“Slaves of a cause”: Psychological Theory and Practice of Frantz Fanon during the

Algerian Revolution

Duncan Murray

University of Prince Edward Island

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Table of Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................4

Introduction ................................................................................................................................5

Methods and Historiography .......................................................................................................6

Historiographical questions and approaches ............................................................................8

Fort-de-France, Martinique .........................................................................................................9

A Martinican Boyhood ............................................................................................................9

War in Europe, Change at Home ........................................................................................... 12

The Second World War ............................................................................................................. 14

A Soldier in North Africa ...................................................................................................... 14

Returning Home – but not for long ........................................................................................ 17

Lyon, France ............................................................................................................................. 19

University of Lyon ................................................................................................................ 19

Frantz Fanon: Psychiatrist… and Playwright? ....................................................................... 24

Private Life in France ............................................................................................................ 26

Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, France........................................................................................... 27

Francois Tosquelles ............................................................................................................... 28

Therapeutic Techniques at Saint-Alban ................................................................................. 32

Black Skin, White Masks........................................................................................................ 40

Private Life in Saint-Alban .................................................................................................... 61

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Blida, Algeria............................................................................................................................ 62

French Colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence................................................... 62

Antoine Porot and the Algiers School .................................................................................... 65

Institutional Psychotherapy in Algeria: Socio-cultural Barriers to Effective Treatment .......... 68

Administration of Psychological Tests in Algeria .................................................................. 70

Private Life in Blida .............................................................................................................. 73

The National Liberation Front, Resignation, and Exile .......................................................... 73

Tunis, Tunisia ........................................................................................................................... 75

Tunisia in Historical Context ................................................................................................. 75

A Dying Colonialism ............................................................................................................. 76

Psychiatric Methods in Tunisia .............................................................................................. 80

Teaching Social Psychopathology in Tunisia ......................................................................... 83

Fanon the Politician............................................................................................................... 85

Terminal Cancer .................................................................................................................... 92

The Wretched of the Earth ..................................................................................................... 92

Meeting Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir .............................................................. 108

Death ...................................................................................................................................... 108

Discussion............................................................................................................................... 110

Psychological Constructs and Social Reality ....................................................................... 110

Fanon’s Impact on Clinical Psychology ............................................................................... 112

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Psychology and Critical Race Theory .................................................................................. 114

References .............................................................................................................................. 117

Appendix A............................................................................................................................. 123

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Abstract

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, political theorist, and prolific writer who is best known

for his radical involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, but also made significant

contributions to the field of Psychology. Fanon’s work has been very influential in postcolonial

studies, particularly through his books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

Though less widely acknowledged, he also contributed to Psychology in diverse and important

ways. Notably, he did this by describing the social factors shaping the subjectivity of Black

people in France and by analyzing the psychological effects of colonialism on native Algerians.

Fanon also endeavoured to create culturally-appropriate therapies and assessments for non-

Western people. This paper presents a biographical account of Fanon’s life, placing his work in

historical context with a particular focus on his contributions to Psychology. Finally, this paper

discusses Fanon’s importance to contemporary psychological discourse and critical theory, and

his relevance to wider social movements like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More.
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Introduction

Frantz Fanon was a Martinican-born, French-trained psychiatrist renowned for his radical

political involvement in the Algerian Revolution in the 1950s and 60s. The fame accrued by

Fanon in his lifetime came mainly from his writing The Wretched of the Earth, which he

published the year of his death in 1961. Contributing to the book’s success, especially in Europe,

was undoubtedly its fiery preface, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the pre-eminent French

intellectuals of the 20th century. But before his direct involvement in political radicalism, Fanon

had established an esteemed career as a psychiatrist. After serving in the Second World War as a

member of the Free French Army, he studied medicine at the University of Lyon, eventually

deciding to specialize in psychiatry. Upon graduation, Fanon took a residency position at a

psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban, a small and isolated region in southern France. At Saint-

Alban, Fanon worked under François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist attempting to radically

re-imagine the practice of psychiatry. Tosquelles had an enormous impact on his thinking, and

his influence can be seen in Fanon’s later work in Algeria and Tunisia. While completing his

residency, Fanon published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952. After completing

his residency, Fanon took a position at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria as a psychiatrist. Here,

he helped reform the psychiatric hospital on two occasions – first, when he arrived,

implementing what he learned at Saint-Alban, and second, when he realized the cultural bias of

his initial reform. Eventually, Fanon was overcome with the dissonance he felt working for a

French colonial institution. He resigned and was subsequently exiled, took refuge in Tunisia, and

continued to work as a psychiatrist despite his strong commitment to the cause of Algerian

independence.
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This Honours thesis aims to recount a detailed narrative of Frantz Fanon’s life in the

larger socio-historical context of his time, emphasizing aspects of his work specifically about

psychology. Fanon is a renowned figure in post-colonial discourse, but his contributions to

psychology have been, thus far, marginalized. This fact is regrettable since his work may inform

clinical practices more conscient to the needs of ethnic minorities and persons of underprivileged

groups. However, perhaps most emphatic in his work and salient for our purposes is his critique

of the dominant conceptualizations of native Algerians as psychologically inferior – views

supported by the colonial ruling class. This project considers the epistemological violence

inherent to the colonial discourse Fanon critiqued, and encourages readers to consider aspects of

contemporary psychology that can be interpreted as justification for neglect, harm, hatred, and

fear of ‘the Other.’

Methods and Historiography

Despite having died young, Fanon wrote prolifically, leaving a substantial number of

primary sources that form the basis of this paper. Most famous are his books Black Skin, White

Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). In the former, he drew on existentialism,

phenomenology, and psychoanalysis to analyze the subjective experience of a Black person. In

the latter, Fanon presented his ideas concerning the relationship between psychopathology,

oppression, and revolution. His other published books are A Dying Colonialism (1959) and

Toward the African Revolution (1964), the latter published posthumously. The aforementioned

books have long since been translated into English. Recently, a vast collection of Fanon’s writing

– including his doctoral thesis, plays, letters, and political articles – has been translated into

English and published in the collection Alienation and Freedom (2018). It is upon these works

that this paper is based and to the respective translators that it is indebted. In this Honours thesis,
 7

I present Fanon’s life and work in its historical context, and emphasize his relevance in the

history of Psychology.

The inspiration for an Honours thesis concerning the work of such radical a thinker as

Frantz Fanon comes from a collection of related interests paired with a series of disconcerting

recent events. Within the last couple of years, I have taken an interest in the work of Jean-Paul

Sartre. It was through a pair of books, At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell and The

Outsider by Colin Wilson, that I became acquainted with Sartre’s work. I began reading some of

his writing, including Nausea and Existentialism and Humanism. I suppose somewhere along the

way, I came across the name ‘Fanon.’ My interest in Sartrean Existentialism coincided with

events illuminating the historical and contemporary injustices that continue disenfranchising

underprivileged groups worldwide. These events – police violence in the United States, the

appropriation of First Nations land by natural gas companies in Western Canada, and the

discovery of mass grave sites of indigenous children across North America – represent systemic

forms of violence in which we are all implicated. As a Psychology student, I wondered how the

discipline might perpetuate this violence, and how it could be reconfigured to help resolve it.

With these considerations, it became clear that Frantz Fanon would be an ideal subject for this

thesis.

Fanon has long since been a major theorist in postcolonial studies, but his contributions

to psychology have been somewhat neglected. This paper, therefore, places particular emphasis

on Fanon’s work pertinent to psychology – both theoretical and clinical. He drew from the work

of Hegel, Sartre, Lacan, and others to write about the lived experience of a Black person. He

administered Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs) to non-Europeans and subsequently wrote

about the test’s sociocultural contingencies. He reconfigured psychiatric hospitals to suit his
 8

patients’ cultural needs better. Perhaps most importantly, Fanon challenged the dominant

conception of native Algerian mentality espoused by colonial psychologists.

Historiographical questions and approaches

Before embarking on the task of creating a biographical account of Frantz Fanon, or any

historical person, one must consider the myriad approaches and conditions informing the study.

Scott Greer calls these the “Five Perennial Questions in Historiography” (Leahey et al., 2015).

This paper regards psychological concepts discussed by Fanon and his contemporaries as

discontinuous, meaning it does not assume a given concept to have essentially the same meaning

today as it did in mid-century France or North Africa. For instance, Fanon used the term

“psychosomatic disorder” to characterize “the general body of organic disorders developed in

response to a situation of conflict” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 216), but it is unclear whether this term

has the same meaning today. In this paper, I assume that meanings differ, potentially with

significant variance, depending on socio-historical conditions.

Historicism is the term denoting the study of history on its own terms, seeking to

understand objects of the past with considerable regard to the variables of the time. Fanon is

infamous for his advocacy of violence as a therapeutic method, and while psychologists, pundits

and otherwise “naïve historians” may repudiate this idea on purportedly moral grounds, they do

so only by studying his work from the viewpoint of the present. A historicist approach to

studying Fanon reserves any judgment that reflects a basic unawareness of one’s own position

(socially, historically, culturally, economically) and instead appropriately evaluates his ideas by

placing them in a historical context. While historicism demands an understanding whereby

historical detail is prioritized, a critical history of Frantz Fanon also analyzes the value of his

ideas in the present context. I try to write this paper from the perspective of critical historicism –
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that is, I consider Fanon’s work in its historical context, while also attempting to apply his

thought as a critique of present psychological theories and practices.

Finally, methodologically, whether Fanon is a product of his time (zeitgeist) or whether

he is the primary agent of change within his historical period (“Great Man”) is a question that

presents something of a false dichotomy – one that this project wishes to transcend. It will

attempt to understand Fanon as both a product of his time and a major figure in 1950s and 60s

psychiatry and psychological theory. The person and the time are inseparable; therefore, the

notion that one should be emphasized at the expense of the other is a non sequitur.

Fort-de-France, Martinique

A Martinican Boyhood

Frantz Fanon lived only to the age of thirty-six, but the interests, ethics, and causes of his

life are emblematic of the struggles that characterize much of the 20 th century. Fanon was born to

Félix Casimir and Eléanore Médélice Fanon, a customs inspector and shop owner, respectively,

in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on July 20th, 1925. His father, Félix, was a descendant of enslaved

Africans, while his mother, Eléanore, was mixed-race. Félix and Eléanore had eight children

total, with Frantz being the third of four sons (Macey, 2012).

Upon marrying, Félix and Eléanore moved away from their rural Martinican origin into

Fort-de-France, the country’s urban center. Félix worked various trade jobs, while Eléanore –

showing an ambitious spirit characteristic of the family name – opened a shop selling hardware

and drapery. Félix eventually entered the customs sector as an inspector, but as civil servants

were only humbly imbursed, the bulk of the family’s income likely came by virtue of Eléanore’s

store. This dual income allowed the Fanon’s to enrol their children at Lycée Schoelcher, a
 10

private school (Macey, 2012). Frantz’s two uncles similarly achieved upward social mobility

concurrently, one becoming a schoolteacher, the other working for France’s Forestry

Commission.

Relatively prosperous, the Fanon family could afford to send its children to Lycée

Schoelcher, then the most prestigious high school in Martinique. While Martinique’s White

minority, békés, owned most of the land, it was not uncommon for Black families to send their

children to Lycée Schoelcher, and students of varying skin tones filled the classrooms (Macey,

2012). The history Fanon was taught as a youth served the dominant ideology of Martinique’s

white, ruling minority. For the colonized, as Fanon later recounted in The Wretched of the Earth,

it is the colonist who makes history, and “The history he writes is not the history of the country

he is stripping, but the history of his own nation as it plunders, rapes, and starves” (Fanon et al.,

2004, p. 14). This French colonialist teaching of history seemed to have served its purpose, as the

young Fanon developed an idealized perception of French values – liberty, equality, and

fraternity. He would later have to leave Martinique to break this spell of illusion.

In his early youth, what concerned Fanon was typical of many his age: football and

disobedience. The field at which he and his brothers played football was near the Fanon family

home. To the Fanon brothers, the field was a little too near the home – within earshot of their

mother, who was keen for them to stop playing, eat, and study. This proximity was unfortunate,

since they found the wide, green football fields a worthwhile escape from the narrow, compacted

streets of Fort-de-France. When he was not playing football, Fanon was prone to mischief. Along

with his brother, Joby, Frantz partook in the trouble-causing of a juvenile gang called La Bande

Raide. Showing early signs of his capacity for leadership and revolt, Fanon was a dominant
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organizer, though most of the group’s activities were harmless, mostly comprised of sneaking

into movie theatres without paying and scuffles with rival groups (Macey, 2012).

Figure 1. A street in Fort-de-France, Martinique, photographed in 1938. (Austin, 2022)

As Fanon matured, so too did his interests. He eventually began reading in the

Bibliothèque Schoelcher. Like the history taught in school, the language in which he read served

a role in Fanon’s, and other colonized peoples’, indoctrination into the dominant ideology of the

colonialists. While Creole was the language of choice in Martinican homes, French was taught

and read in schools and libraries. Later, Fanon would recognize the relationship between

language, race, and colonialism, and document his findings in Black Skin, White Masks. At least

one teacher at Lycée Schoelcher helped catalyze Fanon’s intellectual development.

Aimé Cesairé was an important early influence on Fanon. Then a teacher at Lycée

Schoelcher, he later became a prominent member of parliament for the Martinican Communist
 12

Party and a major figure in the Négritude movement.1 In 1950, Cesairé wrote a now seminal text

in post-colonial studies, Discourse on Colonialism, for which he is best known. Pre-war

Martinique is understood as a country that did not speak explicitly about race. Cesairé spoke with

pride about his skin tone – rhetoric to which Fanon had not been exposed until this point.

Previously, Fanon had not exactly thought of himself as Black – Blacks, to Martinicans, lived in

Africa. As a schoolboy, Fanon and his friends found African-born people living in Martinique

fascinating, seemingly enchanted with the allure of their exoticism (Macey, 2012). It was not

until later that Fanon would come to realize his ‘Blackness.’ He wrote, in Black Skin, White

Masks, “I am a black man – but naturally I don’t know it, because I am one” (Fanon et al., 2008,

p. 168). Under the gaze of White Europeans, Fanon would eventually realize his place in the

social-constructed and economically enforced racial hierarchy.

War in Europe, Change at Home

Fanon came of age when European racial tensions had reached a boiling point. The Nazi

Party, having seized political power in Germany in the 1930s, had constructed a frighteningly

effective war machine, casting a spectre of fascism over Europe. When France signed an

armistice with the Nazi regime in June of 1940, they agreed that the colonies would remain in

French possession. However, loyalties in France were soon to be split. General Charles de Gaulle

refused to accept his country’s appeasement with the German Nazi Party, and fled to England to

escape persecution. After appealing to his compatriots to continue the fight, de Gaulle, with the

support of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, became the undisputed leader of the Free

French.

1
So taken by Cesaire, Fanon worked on his successful campaign for mayor of Fort-de-France, on the Communist
Party ticket, in 1945 (Gibson, Nigel C. & Beneduce, 2017)
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Back in Martinique, politicians gathered and reached a consensus: they would support the

Free French and oppose the Vichy regime, which Philippe Petain, a Nazi collaborationist,

headed. But news of Martinican support for the struggle against fascism would not initially

arrive upon European shores. Admiral Georges Robert, known to Martinicans as “Robè,” a

creolized name, was then High Commissioner for the French West Indies and Commander-in-

Chief of the West Atlantic Fleet. Robert, tightening his grip on the politics of the Caribbean

colonies, spoke regretfully about France’s losses in its war against Nazi Germany, but

nevertheless proclaimed support for the Vichy regime, casting aside the deliberative decision-

making of Martinique’s elected officials (Macey, 2012). Democracy in Martinique had faced a

pressure test – and it failed unequivocally. Ironically, due to centuries of French colonialism,

Martinique’s lack of autonomy now proved detrimental to the cause of a Free France.

Throughout his life, Fanon was never one to shy away from violent conflict, and this was

no different during the Second World War. Still a teenager, he greatly respected the proclaimed

values of French society: liberty, equality, and fraternity. As a result, he rallied to the Allies’

cause, charting their movements around the world. He seems to have had a strong sense that his

freedom, France’s, and Martinique’s were bound together, that defeat for France meant defeat for

Martinique and all human liberty (Macey, 2012).

While Fanon became lost in idealism, the tyranny of Robert’s dictatorialism became for

Martinicans, very real. Upon arrival in Martinique, the renowned anthropologist and ethnologist,

Claude Levi-Strauss, describes his experience of Fort-de-France in regrettable terms. The police,

he said, were deceitful, and he once witnessed a man sentenced to an eight-year imprisonment

after a five-minute trial (Claude Levi-Strauss, 2014). Like many Jewish people fleeing
 14

persecution by the Nazi Party, Levi-Strauss must have been especially and acutely sensitive to all

injustice, like that which he witnessed in Martinique.

The growing racist sentiment notwithstanding, Fanon was intrigued by the war and

charted the Allies’ movements worldwide. Ever the boisterous and impassioned youth, however,

Fanon was dissatisfied merely with charting progress. He longed to take up arms and fight for

the side he viewed as righteous – a theme of his short, action-filled life. Though little is known

about his life in this period, he eventually snuck from Martinique to join the Free French army,

led by Charles de Gaulle. Without money and constrained by family obligations, Fanon

nevertheless actualized his desire to travel to Europe. He stole and sold his father’s suit to pay for

his trip and skipped his brother’s wedding to take up arms abroad (Macey, 2012).

The Second World War

A Soldier in North Africa

Fanon arrived in Casablanca, Morocco, on March 30, 1944, before being sent to Meknes

for basic officer cadet training. Among the Martinicans who had volunteered to fight for the Free

French army, curiously, békés were absent. The desire to fight, seemingly, fell upon the society’s

least privileged – those of African descent. Later, Fanon wrote extensively about the

revolutionary potential of Algeria’s peasantry – the least privileged of that society. The Algerian

revolution, however, was qualitatively different from the war in Europe. In Europe, Black

Martinicans fought to continue the empire within which they constituted an oppressed class. In

Algeria, by contrast, the peasantry was organized and fighting not for any non-arm-bearing class

of landowning elites, but rather against such a ruling class, and for themselves. The latter case

pitted the colonizer against the colonized.

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During his time in North Africa, Fanon became acquainted with the racial hierarchy in

that region. As he explained in Black Skin, White Masks, “Some years ago we were astonished to

see for ourselves that the North Africans despised Black men. We found it impossible to have

any contact with the native Arab population… The Frenchmen does not like Jew, who does not

like Arab, who does not like the black man” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 85). Curious, perhaps, that

Fanon would later become a great champion of the Algerian independence cause, despite the

treatment he endured at the hands of native Moroccans. European colonists lived most

comfortably in Morocco. Whereas Muslims were worse off than Europeans, they were treated

much better than Africans. Europeans and Natives received different wartime food rations

(Macey, 2012).

Meanwhile, Black battalions were being sent into combat first, consequently suffering

casualties disproportionately along racial lines. The fact that the Allied forces were

discriminatory based on race disheartened the thus far idealistic and naïve Fanon, who hoped the

war would bury the ugly form of racism and fascism. He was not alone in this thinking. The

forces purporting to stand against racism and fascism, however, were themselves perpetrators of

these very injustices.

Fighting in the French industrial town of Montbeliard, Fanon was injured while operating

an 81-millimetre mortar under enemy fire, when he was struck in the chest by shrapnel from an

incoming mortar round. The incident occurred on 25 November, 1944. Fanon survived and was

later awarded the Croix de Guerre with a bronze star, with the Brigade dispatch commending his

‘distinguished conduct’ (Macey, 2012, p. 100). Despite being engulfed in a shroud of gunfire, the

battalion somehow evacuated Fanon from the war zone and took him to a hospital in nearby

Nantua, a small lakeside town in the Jura mountains. Here, doctors treated his injuries, and he
 16

promptly recovered. Soon, he played football with the locals and made good friends in the

region. By January, he was back amongst his battalion members, who were now patrolling the

banks of the nearby Rhine.

Writing to his older brother, Joby, on 16 January, 1945, Fanon expressed his

disillusionment with French culture. “Listen to me, I’ve grown a lot older than you. I’ve been

deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes, but I won’t be back in France before the end of the

war. I’m sick of it all” (Macey, 2012, p. 100). This was a war for white men's ideals, and it was

alienating the young, Black Martinican. His feelings on this point are further expressed in a letter

to his parents later that Spring:

Today, 12 April. It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why? To defend an obsolete

ideal. I don’t think I’ll make it this time. During all the scraps I’ve been in, I’ve been

anxious to get back to you, and I’ve been lucky. But today, I’m wondering whether I

might not soon have to face the ordeal. I’ve lost confidence in everything, even myself. If

I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console

each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say God called him back to him.

