Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

Nigel C. Gibson, Roberto Beneduce

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his psychiatric work still has only been studied peripherally. That is in part because most of his psychiatric writings have remained untranslated. With a focus on Fanon’s key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon’s psychiatic writings as materials anticipating as well as accompanying Fanon’s better known work, written between 1952 and 1961 ( Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth ). Both clinical and political, they draw on another notion of psychiatry that intersects history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The authors argue that Fanon’s work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry based on a new concept of culture (anchored to historical events, particular situations, and lived experience) and on the relationship between the psychological and the cultural. Thus, Gibson and Beneduce contend that Fanon’s psychiatric writings also express Fanon’s wish, as he puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, to “develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity.”

Chapter One

The Thoughts of a Young Psychiatrist on Race, Madness, and “the Human Condition”

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He left the island in 1943 to join the Free French Army. By the time he had been deployed to North Africa and then to France to take part in the Battle of Alsace in 1945, his enthusiasm for the French had soured. About his decision “to fight for an obsolete ideal,” he wrote to his mother that “he was questioning everything, even himself,” discovering that free France was as racist as it had been under Vichy France—the client and puppet state that Nazi Germany installed in France and the French colonies from 1940 to 1943. After the war, Fanon returned to Fort de France and worked on Aimé Césaire’s bid for election as mayor on a Communist Party ticket.

In 1946, Fanon returned to France and began a medical degree at the University of Lyon.¹ There, he studied philosophy (especially phenomenology and existentialism), politics, and psychoanalysis, reading Marx, Sartre, Freud, and Lacan. Alongside his degree, he took classes with philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.² Before completing his medical training, he switched to psychiatry and joined Lyon’s psychiatry department, which was then headed by Professor Jean Dechaume, a specialist in neurology who was fascinated by psychosurgery. According to Razanajao, Postel, and Allen (1996: 500), the whole psychiatry department took “a very organicist approach to neuropsychiatry.” In fact, neuropsychiatry was not yet a recognized discipline and most psychiatrists had little interest in psychoanalytical inquiry or methods. The department’s approach was “very ‘biological’ and anxiety cases were treated with shock therapy and intravenous injections of succyl!”³ (Razanajao, Postel, and Allen 1996: 500).

Reflecting on Fanon’s time in Lyon, François Tosquelles remarked that the Faculty of Medicine was a “caricature ... of analytical Cartesianism applied to the pathological event.” The professional training of psychiatrists could be summed up as consisting of the conviction that in any circumstance the patient should be committed to a psychiatric institution. While under Dechaume’s supervision, Fanon submitted what was later published as Black Skin, White Masks as his doctoral thesis. With its scathing critique of reductive biochemical approaches,⁴ the work also challenged what was considered traditional psychoanalytic thinking, arguing that in addition to ontogeny (in Freudian psychoanalysis), sociogeny should be considered (2008: xv). His approach to alienation was sociodiagnostic with a “brutal awareness of the social and economic realities” (2008: xiv). Since his earliest writings, Fanonian questions and research “necessarily connect ... psychological structures to political, economic and geographical ones” (Desai 2014: 66). Thus, from the opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon did not dismiss psychoanalysis but solicited and interpolated it within a social framework.

At the time, psychiatry was generally indifferent to the overlapping issues of marginality, racism, psychic suffering, and violence and continued to repeat and reaffirm that black people were criminals, naturally violent, or simply crazy.⁵ To understand how Fanon was able to take such a radical step beyond the prevailing wisdom in his field, and the views of his academic peers and supervisors, it is important to know that his own reading and research had made him aware of crucial work being done in the United States and Britain in connecting mental disorders to class, race, and migration. In fact, the 1940s marked an important turning point in the United States with regard to mental health facilities for black people, particularly black children. In 1946, for example, a group of black psychologists and psychiatrists decided to offer clinical assistance to poor and marginalized people in Harlem, who, because of the racist attitudes of health professionals, had no easy access to health facilities and often became chronically ill.

