Prof. Lou-Marie Kruger

Brief Academic Biography

Professor Lou-Marié Kruger obtained a M.Soc.Sci. (Political Studies) from the University of Cape Town (1989) and a M.A. and PhD (Clinical Psychology) from Boston University (1996). She completed an American Psychological Association accredited internship for Clinical Psychology at Massachusetts Mental Health Centre, Harvard Medical School in 1996. A runner-up for the national award, Distinguished Women Researcher in 2016, she also was awarded a B-2 rating by the NRF in 2017. She is currently Professor and Chair of the department at the Department of Psychology of Stellenbosch University. In her research, she focuses on the emotional worlds of low-income South African mothers, utilising mainly psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodern theoretical frameworks. In 2020 her book Of Motherhood and Melancholia: Notebook of a Psycho-ethnographer was published by UKZN Press. Kruger has also had a small part-time private practice in Stellenbosch for more than 20 years.

Research

Research Topics

• Women’s mental health
• Poverty and mental health
• Feminist psychology
• Psychology and Biography-writing
• Psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa

About my research

Although a clinical psychologist by training, as a researcher I call myself a psycho-ethnographer. I call myself an ethnographer, because I am interested in the materiality of everyday life, the embodied experience of being poor and being a woman. As a psychologist, I am interested in how what is on the outside becomes the inside. In line with more postmodern readings of psychoanalytic theory, I struggle with the binary oppositions of individual and society and I am interested in the murky places where the individual internalises the social and where the individual constructs the social. I thus want to insist on being both social scientist/ethnographer and psychologist. In my attempts to understand how individual biographies are embedded in larger matrices, I have found feminist relational psychoanalysis and discursive psychology particularly useful. In my analysis I therefore pay close attention to detail and to social theory (typically associated with discursive psychology), but I also focus on individual biography and emotional subtexts (typically the terrain of psychoanalysis). By routinely using a case study approach, I want to always implicitly argue that human beings are complex, multifaceted, situated, in process, under construction. I want to always be able to consider multiple factors in looking at a community or people: subjectivity, context, history, intersubjectivity, the material details of lives, discourses, the unconscious, difference, theory and language. My methodology also compels me to engage in the activity of continuous self-reflection or reflexivity. This requires an on-going interrogation of myself with regards to what I am doing, how I am doing it, what I am finding out and what I am doing with what I find out.

Selected Publications

Academic Articles

Kruger, L. (2019). Of Violence and Intimacy: The Shame of Loving and Being Loved. The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence. 3(1), 55-72.

Hartley, M & Kruger, L. (2017). On being human. The power of specificity in psychotherapy in the South African context. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in South Africa. 25(2).

Hamman, C., & Kruger, L. (2017). Gossip girl: The power of girls’ gossip in a low-income South African community. Critical arts. 31(1), 1-17, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2017.1300822

Van Ewyk, J., & Kruger, L. (2017). The emotional experience of motherhood in planned lesbian families in the South African context: “…look how good a job I’m doing, look how amazing we are”. Journal of Homosexuality, 64(3), 343-366 DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2016.1190216

Kruger, L. and Van Wyk, S. (2017). Editorial. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in South Africa. 24(2).

Kruger, L. (2017). When virtuous (“deugsame”) women flee: reflections on dread and flight in a South African group therapy. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in South Africa.

Dukas, C., & Kruger, L. (2016). A feminist phenomenological description of depression in low-income South African women. Journal of Women’s Health and Wellness, 2(1), 014-022. http://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijwhw/international-journal-of-womens-health-and-wellness-ijwhw-2-014.pdf

Kruger, L., & Lourens, M. (2016). Motherhood and the “madness of hunger”: “…want almal vra vir my vir ‘n stukkie brood” (“…because everyone asks me for a little piece of bread”). Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 40(1), 124-143. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-015-9480-5

Kruger, L., Shefer, T., & Oakes, A. (2015). ‘I could have done everything and why not?’: Young women’s complex constructions of sexual agency in the context of sexualities education in Life Orientation in South African schools. Perspectives in Education, 33(2), 30-48 http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/persed_v33_n2_a3

