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Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics CREOLIZING the CANON Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics CREOLIZING THE CANON Series Editors Jane Anna Gordon, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut Neil Roberts, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science, Williams College This series, published in partnership with the Caribbean Philosophical Association, revisits canonical theorists in the humanities and social sciences through the lens of creolization. It offers fresh readings of familiar figures and presents the case for the study of formerly excluded ones. Titles in the Series Creolizing Rousseau, edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts Hegel, Freud and Fanon, Stefan Bird- Pollan Theorizing Glissant, edited by John E. Drabinski and Marisa Parham Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader, edited by Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, with Paget Henry The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization, Tommy J. Curry Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics, Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce Creolizing Hegel, edited by Michael Monahan (forthcoming) Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26– 34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2017 by Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce The drawings in chapter 8 are reproduced by kind permission of Francesco Pirelli. The drawings were first published in “Racconti di bambini d’Algeria” by Giulio Einaudi Editore in 1962. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978- 1- 7866- 0093- 6 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Is Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-093-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-095-0 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48– 1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents List of Abbreviations vii Foreword by Alice Cherki ix Introduction 1 1 The Thoughts of a Young Psychiatrist on Race, Madness, and “the Human Condition” 31 2 The Political Phenomenology of the Body and Black Alienation 63 3 Colonial Psychiatry and the Birth of a Critical Ethnopsychiatry 95 4 Suspect Bodies: A Phenomenology of Colonial Experience 121 5 Further Steps toward a Critical Ethnopsychiatry Sociotherapy: Its Strengths and Weaknesses 131 6 The Impossibility of Mental Health in a Colonial Society: Fanon Joins the FLN 165 7 Psychiatry, Violence, and Revolution: Body and Mind in Context 185 8 The Tunis Psychiatric Day Hospital 205 9 Bitter Orange: The Consequences of Colonial War 223 v vi Contents 10 From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders, or the Psychic Life of History 245 A Note on Translating Frantz Fanon by Lisa Damon 263 Bibliography 269 Index 293 List of Abbreviations APA American Psychological Association BPD borderline personality disorder DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders FLN National Liberation Front OAS Organisation Armée Secrete PTSD post- traumatic stress disorder TAT Thematic Apperception Test vii Foreword Alice Cherki For a long time, academic interest in Fanon’s work focused mainly on his “political” texts, notably Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, which analyze the cultural and political oppression of the dominant over the oppressed in a colonial and postcolonial system. This was done at the expense of his little-known writing on psychiatry. In fact, Fanon published psychiatry texts on his own and with collaborators throughout his career. To this day, these writings remain understudied. Moreover, it is difficult to distin- guish between Fanon the psychiatrist, Fanon the militant, Fanon the thinker, and Fanon the writer, when one has known him with these multiple facets and has followed the elaboration of his thought. Contrary to David Macey’s claim that Fanon was a conventional psy- chiatrist, it should be emphasized that when it came to his psychiatric work, Fanon was a precursor of “sociotherapy,” better known today as “institu- tional psychotherapy.” He was also a precursor in the theoretical develop- ment of the discipline, starting with his thesis, which he wrote at the age of twenty- six, under the impressive title, “Mental Disturbances, Changes in Character, Psychic Disturbances and Intellectual Deficiency in Hereditary Spinocerebellar Degeneracy: A Case of Friedrich’s Disease with Delusions of Possession.” In the thesis, he linked three dimensions of alienation: the sub- jective, the cultural, and the political. We see this again in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks in which he emphasized that “alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny (Fanon 2008: xv). The article “Le trouble mental et le trouble néurologique” (Mental and neurological disorders), which contains extracts from Fanon’s thesis, proves that he never really rejected biological or neuropathological explanations for the appearance of mental disorders. Notably, Fanon’s particular interest in seeing the alienated as whole persons, including their respective delusions, ix x Foreword is already apparent here. So are the beginnings of his affirmation of “the imbrication of social reality with the organization of mental disorders,” as he took on the undoubtedly cumbersome reading of Lacan’s thesis—it was only 1951. Nevertheless, he extracted from it the following: “And not only can the human’s being not be understood without madness, but it wouldn’t be the human’s being if it didn’t carry within it madness as the limit of its freedom.” It is interesting to read this quote alongside what Fanon wrote some years later, in late 1956, in his letter of resignation to the governor- general of Algeria, Robert Lacoste, in which he insisted that taking care of madness is about returning freedom to the mad: “Madness is one of the means by which the human being can lose their freedom” and that “psychiatry is the medical technique that proposes to help the human being no longer be a stranger to their environment.” He added, “The social structure existing in this country [colonial Algeria] is opposed to any attempt to put the individual back in their place,” and further explained that “the function of a social structure is to set up institutions to serve human needs. A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a nonviable society, a society to be replaced” (Fanon 2001: 61). Fanon did not deny the existence of madness. He was no anti- psychiatrist. And even though he was revolted by the barbaric use of lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy that took place, unaccompanied by wake-up care or talk therapy before and after, he did not refuse the use of drugs and would not have opposed the properly framed use of neuroleptics and other medication. However, he always advocated a relational, personal, and institutional context that favored the emergence of speech and the retrieval of fragments of histories suffered, silenced, forgotten, and espe- cially censored. The modernity of Fanon’s conception of psychiatry pervades all his other writings. In recent decades, pharmacology has reigned supreme and approaches to psychical suffering have been far too often linked to the pseu- doscientific cataloguing of conscientiously numbered diagnostic notations for The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). By contrast, each of Fanon’s texts insists upon the apprehension and comprehen- sion of alienation and the alienated through all social, cultural, and familial registers from which subjects of language and history are born and con- structed. In our present era, governed as we are by the principle of efficiency, and scarcely concerned with subjectivity, the triumph of cognitivism and behavioral practices for treating suffering over sociotherapy and institutional psychotherapy, to which Fanon, student of Tosquelles, subscribed throughout his short time as a psychiatrist, is at its apogee. Foreword xi In all of Fanon’s psychiatric texts (from “Sociotherapy on a Ward for Muslim Men,” coauthored with Jacques Azoulay to “Confession in North Africa,” written with Raymond Lacaton; “The TAT among Muslim Women,” written with Charles Géronimi, and “The Phenomenon of Agitation in Psychiatry,” conceived with Slimane Asselah), his major preoccupation was to enable authentic speech by reestablishing an environment that allows each subject to take up again the traces of real or psychical events. It is not my intention to go through each article in this short prologue. What is important is to highlight the pertinence of Fanon’s discoveries, such as the inappropri- ateness of images used in a projective test that represented, for example, a Christian cemetery or the wooden staircase of an apartment
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