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This article examines the attempts of psychologists in South Africa to “Africanize” the discipline. Beginning with a brief history of psychology on the continent, it contextualizes the call for an African psychology by outlining the state of the broader discipline in post-apartheid South Africa as well as the emergence of Afrocentric psychology in the United States. The article interrogates further the notion of an “African worldview” and suggests that Afrocentric psychologists remain beholden to Eurocentric audiences—the result of their continued marginalization by a Eurocentric discipline. Drawing on Fanon’s image of a Manichean psychology, the paper argues that African psychology—instead of organizing itself around cultural questions—must commit itself to a psychological analysis of the violence that exemplifies life in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the current debate about decolonisation by rethinking the theoretical base of psychotherapy. It offers, first, a reformulation of the problem of human suffering that draws on the concept of alienation as detailed in the works of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Fromm. Second, it presents an alternative reading of Wulf Sachs' psychoanalytic text, Black Hamlet, as viewed through the prism of alienation theory. And third, while affirming the significance of that classic work for psychotherapists today as well as the salience of alienation theory, the paper raises complex questions about the integration of Marxism and psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]