Working in the traumatic stress field for the past 25 years in South Africa as therapist, trainer, clinical supervisor, consultant and researcher – with populations as diverse as rape and torture survivors; political detainees; accident, crime and domestic violence victims; combat veterans; refugees and the traumatically bereaved – I have found it of great value to draw upon aspects of psychodynamic thinking and practice, as will be elaborated in this chapter. During these 25 years the landscape of trauma and trauma intervention has changed markedly. My earliest exposure to trauma intervention was through involvement in the feminist- influenced, rape crisis organisations that grew up around the country in the 1970s. The counselling offered by these organisations was located within a crisis counselling model influenced by insights from feminism about understanding the causes and effects of sexual violence. Later, in the 1980s, like many other progressive professionals in the country, I became involved in an anti-apartheid group, the Organisation for Appropriate Social Services in South Africa (OASSSA), which aimed to address mental health issues relating to oppression and political repression, including trauma-related issues. Two central projects of OASSSA were, firstly, to offer counselling services to ex-detainees, many of whom had been tortured or abused during their time in detention, and secondly, to run crisis counselling workshops for community groups. The latter often entailed conducting some trauma intervention for the trainees themselves, many of whom had been damaged in a variety of ways within the political system. During this time few of us explicitly understood our work within the framework of traumatic stress, a diagnostic and conceptual category that really only gained purchase in South Africa in the early 1990s, although it is now widely employed by a range of practitioners and theorists across the country. Pioneers of trauma work in South Africa tended to become involved in such work in large part out of a political commitment to victims and survivors, given that traumatised populations often represent groups that have been oppressed in some way. In contemporary South Africa there is a much broader spectrum of people involved in trauma work dealing with a wide range of victims, much of this work being undertaken in workplace employee assistance programmes.