Abstract
This paper discusses the contemporary “new stage” of Fanon studies focusing on the interconnections between Fanon’s clinical writings and politics. Fanon’s idea that the anticolonial revolution has to affirm a “limitless humanity” while at the same time insisting psychiatry has to be political is considered through his engagement with François Tosquelles and sociotherapy. Erica Burman’s Fanon, Education, Action: Child as Method and David Marriott’s Whither Fanon and Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce’s Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics help enlighten the myriad levels of Fanon’s discussion of trauma and mental disorders produced by colonial war and question of responsibility “within a revolutionary framework.”
Highlights
I first met Fanon in London in 1980 through Lou Turner and John Alan’s pamphlet “FrantzFanon, Soweto and American Black Thought.” I was interested in the anti-apartheid movement, the unfolding South African civil war and, in particular, the Black consciousness movement— members of which I first met at their external headquarters in London
Before I turn to this I want to consider Fanon’s relationship to François Tosquelles, who was the director of Saint Alban hospital, where Fanon interned and is considered a founder of Institutional therapy or sociotherapy
When reporting on the failure of sociotherapy at Blida-Joinville Hospital, we should not be surprised that Fanon argues that a revolutionary attitude to psychiatry was essential
Summary
I first met Fanon in London in 1980 through Lou Turner and John Alan’s pamphlet “Frantz. In one sense, by Hannah’s Arendt’s On Violence, which fairly crudely dismisses Fanon along with Black Power movements in the US It was in this context that the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders”—a chapter Fanon feared might seem “out of place in a book like this”—was rarely referenced. When apartheid South Africa first banned The Wretched of the Earth in 1965, there was not a word in the censor’s report about violence Rather, they found the final chapter on the colonial war and mental disorders “far-fetched.”. Even if some of this change is managerial and produces new challenges, these are marked shifts
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