This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us

any longer. I was wrong! (Macey, 2012, p. 101)

Fanon did not need to fight much longer for what, to him, had become a set of false ideals.

Barely more than a fortnight after writing to his brother, Adolf Hitler committed suicide during

the battle of Berlin. The Nazi forces surrendered, and Europe erupted in jubilation. Fanon

travelled to Toulon to take part in the celebrations that May. However, for Martinicans, the

festivities were less than completely joyous. Despite their heroic role in defending Europe from

German imperialism, the French people in Toulon treated Martinicans as second-class citizens.
 17

Marcel Manville reported that the treatment Fanon, himself, and other Martinicans experienced

in France – after helping to rescue the country in its darkest hour – left them bitter and resentful.

They were anxious to return to Martinique and tell anyone who would listen about the

inhospitable French (Macey, 2012). Fanon, Manville, and their compatriots' treatment must have

confirmed the sentiment Fanon had previously espoused in his letter to Joby: equality, fraternity,

and liberty only ever meant equality, fraternity, and liberty for white Europeans.

Returning Home – but not for long

Following the celebrations marking the war's end in Europe and France’s liberation,

Fanon returned to Martinique amidst a political transformation. In October 1945, the country

elected Aimé Césaire to parliament as a member of the Communist Party, which was making

gains in the country (Macey, 2012). Césaire’s ability to captivate audiences through language

likely drew Fanon to his former teacher’s campaign. Fiery, in his speech as in his writing,

Césaire once made a woman faint through his powerful oratory, according to Fanon’s account of

the incident (Fanon et al., 2008).

Fanon returned a decorated war veteran but had yet to complete his secondary education.

Beginning where he had left off, he continued to attend Lycée Schoelcher and lived with his

family. Fanon also made time for his first love: football. The game had taken on new meaning

for Fanon, as he teamed up with his brothers Joby and Willy to form a formidable forward line

on the successful local team, St. Pierre. He eventually graduated from Lycée Schoelcher and, in

late 1946, passed his baccalaureat, which allowed him to go to university. Legislation

introduced on August 4th, 1945, gave veterans tuition-free post-secondary education and small

maintenance grants (Macey, 2012). Now that he had his diploma and a financially-viable route to

post-secondary education in France, Fanon had a decision to make.

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Figure 2. Fanon (right) with his brothers, Joby and Willy, in their football uniform, 1946.

(Morris, 1990)

The allure of France and the sense of confinement in Martinique worked to dissuade

whatever apprehension Fanon had about leaving so soon upon return. In his words, an ambitious

young Martinican was “a prisoner on his island, lost in an atmosphere without the slightest

prospect, feels the call of Europe like a breath of fresh air” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 5).

Doubtlessly, what also influenced his decision was the support of his parents. Having evaded life

in the Martinican peasantry, achieving social mobility and becoming members of the petty

bourgeoisie, Fanon’s parents wanted their children to continue the trend. They encouraged their

children to move forward further, in class terms, by attending university and working in a liberal

profession (Macey, 2012). France and the potential for a better life proved irresistible.
 19

Lyon, France

University of Lyon

When Fanon arrived in France, he was initially unsure of what to study. Neither of his

parents had a postsecondary education, making him a “first-generation” university student. His

educational journey initially brought him to Paris, where he enrolled in the Paris School of

Dentistry. But Fanon was unhappy in Paris, and this was as much a factor in his decision, it

appears, than any animosity toward his dentistry education. At the time, in a remarkable paradox

of his character, Fanon was reported to have made derogatory comments toward his own race.

He reportedly told his friend, Marcel Manville and his brother Joby, that there were “too many

negroes” in Paris (Macey, 2012, p. 116). Manville later wrote that Fanon wanted to ‘lactify,’ or

whiten himself, and was disdainful toward Martinicans in France who chastised him for trying to

initiate serious discussion (Macey, 2012). Yearning to escape the Martinican subculture of Paris,

Fanon moved to Lyon to study medicine in 1947, eventually deciding to specialize in Psychiatry.

When Fanon began studying medicine after World War II, Psychology was still a young

and somewhat controversial new discipline in France. Francoise Parot describes the emergence

of Psychology as a distinct discipline as a “crisis of thought,” with philosophers questioning its

validity and worrying about the social consequences of Spencerism (2012, p. 228). The implied

determinism of a scientific psychology also contradicted the French Republican system, which

assumed the liberty of conscience. However, the influence of a well-respected physiologist,

Henri Pieron, led to the establishment of autonomous psychology departments within French

universities and the widespread acceptance of psychotherapy (Parot, 2012). At the same time,

psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
 20

were prominent figures in the French intellectual scene, and they each left an impression on

Fanon.

Fanon was clearly a master of self-education, reading well outside the contours of

mainstream psychiatry while attending the University of Lyon. French psychiatry was, at the

time, a discipline seemingly split between competing epistemologies: a neuropsychiatric

approach and a phenomenological approach. Fanon’s supervisor, Jean Dechaume, subscribed

strongly to the neuropsychiatric approach, with its organicist assumptions and scientific rigour

that Fanon seemed to admire (Robcis, 2020). Despite being supervised by Dechaume, Fanon was

strongly under the influence of psychiatrist Henri Ey and philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

who, like their intellectual precursor, Karl Jaspers, stressed the necessity of taking a

phenomenological approach to understand mental illness. He also attended lectures of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and André Leroi-Gourhan, and read the works of the most celebrated intellectuals

of the time, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Jaspers, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, G. W. F.

Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Kurt Goldstein

(Robcis, 2020).

Jean-Paul Sartre had an almost palpable influence on Fanon, exemplified by the latter’s

innumerate references to the French philosopher and his work. Particularly, Fanon drew

inspiration from Sartre in his analysis of how ‘the Other’ is constructed. In Black Skin, White

Masks, Fanon referenced Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, in which Sartre explained that it is the

anti-Semite who creates the ‘Jew’ (or, Jew-as-social-construct) by projecting various anti-

Semetic tropes onto Jewish people. Although Sartre did not use the term, this process is closely

related to what object relations theorist Melanie Klein called “projective identification,” whereby

the person or people onto which a projection is cast respond by “interjecting” the stereotypes and
 21

acting them out, at least in part. This may give the anti-Semite an allure of vindication in his

perspective, but as Sartre, Klein, and Fanon explain, the anti-Semite, or anti-Black racist, or

otherwise bigoted person plays a primary role in the construction of ‘the Other.’ It should be

noted, that it is not merely that projective identification occurs in this strictly negative sense; it

occurs subtly in all interpersonal relations. Fanon transformed Sartre’s analysis of the anti-

Semite and the Jew to analyze the relations between anti-Black racists and Black people in

France. His conclusion is in accordance with Sartre, that “the racist creates the inferioirized,” but

with a caveat: whereas the Jew is not inextricably bound by his corporeality, the Black person is

a subjectivity perpetually embodied by black skin – the object onto which racist projections are

cast (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 72). This is a subtle distinction that Fanon recognizes: the ‘inferior’

object for the Black person is her skin, something with which she is constantly living, of which

she is constantly reminded. Contrast this with the Jewish person, for whom the object of

‘disgust’ is her religion, not her skin colour. More generally, Sartre’s philosophy informed much

of Fanon’s writing, with the latter’s emphasis on Sartrean tenets like freedom, responsibility, and

scorn for systems of oppression like colonialism and capitalism.

 22

Figure 3. Few influenced Fanon as profoundly as philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre,

photographed here circa 1955. (Cox, 2017)

As a student, Fanon was influenced by another great phenomenologist of the Parisian

intellectual scene: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Fanon had attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures, but

unlike the enthusiasm he had about meeting Sartre (he told Beauvoir that he would be 20 000

Frances to speak with Sartre, morning until night, for a fortnight), he admitted that he found

Merleau-Ponty distant, and never attempted to speak with him (Beauvoir, 1965). Nevertheless,

Merleau-Ponty informed Fanon’s notion of ‘lived experience,’ or Erlebnis – a term first used by

Husserl and Heidegger but popularized by Merleau-Ponty and important to French psychiatrists

in the 1950s (Macey, 2012).

Jacques Lacan is another French intellectual who influenced Fanon. Recent scholarship

has made much of the link between Fanon and Lacan, especially in the field of postcolonialism.

Yet compared to Sartre, Lacan features explicitly in Fanon’s writing considerably less. While the

analyses that link Fanon to Lacan are beyond the scope of this paper, one line can be drawn

between the two in the form of institutional psychotherapy, in which practitioners attempt to

transfuse a social life into patients by some form of symbolic exchange (Macey, 2012, p. 148).

As discussed later, Lacan was an important inspiration for institutional psychotherapy, a practice

Fanon utilized.
 23

Figure 4. Fanon read widely during his time as a student in Lyon (Gibson, Nigel, 2018)

Fanon’s doctoral thesis, Mental alterations, character modifications, psychic disorders

and intellectual deficit in spinocerebellar heredodegeneration: A case of Friedreich’s ataxia

with delusions of possession, represents a bridge from his organicist reductionist training to his

eventual theoretical position that stresses social and cultural factors. He examined recent cases to

find empirical evidence repudiating the adequacy of organicist reductionism as a paradigm for

understanding Friedreich’s ataxia. Fanon thought that identifying the differences between the

neurological and the psychiatric would open up a more fruitful space of inquiry, involving a

consideration of freedom and history in understanding Friedrich’s Ataxia, specifically and

psychiatric disorders in general (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 175). Fanon’s thesis readily accepted the

fact that regarding psychiatric disorders, a majority of serious cases originate in neurological

misfunctions, but stressed that this alone is insufficient criteria for something to be considered a

mental illness. A mental illness cannot be reduced to a neurological misfunction because it can

only be classified as such if it affects one’s interactions with the human world of social relations.
 24

His dissertation can thus be understood as an important point of departure from his strict

organicist training toward an understanding of mental illnesses as conditions arising in the

context of social relations.

Frantz Fanon: Psychiatrist… and Playwright?

During this time, Fanon became a frequent patron of Les Célestins, Théâtre de Lyon – an

experience that inspired him to write three plays of his own in 1949 (Fanon et al., 2018). The

renowned playwrights of the era were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but he also held in

high esteem Paul Claudel’s Partage de Midi. Fanon’s own plays reflect themes drawn from his

prodigious reading in philosophy. Sartre and Camus were major influences, but his library’s

contents prove that so too were Neitzsche, Kierkegaard, Bachelard, Bergson, Jaspers, Levinas,

Merleau-Ponty, and Wahl (Fanon et al., 2018).

The simultaneity of Fanon’s medical training and his playwriting begs a series of

interesting questions. Did one practice influence the other? Were they mutually influential? If so,

can one generalize and proclaim that scientific and artistic pursuits are means of expressing the

same internal drive? From a Freudian perspective, this may be true. As many commentators have

acknowledged, Fanon had an aggressive personality, perhaps suggesting a heightened magnitude

of libidinal energy. He also spoke disparagingly about his father, who he viewed as rather weak

and passive. He sent a letter to his father while away from home during the Second World War,

which is strong evidence of his feelings toward him:

Papa, you really have sometimes failed to perform your duty as a father. I allow myself to

judge you in this way because I am no longer of this earth. These are the reproaches of

someone living in life’s beyond. Sometimes Maman has been unhappy because of you.

We made her unhappy enough. In future, you will try to return to her one hundredfold all
 25

she has done for the equilibrium of the family. The word now has a meaning that was

previously unknown. If we, the eight children, have become something, Maman alone

should take all the glory. She was the spirit. You were the arm. That is all. I can see the

face you will pull when you read these lines, but it’s the truth. Look at yourself. Look

back at the years that have passed, lay your soul bare and have the courage to say: ‘I

deserted’. And then, repentant parishioner, you will be able to return to the altar. (Macey,

2012, p. 56)

Perhaps Fanon’s aggressiveness and ambition can be interpreted as a consequence of the shame

he felt about his father, who he perceived to have been weak. He may have sublimated his

feelings of shame, finding an outlet for these in his borderline maniacal pursuit of success in the

socially acceptable fields of medicine and art.

Of the plays, one of the three have been lost and there has been little analysis of the

remaining two. David Macey had suggested, before the plays were discovered, that they were

likely extensions of the existential themes found in Sartre and Camus, but commentators who

have read the plays argue that this is not quite the case (Fanon et al., 2018). The first play, The

Drowning Eye, is interpreted by Robert J. Young as a critique of “the intellectual position of the

anti-social hero,” the likes of whom permeated French literature of the time (Fanon et al., 2018,

p. 75). Popular examples of this outside literary character include Roquentin from Sartre’s

Nausea and Meusault from Camus’s The Stranger. While more work is required to understand

the meaning of Fanon’s plays, one clear indication is that he was not afraid to pit himself against

the dominant figures of a given field – even a figure as colossal, in a figurative if not literal

sense, as Sartre, whom he deeply admired and who would later become an important ally in the

Algerian struggle for liberation.

 26

Private Life in France

It was in Lyon that Fanon fathered his first of two children. Born out of wedlock, Mireille

Fanon-Mendès France never met her father, and only became aware of him as a teenager, after

he had already passed away (Macey, 2012). Mireille became a part of the Fanon extended family

thanks to the initiative of her uncle, Frantz’s brother Joby. Born in 1948, Marieille Fanon-

Mendès France has continued the family tradition of fighting for social justice. A lawyer by

training, she is currently a board member of the French Jewish Union for Peace and has been

working in various capacities for organizations in solidarity with Palestine since 1967

(Nieuwhof, 2011).

For Marielle’s mother, “Michelle B,” the brief affair resulted in many unhappy

consequences. Despite later marrying a psychiatrist and pursuing a successful administrative

career in the sector, she was forced to give up her own dream of becoming a physician (Macey,

2012). But perhaps more damning for Michelle was others’ perception of her, to which she was

now permanently condemned. Its reputation for being a relatively ‘progressive’ society

notwithstanding, this was still a France in which pre-marital sex was sinful, abortion illegal, and

racism pervasive – what was an unmarried White woman doing with a Black infant?

Paradoxically, the same Fanon, who would later become an inspiration to racial justice

movements worldwide was, in this instance, a perpetrator of a timeless aspect of gender

inequality: the absentee father. Fanon left Michelle to raise Marieille on her own, having fallen

in love with another woman.2 In any case, one is struck by the unequal outcome of a mutual

2
That woman was his future wife Josie, who was then only eighteen (Macey, 2012).
 27

conception – Fanon went on to pursue his dreams, while Marieille was forced to abandon her

own.

Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, France

Figure 5. Saint-Alban Hospital. Fanon completed his residency here in 1952 under the tutelage

of François Tosquelles (Robcis, 2022)

Fanon began searching for a residency position after graduating with a medical degree in

psychiatry in 1951. His first stop was a short internship in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Ylie

of Dole, in the Jura region of Eastern France. Fanon was the only intern for one hundred and fifty

patients. Having been exposed to the underfunded hospitals which constituted French psychiatric

care, he returned to Martinique – albeit briefly – to work as a temporary locum at the Colson

Hospital (Robcis, 2020). Here, the hospital conditions were similarly repugnant, if not worse.

These brief experiences gave Fanon insight into what was a decrepit institution. It also elucidated

the enormity of the task ahead of him, which he had implicitly adopted as his own: psychiatric

reform. Fortunately, his third position post-graduation gave reason for optimism.
 28

Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole is a small, modest commune in the Occitania region of

southern France, and in the 1950s it was the hotbed of what Camille Robcis called a “psychiatric

revolution” (2020, p. 311). Fanon moved to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole to work at a psychiatric

hospital under the administration of Francois Tosquelles. If Saint-Alban Hospital was the center

of the revolution, Tosquelles was its leader. A Catalan-born psychiatrist, Tosquelles is credited

with developing a form of care called “institutional psychotherapy,” which Fanon would later

adapt when working as a superintendent of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria (Robcis, 2020).

While completing his internship, Fanon published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks

and developed various approaches to treatment under Tosquelles’ tutelage (Robcis, 2020).

Despite it not initially being a bestseller, Black Skin, White Masks has since been the subject of

critical attention from scholars of wide-ranging fields, including psychology.

Francois Tosquelles

A lesser-known of Fanon’s diverse and eclectic set of influences, Francois Tosquelles

was a Catalonian psychiatrist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and a doctor at Saint-Alban.

During Fanon’s residency, he collaborated with Tosquelles on several papers. In Tosquelles,

according to David Macey, “Fanon at last found his true mentor” (Macey, 2012, p. 143).

Tosquelles fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and his psychiatric

inclinations reflect his political convictions. He served as a military doctor on the Republican

side of the Spanish Civil War, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), formed by

the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc.3 The

3
This coalition occurred, paradoxically, against the will of Leon Trotsky, the namesake of the former group.
Nevertheless, the newly formed Republican army had myriad admirers and sympathizers within the English-
speaking world. Among them were George Orwell, who fought for the Republicans and later wrote about his
experience in Homage to Catalonia, and Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the war, helped produce a pro-
 29

Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain was a far-left, anti-authoritarian group prioritizing collective

self-determination and equality. Still today, it is held in high esteem by various left-wing

intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, who credits the POUM with encouraging the

development of worker-owned enterprises globally (Chomsky, 2016). The Catalonia-based

party’s logic and commitment to social equality were appropriated by Tosquelles, and placed in a

new context: the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, France.

When Barcelona fell to Franco’s Nationalist army in early 1939, Tosquelles joined many

Spanish Republicans in the arduous journey north between and over the Pyrenees mountains, and

into southern France. (Robcis, 2021). Catalonians and left-leaning Spaniards had fled fascism in

their homeland, but the escape from tyranny would be short-lived. For leftists (never mind for

Jews, Romani, Blacks, Arabs, and other tragically oft-persecuted ethnic groups), Europe in the

1930s must have imbued one with the sense that the walls of oppression were closing in from all

sides. Between Hitler in the north, Mussolini in the east, and Franco in the south, Spanish

Republicans in France were encircled by an inescapable and sinister force. Madness, under such

circumstances of hopelessness, homelessness, defeat, and despair, would be to continue behaving

ordinarily; however, under such circumstances, it was surely the mad who were sane, and the

sane who were mad.

Having survived the trek north, Tosquelles arrived in the Camp de Judes, a refugee camp

in the southwestern French town of Septfonds (Robcis, 2021). Here, he took up a post as a camp

doctor. He lamented the camp conditions, describing it as a “badly organized” psychiatric

hospital. Many refugees in the camp suffered from a particular psychiatric disorder, termed

Republican film called The Spanish Earth, and later wrote a famous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, inspired by his
experience.
 30

“barbed-wire disease,” which seems to have been a ‘catch-all’ description of the neuroses

suffered by refugees and prisoners of war surrounded by barbed-wire fences (Soo, 2013).4

Considering camp conditions, it is little wonder that internments developed mental illnesses.

Robcis described:

As historians have documented and as the archives confirm, living conditions in these

camps were especially harsh, causing many to die from hunger, disease, or exhaustion

and driving others to suicide. The refugees were amassed in overcrowded barracks

surrounded by barbed wire, electrical projectors, and surveillance posts. They slept in

haystacks with only a little wood available for heat and in deplorable hygienic and

sanitary conditions. Many of the testimonies from Septfonds also recall the brutal

treatment from the guards and the system of surveillance and classification to which the

refugees were subjected. (Robcis, 2021, p. 28-29)

Despite the abysmal living conditions in Septfonds, Tosquelles succeeded in psychiatric terms,

and news of his work spread around the region. True to his equality-stressing political

convictions, he worked at the camp both as a doctor and by lending a hand in the more tedious

and ordinary labour. His approach completely defied contemporary medical logic. Like Fanon,

Tosquelles was an idealist – his commitment to an anarchist vision of society attests to as much.

But this did not stop him from acting pragmatically. He mobilized the refugees of the Septfonds

camp, which happened to include many artists and musicians, to help him organize concerts,

theatre productions, publications, and group therapies. Tosquelles believed these activities would

4
“Barbed-wire disease” is a great example of the socio-historical contingency of psychiatric and psychological
disorders. Reflecting on conditions such as this, described by historian Scott Soo, lead us to consider how mental
disorders of our own time – presented as ahistorical and universal – are themselves corrigible only within the
context of present historical conditions.
 31

help stave off the effects of “camp psychosis” (Robcis, 2021). By empowering patients (or, in

this case, internments) to organize their own ‘society’ within the bounds of the hospital, he

minimized occurrences of mental illness within the camp, while managing those that did occur

effectively.

News of Tosquelles's aptitude and ingenuity spread throughout the psychiatric

community of southern France. Paul Balvet, director of Saint-Alban Hospital, eventually became

aware of him. He contacted the administrators of the Camp de Judes, asking for Tosquelles’s

release. The administrators obliged, and on January 6, 1940, Tosquelles arrived at Saint-Alban

(Robcis, 2021). He would have to wait twelve years to meet his most famous student.