Meyer, K., & Kruger, L. (2015). “You get angry inside yourself”: Low-income adolescent South African girls’ subjective experience of depression. Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 51(2), 174-191. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0037-80542015000200002&script=sci_arttext&tlng=pt

Shefer, T., Kruger, L., Macleod, C., Baxen, J., & Vincent, L. (2015). ‘… a huge monster that should be feared and not done’: Lessons learned in sexuality education classes in South Africa. African Safety Promotion. Special issue: Youth, Violence and Equality: Local-Global Perspectives, 13(1), 71-87 http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/safety_v13_n1_a5

Shefer, T., Kruger, L., &. Schepers, Y. (2015). Masculinity, sexuality and vulnerability in ‘working’ with young men in South African contexts: “You feel like a fool and an idiot … a loser”. Culture, Health and Sexuality. Special issue: Beyond Working with Boys and Men, 17, 96-111. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13691058.2015.1075253

Kruger, L., Van der Straaten, K., Taylor, L., Dukas, C. & Lourens, M. (2014). The melancholy of murderous mothers: Reflections on the violence of the institution of motherhood. Feminism and Psychology, 24(4), 461-478.
http://fap.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/27/0959353514539653.abstract

Kruger, L. (2014). Book review: Psychodynamic psychotherapy in South Africa: Contexts, theories and applications. [Review of the book Psychodynamic psychotherapy in South Africa: Contexts, theories and applications, edited by C. Smith, G. Lobbon & M. O’Loughlin]. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, 22(1), 133-145 http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/ppsa_v22_n1_a9

Kruger, L. (2014). The whales beneath the surface: The muddled story of doing research with poor mothers in a developing country. Health Care for Women International. Special Issue: Women and Health in Africa, 35(7-9). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07399332.2014.906441

Fleming, K. & Kruger, L. (2014). “She keeps his secrets”: A gendered analysis of the impact of shame on the non-disclosure of sexual violence in one low-income South African community. African Safety Promotion: A Journal of Injury and Violence Prevention, 11(2),107-124. http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/safety_v11_n2_a10

Capri, C., Kruger, L., & Tomlinson, M. (2013). Child sexual abuse workers’ emotional experiences of working therapeutically in the Western Cape, South Africa. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 30, 365-382. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10560-012-0295-8

Lourens, M., & Kruger, L. (2013). Die subjektiewe ervaring van depressie onder Suid-Afrikaanse vroue in ’n lae-inkomste gemeenskap. Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 49(2), 248-270. http://socialwork.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/68.

Fuchs, O., Kruger, L., & Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2013). An exploration of German subjectivity three generations after the end of World War Two. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(2), 133-158. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08873267.2012.694127#.VmV81Lh97IU

Kruger, L. (2012). “Vrot kolletjies.” (rotten spots): Reflections on shame, silence and enactment in psychotherapy with impoverished clients. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa, 20(2), 1-32. http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/ppsa_v20_n2_a2

Kruger, L., & Schoombee, C. (2010). The other side of caring: Violence in the maternity ward. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 28(1), 84-101. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02646830903294979#.VmV9QLh97IU

Book chapters

Kruger, L. (2020). The becoming girl: Anton van Wouw’s Noitjie van die Onderveld (Lass of the Onderveld), Afrikaner nationalism and the construction of the “volksmoeder” (mother of the nation) discourse. In F. Freshi, B. Schmahmann, & L. van Robbroeck (Eds.), Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism. Wits University Press: Johannesburg.

Kruger, L (2015). The whales beneath the surface: The muddled story of doing research with poor mothers in a developing country. In C. O. Izugbara, E. K. Covan, & E. Fugate-Whitlock (Eds.), Women’s Health in Africa (pp. 7-18). Routledge: London.

Books

Kruger, L. (2020). Of Motherhood and Melancholia: Notebook of a Psycho-ethnographer. Durban: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press.

Teaching

Coordination of Programmes and Modules

• Chair of Department of Psychology: 2019-2021

Undergraduate:

• Psychopathology 314 Module Coordinator: 2018

Postgraduate:

• Co-ordinator Clinical Programme: 2000-2012

Teaching areas

Undergraduate:

• Psychopathology 314

Honours:

• Applied Community Psychology

Masters Clinical:

• Clinical Evaluation
• Psychopathology
• Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Websites and other relevant links

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