The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was established in Harlem with an interracial group of psychiatrists and psychologists working under the guidance of Fredric Wertham, a German American psychiatrist. The group found inspiration in the work of Paul Lafargue, an Afro-Cuban French physician and Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who had been active in the struggle against the “racial prejudice” and oppression created by a “false science” (an expression used in the clinic’s brochure).⁶ The clinic constituted a decisive experiment that was a singular response to the racism of existing health institutions:

It was free ... in its first year and half alone the clinic saw over two thousand patients, both adults and children. Some were simply in need of someone to talk to about their daily problems; some were indeed suffering from neuroses; others were diagnosed with a psychosis ... The Lafargue Clinic represented a landmark in both the history of African American encounters with psychiatry and the history of American psychotherapy’s reckoning with the social sources of mental disorders. (Mendes 2015: 7–9)

In his book Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry, Gabriel Mendes noted that Richard Wright, a writer that Fanon admired, became a close friend of Wertham’s in the early 1940s. Wright “embraced psychoanalysis and other psychological sciences as a guide to understanding his own thinking and for plumbing the ‘inner landscapes’ of fictional characters” (Mendes 2015: 35).⁷ Wright was an important supporter of the Lafargue Clinic and a founding board member. He considered it essential to make public the “the psychological and emotional effects of antiblack discrimination and segregation” (Mendes 2015: 95). Although Wright left the United States for France only a year after the clinic opened, his article “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem” described the clinic as an absolutely necessary institution, which “violate[s]‌ ... the contemporary metaphysical canons of organized medicine in America” (Wright 1946: 49).

Human needs metamorphose when they are forgotten or unrecognized, Wright observed, underscoring how among the dominated and subordinated, “social needs” emerge in fragmented and pathological ways,⁸ only to surface later “in strange channels.” “Psychologically repressed needs ... go underground,” said Wright, searching for an “unguarded outlet ... gushing forth in a wild torrent, frantic lest a new taboo deprive it of the right to exist.”⁹ Repressed needs become “symptoms” or are simply labeled deviant and give rise to “artificially-made psychological problems.” For example, Wright noted, “Harlem’s 400,000 black people produced 53% of all the juvenile delinquents of Manhattan, which has a white population of 1,600,000” (Wright 1946: 49).

In the absence of mental health facilities for the black community, the clinic was established without the help of rich (white) benefactors. Its necessity was explained by Wright’s poignant social and institutional diagnosis:

While in theory Negroes have access to psychiatric aid (just as the Negroes of Mississippi, in theory, have access to the vote!), such aid really does not exist owing to the subtle but effective racial discrimination that obtains against Negroes in almost all New York City hospitals and clinics; that it is all but impossible for Negro interns to gain admission to hospitals to receive their psychiatric training; and that the powerful personality conflicts engendered in Negroes by the consistent sabotage of their democratic aspirations in housing, jobs, education, and social mobility creates an environment of anxiety and tension which easily tips the normal emotional scales toward neurosis. (Wright 1946: 49)¹⁰

The Lafargue Clinic wanted to contest this state of things and Wright’s intention, like Fanon’s, was to undermine the false explanations and medical objections, which he said appeared sadistic, “uttered not only with straight medical faces, but, indeed, with moral solemnity.”

Wright tackled six often-heard objections to the opening of the clinic (1946: 50). First, that the establishment of a mental health clinic in Harlem must wait for black psychiatrists: Wright responded, “Race hate and the quota system of our medical schools have made it well-nigh impossible for a Negro to receive such training.” Second, the clinic is not necessary because the social and mental problems of the black population are the rule. As Wright ironically put it: “After all, aren’t Negroes ‘pleasure-loving,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘shiftless,’ naturally inclined toward crime, slow of comprehension, and irresponsible?” Third, a mental health clinic for blacks in Harlem ghettoizes intervention, risking the extension of “the already well-set pattern of racial segregation.” This, Wright replied, “neatly overlook[s]‌ that Harlem itself is an artificially made community!” Wright made it clear that he considered proponents of the fourth objection that “existing institutions serving the mentally ill must be made to give up their racial prejudices against Negroes,” both hypocritical and sadistic. No law, he retorted, “can possibly cope with the manifold dodges used by institutions to deprive Negroes of treatment.”¹¹ Fifth, he stated that psychiatrists who insisted that “the psychiatric need in Harlem is not more acute than other areas and singling out Harlem is a just a sign of ‘over-sensitivity’” were being “dangerously defensive about their racial prejudices.” Finally, he observed that when clinic staff stated that the cost of existing treatment was too high for the poor, black population, opponents of the service would inexorably remember “that payment of psychiatric fees is considered an indispensable part of the psychotherapeutic process. And on and on” (Wright 1946: 50). Wright’s criticisms resonate with the politico-epistemological deconstruction Fanon advocated when faced with colonial psychiatry. The objectives of the clinic intimated Fanon’s later sociodiagnostic critique of racism in psychiatry.¹²

