Trauma, reflexivity, and the social unconscious: Decolonising psychology education in South Africa

Psychology in South Africa continues to grapple with its colonial inheritance and its ongoing struggle for disciplinary legitimacy. This study investigates how experiential learning can advance decolonial transformation and reposition psychology as a discipline of public value. Centred on an educational tour of a site marked by both historical trauma and dialogical possibility in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, the research draws on cultural-historical activity theory and the concept of the third space to conceptualise learning as a socially mediated and hybrid process. Over a two-year period, twenty-nine postgraduate psychology students participated in the initiative, engaging in reflective surveys, photovoice activities, and facilitated discussions. These methods created opportunities to interrogate how chosen traumas, chosen glories, and processes of othering are embedded in collective memory, shaping subjectivity and social identity. The findings demonstrate that the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre functioned as a generative third space in which students confronted intergenerational trauma, cultivated reflexivity, and engaged with the social unconscious as a force shaping both exclusion and belonging. While moments of resistance underscored the difficulties of working with experiential pedagogy, they also revealed its potential to generate productive tensions that deepen critical thought. The study concludes that experiential learning, situated within a decolonial framework, can destabilise inherited epistemologies while fostering dialogue, empathy, and ethical awareness. In doing so, it demonstrates how psychology can expand its intellectual and social relevance, strengthen its disciplinary legitimacy, and contribute to broader imperatives of social justice, epistemic freedom, and curricular transformation in South African higher education.