A story of dislocated thinking

Abstract

This paper offers a narrative description of what it means to be an itinerant, clinical psychologist at the primary health care level in South Africa from an experience-near vantage point. Case material from the author’s community service year is drawn on to explore what happens when psychodynamically oriented thinking becomes: (a) displaced due to an absent or significantly modified analytic set-up and/or (b) disabled, largely as a defence against trauma. The hypothesis proffered is that these disruptions in thinking can be mitigated when the ‘thinking space’ represented by the psychologist, is also an itinerant one. Winnicott, Bion, Ogden and others will be used to illustrate relevant constructs such as reverie, containment and transitional phenomena, while psychoanalytic trauma theory will be drawn on to show how trauma can affect thinking.