout its final documentation and recommendations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and many of those who came to speak before it, expressed reconciliation by recourse to psychotherapeutic metaphors, such as ‘healing’, and the technologies of the testimonial and the confessional. These shaped the assumptions central to reconciliation, namely, that the TRC was mandated to heal the individual and social body and to repair the national psyche, assumptions that were compounded by the co-presence of Christian discourses on forgiveness. These discourses framed the submissions of victims and perpetrators to the TRC and conditioned the social and political process of recasting the past, within which reconciliation was sought, and the material practices – granting amnesty to perpetrators and reparations to victims – by which reconciliation was thought to be instituted.