Fanon arrived at Saint-Alban in the spring of 1952. Disheartened by his previous

internships, his mind must have been ripe to embrace novel, more enriching approaches to

treatment and care in the institutional setting. His philosophical and political orientations had, by

and large, crystalized before arriving to work with Tosquelles in southern France. His tendencies

as a psychiatrist, however, were still in a formative and malleable state. Tosquelles was just the

mentor to help him further develop as a psychiatrist and theorist.

 32

Figure 6. Tosquelles holding a sculpture by Auguste Forestier. Clearly an eccentric character,

one wonders how his personality related so productively with that of the uber-serious Fanon.

(Robcis, 2022)

Therapeutic Techniques at Saint-Alban

Institutional Psychotherapy

The approach to psychiatric care practiced by Tosquelles and Fanon at Saint-Alban has

come to be known as Institutional Psychotherapy. Institutional Psychotherapy was a branch of

social therapy conceived partly based on his experiences growing up as an anarchist in Catalonia,

where he had been reading Freud and Marx since the age of ten (Robcis, 2021). It is a practice

shaped significantly by the work of Jacques Lacan and Hermann Simon, as well as by Emilio

Mira y Lopez (known as ‘Mira’), whom Tosquelles described as his “master.” Significant for
 33

Tosquelles was Lacan’s 1932 thesis on paranoia, which described his concept of the symbolic.

The symbolic, which suggested that madness was “founded and expressed in a form of linguistic

alienation – what Lacan later called foreclosure from the symbolic order,” became critically

important for Tosquelles (Robcis, 2021, p. 22). Simon was a pioneer of what is today

occupational therapy. Tosquelles read Simon’s 1929 account of psychiatric work in a German

asylum, which influenced institutional psychotherapy in two ways. First, the psychiatric hospital

should be re-organized to better resemble life outside the facility and improve the transition back

into society. Second, and more significantly for Tosquelles, he learned from Simon that doctors

and nurses should change their attitudes toward patients. Mira influenced Tosquelles most

significantly in shaping his epistemological and methodological assumptions regarding

psychiatry. While working together at the Pere Mata, a psychiatric hospital in Catalonia, Mira

taught Tosquelles to be very skeptical of the concept of an objective psychiatrist – an idea firmly

entrenched in the conventional medical wisdom of the time.

Figure 7. Pinel releasing the mentally ill from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris,

1795. Tosquelles and Fanon follow a tradition of emancipatory approaches to psychiatric care in

France. (Robert-Fleury, 1876)

 34

While it seems clear that Tosquelles was hugely influenced by his political background,

studies, and psychiatric experience in Catalonia, it would be remiss not to place him in the

lineage of progressive practices typical of French psychiatry. Tosquelles’s therapy converges

with a tradition of emancipatory approaches toward treating neuroses, dating back at least as far

as the practices of Philippe Pinel, who famously ordered the unchaining of French asylum

patients during the French Revolution. Pinel developed Moral Therapy, based on the success of

unchaining people in asylums (Parot, 2012). But although Moral Therapy and Institutional

Psychotherapy overlap with a commitment to greater patient autonomy, they diverge in an

important way that Tosquelles made explicit. The essential difference is that Moral Therapy

embraces a medical approach, whereas Institutional Psychotherapy repudiates medical treatment

of neuroses, as if they were of physical origin, and prefers to focus instead on the social factors

contributing to abnormal behaviour. Tosquelles’s central tenant for successful therapy is

interesting, especially when considered in present context: give patients meaningful work.

Tosquelles found that by empowering patients to be autonomous and engage with

society, they overcame their neuroses rather naturally. By having patients engage with each other

and treating them like citizens with unique hopes, fears, and dreams, his approach to therapy is

akin to what anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, David Wengrow, called a

“project of collective self-creation” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). Enlisted in such a project,

patients have a say in things as inconsequential as the organization of activities, to those as

important as how the hospital operates. Far from ‘the lunatics running the asylum,’ they

organized work they found meaningful and, as such, developed a sense of responsibility

important for a well-functioning citizen. This patient self-organization was not a matter of work-

as-distraction, as it might seem from the outside. Nor was this work meant to adjust patients to
 35

be more adherent, in an automatonlike sense, to an oppressive status quo. It was simply a matter

of trusting patients to organize themselves – something anarchists take to be what Simon calls a

“general law” of human social behaviour. Robcis wrote that “Tosquelles put it this way: ‘The

point was not to ‘make the patients work’ to alleviate this or that symptom but to make the

patients and the staff work to cure the institution’” (2021, p. 22). Empowerment, for Tosquelles,

is the means to an effective hospital and a sane society. Fanon would later develop these ideas in

a non-European context.

After presenting a paper, co-authored by Fanon, at a conference in July 1953, Tosquelles

was asked by an attendant what he meant, exactly, by Institutional Therapy.5 He begins by

expressing his frustration that the term is often confused with group therapy, ergotherapy, or

some comparable social therapy. While these are formal therapies during which a psychiatrist or

similar professional is always present, institutional therapy is completely informal. It, therefore,

refers not to any specific practice or set of practices, but rather to the conditions of the hospital

itself. Tosquelles explained:

Institutional therapy only rightly exists at the level of that awareness, and I would say, at

the level of acquisition of power and mastery in the medical handling of the ‘institution’

through all that it contains of a material and living nature. In this respect, institutional

therapy distinguishes itself from the group therapies – psychodramas, courses, and so on

– in that the latter are established through ‘sessions’ that are, as it were, detached from

the patient’s daily life. (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 296)

5
Tosquelles seems to use the terms “Institutional Psychotherapy” and “Institutional Therapy” interchangeably.
 36

The critical point of institutional therapy is its spontaneity, and the hospital is organized to

facilitate this as an everyday reality, thereby mimicking social conditions outside the hospital. In

his answer, Tosquelles also gives guidelines detailing how institutional therapy can be

successfully implemented, based on fourteen years of “trial and errors at Saint-Alban.” These

include making possible the arrangement of “life communities and heterogeneous treatments,”

no more than ten to twelve patients per “life community,” life communities connected to the

larger hospital community, and doctors and nurses trained to behave as if equal to the patient.

Training nurses and doctors to behave as if equal to the patients helped dissolve the distinct

power dynamic between these relations. He also stressed the importance of not arranging patients

in life communities based on any characteristic, whether that be by age, race, culture, or by any

diagnostic similarity. Sorting in this way “prevents any possibility of progress in the dialectic of

identifications and mythical transfers established by the patient with the milieu” (Fanon et al.,

2018, p. 298). In other words, it prevents the establishment of a hospital environment that

reflects the larger society.

The Bini Method (Electroconvulsive therapy)

Fanon and Tosquelles co-authored two papers about the use of electroconvulsive therapy,

what they sometimes referred to as the Bini Method, at Saint-Alban. The first of these papers,

“On some cases treated with the Bini method,” was presented at a conference in July 1953. It

describes the treatment of a middle-aged nun, who had suffered from “serious mental disorders,”

“delusional ideas of persecution,” and “serious behavioural problems manifested in raucous

cries, screaming at any time in any place” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 286). Suffering such severe

mental ailments, Fanon and Tosquelles found it justifiable to administer electroconvulsive

shocks to treat the patient. Though they champion a standardized approach to shock therapy,
 37

using it only when other, less invasive techniques had failed, the way they administered shocks

in this case would doubtlessly be seen as indefensibly unethical, from the standpoint of the

present. The patient refused to receive the prescribed treatment, citing her personal values and

religious beliefs. In response, Tosquelles and Fanon devise a rather morally dubious plan:

The plan was thus to trick her, by putting her in the ward for acute sufferers, monitoring

her closely to prevent her escape and divesting her of her religious habit during her sleep.

Her companion was to wait until night before leaving. At the risk of being

misunderstood, and making the most of the voluntary character of the placement, we

refused to admit the patient without a first explanatory session with the accompanying

sister. (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 287)

Despite knowing full well that the patient required long-term care, Fanon and Tosquelles insisted

she did not, thereby creating the opportunity to reason with her about the extent of her condition.

They were dishonest about their intentions in establishing an interview with the patient. But it

was nonetheless effective, in the sense that they were able to compel the patient into consenting

to the treatment plan the doctors had envisioned.

The treatment plan for the patient proceeded in three stages. In the first stage, they

performed psychotherapy in an effort to unveil to the patient the “meaning of her conduct and the

psychological interpretation of her behaviour as a whole” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 289). The

second stage involves what Fanon and Tosquelles call “narcoanalysis.” Narcoanalysis is

essentially psychoanalysis performed under conditions in which they have sedated the patient.

The logic is, that while sedated through the administration of barbiturates, the patient is less

likely to experience resistance. Once the patient fell into a deep sleep, she was moved to a

different room and given electroconvulsive therapy to invoke what Fanon and Tosquelles call a
 38

“confusional stage.” The third stage begins when, after the patient obtains the confusional stage,

they administer insulin shock therapy. Insulin shock therapy aims to help the patient begin her

“recovery of consciousness” by inciting the “very primitive situation of mother-child relation:

spoon-feeding, hygiene care, first words.” Gradually, the patient experiences a recovery of her

‘normal’ mental faculties and integrates successfully into the collective life of the hospital – a

key component of institutional therapy.6 During her treatment period, she received seventeen

electroshocks over five days, followed by forty sessions of insulin shock therapy (once per day,

for forty days) (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 289). In total, the patient’s hospitalization lasted three

months. Fanon and Tosquelles presented this as a success story owed to the Bini method.

Sleep therapy techniques

During his residency, Fanon became interested in what he called “sleep therapy

techniques.” This interest seemed to have emerged through engagement with Tosquelles. Fanon

wrote in the Saint-Alban ward journal about an interaction with his mentor regarding sleep

therapy.

On Saturday morning at the newspaper meeting, we talked a bit about sleep. And Doctor

Tosquelles reminded us that many patients ask for sleeping medication. This difficulty in

getting to sleep is called insomnia. What is insomnia? Insomnia is a way of living that

likes to think it is justified. You stay awake when there is a reason to stay awake. The

ordinary man is able to suspend his wakefulness. His sincerity is such that he posses the

freedom to be suspended. The insomniac does not have this freedom to sleep, to relax, to

6
The second paper, “Indications of electroconvulsive therapy within institutional therapies,” also presented in July
1953, discusses the importance of administering electroconvulsive therapy in conjunction with institutional therapy.
 39

doze. The insomniac does not stay awake: it’s the night that stays awake. It stays awake.

(Fanon et al., 2018, p. 282)

Freedom and mental illness are closely related in Fanon’s writing. This is no different in his

discussion with Tosquelles about insomnia, which he understood as a lack of freedom to submit

oneself to the unconsciousness of sleep.

In July 1953, Fanon co-authored a paper with Maurice Despinoy and Walter Zenner

called “Note on sleep therapy techniques using conditioning and electroencephalographic

monitoring” (Fanon et al., 2018). The paper puts the technique in context by noting the renewed

interest in insulin-based sleep therapies owing to recent publications by Soviet authors. The

authors describe that, despite having existed as a therapeutic technique since the advent of

synthetic insulin, the primary medication used in sleep therapy, many psychiatrists lost interest in

such techniques. Fanon, Despinoy, and Zenner, however, retained an interest, and experimented

to observe whether they could use conditioned stimuli to induce sleep in insomniacs, to reduce

the use of sleep medications. They developed a concoction of drugs, including ‘4560 RP’

(chlorpromazine), and paired this unconditioned stimulus with the conditional stimulus, which

was “a water mill worked to light up a low-intensity lamp placed above the head of the patient at

regular intervals and to trigger an electric metronome” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 308). They

measured sleep patterns using electroencephalographic monitoring, and reduced the quantity of

medication at each session. Of their method, they said:

We accepted that the creation of conditional sleeping reflexes requires the coincidence,

on the one hand, of sleep brought on by the medication, and, on the other, by the

activation of the sound-and-light system (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 308).

 40

The trio concluded that, while they “will not insist on the therapeutic results properly

speaking,” they were able to “nonetheless say that the use of 4560 made it possible to reduce

considerably the quantities of medications used” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 309).

At the time, chlorpromazine was a novel therapeutic molecule, synthesized by the French

pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc in 1950. Initially used as an antihistamine, psychiatry

soon adopted it after its ‘neuroleptic’ effects on people who have psychosis were observed by

Pierre Deniker and Jean Delay, working in the Parisian hospitals of Val-de-Grâce and Saint-

Anne, respectively (López-Muñoz et al., 2005).

Fanon was a willing adopter of novel therapies and technologies. Scholars have lauded

the use of chlorpromazine to treat symptoms of schizophrenia as a critical moment in the history

of psychiatry (López-Muñoz et al., 2005). Fanon and his colleagues used this drug in another

psychiatric context, to treat insomnia, as early as 1951 (it was synthesized in December 1950).

Moreover, neuropsychiatry had grown substantially since the advent of electroencephalography

in the 1930s (Borck, 2008). Fanon’s use of electroencephalography is indicative of his

pragmatism and willingness to explore treatments and techniques that imply different

epistemologies – phenomenology and existentialism make, after all, different assumptions than

neurology. Fanon’s pragmatism is, through this paper, in full display. Rather than trying to

construct a single, unifying theory he decidedly embraces the burgeoning

psychopharmacological revolution, while also producing influential structural critiques of

psychiatry.

Black Skin, White Masks

Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, went largely unnoticed when published in

1952. At the time, he was completing his residency at Saint-Alban Hospital and was virtually
 41

unknown within professional psychiatry. Not until after his death did Black Skin, White Masks

become a fruitful object of interest for scholars – mostly scholars in postcolonial studies than in

any of the ‘psy-disciplines.’

In his introduction, Fanon presented a central theme in his work. He stressed that

conflicts between groups result in mental illnesses on the individual level. He described the

process by which the Black person develops an inferiority complex as two-fold. First, it is

economic. The history of colonialism is one in which white Europeans amassed vast sums of

material wealth through the appropriation of resources and labour (often in the form of slavery)

from the hands of Black and indigenous people. The result is centuries of economic inferiority

and generational poverty, stemming from crimes yet to be properly addressed. Following

economic inferiority, social processes cause an internalization of this inferiority – a process that

Fanon called “epidermalization.” (Fanon et al., 2008). For Fanon, the alienation of a Black

person involves multiple layers of analysis.

Reacting against the constitutionalizing trend at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud

demanded that the individual factor be taken into account in psychoanalysis. He replaced

the phylogenetic theory by an ontogenetic approach. We shall see that the alienation of

the black man is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is

also sociogeny…

What is the prognosis?

Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence. The prognosis

is in the hands of those who are prepared to shake the worm-eaten foundations of the

edifice. (Fanon et al., 2008)

 42

This passage is an important introduction to Fanon’s work because it emphasizes complex social

factors contributing to mental illness in Black people and presents another idea central to his

thinking: responsibility. He was not interested in lecturing white people, colonials, or whomever

the dominant group was. Fanon instead addressed the Black man, who must “shake the worm-

eaten foundations of the edifice.” He explained how the white man has it all, and that to achieve

what he calls “genuine disalienation,” Black people must fight to bring about equality in a

material sense.

Fanon was innovative and resourceful, and demonstrated these qualities through his call

for an effort to create new methods.

It is considered appropriate to preface a work on psychology with a methodology. We

shall break with tradition. We leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians. There

is a point where methods are reabsorbed. (Fanon et al., 2008)

Fanon’s approach was phenomenological. Influenced by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty7, he wanted

to understand the lived experience of Black people in relation to the white race, which he

claimed resulted in a “massive psycho-existential complex.” Cautious of sweeping over-

generalizations, Fanon was careful to qualify his avowed aim – analyzing the complex with the

intent to destroy it – by writing that not all Black people will recognize themselves in what he

was describing. He prospectively replied to those who did not see themselves in his work: “But

the fact that I feel alien to the world of the schizophrenic or the sexually impotent in no way

diminishes their reality” (Fanon et al., 2008). He stressed the temporality of his work, claiming

that “the ideal being that the present always serves to build the future.” He recognized that his

7
Fanon attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures in Lyon, but never approached him, confiding in Simone de Beauvoir
later that he found the French phenomenologist distant (Beauvoir, 1965)
 43

responsibility lay in addressing the conditions of his time, so that the immediate future, in some

capacity, might prove brighter than the present.

“The Black Man and Language”

In the first chapter, he analyzed the role language plays in shaping the mental life of the

Black man. In Fanon’s words, “the study of language is essential for providing us with one

element in understanding the Black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood

that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 1). Sartre’s influence on

Fanon is immediately recognizable. The French philosopher, famed for his development of

existentialism, described being-for-others as the reduction of oneself to an object for others,

pulling one out of one’s own subjectivity. The alternative is “being-for-itself,” in which the

person is the centre of one’s own world. For Sartre, between being-for-others and being-for-itself

exists a constant tension. Fanon utilized this paradigm to evaluate the tension between the Black

man and the white world, mediated by language.

Fanon began by stating that the “black man possesses two dimensions: one with his

fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites.” He described this difference – the manner by which

Black people exist around other Black people compared to how they exist around White people –

as a “fissiparousness,” and due to colonialism. Fanon wrote, mockingly, about the idea that the

Black man is the “missing link” between the ape and white man: “These are objective facts that

state reality,” he wrote, seemingly parroting social Darwinists (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 1). Social

Darwinism was very popular in France in the mid- to late-19th century, when Spencer had been

discovered by French readers and On the Origin of Species had been translated from English. A

key text of Spencer’s The Right to Ignore the State, which argued for small government to reflect

the so-called ‘state of nature’ in which only the fittest survive, was especially popular among
 44

French Republicans. But by the late 19th century, following an economic recession that required

significant state intervention, Spencerism faced a decline in popularity (Parot, 2012, p. 233).

However, the idea parodied by Fanon is expressly social Darwinist, which seems to imply that

racist precepts existed in the dominant psychological discourse of 1950s France.

His condemnation of the pseudo-Darwinian paradigm is the first evidence of Fanon’s

status as an early proponent of what Teo calls epistemological violence. Teo describes

epistemological violence as a means by which violence is incited through interpretation, albeit

indirectly, and often to justify the domination of one group over another. Those committing

epistemological violence favour one interpretation of data over other, equally viable

interpretations, and portray their interpretation as objective or self-evident (Teo, 2008).

Fanon claimed that the Black person adopts the French language in an effort to overcome

his perceived inferiority relative to the White person. “The more the black Antillean assimilates

the French language,” he began,

the whiter he gets – i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being. We are

fully aware that this is one of man’s attitudes faced with Being. A man who possesses a

language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this

language. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 2).

This effort to assimilate into the dominant, White culture, is an implicit renunciation of not only

the unique cultural history from which one emerges, but also, and more damningly, of Blackness

itself. For the dominant culture, whether in France or a colony, this affirms its sense of

superiority. Moreover, one’s relative superiority is organized hierarchically – not just a matter of
 45

black or white. The Antillean – him from the likes of Martinique or Guadeloupe – gets “annoyed

at being taken for Senegalese,” and:

It’s because the Antillean is more “évolué” than the African – meaning he is closer to the

white man – and this difference exists not only on the street or along the boulevard, but

also in the administration and the army. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 9)

This racial hierarchy existed in all aspects of life under French rule, whether in France or abroad

in the colonies. Fanon described one example wherein a Martinican became “incensed” that

Guadeloupeans were passing as Martinican because, as it goes, they are the more savage people,

and thus farther removed from the White man.

Racist social assumptions precede attempts to “scientifically prove” racial superiority.

Fanon recounts the findings of a Dr. H. L. Gordon, who wrote in the East African Medical

Journal, that a new “highly technical” (in Gordon’s words) examination, involving “naked eye

and microscopic facts” that “Quantitatively” the brains of Black people compared to those of

whites are inferior by “14.8 percent” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 13). This pattern, whereby racism

informs “science,” has persisted to the present, with the most prescient example coming in the

recent past. In 1994, The Bell Curve was published, in which the authors, Charles Murray and

Richard J. Herrnstein, compared the results of IQ tests between a group of White people and a

group of Black people, finding that the results of the Black group were lower than the White

group by a standard deviation (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Like Gordon before them, Murray

and Herrnstein presented their findings as definitive scientific evidence for the lesser intelligence

of Black people, on average. What these researchers failed to do is question the methodological

assumptions of their respective studies. In the age of neuroscience, it is hardly worth mentioning

Gordon’s study, so clear are its methodological faults. But questioning the validity of the IQ test
 46

has proven a more arduous task, and many psychologists persist in the idea that it is a definitive

indicator of “intelligence.” Deconstructing the IQ test, and communicating this in an academic

and public setting, would open avenues to a more fruitful definition of intelligence – one that

would emancipate groups to which interpretations of IQ test data has been so harmful.

