%0 Journal Article %T Apartheid's lost attachments (1): on psychoanalytic reading practice %A Derek Hook %J Psychology in Society %D 2012 %I Psychology in Society %X This paper, the first of two focussed on the topic of libidinal attachments between white children and black domestic workers in narratives contributed to the Apartheid Archive Project (AAP), offers a series of methodological insights derived from a Lacanian type of psychoanalytic reading practice. A Lacanian reading practice is one which emphasizes the importance of symbolic juxtaposition, of recombining different facets of texts, and of attempting to locate what I term the "absent mediator" implied by tacit conjunctions and associations within texts. In this paper I focus particularly on a puzzling aspect shared by a series of contributions to the AAP, namely the role of animals in the narratives of white participants, which appear to emerge precisely when the question of a loving relation for a black person is posed. I argue that this narrative device is an attempt to make sense of a prospective relationship, particularly when such a relationship is effectively prohibited by the prevailing rules of interaction. In response to pressing questions of inter-racial loss and love, and in respect of an ambiguous inter-racial relationship, recourse to an animal provides a fantasmatic "solution", a model of how to manage a relationship that otherwise difficult to understand. %K Absent mediators %K Apartheid Archive %K Lacan %K psychoanalysis %K racism %U http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1015-60462012000100003