Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

SUMMARY: The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his medical work still has only been studied peripherally. That is partly because most of his psychiatry writings have remained untranslated. With a focus on Fanon’s key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon’s medical 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 clinical 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.”TABLE OF CONTENTS: Foreword by Alice Cherki / Preface / 1. Introduction / 2. The Thought of a Young Psychiatrist: Theories of Madness and the Human Condition in Fanon’s Dissertation / 3. The Disalienation of the Black Person / 4. Suspect Bodies: A Semiotics of Colonial Experience / 5. The Death of Colonial Psychiatry and the Birth of a Critical Ethnopsychiatry / 6. Sociotherapy, its Strengths and Weaknesses. Further Steps Toward a Critical Ethnopsychiatry / 7. The Impossibility of Mental Health in a Colonial Society: Fanon Joins the FLN / 8. Psychiatry, Violence, and Revolution: Body and Mind in Context / 9. The Tunis Psychiatric Day Hospital / 10. Politics and Madness. Trauma, Violence, and Torture / 11. From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders, or the Psychic Life of History / 12. Conclusion / Bibliography / Index