In the latter half of the chapter, Fanon discussed the lamentable semantics by which

Europeans addressed Black people, which he called “pidgin.” He said a “white man talking to a

person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and

coddling” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 14). Speaking in this manner to a Black person is insulting,

Fanon explained, even if no offence was intended. In fact, he further suggests that “this offhand

manner; this casualness; and the ease with which they classify him, imprison him at an

uncivilized and primitive level – that is insulting” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 15) Yet, Fanon wasted

little time chastising the racism of white Europeans. He instead addressed the Black person

directly. When a White man speaks to a Black man in pidgin, and the Black man responds in the

same manner of speech, the white man is vindicated, consciously or unconsciously – “that’s how

they are,” the White man thinks. Fanon, addressing the Black man:

In the opposite case, you need to retract your pseudopodia and behave like a man. The

entire foundation collapses. A black man who says: “I object, sir, to you calling me ‘my

old fellow.’” Now there’s something new. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 16)

Speaking pidgin to a Black man is an effort to imprison him in his own essence. It keeps the

Black man locked into behaving as a being-for-others: as a tool for White people in both a

psychological and economic sense. Psychological, because it asserts the White man’s position as

a member of the purportedly superior group. Economic, because the Black man confined to a
 47

position of inferiority sees his capacity for upward mobility undermined and sustains a populous

pool of cheap labour for the White ruling class.

“The Woman of Color and the White Man”

Fanon began this chapter on an optimistic note, explaining that although we are indebted

to Sartre for his portrayal of failed love in Being and Nothingness, the fact remains that true love

is a possibility – if “psychological agencies [are] liberated from unconscious tensions” (Fanon et

al., 2008, p. 24). Here, again, we see Fanon’s thinking guided by psychoanalytic theory. He drew

from psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology to argue about the woman of colour’s

orientation toward the White man. His thesis states that “authentic love remains impossible as

long as this feeling of inferiority or this Adlerian exaltation, this overcompensation that seems to

be indicative of the Black Weltanschauung, has not been purged” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 25).

He began by analyzing I Am a Martinican Woman, a memoir by Mayotte Capecia that

details her desire to marry a White man. Fanon made it clear that he is no fan of the memoir,

calling it “a third-rate book, advocating for unhealthy behavior,” but insists that its popularity in

some circles is worth analyzing (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 25). Having married a White man,

Mayotte cannot escape her sense of inferiority – a reflection of the broader social conditions in

which she finds herself, where White is the race associated with dominance and Black with

inferiority. She believes that if she marries a White man and achieves a certain amount of

material success, she herself will ‘become White,’ in a symbolic sense. But this does not happen,

as Fanon explained: “She is not tolerated in certain circles, because she is a coloured woman.

Her facticity was the starting point for her resentment” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 27). 8 She has no

8
Facticity is a philosophical term that has been used with slightly variant meanings depending on who uses it. Here,
Fanon is likely borrowing from the definition of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who used the term to
 48

control over the fact of her skin colour. In the colonial world, the Black race has had a socially-

constructed meaning imposed upon it. According to Fanon’s analysis, marrying a White man is a

Black woman’s effort to escape her Blackness. He wrote that, the Black woman, “unable to

blacken or negrify the world, she endeavours to whiten it in her body and mind” (Fanon et al.,

2008, p. 28). But to him, this is a fool’s errand.

This quest by the Black woman to “lactify” herself by marrying a White man is, to

Fanon, wholly pathological. Women who marry White men attempt to overcome their inferiority

complex by renouncing their Black skin. Both impossible (society will never view them as on

par with White people) and, in any case, undesirable. It is undesirable to ‘become White’

because bourgeois European society is itself a machine producing mental illness: “… the

patriarchal European family with its flaws, failings, and vices, in close contact with the society

we know, produces about thirty percent of neurotics” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 31). A new approach

to overcoming feelings of inferiority is therefore necessary.

The new approach to overcoming the inferiority felt by the Black woman involves a

transcendence of the family structure. “On the basis of psychoanalytical, sociological, and

political data it is a question of building a new family environment capable of reducing, if not

eliminating, the percentage of waste, in the antisocial sense of the term” (Fanon et al., 2008, p.

31). But for this to be achieved, Black men must overcome a phenomenon that Fanon associated

with them.

Fanon associated Black men with “the phenomenon of self-withdrawal,” which makes it

difficult to “overcome his feeling of abasement and expunge the compulsive characteristic that

refer to all the concrete background details that characterize one’s life, over which one has no control. These include
one’s place of birth, language, race, environment, and certainty of death (Sartre et al., 1969).
 49

resembles so much that of the phobic,” and thereby build a new family environment (Fanon et

al., 2008, p. 33). Drawing on work by Anna Freud, Fanon described how the Black man restricts

his ego to avoid pain. He withdraws in one field, and this withdrawal is compensated by

excellence in another. However, if he responds to stress through withdrawal too frequently, it

becomes a rigid pattern of behaviour, causing him to become “one-sided” and achieve very little

with his life. Thus, the Black man becomes obsessed with his “only way out”: joining the white

world. A world which, as already stated, is pathological and undesirable (Fanon et al., 2008, p.

33).

“The Man of Color and the White Woman”

This is the chapter in which one observes the influence of Hegel on Fanon most

forcefully. He proclaimed that a Black man wants not to be recognized as Black: he wants to be

recognized as White. He likens this desire to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, whereby the slave

wants to be recognized as a master – a superior.

Fanon elaborated on the symbolic role of the White woman in the Hegelian dialectic, as

applied to the White-Black relationship. For the Black man, love from the White woman

symbolizes recognition from the broader white world. He wrote:

By loving me, she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white

man.

I am a white man.

Her love opens the illustrious path that leads to total fulfilment…

I espouse white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.

 50

Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and

worthiness become mine. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 45)

To illustrate his point, Fanon drew on the literary character Jean Veneuse from Nini by René

Maran. Veneuse is a Black man, born in the French Antilles, who has lived in Bordeaux for

many years. Fanon claimed that Veneuse does not understand his race – he has lived in Europe

for many years, and therefore sees himself as White, since White people live in Europe, in a

socially-constructed sense of what it means to be White. But Veneuse cannot escape his facticity:

he has black skin. And thus, he is faced with this contradiction, with which he must grapple.

Fanon generalized Veneuse’s cultural confusion to understand the situation in which many Black

people living in 1950s Europe found themselves. The result of this confusion is an individual

who enters a self-imposed state of alienation and is terribly unsure of himself.

Jean Veneuse is the archetype of the Black man who, having been rejected by the White

world, compensates by excessive intellectualism. Veneuse is extremely well-read, “dabbles in

poetry,” and has produced very intelligent studies. But, according to Fanon, and the work by

Guex from which he drew, Veneuse maintained a profound sense of worthlessness, besides his

success in his intellectual life (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 59). Fanon offers Veneuse, and those like

him, a solution, predicated on his reading of Sartre:

What is the objective of such an analysis? Nothing short of proving to Jean Veneuse that

in fact he is not like the others. Make people ashamed of their existence, Jean-Paul Sartre

said. Yes: make them aware of the possibilities they have denied themselves or the

passiveness they have displayed in situations where it was really necessary to cling to the

heart of the world, like a splinter – to force, if needed, the rhythm of the world’s heart;
 51

dislocate, if needed, the system of controls; but in any case, most certainly, face the

world. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 59)

This was Fanon’s aim in writing Black Skin, White Masks: by analyzing this “psycho-existential

complex,” he hoped to destroy it.

“The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized”

Fanon dedicated this chapter to critiquing the theory of Octave Mannoni, whose ideas

regarding the mind of colonized people were published in the book The Psychology of

Colonization. Fanon seems to have a certain degree of respect for Mannoni, calling his work

“exhaustive” and “intellectually honest.”

Upon quick analysis, any subjectivity in the field seems to have been avoided. Monsieur

Mannoni’s research is sincere, since it sets out to prove that man cannot be explained

outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation. (Fanon et al.,

2008, p. 65)

Mannoni was a psychoanalyst by training but seems to have, according to Fanon, thought too

dogmatically about the colonizer-colonized situation. He confronted Mannoni’s work with the

charge that it ignores the subject aspect of the colonized, and follows too stringently paradigms

of thought not perfectly applicable to the colonial situation.

Fanon was unafraid to deviate from the specifics of a particular tradition to analyze and

interpret how people are affected by colonialism.9 In this case, he was challenging Mannoni’s

psychoanalytic approach by insisting that psychoanalysis, on its own, is incapable of providing

9
As described later, Fanon also stretches Marxism to analyze the colonizer-colonized situation, particularly in The
Wretched of the Earth
 52

an accurate interpretation. It is his willingness to think originally about esteemed schools of

thought – psychoanalysis, Marxism, phenomenology – that makes him a key theorist in

postcolonialism, a field that draws from a range of disciplines (Young, 2001).

Fanon repudiated Mannoni’s idea that within colonized people, there exists an inferiority

complex even before colonization. The opposite is true, according to Fanon’s phenomenological

approach: the colonized develop an inferiority complex due to the nature of the colonial

situation. The same is true for all forms of exploitation and racism. He said, “Let us have the

courage to say it: It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.” Sartre wrote in Antisemite and

Jew, "The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we

must start… It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.” Fanon agreed with Sartre’s conclusion,

and applied the same logic to the colonial situation (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 73).

He also took issue with Mannoni’s claim that “France is unquestionably one of the least

racialist-minded countries in the world.” Europe, like apartheid South Africa and the United

States, has a racist structure, Fanon explained, because the myth of the bad Black man is part of

the collective unconscious (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 72).10

The colonial situation forced the colonized into a particular pattern of behaviour. The

colonized Black man must act dependently if “peace” is to be maintained. If he attempted to

ameliorate his social position or forgot his status as subordinate to the White man, the colonials

would have rejected him. Therefore, he paid for his attempt to overcome his dependency with

rejection, and as a result, he develops an inferiority complex. The choice for Black men in the

10
By “Collective Unconscious,” Fanon made clear, he is not referring to “inherited cerebral matter” but “the
repository of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a particular group” (Fanon et al., 2008, p . 165)
 53

colonies, according to Fanon, was this: a passive dependence, or inferiority predicated on an

effort to overcome dependency.

If a Black man suffered from an inferiority complex in this context, Fanon advised that

psychoanalysts first take measures to “safeguard him and gradually liberate him from this

unconscious desire.” By unconscious desire, he referred to the patient’s desire to submit himself

to inferior status relative to the colonial. Second, Fanon demanded that analysts not only help the

neurotic Black man, but help him devise a method of overcoming the inferiority he feels in the

colonial setting: change the setting itself.

If he is overcome to such a degree by a desire to be white, it’s because he lives in a

society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that draws its strength by

maintaining this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race over

another; it is to the extent that society creates difficulties for him that he finds himself

positioned in a neurotic situation.

What emerges then is a need for combined action on the individual and the group. As a

psychoanalyst I must help my patients to “consciousnessize” his unconscious, to no

longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification, but also to act along the lines of a

change in social structure. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 80)(my emphasis)

Contemporary mainstream Psychology presents itself as existing in a vacuum, devoid of social

context – the hallmarks of a “scientific” discipline, proponents might say. The construction of

Psychology as such has myriad problems, both in the theoretical and clinical terms, to be

discussed toward the end of this paper.

 54

“The Lived Experience of the Black Man”

In this chapter, Fanon took a phenomenological approach to understand the subjectivity

of the Black man in France. On European grounds, the Black man is ‘the Other,’ and Fanon

explains why this is his predicament – and why ultimate freedom from it is a hopeless task.

He began the chapter by describing how a Black person is continuously reminded of his

skin colour by White people. Someone passing need only make reference to a Black man’s most

basic physical appearance to pull him out of his subjectivity, casting him primarily as what Hegel

and Sartre have called a “being-for-others.” The Black man in France is forever the outsider

because his race is tied, in a figurative sense, to customs and agencies contradictory to those of

the society imposed upon them, and therefore condemned and repudiated. Since Blackness is, in

the eyes of White Europeans, inextricable from these rejected customs and agencies, the one with

black skin is likewise rejected and subjugated.

Fanon wrote that Black people on “their home territory” have no occasion for feeling

inferior to White people because they have not encountered White civilization. That is until they

are confronted by the white gaze, “an unusual weight descended on us.” Suddenly, the person of

colour has reason to construct an ambivalent and questioning attitude toward his own skin.

Previously, skin tone had no meaning in the absence of the Other, the White man. The gaze from

the Other inculcates the Black man as a being-for-others, consequently affecting his subjectivity,

which adopts a pejorative attitude toward his skin colour.

Now that the Black man recognizes himself as Black, he comes to be conscious and wary

of the elements of himself that he cannot change. Sartre and de Beauvoir call the totality of

oneself that one cannot change one’s “facticity.” These include one’s skin colour, sex assigned at
 55

birth, height, and place of birth. But it also includes the traditions and customs of those in one’s

lineage. Fanon describes the phenomenology of this recognition.

I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an

objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by

cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes,

above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 92)

In relation to the White man who, is depicted in history as the victor, the progressive, and the

creator of civilization, the Black man is wholly inferior. He is constantly reminded of his

inferiority by seemingly innocuous images. These images, like the grinning Y bon Banania, serve

as symbols representing the simple-mindedness of the Black man.11 Fanon wrote that Black

people act inferior to Whites as an implicit acceptance of themselves as objects, passively

allowing the imposition of racial stereotypes onto them.

11
The name of the company, Y a bon Banania, is even more demeaning and derogatory than how Fanon portrays it
in the book. As David Macey points out, the phrase “Y a bon” is French slang for “C’est bon.” It is a racist
caricature, supposedly describing how black people speak.
 56

Figure 8. The French chocolate milk brand to which Fanon refers, Y a bon Banania. It depicts a

joyful black man tasting the milk. Symbolically, it represents derogatory stereotypes associated

with black people. (Bentahar, 2022)

Fanon wrote that since the White man will not recognize his Black counterpart, the Black

man must make himself known. But he cannot do this, argued Fanon, by simply acting angrily,

pointing out the unfairness of the stereotypes imposed on him. The Black man will not be taken

seriously. He must find another way, but what that is remains unclear – Fanon himself does not

offer a solution.

The Black man is irrevocably subject to judgement based on his skin. Even when a white

man explicitly insists that he is not judging a Black man by his skin, it still reminds him of his

Blackness – causing “Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea.” Fanon continues, “When they

like me, they tell me my color has nothing to do with it. When they hate me, they add that it’s not

because of my colour. Either way, I am a prisoner of the vicious cycle” (Fanon et al., 2008, p.

96). From sentiments like these, there is no escape.

The Black man must assert himself, independent from recognition by the White man. He

must embrace the history of his people – the history constructed by him, not the “history”

imposed upon him. Fanon drew from Sartre who, in Orphée Noir, wrote that the movement

affirming the value of blackness is the negative moment of the Hegelian dialectic. White

supremacy represents the thesis, whereas this movement, “Negritude,” is the antithesis that paves

the way for the synthesis: “the realization of the human society without race” (Fanon et al., 2008,

p. 112). Fanon disagrees with one element of Sartre’s description, arguing that he cannot

possibly “live in his blackness” because, to him, there is no Black past or Black future. How to
 57

live with this phenomenological reality? Fanon offered no solution. “Not responsible for my acts,

at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.”

“The Black Man and Psychopathology”

Fanon questioned the generalizability of psychoanalysis beyond a European context. He

claimed that psychoanalytical schools are functional only from within specific environments.

Psychoanalytical schools have studied neurotic reactions born out of certain

environments and certain sectors of civilization. In response to a dialectical demand we

should now ask ourselves to what extent the findings by Freud and Adler can be applied

in an attempt to explain the black man’s vision of the world. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 120)

In Europe, Fanon argued, the family structure mimics the larger social structure. When the child

leaves the family, he finds that he has already absorbed the same laws, principles, and values

necessary to be a “normal adult.”12 But psychoanalysis is a poor method of understanding the

situation the neurotic black person finds himself in, within a European context. The Black family

structure is different, and the Black adult leaves the family having not absorbed the laws,

principles, and values acceptable in the eyes of White European society.

Studying this phenomenon, Fanon employed a hermeneutical method, casting his critical

eye first on children’s stories. He insisted that we must “use Jung’s postulate of the collective

unconscious” to discover why the Black child becomes a neurotic Black adult in the White

world. He identified stories and comics for the young as outlets for aggression, and since most

12
Anticipating criticism based on his use of “normal adult,” Fanon essentially concedes that the term is contentious
and problematic. He asks us, for the sake of his argument, to consider that the “abnormal is he who demands,
appeals, and begs.”
 58

children read them, reading these is described as a form of “collective catharsis.” The plot of

such stories may be diverse, but they follow certain similar themes.

In children’s stories, the antagonist is always represented by Black or indigenous people.

The White child identifies with the story’s hero: the adventurer “who is in danger of being eaten

by the wicked Negroes.” The Black or indigenous child thus begins his imaginative life with a

sense that he is a kind of criminal – or at the least, a “Noble Savage” or a “Bad Injun” (Fanon et

al., 2008, p. 125). But never the hero. These negative stereotypes, perpetuated by children’s

stories, are internalized by young readers.

“The Black Man and Recognition”

In the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon critiqued dialectical thinking,

while also drawing important lessons from it. He claimed that the Black man is always a

“comparaison.”13 By this, Fanon means that the Black man is always “preoccupied with self-

assertion and the ego ideal,” and the value he affords himself always depends on “the Other.” He

finds himself constantly in this state of comparison, asking himself: Am I smarter? Am I more

White? Am I better? Fanon wrote, rather darkly: “It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I build

my virility” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 186).

Using Adlerian Psychology, Fanon described the process the Martinican undergoes upon

contact with “the Other.” The Black man wants to fight against the inferiority he feels – his race

having historically been subjected to so much abuse. Reacting to this inferiority, he develops a

superiority complex. But he can never be sincerely convinced of his superiority. In Adlerian

terms: his Ego is never greater than “the Other.” Thus, psychoanalysts tell the Black man –

13
A Creole term meaning something like “in comparison to”
 59

regrettably, as far as Fanon is concerned – that they have “undeniably a dependency complex

regarding the white man” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 190). Such “psychological knowledge” serves to

perpetuate subordinated behaviour on the part of the black man and justify social structures

favourable to the ruling class.

After addressing his concerns with Adlerian psychoanalysis, Fanon then began his

critique of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. He begins with his basic reading of Hegel’s doctrine

of recognition:

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in

order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the

other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality

depend on this other and on his recognition by the other. It is in this other that the

meaning of his life is condensed. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 191)

Appropriating the master-slave dialectic to the contemporary situation in which Black men judge

themselves in relation to White men, Fanon described how Black men toil in vain to gain

recognition from White society. But the Black man who yearns for recognition from the White

cannot create such a reality from his own will alone. He needs the White man to voluntarily

recognize him. Quoting Hegel, he said, “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing

each other” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 192). What if the White man refuses to recognize the Black

man? In the extreme case, this deprives the Black man of his being-for-self. However, it also

deprives the White man, who must accept the recognition of the Black for their mutual

recognition to “blossom into the universal self-consciousness” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 192).
 60

The history of the White master in relation to the Black slave is one in which the former

has always made concessions to the latter. Popular history portrays the noble, moral master, who

willfully grants the slave freedom. But Fanon claims that since the Black man has not fought for

his freedom, he does not understand its value. Moreover, the freed Black man struggles to

acclimatize to life post-slavery:

Just as a patient suffers a relapse after being told that his condition has improved and

that he will shortly be leaving the asylum, so the news of emancipation for the slaves

caused psychoses and sudden death. (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 195)

The slave, Fanon went on, “has no memory of the struggle for freedom or that anguish of liberty

of which Kierkegaard speaks, draws a blank when confronted with this young white man singing

and dancing on the tightrope of existence” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 196). The White man tells the

Black that there is now no difference between them. But the Black man knows better.

The Black man knows that, despite the abolition of slavery, there remains a difference

between him and the White man. In a legal sense, there is no difference – at least in Europe.

Fanon denoted the difference between the Black Frenchmen and the Black American, the latter

of whom was fighting for the erasure of racist segregation laws in their country. Black

Americans, therefore, have something to struggle together over that Black Frenchmen do not.

Instead, they relive the myths of the paternalistic White man and the dependent slave. The

question of how the Black Frenchman is to overcome his predicament, Fanon answered only

vaguely. He implored the Black man to act, noting that only through action with respect to

humanistic values can induce change.

