Political Oppression, Social Change and the Family: A View from South Africa

Abstract

The obvious continuities between the political and the personal, the public and the private, dominate South African life in a way which may not be familiar to those in the Australian context. South African clinical work with families, much of it in the form of mediated interventions, cannot but operate at the edges of our definitions of both what a family is and what it means to be a mental health worker. In this article I argue that thinking broadly about politics and about our work is essential in the service of developing family and personal growth.