A Hospital Journal. Reforming Psychiatry in Colonial Algeria during Wartime (1953–1959)

Abstract

Between 1953 and 1959, the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB) published a weekly magazine with the sober title Notre Journal. It was written jointly by the colonial hospital’s patients, nursing staff and doctors, and was seen as the “social cement” of a vast medical reform undertaken on the initiative of Dr Frantz Fanon. The journal was a supporter and a privileged witness of the reform, and was one of the places where socialtherapy was developed in word and deed, and where its achievements, representations and contradictions could be seen most clearly. By analysing the 165 issues that appeared in the course of the weekly’s six years of existence, this article points out the interest this source has for the history of psychiatry and its reform in colonial Algeria. A study of the copies of the journal makes it possible to separate the history of Algerian collective psychotherapy from that of its pioneer. Without downplaying Dr Fanon’s influence on the trajectory of a medical reform of which he was the architect, the aim of this article is to give the project back its historical and collective depth. By revealing the ways the junior doctors, nursing staff and patients appropriated and implemented the principles defended by the Martinican psychiatrist on a daily basis, it reminds us that socialtherapy was not simply part of the actions and itinerary of one man alone: just as the signs of collective psychotherapy preceded Frantz Fanon’s arrival in Algeria, the reform survived his departure, in spite of the problems that followed it.The article makes the in-house weekly its topic of interest and principal source, and in so doing assesses the role played by Notre Journal in the transformation of psychiatric practices at the HPB. By turns a vehicle for dissemination, a therapeutic resource, a tool for professionalisation and a political forum, the magazine was unquestionably one of the principal representatives of the paradigm supported by Dr Fanon. While it contributed to a change in the level of the reformist dynamic and was a collective voice for patients’ claims and recriminations, it also revealed a variable geometry of reform: depending on their beliefs, resources or personal status, psychiatrist, junior doctors, nurses and patients took hold of the project begun by Dr Fanon in different ways.Finally, while it makes the portrait of Algerian socialtherapy more complex, this article invites us not to overestimate the specificity of the reform engaged at the HPB. In terms of the rhetoric used in the pages of the in-house weekly, and of the protocol and treatment techniques applied, the approach that was begun in Algeria was inspired by previous experiences in Metropolitan France. What was unique about the overseas experience was for the most part of the interest shown in the local culture and beliefs, which gave rise to a cross-community paradigm that acted as a radical, alternative societal project. In the context of colonial Algeria during wartime, the journal had great difficulty maintaining its status as a safeguard in the face of intensifying political and military tensions, which in all likelihood had an impact on its disappearance.