 61

“By Way of Conclusion”

Fanon reiterated his call for action by presenting a famous excerpt from Marx’s The

Eighteenth Brumaire:

The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It

cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the

past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug

themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions

of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead. Before, the expression

exceeded the content; now the content exceeds the expression. (Fanon et al., 2008, p.

198)

In a pessimistic tone, he wrote that it would be naïve to believe that “appeals for reason or

respect for human dignity can change reality” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 199). Only through

collective, violent effort can Black and colonized people force the white world to recognize

them.

Private Life in Saint-Alban

While establishing himself in professional psychiatry, Fanon was also passing milestones

in his personal life. In 1952, he married Marie-Josie Dublé, known to all as Josie. She was born

in Lyon to a family of leftists, with parents working as trade unionists in the postal service, who

by no means opposed her marriage to the older, Black Fanon. A talented singer described as

“strikingly good-looking,” Josie was of Corsican-Romani descent and had a short temper. Like

Fanon, she too was making progress in her professional life, graduating from the University of

Lyon with a liberal arts degree the same year as her marriage (Macey, 2012). She was, by this

point, in the early stages of a successful career in journalism.

 62

Fanon was only twenty-seven when he worked under Tosquelles at Saint-Alban, but he

had already lived an extraordinarily fast-paced life. He was a decorated war veteran, a father, a

husband (to a woman that was not his child’s mother), and a psychiatrist at the forefront of what,

at least at the time, must have felt like a revolution within the discipline. In Algeria, the

revolution would move beyond the confines of the psychiatric hospital.

Blida, Algeria

Fanon arrived in Blida, Algeria, in 1953, after taking a position at the city’s psychiatric

hospital. In Algeria, and North Africa in general, psychiatric care was split between French

colonial psychiatry and traditional forms of medicine native to the region (Bégué, 1996). Fanon

sought to transform psychiatric care in Blida to accommodate cultural differences, whereas

before, the established colonial psychiatry imposed Western values on psychiatric patients

(Robcis, 2020). Colonial psychiatrists before Fanon even violated some very well-known

abstinence practices of the predominantly Muslim population, forcing patients to consume

alcohol and eat pork (Keller, 2007). Entering the fray after over a century of medical malpractice

committed under the colonial regime, Fanon found himself able to contend with the intellectual

heavyweights of colonial psychology.

French Colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence

European colonialism had long been established as the law of the land by the turn of the

20th century. But by the 1950s, Europe's grip over its colonies was beginning to loosen. This was

especially true in the case of France, who by now were facing decolonial movements in three

colonies. Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) had fallen under Japanese control

during the Second World War. When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, Laos and

Cambodia fell back under French control. In Vietnam, a new party called the “Viet Minh,” led
 63

by nationalist Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves governors of the newly established Democratic

Republic of Vietnam, independent of France. Accepting Vietnam’s independence, France

renamed what remained of French Indochina the “Indochinese Federation,” comprised of Laos

and Cambodia (Indochina | Definition, History, & Maps. 2022). A conflict soon erupted between

Viet Minh and France, who were reluctant to cede control of the region. This conflict was settled

in 1954, when a conference in Geneva determined that the Marxist-Leninist Viet Minh would

control North Vietnam, while South Vietnam fell partly under American command, setting the

stage for one of the most brutal wars in modern history (Indochina wars. 2023). American

intervention in Vietnam resulted in the removal of French troops. For France, however, more

fires were raging. Tunisia, never completely colonized, despite being under partial French

control since 1881, became independent in 1956, but not without some civil disobedience and

violent conflict (Tunisia - The protectorate (1881–1956). 2023). By 1954, tensions in Algeria

were rising, and with troops out of Vietnam, military resources were newly available.

Algeria had been a colony since 1830, when French imperialists violently appropriated it.

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed, contrary to the usual rhetoric that colonialism

is justified in the name of French democracy (or some other supposed higher value), that

colonization had reduced Algeria to barbarism (Algeria - Colonial rule. 2023). By the First

World War, an Algerian nationalist movement began gaining traction. Between then and the

eventual independence war of the 1950s and 60s, a split emerged between those who thought

gradual reforms could achieve independence and those who insisted that only violence could

counteract colonialism's initial and persistent violence. Fanon would eventually become a major

proponent of the latter group.

 64

Before arriving in Algeria in 1953, and despite the country having experienced

considerable social unrest in the previous decade, Fanon could have had little indication that he

was again moving to a region soon to be under the spotlight of history. Just as May 1968 holds

immediate significance for left-leaning French people, May 1945 is something of an inflection

point for Algerian independence advocates. It began innocuously, on Algeria’s Labour Day, the

first day of the month. Whereas Algerian trade unionists and youth organizations traditionally

marched alongside the Pieds Noirs, this time they did not. Instead, Algerian nationalists raised

homemade flags and placards calling for independence. The day passed with tragedy in Algiers –

police killed two in a scuffle that turned violent. Other regions demonstrated without provoking

any reaction. In the small market town of Sétif, five thousand people marched through the

treeless, desert region holding banners that read ‘Long live free Algeria’ (Macey, 2012). While

Paris was ready to celebrate Victory in Europe, trouble was brewing in Algiers.

The collective feeling across Algeria was ambiguous on Tuesday, May 8th. Hitler was

dead, and the Nazis had surrendered. It was Victory in Europe Day, and however much it might

have been a celebratory day of liberation, there was a growing sense among oppressed Algerians

that it was nothing of the like. A week earlier, thousands of pro-independence Algerians marched

through Setif with a minimum of fuss. Today, it would not be so peaceful. The town was flooded

with flag-bearing Europeans – French, British, American, Russian – crowding an already busy

Tuesday (market day) in the town. However, this was not the only group parading the market

streets of Setif on May 8th. The Algerian nationalists were back and did not take kindly to the

suggestion that they leave. Fighting broke out. Twenty-two Europeans were killed – tragic,

though merely a rounding error compared to the number of Algerians killed over the next three

days: estimates range between 25 000 – 40 000 (Macey, 2012). Algerian novelist Rachid
 65

Boudjedra marks this as the date the Algerian revolution began, “Not in 1954” (Boudjedra,

1995). By the time Fanon arrived in 1953, support for independence was growing, and France,

having withdrawn troops from Vietnam, had a pool of military resources newly at its disposal.

This excess of troops allowed France to adopt the occupation strategy called quadrillage,

essentially stationing small defensive units around the country. As the uneasiness in Algeria

grew, there were major conflicts sprouting elsewhere. Global tensions were reaching a new

boiling point as the ideological battle between capitalism and Soviet-style communism was

gaining speed. These were not ideal conditions for peace. By 1954, the National Liberation Front

(FLN) openly advocated separation from France, using both guerrilla warfare techniques and

diplomacy with allies and potential allies abroad – particularly at the United Nations (Algeria -

Colonial rule. 2023). Fanon was soon one of the FLN’s most ardent supporters, despite having

shown little indication of such when he first moved to Blida.

Antoine Porot and the Algiers School

As psychiatric care in the Maghreb consisted of either indigenous forms of healing or

colonial asylums – viewed by even by Frenchmen as outdated – there was an opportunity for

enormous revision in treating the region’s mentally ill. In the 19th and early 20th century,

‘Moristans’ were overflowing and in poor condition.14 Colonialists transferred many mentally ill

Algerians to France. Somewhere in the region of five thousand are thought to have been

transferred to asylums in France between 1850 and 1910, where they were removed from a

familiar cultural environment and often grossly mistreated, even being forced not to observe

Islamic traditions As French asylums began to reject Algerian patients because they were

14
The Persian term for hospital, appropriated by French colonials to mean asylum for the mentally ill in French
North Africa
 66

overcrowded, advocates began to call for substantial changes to Algerian psychiatric facilities.

(Bégué, 1996).

French colonials' psychiatric system setup in Algeria was two-tiered: a category for

patients deemed rapidly curable, and a second category for those whose mental illness was

considered chronic. After 100 years of French occupation, Algeria finally had a system dedicated

to psychiatric care. But one would be mistaken for thinking the motives were purely

humanitarian. Rather, Arab Muslim patients in Algeria were unwittingly inducted into

‘comparative psychiatric and ethnic’ studies, and professional self-interest on behalf of

psychiatrists was clearly a major factor contributing to the expansion of psychiatric care in

Algeria (Bégué, 1996).

Furthermore, it was in the interest of colonial administrators to justify the subjugation of

Arab Muslims as chattel with purportedly ‘scientific’ evidence, presented by colonial

psychiatrists. For colonialists, it was also favourable to expand psychiatric care because it could

become a means of controlling behaviour and dictating what constitutes ‘normal.’

A major theorist in this burgeoning field of ethno-psychiatry was Antoine Porot,

professor and psychiatrist at the Algiers School in the nation’s capital. Porot, viewed by many at

the time as a champion of humanism and psychiatric reform in the French colonies, tried to

explain Algerian behaviour by describing what he calls the ‘native mentality.’ His psychiatric

reform work in Algeria was not his first of the kind. Porot was involved in constructing

psychiatric service at the French Civil Hospital in Tunis, which began service in 1912 – a full

two decades before reform came to Algeria While his advocacy brought expanded psychiatric

care, his theoretical work severely damaged native Algerians (Bégué, 1996).
 67

In 1918, Porot published a book based on his medical activities in Algeria during the First

World War. The book, titled Notes de psychiatrie musulmane, aimed to describe what he terms:

‘native mentality.’ Because Algerians showed distinct psychiatric symptoms that differed from

Europeans, Porot sought an explanation based on his clinical practice, eventually proclaiming

that “suggestibility, credulousness, hysteria, and pithiatism, perseverance, mental childishness

and relative mental deficiency” explained the comparatively odd clinical manifestations (Bégué,

1996, p. 539). Porot thought that these components of the native mentality explained what he had

observed during the war: hysterical and stupor syndromes, ideas of being possessed by spirits,

unusual cases of melancholy, ill-systematized chronic delusions, and mental epilepsy and

echokinesis. Years later, he would add to his list: criminal impulsivity. As Porot explained,

criminal impulsivity was so frequent in native Algerians that he considered it a specific, culture-

bound syndrome. Among the voices repudiating Porot and his findings, was Frantz Fanon –

particularly in the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth.

Figure 9. Fanon with colleagues at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. (Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon:

The brightness of metal. 2020)

 68

Institutional Psychotherapy in Algeria: Socio-cultural Barriers to Effective Treatment

Fanon arrived at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital eager to implement what he had learned

working under Tosquelles at Saint-Alban. He achieved only mixed results. The hospital was

comprised of two wards, one housing 165 European women and the other 220 Muslim men. By

organizing the hospital similarly to the structure where he practiced psychiatry at Saint Alban

Psychiatric Hospital, he achieved considerable success in treating and discharging European

women. Fanon and his staff helped the patients organize various events, celebrations, even a

hospital publication called Our Journal. He facilitated this by creating numerous committees:

Celebrations, Film, Record Collection, Newspaper, and Printing (Fanon et al., 2018). While the

European ward became something of a “petit France,” the attempt to implement institutional

psychotherapy in the Muslim ward was an abject failure. Fanon himself acknowledged that the

“rapid and relatively easy successes” of treatment in the European ward “only underscored the

total failure of the same methods when employed in our service of Muslim men” (Fanon et al.,

2018, p. 357).

Fanon could have easily explained these poor therapeutic outcomes as a function of the

supposedly inferior North African mind – a ‘scientific’ and popular idea at the time (Bégué,

1996). To his great credit, he not only refused to do this, but repudiated and attacked the theories

that espoused the idea – an idea that French journalist André Mandouze aptly described, in an

introduction to Fanon’s article Ethnopsychiatric Considerations, as “racism with scientific

pretensions” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 405). His willingness to question the dominant psychiatric

paradigm earned Fanon the admiration of Jacques Derrida, who recognized Fanon’s importance

earlier than most. Derrida called Fanon “exceptional and untypical,” noting how he was one of

the very few psychoanalysts in Africa to question his “own practice, ethno-psychoanalytical and
 69

socio-institutional dimensions;” to Derrida, “the Fanons were few and far between, marginal or

marginalized” (Gibson & Beneduce, 2017, p. 3).

His earnest reflexivity also had important therapeutic implications, though not without

considerable initial difficulty. In an article titled “Social therapy in a ward of Muslim men,”

Fanon explained how he and his colleagues first instructed the nursing staff to choose ten

patients to meet in the evening, for an hour each night, to engage in discussion, games, or songs.

The result was another failure, as the patients “remained indifferent” and thought of the meetings

as a “chore” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 359). At the same time, they tried to organize a ward party,

which would include a choir and a theatre performance. The nurses were not enthusiastic, much

to Fanon’s initial dismay. He chastised them for their “lack of will,” asserting that what was

possible in the European ward was possible in the Muslim ward. But once he had recruited

capable and enthusiastic nurses, they also tried and failed to organize the party successfully –

perhaps, thought Fanon, there was something more to it than the unwillingness of nurses to

implement his changes. After three months, there had been no change in the ward’s social

conditions, which were conducive to an atmosphere that was “oppressive” and “stifling” (Fanon

et al., 2018, p. 361). Patients argued frequently, nurses worked in fear, and the hairdresser

insisted that someone tie up patients before she shaved them. The conditions were comparable to

those of a concentration camp – by Fanon’s own depressing but candid admission.

Fanon and his colleagues eventually realized that if they were to improve conditions

within the hospital, they needed to mould institutional psychotherapy to reflect the wider social

conditions of Islamic Algerian society. For example, they came to recognize that singing in

groups was a totally foreign and uncomfortable concept to Muslim patients. Moreover, the work

they had initially been assigned, basket weaving, was exclusively a feminine practice in Muslim
 70

society – it was degrading for a man to do such work. By reading and learning about the social

practices of Algerian natives, Fanon and the hospital staff devised more culturally appropriate

social practices for the Muslim ward. They established a Moorish café, regularly celebrated

traditional Muslim feasts, and invited a professional ‘storyteller’ to visit the ward.15 With these

changes, social life in the hospital began to improve, which Fanon owed to the elimination of

“methodological errors” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 371).

Administration of Psychological Tests in Algeria

By the 1950s, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was an established fixture in

psychoanalysis, but questions remained over its utility outside a European context. In exploring

the universality of TATs, Fanon, along with French psychiatrist Henri Collomb, was a pioneer

(Bullard, 2005). Fanon and his colleague Charles Geronimi presented a paper titled “TAT in

Muslim women: Sociology of perception and imagination,” which described the unconventional

responses given by Algerian women.

In their experiment, they found that rather than interpreting the scene by imagining it as a

drama, the Muslim women seemed to think it was a kind of intelligence test. Rather than

interpreting, they set themselves on the meagre task of identifying items on the card – “Narrative

is inexistent” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 429). Fanon and Geronimi give some examples:

Card 3 BM (obs. 4): ‘I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. I think it’s a girl. I don’t know

what she’s doing. I am not sure what to say. I don’t understand. Perhaps he is sick. He

has a headache. I’m tired (she sighs).’

15
As Fanon explains in “Social therapy in a ward of Muslim men,” storytellers who travelled between villages was a
typical social practice in North Africa, and ensured a unified cultural fabric among otherwise separate tribes.
 71

And:

Card 11 (obs. 7) (Rit.): ‘You’d say it’s the sea, but it is blue or green, and there it is

black. It’s not the sea, perhaps it’s a village (turns the card around and back), it looks

like a plane, a boat, but it is none of these things. I don’t understand. You’d say it’s a

serpent? It looks like a person (stones). (The card is the right way up.) It looks like

persons, but you cannot make them out properly (the stones).’16

Instead of describing what was happening, the Muslim patients merely described what was in the

photo. Despite their initial bemusement, Fanon and Geronimi offered compelling reasons to

explain why their patients responded as they did. Their reasoning was against the grain. In the

era of abundant “racism with scientific pretensions,” it would have been easy to espouse the

psychiatric consensus and explain the results as another example of “primitive mentality.” But

Fanon, after all, was not one to appeal to the majority, or simply heed to the dominant opinion of

the zeitgeist. He explained:

To say that the Muslim is unable to invent, by invoking a particular genetic constitution,

one subsumed within the more general framework of some primitivism, seems a difficult

position to defend in our view. (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 431)

Fanon and Geronimi gave myriad reasons to explain why the patients responded how

they did. As members of society’s subjugated group, there was a pervasive sense among

Muslims that they were constantly being challenged, and that the European was persistent in his

efforts to exemplify the Arab’s lesser intellect. Thus, the patients took the test as one of

intelligence, rather than one of personality (Bullard, 2005). The patients also frequently

16
See Appendix for Card 3 BM and Card 11
 72

expressed genuine confusion about what was depicted on the card, responding “My God, what is

that!” to certain displays (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 430). One can imagine that interpretation is

difficult when what is actually on the card is unclear. That Muslim patients had difficulty making

sense of the people on the card is less surprising when one considers that in Islamic art, people

are never or virtually never displayed – God is the only one who should depict humans,

according to Islamic custom (Bullard, 2005). Moreover, others refused to interpret the images,

citing instructions in the Koran: “I cannot lie, because that’s a sin. Only God knows what is

going to happen [in the scene depicted on the card]” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 431). Fascinatingly,

the blank card included in the test did invoke imaginative responses, likely owing to its being

void of culture objects foreign to the Muslim patients. “Not running up against a world that

excluded them, our patients formed rich and varied stories” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 432).

Fanon and Geronimi expressed their desire to overcome the cultural biases of the TAT by

developing a projection tests “with Maghrebi Muslims in mind” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 432).

They explained that they wanted the projective test to reflect the “cultural dynamisms” specific

to Islamic society. But it never came to fruition. Alice Bullard, professor of history at Georgia

Institute of Technology, is doubtful that any such test would have been useful anyway, because

he would have faced the enormous challenge of “creating culturally sensitive practices within a

decaying imperialist setting” (Bullard, 2005). Algerian culture was evolving through

decolonisation, and creating a projective test to reflect those changes would have been in vain,

since the culture would soon change again anyway, and the test would prove outdated. Fanon

and Geronimi’s contribution, in this instance, was recognizing, describing, and explaining the

TAT's European biases and cultural contingency.

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Private Life in Blida

Frantz and Josie Fanon lived in a comfortable home in Blida-Joinville – even if, as their

son Olivier recalls, their neighbours’ behaviour tended to be eccentric (Macey, 2012). What

Olivier recalled, in an interview with David Macey, must have been second-hand knowledge,

because he was born that year, 1956. By 1957, the Fanon family had relocated to newly

independent Tunisia. Olivier became Fanon’s second child, and his first with Josie. But he was

far from the ideal father. Even before Fanon was involved with the FLN, professional

commitments largely occupied his time, and he had little time for family life. Unsurprisingly,

what little time he dedicated to his family was shortened still, once he had committed to the

cause of Algerian independence.

The National Liberation Front, Resignation, and Exile

The National Liberation Front (FLN) was formed in 1954, the year after Fanon arrived in

Blida. By 1956, all other Algerian nationalist movements had united under the title, and

revolution was no longer a fringe and radical idea – it was quickly becoming a reality. As the

tide of change swept over the country, a choice faced Fanon. As a psychiatrist employed by the

colonial government, he felt implicitly on the oppressor's side. However, he had only been

appointed a psychiatrist of Blida Psychiatric Hospital four years earlier. In his time in the role,

his output had been prodigious and he had achieved considerable professional success. Was he

unwise to disavow all he had accomplished and walk away from the patients who depended on

him? Sartre presented a famous paradox, during the Second World War, that French people were

never so free as they were under German occupation – and it certainly was not thanks to the

autonomy the Nazi occupiers afforded them. He said this because, under conditions of duress,

our options tend to become crystalized, black and white. The French could choose either
 74

resistance or submission; there was no in-between. Similarly, Fanon had to choose either

oppression or revolution – he could no longer remain coy about where his sympathies lay.

Fanon eventually resigned from his position at Blida in 1957, citing his disillusionment as

an employee of what he increasingly viewed as a colonial oppressor (Fanon et al., 2018). He

wrote to Robert Lacoste, Governor General of Algeria, in December 1956, announcing and

explaining his resignation:

For almost three years, I have devoted myself completely to the service of this country

and to the men who inhabit it. I have not been sparing in either my efforts or my

enthusiasm. Every aspect of my actions demanded as its horizon the universally hoped

for emergence of a viable world.

But what is enthusiasm and what is a concern for men when, day by day, reality is being

torn apart by lies, acts of cowardice and scorn for man? What are intentions when their

embodiment is made impossible by emotional poverty, intellectual sterility and hatred of

the people of this country? Madness is one of the ways in which man can lose his

freedom. And being placed at this intersection, I can say that I have come to realize with

horror how alienated the inhabitants of this country are.