Wright’s insightful analysis also anticipated other aspects of Fanon’s argument, offering precise counterpoints to the racial prejudices and contradictions characterizing psychiatry at that time. But beyond his uncommon interest in psychiatry, Wright’s work questioned segregation, racial alienation, and the black condition, while offering a caustic analysis of American nation and its lies.¹³ Wright was not alone in this. His interest in Wertham’s adventure was shared by Ralph Ellison:

When Negroes are barred from participating in the main institutional life of society, they lose far more than economic privileges or the satisfaction of saluting the flag with unmixed emotions. They lose one of the bulwarks ... between themselves and the constant threat of chaos ... And it is precisely the denial of this support through segregation and discrimination that leaves the most balanced Negro open to anxiety. (Ellison 1964: 299)¹⁴

The connection between psychiatrists, black writers, and Anglican priests (the Lafargue Clinic operated from the basement of the parish house of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem) against the background of racial and class conflict in New York is not without interest for those interested in investigating the implications of the clinic’s “singular position at the intersection of the histories of literature and psychiatry” (Campbell 2010: 443). For us, the connections clearly articulate with Fanon who considered Wright’s novels and characters to be cornerstones of his investigations into black alienation.¹⁵ An awareness of Wright’s engagement in the field of psychiatry, and of his call for another psychoanalysis (from the underground), is decisive in understanding the particular ways in which Fanon extracted his analysis of alienation from literature, film, and comic books, and presented this in Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon scrutinized Mayotte Capécia and René Maran’s characters, and discussed their novels in his book (including when he was writing it for submission as his doctoral thesis), posing a series of questions. What does the novelist’s imaginary say (and do) about the making and the unmaking of black self? What does it say about the internalization of oppression and subjugation on one hand and the building of French national identity on the other?¹⁶ How does it contribute to revealing and healing (or, alternatively, concealing) the roots of racial alienation? Could one consider the madness and violence of Wright’s Native Son and the neurosis of Ellison’s The Invisible Man as counterpoints to Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise (1948) and Maran’s Un homme pareil aux autres (1947)?

The Northside Center for Child Development opened in Harlem at the same time as the Lafargue Clinic. Its founders were the two black psychologists, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who, in the late 1930s, had conducted the famous “doll experiments” on identification among black children (Clark and Clark, 1939, 1940). The study is particularly relevant for understanding the impact of internalized racism and segregation on mental health. When asked to pick out the doll that “looks bad,” eleven of the sixteen children in the study selected the black one. An often-overlooked question was the traumatic meaning of the test itself, for both the children and the psychologists. As Kenneth Clark remembered it,

We were really disturbed by our findings, and we sat on them for a number of years ... Some of these children ... were reduced to crying when presented with the dolls and asked to identify with them. They looked at me as if it were the devil for putting them in this predicament. Let me tell you, it was traumatic experience for me as well. (Quoted in Cheng 2001: 1)¹⁷

Other scholars investigated the relationships between social discrimination, frustration, rage, or tension caused by repressed aggression (Kardiner and Ovesey 1951). Fanon did not mention these studies, or the work of the Clarks, in his writings but their conclusions are cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Thoughts of a Young Psychiatrist on Race, Madness, and “the Human Condition”
• Chapter Two The Political Phenomenology of the Body and Black Alienation
• Chapter Three Colonial Psychiatry and the Birth of a Critical Ethnopsychiatry
• Chapter Four Suspect Bodies: A Phenomenology of Colonial Experience
• Chapter Five Further Steps toward a Critical Ethnopsychiatry Sociotherapy: Its Strengths and Weaknesses
• Chapter Six The Impossibility of Mental Health in a Colonial Society: Fanon Joins the FLN
• Chapter Seven Psychiatry, Violence, and Revolution: Body and Mind in Context
• Chapter Eight The Tunis Psychiatric Day Hospital
• Chapter Nine Bitter Orange: The Consequences of Colonial War
• Chapter Ten From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders, or the Psychic Life of History
• A Note on Translating Frantz Fanon
• Bibliography
• Index