Abstract
Few psychobiographies have been conducted on influential Colored South Africans. The dehumanizing nature of South Africa’s historical institutionalized racism and discrimination during apartheid motivated an expansion on psychobiographical studies of oppressed persons of colour. This study aimed to uncover and reconstruct the Eriksonian psychosocial ego-strengths or virtues of the controversial and enigmatic poet, academic, political activist, philosopher and social worker, Professor Adam Small (1937–2016). Small was selected as subject via purposive sampling. Alexander’s psychobiographical indicators of salience and a psychosocial-historical conceptualization were used to identify and analyze significant biographical evidence on Small’s life. The findings indicate that Small developed hope, will, purpose and competency as ego-strengths or virtues throughout his first four Eriksonian stages. The apartheid regime’s discrimination against Black ethnic groupings complicated not only the resolution of Small’s identity crisis, but also the attainment of the ego-strength or virtue of a sense of self. Forced removal from his birth-home by the apartheid regime, which Small viewed as an attack on the attachment relationship with his mother, contributed to his mistrust of societal institutions. This challenged the resolution of his eventual establishment of the ego-strengths or virtues of love and wisdom, respectively. Accordingly, the use of Eriksonian theory seems to be apt for uncovering contextualized ego-strengths and virtues of significant persons within dehumanizing contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
District 6: Area that was demolished by the Apartheid government, which led to the mass displacement of thousands of Colored families (Beyers, 2017).
- 2.
Professor Jakes Gerwel later became the Vice-Chancellor of UWC, then Rector of Rhodes University. He also served as the Director-General of Nelson Mandela’s Presidency office (Le Cordeur, 2017).
- 3.
English: South African Academy for Science and the Arts.
- 4.
The Hertzog Prize is one of the most acclaimed language prizes for Afrikaans Literature (Smit, 2015).
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Fouché, P.J.P., Naidoo, P., Botha, T. (2019). A Psychobiographical Portrait of Adam Small’s Eriksonian Ego-Strengths or Virtues: Contextualized Within South Africa’s Apartheid-Eras. In: Mayer, CH., Kovary, Z. (eds) New Trends in Psychobiography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16953-4_23
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