If psychiatry is a medical technique which aspires to allow man to cease being alienated

from his environment, I owe it to myself to assert that the Arab, who is permanently

alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. The status of

Algeria? Systematic dehumanization . . .

For long months, my conscience has been the seat of unforgivable debates. And their

conclusion is a will not to lose hope in man, or in other words myself. I have resolved
 75

that I cannot face my responsibilities at any cost on the fallacious grounds that there is

nothing else to be done.

For all these reasons, Monsieur le Ministre, I have the honour of asking you to accept my

resignation and to bring my mission in Algeria to an end. (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 433).

French colonials subsequently exiled him the next month, in January 1957. Fanon moved to

Tunisia, where he continued to practice psychiatry while more fully committing himself to the

cause of Algerian independence.

Tunis, Tunisia

Tunisia in Historical Context

Tunisia is one of the few African countries that avoided full-blown colonization by a

European country. It did so not by armed resistance, but by accepting status as a protectorate of

France in 1881. Tunisia remained an independent country with the bey as an absolute monarch,

who appointed ministers and controlled national affairs. Unlike the fate suffered by Algerians,

Tunisians did not see their land confiscated, their mosques converted to churches, or their official

language changed. The only real difference was, any absolute power held by the monarchy was

purely symbolic – for any matters in which they had legitimate interest, France made the

decisions. Tunisia managed its finances under French guidance, and France compelled it to allow

other European countries to harvest fertile land in the north of the country (Tunisia - The

protectorate (1881–1956). 2023).

However, as early as the 1890s, patriotic and exuberant young Tunisians began

organizing and advocating for independence. After the Second World War, with France in ruins

(in every sense), Tunisian nationalists began to use guerrilla warfare tactics, leaving the country
 76

at a standstill. These tactics forced France’s hand. French premier Pierre Mendes-France

promised to negotiate autonomy for Tunisia in July 1954. By March 1956, Tunisia was fully

independent (Tunisia - The protectorate (1881–1956). 2023). Newly independent and

geographically near Algeria, Tunisia became the chosen refuge for exiled members of Algeria’s

FLN. In January, 1957, Frantz, Josie, and their infant son Olivier relocated to Tunisia’s capital

city, Tunis, having received orders to leave Algeria from the Governor General (Fanon et al.,

2018).

A Dying Colonialism

Fanon’s second book, A Dying Colonialism, was published in 1959, after he had been

exiled from Algeria. Prior to this book, his political writing had found an outlet in El Moudjahid,

but these short articles are more aptly described as propagandistic, rather than any serious

attempt to interpret and explain the decolonial movement in Algeria. Macey describes A Dying

Colonialism as an attempt to change the “left’s perception of the Algerian Revolution” (Macey,

2012, p. 397). Whereas his newspaper articles depict a Manichean world of good versus evil –

where French colonials are castigated as criminals beyond redemption – his book serves as an

appeal to logic, and is written in a more muted and simple tone.

The first chapter, Algeria Unveiled, describes the changing role of women during the

revolution. A theme of Fanon’s work is his emphasis on the physical, immutable elements of

one’s self or one’s culture. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, he described how Black

skin is a fact about a Black person that he cannot escape. Others constantly remind him of it, by

their glances, their behaviour around him, the way he speaks to him. Recall that he distinguished

this anti-Black racism from Sartre’s examination of anti-Semitism by pointing out that a Jew can

take measures to veil his Jewishness from others – but the Black man cannot escape the “fact of
 77

blackness,” to use Fanon’s term (Fanon et al., 2008). Similarly, some aspects of one’s culture are

not immediately obvious, while others can never escape the observer's gaze. Fanon gave an

example in this chapter of a Christian tourist in Algeria. Such a tourist could spend a long time in

the country without ever knowing that Muslims never eat pork and do not have sex during

Ramadan. But the veil worn by the country’s women, like black skin, is constant and

unmistakable. The veil, therefore, characterizes Arab society in the eyes of the outsider, the way

a Black person is characterized by his skin colour. The European, who perhaps imagines his

culture as relatively enlightened, putting fewer restrictions on the social expectations of women’s

clothing, might be inclined to view this kind of attire as symbolic of Islamic culture’s intrinsic

misogyny. Fanon dispelled this idea with nuance and acuity, pointing out how colonials

weaponize the veil, known as a haik, to garner support for their position of dominance. He

pointed out how colonials are disingenuous about their purported intention of emancipating

women from their own culture (Fanon, 2022). If they could win over the women, they could

destroy Algerian culture and with it the independence movement:

Converting the woman, winning her over to the foreign values, wrenching her free from

her status, was at the same time achieving a real power of the man and attaining a

practice, effective means of destructuring Algerian culture. (Fanon, 2022, p. 39)

Whether it is ethical for a culture to demand women veil all but their eyes does not concern

Fanon, no less the Europeans. If the veil is perceived as an infringement on the basic rights of

women, then such a problem is the concern Algerians, and should be addressed by them, rather

than the European imagining himself to have a monopoly on morality, and impose his culture’s

ethics onto the Arab. To Fanon, these efforts to impose a new moral code upon Algerians was in

vain. Contrary to their intentions, Europeans end up “strengthening the traditional patterns of
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behaviour,” and, subsequently, encourage Algerian women to play a more active role in the

revolution (Fanon, 2022, p. 49).

In the book’s second chapter, “This is the voice of Algeria,” Fanon examined a new

technological instrument – the radio – and its role in the revolution. He points out that while

radios were popular among Europeans living Algeria, Algerian households tended not to adopt

them – including those households that had the financial means. This, according to Fanon, was

because the radio stations discussed topics not in accordance with Algerian culture. They made

“sex allusions, or even the clownish situations meant to make people laugh” and these “cause an

unendurable strain in a family listening to these programs” (Fanon, 2022, p. 70). This could be

an important lesson for those pursuing equality in non-WEIRD regions of the world: the

attainment of equal levels of material wealth is not necessarily indicative of equality when that

material has variable social value, depending on the culture. A radio costs the same to a

European as it does to an Algerian, but it is worth more to the European because it is more

desirable to him than it is to the Algerian. As the war progressed, radios began to proliferate

Algerian households because they proved themselves the most reliable source of news about the

revolution. The station of choice for pro-independence Algerians was The Voice of Fighting

Algeria, which disseminated news and unified listeners (Fanon, 2022). Once it served a social

goal, the radio became indispensable.

In the third chapter, “The Algerian Family,” Fanon discussed the “evolution of the

Algerian family” during the revolution. He began by denoting the rigid patriarchal structure of

the Algerian family, wherein the father is distinctly in a position of authority. During the war,

however, this position necessarily changes. And although the family remains highly structured,

the son becomes far more in tune than the father “on the level of national consciousness.” Fanon
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is vague about what he means, exactly, by national consciousness. But we can assume that it

refers to how well attuned the son is to the wishes and best interests of all Algerians. By

becoming the agent of change in the family, the militant son does not replace the father, but

recognizes his duty, as it relates to the revolution, of “indoctrinating” him – convincing him of

the virtues of decolonization. In the hierarchical family structure, Fanon explains, the daughter is

always behind the son. The birth of a baby boy is more desirable, from his parents’ perspective,

because he is seen as a future worker and guardian, whereas the girl, aware yet powerless of the

preference for the son, is destined for a life of domestic duties with no opportunity to “develop

her personality or take any initiative” (Fanon, 2022, p. 105). The revolution changed the situation

for young women, according to Fanon. Women joined the revolution, took up arms, and were

imprisoned or martyred for their actions – but these tragedies opened the imagination of Algerian

women. Now, in Fanon’s words: “The woman-for-marriage progressively disappeared, and gave

way to the woman-for-action. The young girl was replaced by the militant, the woman by the

sister” (Fanon, 2022, p. 107).

Himself a former colonial physician, Fanon critically analyzed the role of medicine in the

fourth chapter, titled “Medicine and Colonialism.” Native Algerians have always been

ambivalent to Western medical science, according to Fanon, because it is part of an oppressive

colonial system. He called this “one of the most tragic features of the colonial situation” not

because the colonized are wrong to be skeptical of medicine, but because he recognized the

immense capacity for good being squandered. Colonial medicine, like other aspects of

colonialism, is presented as an idol to which the colonized should submit themselves absolutely.

This leads to ambivalence if not outright rejection for two reason. First, native Algerians have

their own healing traditions that are not meritless and connect the colonized to their own distinct
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culture. Second, colonial physicians have abused their position, in many cases, to serve France in

its bid for counterrevolution. Fanon pointed out the failures of “objective science” in Algeria and

throughout the French empire: “Science depoliticized, science in the service of man, is often

non-existent in the colonies” (Fanon, 2022, p. 140). In this chapter, Fanon identifies the perverse

incentives of colonial medicine with acuity, and highlights the importance of questioning the

motives – avowed and hidden – of institutions and disciplines.

Fanon discusses the “often odious behaviour” of European intellectuals in chapter five,

“Algeria’s European Minority.” However much one wishes the European doctors and

intellectuals living in Algeria would want to “lesson the tension” in the country, Fanon accuses

such people of supporting unequivocally the “colonists’ cause.” He also laments the ambivalence

of the left in France, namely the French Communist Party (FCP), for its unwillingness to engage

with and support the revolution in Algeria.

Psychiatric Methods in Tunisia

Day Hospitalizations

Fanon’s advocacy for “Day hospitalization in psychiatry” represents an evolution in his

approach to psychiatric practice. He wrote two papers on the merits and drawbacks of day

hospitalization, both appearing in La Tunisie médicale in 1959.17 Recall that, studying under

Tosquelles at Saint Alban, Fanon had previously written about Institutional Psychotherapy,

which assumed patients to be long-term residents of a psychiatric hospital. He implemented

institutional psychotherapy, à la Saint Alban, as superintendent at Blida Psychiatric Hospital but

altered this approach in Tunis. Day hospitalization embraces the same ethos championed by

17
These articles were translated into English and published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018, in the collection
Alienation and Freedom.
 81

Tosquelles, which favours the construction of an atmosphere within the hospital that mimics life

outside – what Fanon calls a “neo-society” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 475). But the key difference

between day hospitalization and institutional psychotherapy is that day hospitalization does not

require patients to be admitted to the hospital on a long-term basis. It is, as the name suggests,

simply an approach whereby patients visit the hospital during the day, before returning to their

families in the evening – similar to how one might go to work during the day. Fanon gave

various reasons explaining why this approach is preferable, offers suggestions as to how it might

be improved, and underlines the distinct weaknesses of the approach – keeping in line with his

tendency for critical self-reflection and reflexivity.

Figure 10. Never one to shy away from action, Fanon paired his commitment to fighting for truth

and justice with endless study and deliberation. (Morris, 1990)

Day hospitalization deconstructs the master/slave dialectic that exists between the doctor

and the patient in an “internment,” long-term care setting. Fanon explained how internment –
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like the name suggests – implies the patient is akin to a prisoner, whose own wishes, thoughts,

and impulses are subjugated to those of his master. Day hospitalization, by contrast, normalizes

relations between the doctor and patient, since the patient is free to leave at the end of the day,

make his own choices about where to go, what to do, and so on. This opening up the patient to a

higher degree of freedom, relative to institutional psychotherapy, is a sense in which Fanon’s

thinking serves as a prelude to the anti-psychiatry movement, which achieved prominence in the

1960s through the likes of Ronald Lang, Thomas Szasz, and Michel Foucault. Beneduce and

Cherki comment, in Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics, that although he is unlikely to have

embraced the anti-psychiatry movement, there are elements of his work that overlap with the key

assumptions of that movement – namely, his commitment to social liberation, creating

opportunities for patient self-directed activity, and creating “culturally sensitive sociotherapy

programs” (Gibson & Beneduce, 2017, p. 3). Negating what he perceived as a master/slave

dialectic between doctor and patient in the institutional setting, day hospitalization represents a

precursor to movements advocating yet greater patient autonomy. True to his conviction that

political engagement is a requisite to psychological liberation, Fanon concludes by asserting

“very strict legislation must be established, guaranteeing the patient a maximum of freedom by

removing all the carceral and coercive aspects of internment” (Fanon et al., 2018, p. 509).

Art as Therapy

Macey recounts a case wherein Fanon developed a therapeutic relationship with an ALN

fighter and artist, Boukhatem Farés. In 1958, Fares had been injured in battle and required both

physical and psychiatric care. Impressed by Fares’s artwork, which included a painting depicting

a child waving an Algerian flag with bomber planes in the background, Fanon encouraged him to

“use painting as a means of exploring and ‘visualizing’ his own fears and anxieties.” Of Fanon’s
 83

guidance, Fares had this to say: “Fanon’s advice was a great help to me in producing leaflets for

the psychological struggle against the enemy, and for raising the moral of the ALN’s troops”

(Macey, 2012, p. 319). He later encouraged Fares to join the propaganda service as an artist, and

some of his work was presented to representatives of foreign delegations.

Teaching Social Psychopathology in Tunisia

Now a prominent figure in the movement for Algerian independence, Fanon took a

lecturer position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Tunis, teaching a course on social

psychopathology. This course was unusual in that it was not simply university students who

attended. More than that, Fanon’s course became popular with medical doctors, academics,

Algerian militants, and politicians. Lilia Ben Salem, a student who published notes based on this

course, recalls that it “assumed a social character unusual within the Tunisian university milieu”

(Fanon et al., 2018, p. 514). Ben Salem’s notes on Fanon’s course provide insight into the

aspects of his work he felt important for those partaking in the Institut’s Bachelor of Sociology

and Psychology program. These notes also provide a window for observing Fanon the person –

his lecturing style, tendencies, general persona.

Immediately striking is the attention Fanon payed to the condition of the worker, who is

under constant surveillance by the employer. Predating the calls of the anti-psychiatry

movement, which had yet to gain real traction in the late 1950s, Fanon stressed the

psychopathological consequences of control and surveillance in the workplace. He identified

where the psychiatrist – or conceivably in our time, the psychologist – becomes relevant in

relation to work behaviour. The psychiatrist intervenes when a worker does not fulfill his role as

a member of a team or an aspect of the assembly line. The term ‘normal’ becomes defined by

one’s capacity (or willingness) to fulfill the role of the ‘good worker.’ Those who cannot fulfill
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this role are diagnosed as ‘mentally ill.’ Continuing the theme of surveillance-induced neuroses

observed in members of the working class, Fanon describes a peculiar condition occurring in

telephonists. Call center workers find themselves, depending on circumstances, under

surveillance – their employer could, at any time, be listening to every word they speak. This

feeling occurs whether the employer is listening or not, inducing a state of perpetual anxiety. Is

he listening? Am I being monitored? The arising of these questions in perpetuum is enough to

make a paranoid neurotic out of even the most stable of characters. What is curious about this

phenomenon, and the point which Fanon wishes to impart to his students, is that even in the

known absence of ‘wiretapping,’18 telephonists develop a mental illness. This illness was, at the

time, known as External Action Syndrome (EAS)19. Henri Claude first described EAS as a kind

of ‘mental automatism’ that causes disorders to appear even in the absence of the supposed cause

of the disorder – a common feat in the workplace. Fanon is supposed to have said that those who

work in large stores, particularly in the United States, likewise develop the same neuroses as the

telephonists, owing to perpetual surveillance. He also expresses his concern that “within the

technological milieu, the tendency is to reduce communications and transform the human being

into an automaton.” Whether this was a novel observation in 1959 is a question lying outside the

concern of this paper. But it is nonetheless an important insight, the prescience of which has only

grown with time.

The remaining course material largely reflects Fanon’s work discussed elsewhere,

particularly Black Skin, White Masks. He analyzed the “Problem of racism,” again with a

18
Process by which employer listens to conversations of telephonist
19
External Action Syndrome presents another example of the historical contingency of psychological constructs.
Only in a particular socio-historical moment can a given construct have meaning. In this case, post-war France, with
a prominent Communist Party and in the midst of a strong labour movement, provides the context from which
labour-concerned constructs emerge. When the Communist Party, the labour movement, and other such
contingencies dissipate or lose influence, so too does EAS cease to have meaning.
 85

particular focus on the Untied States. The Black American, born into a violent culture, himself

becomes violent – a sort of “introjection.” He lectures on the problems faced by Blacks in

predominantly white societies, the problems of psychopathology specific to minorities, the

colonized society, and other topics relating to the major themes of his life’s work. The notes

conclude with an emphasis on a change in the nature of labour. Fanon is said to have stressed

that “Labour must be recovered as a humanization of man.” In its contemporary form, it served

to alienate. The colonial (or the capitalist in European countries) favours high unemployment

rates because this gives him leverage against the proletarian: a large labour pool means he can

threaten to replace him, even implicitly, and he can therefore justify low wages, owning all

leverage against him who has only his labour to offer.

Fanon the Politician

He was now an outlaw in Algeria, but by openly denouncing French colonialism, Fanon

had freed himself from the contradiction of working for colonials while secretly detesting them.

He was now in open rebellion, and wasted little time becoming a prominent voice in the

independence movement. By May 1957, Fanon was an official spokesperson for the FLN,

despite spending most of his first year in Tunisia strictly working as a psychiatrist (Macey,

2012). He doubtlessly worked extraordinary hours to sustain a full professional commitment to

his medical practice, because, in the summer of 1958, his involvement with the FLN had reached

a new height.
 86

Figure 11. Fanon and other FLN members boarding a ship. He travelled freuquently after leaving

Algeria. (Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon: The brightness of metal. 2020)

Fanon was issued a document known in French to be a vrai faux passport (a ‘real fake

passport’) – an official document under a false identity. Frantz Omar Fanon of Martinique

became, for all legal purposes, Omar Ibrahim Fanon of Tunisia. The passport, issued by the

Tunisian consulate of the United Kingdom of Libya, allowed him to travel throughout Africa as a

spokesperson for the FLN (Macey, 2012). His first documented use of this passport was on a trip

to Rome in September 1958. Though the exact reason for travelling to the Italian capital is

unclear, it is understood to have been related to the establishment of the Provisional Government

of the Republic of Algeria (PGRA) (Macey, 2012). That Fanon was involved in such serious

matters indicates the level of seniority achieved within the FLN, in short order. Later that month,

the PGRA declared itself governor of Algeria, and it was soon recognized by Iraq, Egypt,

Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Mongolia, North
 87

Korea, North Vietnam, and Indonesia. This was a civil war, and Fanon was now irrevocably

involved.

During this time, Fanon wrote frequently for El Moudjahid, a pro-FLN magazine. In

these pieces he often targets Charles de Gaulle, by now French President, referring to him as

“this scourge” who is denying Algeria the right to independence and self-determination (Fanon

et al., 2018, p. 616). One also detects Fanon’s Marxist inclinations by the certainty of his thesis

in “National independence: The only possible outcome,” resembling Marx’s doctrine of

historical materialism, which assumes revolutionary change toward equality inevitable. Many of

the other articles, written in French and since translated to English, are about anticolonialism in

Algeria specifically and Africa as a whole. Consistent in all of them, is the blunt and pointed

tone of someone who holds firmly the courage of his convictions.

In December 1958, Fanon travelled to Accra, Ghana, as part of the FLN delegation at the

All-African People’s Congress. The London Times described “Dr. Omar” (recall Fanon’s

pseudonym) as the leader of the delegation, but this is inaccurate. Ahmed Boumendjel led the

delegation, but Fanon had overshadowed his colleague thanks to a speech in which he professed

that recourse to violence was never out of question during the struggle for African liberation.

Despite receiving “wild applause” for his advocacy of violence, it was apparently dramatically

against the general consensus of the conference leaders, who favoured non-violent means of

resistance and change. Nevertheless, Fanon’s fame within the African liberation movement was

growing, and he left the conference as enthused and impassioned as ever (Macey, 2012, p. 364).

After the excitement of Accra in December 1958, Fanon dutifully returned to his medical

practice, before again interrupting his time in the hospital to speak at the Second Congress of

Black Writers and Artists, which was being held in Rome from March 26th to April 1st. Fanon
 88

read a paper called “The Reciprocal Foundation of National Culture and Liberation,” in which he

insisted that genuine culture was impossible under colonial oppression. He later wrote a chapter

of The Wretched of the Earth based on this speech.

The high Fanon must have been feeling at the prospect of genuine change in Algeria was

soon dampened, when he was badly injured in a car accident in May 1959. Travelling to pickup

new patients, his driver lost control of the car, which skidded and sent Fanon flying from the

vehicle. He landed on his back with consequently damaged vertebrae. When Josie heard of her

husband’s accident she was alarmed – there had been frequent ‘accidents’ involving prominent

members of the FLN. This indeed was truly an accident, and despite his decrepit physical

condition, he was travelling and advocating on behalf of the Algerian cause in a little over a

month (Macey, 2012). Given his injuries, Fanon was lucky to be alive. This would not be his

only brush with death in the coming months.

