Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics - Couverture rigide

Gibson, Nigel C.; Beneduce, Roberto

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1786600935 ISBN 13 : 9781786600936

Editeur : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017

Synopsis

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.”

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Roberto Beneduce is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Turin. He is the founding director of the Frantz Fanon Center in Turin. His recent publications include a collection of Fanon’s psychiatric writings in Italian, Decolonizzare la follia. Scritti sulla psichiatria coloniale (2011), and L'histoire au corps (Embodying History) (2016). In 2016 he edited a special issue of the journal Politique Africaine, "Mobilzer Fanon".


Nigel C. Gibson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Emerson College. He is author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003) and Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2014), and the editor of Rethinking Fanon (1999) and Living Fanon (2011). He is the editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

By Nigel C. Gibson, Roberto Beneduce

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-093-6

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, 
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, 

CHAPTER 1

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

Frantz Fanon was bom 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. 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. 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!" (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, 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. 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). 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). 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, 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." 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)

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." 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.

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. 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)

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. 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? 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)

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 consistent with remarks he made in Black Skin, White Masks.

In postwar Britain, the impact of new psychiatric and psychological theories on the pathologization of black immigrants and, above all, of foreign black students and their parents, was considerable. The particular fragility of black students seems to have been related to cultural and environmental shock related to the racism they encountered. For example, Jordanna Bailkin quoted Farrukh Hashmi, a senior transcultural psychiatrist at the University of Birmingham, describing "what he called a 'displaced persons syndrome,' prompted by paranoia about racial and ethnic discrimination. Hashmi has claimed that many migrants feel guilty about being unable to defend their rudimentary religious beliefs against English logic: 'Conscience, when injured, is like a wound, which does heal eventually but leaves a permanent scar'" (Bailkin 2012: 38). Bailkin also recorded a claim made by H. P. Burrowes, the city of Bradford's principal medical officer, that the move to Britain prompted either "servile obsequious endeavor" or "aggressive endeavor" in migrants of color. Burrowes reportedly argued that migrant delusions typically involved white women, thus pathologizing the effects of interracial relationships on "the fragile migrant psyche" (quoted in Bailkin 2012: 39). Concerns about the relationships between immigrants and European women had become a central issue among psychiatrists. A new reason for repatriation was emerging, but, around the same time, Nigerian psychiatrists were emphasizing that there was no improvement when migrants returned home. Diagnoses such as "brain fag syndrome," proposed in 1960 by Raymond Prince, the chief psychiatrist at the Aro Hospital in Nigeria, tried to capture the sense of the fragility and nervous "weakness" among black students. Born in Canada and trained as a psychiatrist, Prince worked in Nigeria, where he recognized the difficulties of applying western psychology or psychiatry as well as the their lack of superiority with regard to African techniques: "Western psychiatric techniques are not in my opinion demonstrably superior to many indigenous Yoruba practices. Psychotherapeutic techniques fit the cultures in which they have developed and cannot cross cultural boundaries so successfully as can physical therapies." (Prince 1964: 116) As Bailkin suggested, Prince seemed to recognize a more complex meaning in these diagnoses, including the social and political reasons for the suffering:

Prince theorized that because the British educational experience required isolated endeavor where the Nigerian craved community, the syndrome constituted an unconscious 'revolt' against an alien metropolitan experience. In a further study of "brain fag syndrome" among secondary schools students some years later, Prince came to the conclusion that Nigerian students were not suited to academic work and suggested that they developed this disorder as a way of "escaping responsibility for the demands of education. (Bailkin 2012: 122).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics by Nigel C. Gibson, Roberto Beneduce. Copyright © 2017 Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Rowman & Littlefield
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1786600935
• ISBN 13: 9781786600936
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 307
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne