A small but significant event took place on Friday 14 March 2025. The Department of Psychology started its Psychoanalytic Journal Club – or rather two clubs! One for the Honours students and one for the students in the MA professional training programme for Clinical Psychology. No evidence could be found that a Psychoanalytic Journal Club previously existed in a psychology department at any South African university. So, unless the historical record proves otherwise, Stellenbosch is the first!

For the first meeting both groups read an academic journal article on the Oedipus Complex. The article explores the complex as a universal process against the incest taboo, rather than limiting it to a storyline that prioritises an Anglo-Western position.

For many complex historical, epistemological, and ontological reasons, psychoanalysis does not align comfortably with positivistic, empirical psychology. The journal club is an opportunity for students to grapple with this variance between the academic psychology that they know, and the psychoanalytic “science of subjectivity” that they are introduced to at a depth level that they have not experienced before.

The psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg has written extensively about the need for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training institutes to work closer with universities and for collaboration and knowledge exchange to take place between institutes and academia. Furthermore, neuro-science research by people like Professor Mark Solms at the University of Cape Town, underpinned by the theory of psychoanalysis, is clearly establishing the empirical evidence base for psychoanalysis as a domain of the brain as much as it is of the mind.

The journal club meets once a month under the guidance of Francois Rabie. He is a Clinical Psychologist in private practice who has devoted years to the study of psychoanalysis. He is currently completing his specialisation training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and also completing his PhD in Psychoanalysis at the University of Cape Town.