Figure 12. Fanon during a press conference in Tunis, 1959. (Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon: The

brightness of metal. 2020)

 89

On July 5th, 1959, a little over a month after the car accident, Fanon and his two

bodyguards arrived in Rome, expecting to meet with Taieb Boulharouf, a long-time FLN

diplomat. He was instead met by the police, who would take him under their protection.

Boulharouf had been badly injured and was recovering in hospital. If Fanon’s recent escape from

death was fortunate, it was nothing compared to the luck Boulharouf had experienced. As

Boulharouf was walking toward his bomb-rigged car, a group of children kicked a ball that rolled

under it – enough to set off the bomb just before its owner entered. It surely would have blown

him to pieces. One boy was killed, and his playmates, like Boulharouf, were badly injured

(Macey, 2012).

Part of Fanon’s visit to Rome was to receive adequate treatment for his injuries. While he

read the newspaper report of the car bomb, he recognized the reporter’s reference to a

“mysterious Libyan” being escorted to the hospital. He immediately realized that the reference

was to himself and, cognizant of the danger of his enemies’ knowledge of his location,

demanded he be moved secretly to a different room. Fanon’s fear was justified. A gunman burst

into his initial hospital room, before being apprehended. Fanon, safe in a different room, would

most certainly have been killed (Beauvoir, 1965). He must have wondered how many more near-

death experiences he could walk away from.

What was unclear, at this point, was who exactly was responsible for the car bombs and

gunman killing FLN members. Press reports were beginning to point the figure at the mysterious

‘Red Hand’ organization, who were thought to be a group of right-wing pied noirs reactionaries.

Historians today generally accept the consensus that the ‘Red Hand’ organization was no loose

congregation of pro-colonial extremists, but was in fact a concerted effort commanded by a

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French foreign intelligence agency (Riegler, 2012). The FLN and Fanon were, respectively,

victims and the intended victim of state-sponsored terrorism.

As violence characterized the Maghreb, revolutionary militias were making themselves

known in the French Antilles – and Fanon was taking notice. In January 1960, he wrote an article

called “Blood Flows in the Antilles under French Domination,” in which he celebrated native

Antilleans’ uprising and repudiated French reactionaries. Following the Cuban Revolution of the

1950s, the result of which was the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist government, there was a

growing sentiment in the region that the seeds of change were blooming. Native to the

Caribbean, it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that Fanon followed these developments with

great interest. By the late 1950s, he felt betrayed by the vanguard revolutionary figures who

sustained him in his youth. Particularly, his quarrel was with Aime Cesaire, who had broken with

the Martinican Communist Party and had begun to champion the virtues of association with the

French Empire. With his attention diverted to the emerging struggles of his homeland, Fanon

began to seek a diplomatic position, within the FLN, that would allow him to influence

developments in the Caribbean. His connection to the region made him a logical choice for an

ambassadorial role, but the fact that he was a well-known figure wanted by the French

government meant that the scope of his potential outreach in an area ripe with French colonies

might be limited. Nevertheless, he began to seek appointment as the FLN’s ambassador to Cuba,

an obvious ally to the Algerian cause (Gordon, 2011).

Fanon was never assigned a political role in the Caribbean, but his effort to support the

revolution – what he called “the cause of the peoples,” in a letter to his brother – was never

greater. By 1960, he had been appointed FLN ambassador to Ghana, organized supply routes for

the FLN, provided medical and military training to FLN members, wrote responses to French
 91

propaganda, participated in strategic meetings, and tended to internal squabbles (Gordon, 2011).

He did this on top of his commitments as a psychiatrist and lecturer – in Tunis, he treated

patients, wrote academic papers, and taught at L’Institut des Hautes Etudes.

Fanon boasted a resume that put even the most productive people to shame, but despite

his seemingly endless outward enthusiasm, one suspects that years of short-cutting sleep and

surviving near-death experiences were beginning to take a toll. In Mali to secure a supply route

for the FLN, he is known to have fell ill (Gordon, 2011). Upon returning to Ghana, he reluctantly

inquired about his health. The initial results were daunting, but inconclusive. Doctors had found

very high levels of leucocytes, indicating that something was wrong with how his body was

regulating the cells in his bloodstream. After hearing Josie's pleas, he returned to Tunis to

undergo further tests (Macey, 2012). It was to be an unhappy return.

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Figure 13. Fanon casts what appears to be a contemptuous glare. By now, he is sick, tired, and

ailing – but no less the passionate and iconoclastic revolutionary. (Gordon, 2011)

Terminal Cancer

Toward the end of 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia, presumably in an

advanced stage. The assumption of the condition’s advanced development can be made based on

the fact, in terms of treatment options, oncologists in Tunisia (who were generally very good, by

the standards of the day) readily admitted their helplessness. If he was to survive to see his son

grow up or the revolution succeed, he would need to seek treatment elsewhere. He was adamant

that he would die before being treated in the United States – which was, to him, a land of racists

and lynch mobs. That left the Soviet Union as the next best option. The FLN arranged for Fanon

be flown to Moscow, where he was treated sometime in the spring of 1961 (Macey, 2012). He

was treated with a new and highly-touted drug called “Myleran” (Geismar, 1971). He told

Simone de Beauvoir, who he met alongside Sartre in Rome, that the treatment had brought him

some relief (Beauvoir, 1965). The treatment he received in the Soviet Union also allowed for

him to write The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s last and most famous book, impressive in its

own right, is yet more remarkable when considering the deteriorating condition of the author –

dying of cancer, Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth in a mere ten weeks. It has come to be

considered a foundational text in postcolonialism and had been required reading for the

American Black Panthers organization in the 1960s (Abu-Jamal, 2020).

The Wretched of the Earth

Dying of cancer, the traits that characterize the ‘historical’ Fanon are explicit in his final

great work, The Wretched of the Earth. With a sense of anger, palpable to the reader even

through translation and time, Fanon attacked the outmoded institution of colonialism, with an
 93

emphasis on colonial medicine, and calls on the peasantry of the ‘Third World’ to act in

solidarity and revolt against their colonial masters (Fanon et al., 2004). While it is written as a

scathing attack on all things French Colonialism, Fanon also demonstrated his brilliance as a

psychological theorist, detailing the psychiatric conditions in the Maghreb and concisely

dismantling racist theories of colonial psychiatrists.

In the book’s first chapter, “On Violence,” Fanon stressed the importance of violence in

the process of decolonization. He does not beat around the bush. “National liberation,” Fanon

wrote, in the opening sentence,

national awakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever

the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event”

(Fanon et al., 2004, p. 1) (my emphasis)

Having been subdued for so long by their colonial oppressors, Fanon claimed that the colonized

must redirect their displaced anger into a collective struggle for liberation made possible only by

violence. Fanon saw violence as necessary in the Marxist sense of the colonized seizing control

over the means of production, wrestling away economic power from colonialists, and creating a

new political order.20 However, he viewed violence as valuable not only as a method of altering

an economic reality, but also as a kind of psychotherapeutic. Fanon denoted the internalized self-

hatred with which the colonized must content and posits that violence, perhaps by shifting the

balance of power, serves as therapy for colonized neurotics.

20
Fanon’s ideas relevant to Marxism are more complex than this, as discussed later. Scholars have argued that his
political disposition is more closely aligned with Maoism, owing to his emphasis on the revolutionary potential of
the peasantry. However, eyewitness reports claim that Fanon lectured on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reasoning
in Accra, Ghana, in the time following his exile from Algeria (Fanon et al., 2018). Unfortunately, there are no
known recordings or transcripts of these lectures, but that they were given suggests another deep layer of Fanon’s
engagement with Marxism.
 94

In the second chapter, “Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity,” Fanon spoke in poetic

terms about the revolutionary potential of the Algerian peasantry. He pushes against orthodox

Marxism, at least regarding its utility in colonized countries, when he proclaimed that the urban

proletariat in these countries is relatively privileged: “In the colonized countries, the proletariat

has everything to lose” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 64). According to Fanon’s analysis, the reality of a

proletarian in capitalist countries, who has nothing to lose, contrasts with that of him in the

colonies. In the colonies, the source of revolutionary potential rests in the lumpenproletariat – the

peasantry that lives outside the colonized country’s urban centres and whose traditional way of

life is upended by colonialism. The national bourgeoisie naturally opposes the “native” way of

life, because it offers an alternative set of social practices – marabouts instead of physicians,

djemaas instead of lawyers, kaids who run businesses beyond the homogeneous practices

acknowledged by the colonials – that contradict and weaken the colonized bourgeoisie’s primary

goal: the accumulation of capital.21 The national bourgeoisie, therefore, forces the rural

population into cramped urban living conditions:

Abandoning the countryside and its insoluble problems of demography, the landless

peasants, now a lumpenproletariat, are driven into the towns, crammed into shanty towns

and endeavor to infiltrate the ports and cities, the creations of colonial domination. As

for the mass of the peasantry, they continue to live in a petrified context, and those who

cannot scrape a living in the countryside have no other choice but to emigrate to the

cities. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 66)

21
By the “national bourgeoisie”, Fanon is referring to native Algerians who, with the colonists, own the means of
production. This class tends to be concentrated in what Fanon refers to as the “metropolis” – Algeria’s major urban
centers.
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This displaced mass of Algerians, who “fluctuate between madness and suicide,” must take

collective, militant action against their oppressors. Fanon holds no illusions: building a common

front will be difficult, as it entails forgiving the historical intra-national grievances that exist

between tribes of the indigenous population. Having set aside their differences to confront a

common enemy, itself an arduous task, Fanon states clearly that the suffering of decolonization

will far exceed that experienced during colonialism. But while the means are frightening,

dangerous, and opaque, the end is translucent: a liberated people in an independent Algeria.

Echoing Sartre:

This new politics is in the hands of cadres and leaders working with the tide of history

who use their muscles and their brains to lead the struggle for liberation. It is national,

revolutionary, and collective. This new reality, which the colonized are now exposed to,

exists by action alone. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 96) (my emphasis)

Sartre posits that through action, we create ourselves. That action, Fanon reiterates at the closing

of the chapter, must be constitutive of “violence alone.”

The third and fourth chapters are notable for Fanon’s critiques of the national bourgeoisie

and the colonized intellectual, respectively. He identifies two classes that should be the primary

agents of revolutionary change, and calls on Algerian leaders to inform and empower them. The

first class Fanon identifies, the lumpenproletariat, are the un- or under-employed who have

travelled to Algeria’s urban centres, have been driven from their rural homes by the systemic

violence of colonialism and are forced to live in “shanty towns.” The peasantry has retained the

capacity to live away from urban centres, but the politics of colonialism make their lives of

relative independence increasingly difficult. A revolution governed by the national bourgeoisie is

unfavourable to most of the general public, because their interests differ from those of the
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masses, and are more closely related to the established colonial power. The national bourgeoisie

is out of touch with the masses, concerned mostly with “lining its own pockets not only as fast as

it can, but also in the most vulgar fashion” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 111). The peasant masses are

capable of governing themselves, argues Fanon, and therefore should receive political education

from colonized intellectuals in plain language. This will contribute to the creation of a dynamic

national consciousness which will dictate the politics of the independent nation.

The final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,”

describes Fanon’s clinical experience in the Maghreb and includes an incisive critique of the

racist psychological theory of Antoine Porot and other colonial psychiatrists. Fanon posited that

the difficulty in “curing” a colonized subject stems not from a preordained, genetic and cultural

disposition to madness, but rather is a consequence of a maladaptive social reality imposed upon

Algerians – and other colonized peoples – by the means of colonial oppression.

Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the

other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forced the colonized to constantly ask the

question: “Who am I in reality?” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 182)

The social reality, construed by the process of colonization and into which Algerians are born, is

alienating, and a product of exploitative economic policy and racist social norms and institutions.

One of these institutions is colonial psychiatry, headed by Antoine Porot and the Algiers school.

Before critiquing Porotism, Fanon presents a series of psychiatric case studies involving both

Algerian and European patients.

The first set of cases, which Fanon called “Series A,” is constitutive of five cases who

had clearly defined symptoms of “severe reactive disorders.” One case involves an Algerian man
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developing impotence following the rape of his wife by a French soldier. The man had been a

member of the FLN since the age of eighteen, carrying propaganda leaflets and political leaders

as a taxi driver. Eventually, he became a target of French intelligence, forcing him to go

underground, leaving him with little means of communication with his wife, with whom he had a

young daughter. A mention eventually got through from his wife, explaining how she had

brought shame upon herself: she had been raped by a French soldier. Suffering from extreme

insomnia, the man was referred to Fanon’s clinic. He initially presented himself as feeling fine,

but Fanon saw through this superficial presentation, immediately hospitalizing the man. The next

day, the “smoke screen of optimism had vanished,” and the man suffered from anorexia and

melancholic depression (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 187).

Fanon’s analysis of the man’s condition was, initially, unmistakably Freudian. Away

from his wife, with the knowledge that she had been raped, he tried and failed to have sex with

another woman. Under advice from his comrade, in whom he had confided, he began to take

Vitamin B12 tablets, hoping this would solve his impotence. But this was to no avail: “new

attempt, new failure” (p 187). “Furthermore,” Fanon explains,

a few moments before the act he had an irresistible impulse to tear up a photo of his little

girl. Such a symbolic connection could raise the possibility of unconscious incestuous

drives. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 187)

Fanon then explained that he went in another direction with his analysis when he learned that the

patient, who he calls “B,” was suffering in the aftermath of his wife having been raped. B told

Fanon, laughingly and in crude language, that his wife “got a bit of French meat.” With this new

information, Fanon concluded that the man was suffering from impotence due to his guilt at his

wife having been raped. B felt he should have played a more protective role, and his guilt
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resulted from this. His wife was willing to accept anything before she would give up information

about her husband to French authorities – even if it meant sacrificing her most basic autonomy.

Fanon explains that B’s guilt resulted in part from the way his wife broke the news of her rape:

“Yet she didn’t say: ‘This is what I have endured for you.’ On the contrary, she said: ‘Forget me,

start a new life, I have been disgraced’” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 189). With Fanon’s help

elucidating this contradiction, B resolved to take back his wife, and his symptoms resided.

B’s case study reveals Fanon’s capacity to think in psychoanalytic terms. Fanon’s first

instinct was to think in an orthodox Freudian manner, suspecting B of unconscious incestuous

desires toward his young daughter. This is evidence contrary to the claim made by Macey that

Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis was weak (Macey, 1999). Macey’s analysis of Fanon’s

status as a psychoanalyst curiously fails to consider any of his writing in The Wretched of the

Earth, which would have weakened his thesis.

The case study, and others Fanon considered in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,”

points to Fanon’s acuity in recognizing the social reality underpinning neuroses during the

Algerian revolution. Psychotherapy is hindered by an implicit futility in the face of larger,

maladaptive social circumstances. War, poverty, inequality, injustice, racial or ethnic persecution

– psychotherapy serves only to treat or mask the symptoms of a sick society. The case studies

highlighted by Fanon in “Series A” spoke to this idea:

- “Case No. 2: Random homicidal impulses in a survivor of a massacre”

- “Case No. 3: Major depressive disorder with mood-congruent psychotic features

following the murder of a women while briefly psychotic”

- “Case No. 4: A European police officer suffering from depression while at the hospital

meets one of his victims, an Algerian patriot suffering from stupor”

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- “Case No. 5: A European police inspector tortures his wife and children”

Events made possible by social conditions lead to an extraordinary number of psychiatric cases

such as these listed above, what Fanon called “severe reactive disorders” (p. 185). His next

presentation of case studies, “Series B,” pointed explicitly to social conditions as causal in cases

of mental illness: “Here we have collected cases or groups of cases where the triggering factor is

first and foremost the atmosphere of outright war that reigns in Algeria” (Fanon et al., 2004, p.

198).

Fanon’s discussion of cases made possible by social conditions underlines his status as a

prodigious psychological theorist, transcending the traditional confinements of mainstream

psychology by identifying the object needing change behind the patient, rather than simply

dealing with the patient himself. The “Series B” cases demonstrate the human capacity to forsake

all moral sense under conditions of cruel austerity. Particularly striking of this series of cases is

the first, “The murder by two thirteen- and fourteen-year-old Algerians of their European

playmate.”

The young Algerian murderers confess readily to their crime, viewing the killing of their

European schoolmate as justice served, despite the victim himself never having wronged the

pair. The thirteen-year-old’s confession is eerie:

“We were not angry with him. Every Thursday we used to go and hunt together with a

slingshot up on the hill behind the village. He was our best friend. He had left school

because he wanted to become a mason like his father. One day we decided to kill him

because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill the ‘grown-ups,’ but we

can kill someone like him because he’s our own age. We didn’t know how to go about it.
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We wanted to throw him into a ditch, but this might only have injured him. So we took a

knife from home and killed him.” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 198-199)

The confession becomes more disturbing still. When asked whether the boy was sorry, he

responded: “No, because they want to kill us, so….” The fourteen-year-old’s lack of remorse is

similarly perverse, though he demonstrates more acute political awareness than his co-killer,

perceiving a lack of justice within his homeland. He protests, albeit futilely, that there are no

Europeans in prison, despite the fact that Europeans kill Algerians on a daily basis – a point that

Fanon does not dispute. Fanon shared this study to disturb the audience, which was intended to

be non-Westerners, into recognizing the social basis of mental illness.

Today, psychological diagnoses serve the status quo by categorizing mental illnesses as

independent of social context. Fanon recognized this:

Once again we must point out that the underlying problem is not solved by sedation or a

reversal of the symptoms. Even after the patient has been cured, her predicament

maintains and nurtures these pathological complications. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 207)

(my emphasis)

Fanon spoke in context where one ethnic group dominated another, producing an overabundance

of psychopathologies. Were one really to desire elimination or, at least, minimization of these

diagnoses, one would address the underlying social reality; namely, through decolonization.

The case studies in “Series C” discuss the “affective and mental changes and emotional

disturbances after torture.” The patients in this group display serious psychological conditions –

both for the torturer and tortured. “Group No. 1,” is comprised of Algerians who had been

brutally mishandled in the process of interrogation by European forces. Fanon claims that these
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methods bear no resemblance to a coherent strategy of applying physical harm as a means to

attain information – a kind of rational torture, if you will. No, these patients are victims of torture

for torture’s sake, whose only end is the satisfaction of sadistic desire. The patients of “Group

No. 1” display psychiatric symptoms of clinical depression (four cases), anorexia nervosa (five

cases), and what Fanon calls “restlessness” (eleven cases).

Of the diagnoses in this group, one stands apart for its absence in present-day

psychological dialect: “restlessness.” Curious is the description of this condition: “These are

patients who cannot stay in one place. They insist on being alone and have difficulty accepting

confinement with a doctor in his consulting room” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 210). The status of

“restlessness” as a diagnostic condition in Algeria under French occupation indicates the socio-

historical contingency by which psychological conditions are constructed and defined.

Thankfully, ours is a society in which torture – in the normative sense of the term – is virtually

absent. Thus, there is little need for a diagnosis of restlessness for those who behave anxiously in

conditions of confinement or one-person-to-one-person interaction.

In “Group No. 2,” Fanon describes the psychiatric symptoms of patients who have

survived torture by electricity, while in “Group No. 3,” he discusses the role colonial doctors

play in interrogation and torture. Psychiatric symptoms of Group No. 2 are clumped into “local

or systemic delusions” (three cases), “apathy, lack of will, and loss of interest” (seven cases),

and, predictably. “phobia of electricity” (no count number provided). The patients of Group No.

3 had, in the hands of the colonial military, been administered “truth serum,” whereby doctors

injected Algerians with Pentothal before beginning interrogation. Fanon asserts that these

methods are the “medical equivalent of psychological warfare” and can have lasting psychiatric

consequences (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 212).

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Psychosomatic disorders are the subject of “Series D.” Fanon defines psychosomatic

disorders as “the general body of organic disorders developed in response to a situation of

conflict.” Here, Fanon again stressesd the need to consider underlying conditions as an

irreducible aspect of psychological assessment:

The increasing occurrence of mental illness and the rampant development of specific

pathological conditions are not the only legacy of the colonial war in Algeria. Apart from

the pathology of torture, the pathology of the tortured and that of the perpetrator, there is

a pathology of the entire atmosphere in Algeria, a condition which leads the attending

physician to say when confronted with a case they cannot understand: “This will all be

cleared up once the damned war is over.” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 216) (my emphasis)

Here, Fanon emphasized something that mainstream Psychology today largely overlooks: the

underlying social reality irreducibly connected to any and all diagnoses. When a patient is

diagnosed with depression, a psychologist might ask whether she has insurance to pay for

treatment, knowing that poverty is a risk factor for depression. But what she will not ask is

whether the social and economic reality within which the patient is situated is such that he can

live a prosperous, meaningful, and free human life. It is this latter aspect of psychological

analysis of which Fanon’s thought is so acutely aware, and from which psychologists can learn.

