The Pathological Constitution of Colonized Subjectivity in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: Kohut and Fanon in Dialogue

Abstract

The following theoretical review attempts to provide a distinctly psychoanalytic reading of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Integrating a Fanonian conception of intersubjective recognition with Kohut’s work on narcissism and self-object relations, it is argued that the enduring nature of psychopathology in colonized peoples is readily sustained by denigrating ties to hegemonic colonial selfobjects- the symbolic “gleam” identified so lucidly by Armah in his novel. It is suggested that positing the existence of selfobjects which are actively harmful, instead of necessarily compensatory and/or curative, enhances the dialectical strength of Kohutian self-psychology in previously colonized nations. Such an extension also places self-psychology in explicit dialogue with Fanon’s sociogenic diagnosis of psychopathology; providing one potential interpretative lens through which to explore what processes of decolonization might intimate regarding the psychic reality of the colonizer/colonized dyad.