The psychosomatic disorders identified by Fanon are relatively severe physical

conditions whose cause is psychological. These include stomach ulcers, renal colic, disturbed

menstrual cycles, hypersomnia due to idiopathic tremors, premature whiting of hair, and

paroxysmal tachycardia.22

22
Also known as “Bouveret-Hoffman syndrome.” Its cause is not well understood.
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The final section of the last chapter in the Wretched of the Earth is “From the North

African’s criminal impulsiveness to the war of national liberation,” the contents of which are a

shrewd deconstruction of colonial psychiatry. Fanon begins by demanding that his audience

consider the history of their own people.

Fighting for the freedom of one’s people is not the only necessity. As long as the fight

goes on you must reenlighten not only the people but also, and above all, yourself on the

full measure of man. You must retrace the paths of history, the history of man damned by

other men, and initiate, bring about, the encounter between your own people and others.

(Fanon et al., 2004, p. 219)

This reflects Fanon’s own praxis – one that entails critical self-analysis but not to the point of

stagnation. Being a student of Sartre, Fanon moves to pick sides and create reality through

action; he is a rare and admirable combination of intellectual and militant activist.

Fanon begins by presenting the argument of the colonial psychiatrists, one that says

Algerians are born indolent. Algerians are lazy, claim the colonial psychiatrists. But that they do

not want to work is far from a sign of inherited inferiority or a mark against the character of each

Algerian. Rather, argues Fanon,

the colonized’s indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the colonial machine; on the

biological level it is a remarkable system of self-preservation and, if nothing else, a

positive curb on the occupier’s stranglehold over the entire country. (Fanon et al., 2004,

p. 220)
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The refusal to work, or the conscious effort to work poorly, inefficiently, is an act of freedom on

the part of the colonized, and the first step toward an organized revolt against the malevolent

colonial master.

Before criticizing the racist rhetoric of colonial psychiatry, he begins with one of the

most poetic and moving passages of all his work, an enunciation of the colonized, militant

forces:

During the course of recent years I have had the opportunity to witness the extraordinary

examples of honor, self-sacrifice, love of life, and disregard for death in an Algeria at

war. No, I am not going to sing the praises of the freedom fighters. A common

observation the most hard-lined colonialists have not failed to note is that the Algerian

fighter has an unusual way of fighting and dying, and no reference to Islam or Paradise

can explain this spirit of self-sacrifice when it comes to protecting his people or shielding

his comrades. Then there is this deathly silence – the body of course cries out – the

silence that suffocates the torturer. Here we find the old law stating that anything alive

cannot afford to remain still while the nation is set in motion, while man both demands

and claims his infinite humanity. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 221)

Fanon is well-known for his literary talent – the above passage is doubtlessly some of his best

work, in that sense.

Colonial psychiatrists presented many theories elaborating on the supposed criminality of

the Algerian. These had been taught and presented as scientifically valid in universities and to

medical students for, according to Fanon at the time of writing, more than twenty years.

Algerians were taught that science proves them to be born idlers, liars, thieves, and criminals
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relative to the Europeans. The leading proponent of this was Antoine Porot, who has already

been detailed earlier. Fanon recalls the damage this did to the esteem of Algerians, even those

who graduated from the country’s medical schools, reporting a discussion that he had been a part

of, in which one of these doctors said: “It’s hard to swallow, but it’s been scientifically proved”

(Fanon et al., 2004, p. 223). He described Porot’s ideas, emphasizing his focus on the largely

absent “inner life” of the Algerian, which purports to explain his tendency for violence, whereas

the European equivalent, owing to their presumably active inner life, is contemplation.

Having provided an overview of Porot’s thought, Fanon took the colonial psychiatrist to

task, critiquing his theory and providing alternative explanations for the distinct psychiatric

symptoms presented by Algerians. Fanon argued against Porot: “It is common knowledge that

significant social upheavals lessen the occurrence of misdemeanours and mental disorders”

(Fanon et al., 2004, p. 230). He pointed, then, to the decrease in Algerian criminality since the

outbreak of the war, suggesting that the struggle against oppressive conditions was itself

curative, or at least, therapeutic, regarding mental disorders. Fanon continued his rebuke of Porot

by describing the daily stress faced by Algerians under colonialism. The colonized are faced with

constant duress, faced with threat of famine at a moment’s notice. Under these conditions, the

stakes are very high. A neighbour’s cow who grazes on a fellow Algerian’s land may react

violently because, for him, this is not a minor event: it symbolizes a threat against his life. In

Fanon’s words:

To live simply means not to die. To exist means staying alive. Every date grown is a

victory. Not the result of hard work, but a victory celebrating a triumph over life. Stealing

dates, therefore, or allowing one’s sheep to eat the neighbor’s grass is not a disregard

for property rights or breaking the law or disrespect. They are attempts at murder. Once
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you have seen men and women in Kabylia struggling down into the valley for weeks on

end to bring up soil in little baskets you can understand that theft is attempted murder

and not a peccadillo. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 232)

This explanation, which accounts for what behaviour symbolizes under the material conditions

imposed upon the colonized by a colonial regime, one recognizes the invalidity of Porot’s theory.

By suggesting alternative and equally valid interpretations of findings regarding the

psychiatric symptoms of Algerians, Fanon exposed Porot’s premature and racially-motivated

conclusions as a version of what Teo calls “epistemological violence.” Epistemological violence

occurs when a scientist or academic draws a conclusion, from a dataset or some other collection

of evidence, that is harmful to a particular group and while equally valid interpretations or

methodological problems exist (Teo, 2008).

The Wretched of the Earth concludes with a call for change. Continuing the theme of

empowerment that permeates his work, beginning with Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon

addressed the colonized masses, rather than condemning the occupier or waiting for those in

power to change. What he called for is not the recreation, in Africa, of European civilization.

Rather, he underlines the necessity of creating a new brand of humanity.

Let us decide not imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new

direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been

incapable of achieving. (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 236)

He called for an end to African cries about the hardships imposed by the Europeans. He even

reserves some praise for Europe, insisting that in some respects, it has “done a good job,” but
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that the task of the Third World is not to emulate Europe, but rather to find new answers to the

problems of creating a just society.

It is worth remembering, that at the time of Fanon’s writing, the economic and political

atmosphere was much different than it is today. The Soviet Union was the region’s major

economic power, and the Eastern Bloc was firmly intact. Western Europe was aligned with the

United States and Canada, espousing liberal democratic values, while Eastern Europe and the

Soviet Union identified, with some variation, as communist countries in the Marxist-Leninist

tradition. By condemning Europe, Fanon is not simply condemning capitalism as an implicit

condonation of Soviet-style socialism. He rejects both, and calls on the Third World to find new

answers to old questions.

Despite his condemnation of the Soviet Union, there can be little doubt that Fanon was a

committed socialist. However, the emphasis of Third World countries should not be set upon

economic efficiency, but on creating what we may call a human-centric society. What should be

created is a society where citizens want “to walk in the company of man, every man, night and

day, for all times” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 238). This new society will learn from what Europe did

effectively, what he calls its “occasional prodigious theses,” but also from its most “heinous”

crimes of rampant inequality, racial hatred, slavery, exploitation, and, “above all, the bloodless

genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off.” He concludes by reiterating

his call for revolution in the very notion of humanity, proclaiming: “For Europe, for ourselves

and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and

endeavour to create a new man” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 240).

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Meeting Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Fanon met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Rome, in the spring of 1961

(Gordon, 2011). Fanon had contacted Sartre, requesting that he write the preface to The

Wretched of the Earth and urging him to increase his involvement in the war. Sartre had been an

early proponent of Algerian independence, even when much of the French left was either

ambivalent or against it. He first proclaimed his support by speaking at the Salle Wagram (a

theatre hall in Paris) in January 1956, while Fanon was still working at the Blida-Joinville

Hospital (Macey, 2012). Simone de Beauvoir captured and astutely depicted Fanon’s personality

during his meeting with herself and Sartre. Despite his weakening physical state, Fanon

remained abrasive and boisterous. He was outraged at Beauvoir’s suggestion that Sartre should

go to sleep, and subsequently kept the French philosopher up until eight the following morning.

Beauvoir was, like Sartre, clearly an admirer of Fanon’s work. But in her diaries, she could not

help but to analyze his character in light of his impending death. Fanon reportedly spoke about

his future projects as if he would live for many more years, leading Beauvoir to speculate that he

was “haunted by death,” – which perhaps explained his sense of urgency and impatience

(Beauvoir, 1965). Fanon is said to have told Claude Lanzmann, an executive member of Les

Temps Modernes and friend of Sartre and Beauvoir’s, that “I’d give twenty thousand francs a day

if I could talk to Sartre from morning till night for two weeks” (Hayman, 1986). The pair clearly

shared a mutual admiration – Sartre agreed to write the preface for Fanon’s final project, The

Wretched of the Earth.

Death

What I wanted to tell you is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to

know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas
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we have made our own… We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the

slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty.

- Frantz Fanon, in a letter to his brother, Joby, from his hospital bed in Washington D.C.,

December 1961 (Gordon, 2011)

Frantz Fanon died on December 5th, 1961, in Washington D.C. It was hardly the idyllic,

surrounded-by-family, having-lived-a-full-life type of death that may be the least-bad manner of

dying. Josie and Olivier were at his bedside, but they were otherwise alone, in a land they

despised, with only hurried doctors, tired nurses, and CIA operatives for company (Macey,

2012). By July of that year, he is said to have had been unlike his usual self. So sick that he could

not carry on, he flew to the United States for treatment in October 1961 (Macey, 2012). But in

the weeks preceding that summer, his legendary capacity for productivity was never so apparent.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir explained how the ethical person commits

himself to a project of achieving freedom. One does this not in the perverted sense that has

captured Western consciousness, with its phony caricature of the ‘self-made man,’ who purports

to have achieved freedom by the accumulation of ever more resources, neglecting to consider the

unfreedom he has imposed on others – the labour from whom he has derived his wealth. Rather,

we achieve freedom for ourselves only by working to achieve freedom for others. An ethical

project is thus one of self-emancipation, which also fights for collective liberation. However

much it may seem either menial or unachievable, such a project is worthwhile if directed toward

the moral end of ever-greater freedom, in accord with multitudinous other projects (Beauvoir,

1962). Whether he ever read Beauvoir’s ethics aside, Fanon seems to have embraced her image

of an ethical person, regardless. There can be no better testament to this, than the fact that he

managed to write his most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, in a mere ten weeks,
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beginning in the spring of 1961 – while he was slowly dying (Macey, 2012). This achievement

holds more semblance to myth than reality – but that was Fanon. He died as he lived: maniacally

devoted to the fruition of causes greater than himself.

Discussion

Psychological Constructs and Social Reality

An aspect of Fanon’s work that is, I wish to suggest, extremely pertinent to our own

present context, is his recognition of the irrevocable connection between psychology and politics.

In this regard, Fanon made two important points. First, he described how socio-political factors

contribute psychological disorders amongst members of the affected population. Few would

dispute this fact – war, colonialism, and otherwise oppressive policy decisions all contribute to

the development of mental illnesses within a group of affected people.

Second, and the point which perhaps demands a more detailed explanation, is the way

psychological diagnoses mask a perverse social reality, serving an oppressive status quo.

Colonial psychiatrists like Antoine Porot predominated psychological discourse in Algeria not on

the merit of their ideas, but rather for the fact that they justified a social structure in which native

Algerians were subjugated and dismissed as inherently inferior to European settlers. Porot’s

work embodied – to borrow again the line from Mandouze – “racism with scientific

pretensions.” In his critique of Porot, Fanon explained how the colonial psychiatrist masks

underlying social conditions by directing attention upon the supposed inferiority of individual

Algerians. For example, Porot claimed that the North African is hereditarily violent, and as such

controls his violent instincts only with great difficulty. This, according to Porot, explains the

tendency toward violence among native Algerians. But what Porot does not discuss, is the

context in which Algerians were acting aggressively. He presents cases of violence perpetrated
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by Algerians as if they occur in a vacuum, devoid of social factors and absent of context. Fanon

points out that colonists were less inclined to study the so-called “primitive mentality” of

Algerians once they organized around the empowering cause of independence, which afforded

them greater “individual and social freedom” (Fanon et al., 2004, p. 228). Moreover, Simone de

Beauvoir observed that Algerians living in Paris changed their behaviour once the revolution

began: as incidences of violence decreased, they dressed more formally and drank only milk in

cafés (Beauvoir, 1965).

Psychological diagnoses often serve to mask an oppressive social reality. Whereas in

French-occupied Algeria, attention was directed away from the perverse conditions of

colonialism by clinging to the supposed “primitive mentality” of Algerians, the diagnoses that

cover today’s underlying social issues operate more subtly. Fanon’s critique of Porot and the

Algiers School is of critical importance to psychologists in the present because it encourages us

to reflect on the assumptions, perhaps often unwarranted, that constrain us from examining more

deeply the roots of mental duress. By diagnosing mental illnesses, we often atomize members of

society and imply that such issues are matters of biology – neurological functions gone array, but

happily remedied by medicalized procedures. As Mark Fisher pointed out in his book, Capitalist

Realism, conceptualizing mental illness strictly in terms of an individual’s particular

neurochemistry has, in his words, “enormous benefits for capitalism” (Fisher, 2009). Re-

politicizing mental illness, by considering the social and political factors that contribute to its

emergence, is an important step toward challenging unfettered capitalism – just as Fanon

politicized Porot’s concept of “primitive mentality” to challenge French colonialism.

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Fanon’s Impact on Clinical Psychology

Clinical Psychology for Palestinians

Psychologists employing a critical lens have extended Fanon’s analysis to address

contemporary issues in which one ethnic group wields power over another. Perhaps the most

explicit and damning of these issues, at least from a critical Western perspective, is the conflict

arising from Israel’s expansion and subsequent eviction of Palestinians from their traditional

land. Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel annexed portions of land previously

acknowledged as Palestinian, controlled by the likes of Jordan and Egypt. Since this time, these

territories have come to be known as the “Occupied Territories,” comprised of the Gaza Strip,

the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. For Palestinians, life in the Occupied Territories is

constitutive of mistreatment, fear, and oppression – not so dissimilar to the challenges faced by

Algerians under French colonialism. Clinical techniques and praxis for Palestinians thus draw

inspiration and, at least partly, instruction from Fanonism.

Critical psychologists in Palestine have reported positive affective outcomes in students

and Palestinian clinicians following discussions of Fanon – of whom they were unfamiliar,

mainly owing to an education system dictated by Israeli authority.23 Psychologists who led a

workshop reported that: “Reading and discussing Fanon in Palestine with Palestinian clinicians

and trainees elicited deepseated feelings of affirmation and validation, while also disclosing

anxieties arising from colonial alienation” (Sheehi & Sheehi, 2020).This work suggests that

23
Fanon recognizes the danger of colonial education for the colonized people. As he writes in The Wretched of the
Earth, “The colonist makes history as he knows it… The history he writes is therefore not the history of the country
he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation’s looting, raping, and starving to death. The immobility to which
the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization
and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization.” What
is taught in public education reflects the values of society’s dominant class – as salient for Algerians under French
occupation as it is for Palestinians in the occupied territories.
 113

Fanon is an important figure in a clinical setting, particularly in the context of therapy for an

oppressed clientele. Fanon serves as an inspiration in that his words demand a commitment to a

distinctive Palestinian history and a prioritizing of indigenous experiences. These researchers

assert that for the process of decolonization to ensue in the Palestinian context, a “Palestinian

national psyche” must be cultivated – a process that Fanon defines in the fourth chapter of The

Wretched of the Earth. Drawing from Fanon, Sheehi and Sheehi denounce the “spaciousness”

felt by some Palestinian clinicians living in Israel, who are comfortable with their personal

condition under occupation. These clinicians are akin to the national bourgeoisie and

metropolitan proletariat that Fanon described: they live comfortably enough that to oppose the

colonialists would be a risk. This allows Israel to present such Palestinians as evidence for its

“inclusiveness,” making it more difficult still for the remaining Palestinian majority.

Sheehi and Sheehi’s analysis of Fanon in Israel calls into question the role of the

clinician, who may be upholding an oppressive status quo by virtue of her own prominent social

position. Such a clinician may or may not be a member of a distinct ethnic group or race, with its

own history, tradition, and culture. But by attaining her high social rank, she may be

internalizing the values of the dominant class or group, and consequently, her clinical approach

may be informed by this. This “spaciousness,” afforded to her by the dominant group, leads her

to practice in a way that masks underlying social realities that are damaging to the psychological

functioning of marginalized people. A Fanonian approach to therapy would be extremely self-

critical, demanding the clinician recognize her place within a larger socio-historical context, and

how her clinical practice may undermine wider social realities.24

24
French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote about his admiration for Fanon’s self-reflective approach, noting that
his capacity for recognizing his place in the larger social milieu was “exceptional and untypical” and that, in the
 114

Psychology and Critical Race Theory

Central to Fanon’s work is the critical stance he adopted toward Western methodologies.

Rather than unquestioningly accepting the methods of his time, Fanon determined to “leave the

methods to the botanists and mathematicians” (Fanon et al., 2008). Maldonado-Torres calls

Fanon’s position represents (?)a “decolonial attitude,” whereby he questions epistemological

assumptions of Western science and explores other ways of knowing. He argues that Fanon was

searching for a decolonial attitude which sought to “build the world of you,” and held that this

attitude is more important than method in psychological knowledge production. By subscribing

to the primacy of attitude over method, Fanon engaged in a “non-reductionistic psychology” that

transcended the constraints of Western science and opened the door to the creation of a discipline

that is highly trans-disciplinary (Maldonado-Torres Nelson, 2017).

Fanon should be understood as an early proponent of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race

Theory does not accept the premise that disparities across racial lines are simply the outcome of

immoral, racist people intentionally upholding a status quo for the express purpose of white

superiority. Doubtlessly, there are explicitly racist people, and there are many more (perhaps,

everyone) with implicit biases against one or more groups of people. But instead of casting its

focus upon these interracial dynamics that occur on the individual level, Critical Race Theory

proclaims racial inequality to be the product of a complex interplay of legal, historical, social,

and political factors (Martinez, 2022). Fanon’s work, particularly Black Skin, White Masks, fits

this description as a trans-disciplinary approach to understanding complex racial problems.

region, “The Fanons were few and far between,” speaking to the air of false self-assurance that characterized French
colonial psychiatry in the 1950s (Gibson, Nigel C. & Beneduce, 2017).
 115

Although, as this paper demonstrates, Fanon was not completely dismissive of

established Western scientific methods, the critical attitude he adopted toward them allowed him

to engage in a trans-disciplinary inquiry of individual subjects. From Fanon’s perspective,

Western science provided means inadequate to understand subjectivity. Based on his written

works, particularly Black Skin, White Masks, he seems to have seen this as liberating – by

critiquing Western scientific methods, a space in which new methods of understanding

subjectivity emerged. This allowed Fanon to consider the role of collective attitudes and social

structures in the formation of subjectivity (Maldonado-Torres Nelson, 2017). Fanon called the

way in which these factors form subjectivities of an entire group of people “sociogeny” (Fanon

et al., 2008). The subjective experience of colonized people, for example, is not such because of

any biological inferiority, but because of structural inequities – economic, social, political – that

result in commonalities in subjective experience.

Because social structures and collective attitudes play a role in the formation of

subjectivity, Fanon’s decolonial psychology demands a cultural and structural analysis; but a

decolonial psychology is not merely theoretical – it also implies the necessity of social and

political action. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Fanon’s legacy is celebrated by proponents of

various social movements. The Black Panther Party, a key group in the Civil Rights Movement

of the 1960s, considered The Wretched of the Earth required reading. Bobby Seale, in his book

Seize the Time, wrote that Huey P. Newton, a leading figure in the group, read the book seven

times (Seale, 1970). More recently, Fanon’s work has been of interest to scholar-activists

involved in various social movements, including Idle No More (Coulthard & Alfred, 2014) and

Black Lives Matter (Ekotto, 2021). The value of theory rests not in the ideas themselves, but the

social and political change informed by it. In Fanon’s words, “How can we possibly not hear that
 116

voice again tumbling down the steps of History: ‘It’s no longer a question of knowing the world,

but of transforming it.’ This question is terribly present in our lives” (Fanon et al., 2008, p. 1).
 117

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Appendix A

Thematic Apperception Test card 3BM (left) and card 11 (right)