The Maghreb Review, Vol. 35, 4, 2010 © The Maghreb Review 2010 This publication is printed on longlife paper ‘PREGNANT WITH MADNESS’: MUSLIM WOMEN IN FRENCH PSYCHIATRIC WRITING ABOUT COLONIAL NORTH AFRICA BY NINA SALOUA STUDER∗ INTRODUCTION Muslim women are usually not mentioned in French colonial psychiatric theories, even though it is clear from the evidence (case studies published in academic journals and dissertations, and the statistics of asylums both in France and in North Africa) that ‘indigenous’ women were very much part of the patient group the colonial psychiatrists treated.1 Paradoxically, when Muslim women are mentioned it is usually to illustrate ‘normal’ (i.e. non-patient) femininity rather than to exemplify their diseases and their treatment, that is, these psychiatric texts tend to apply their expert knowledge of female Muslim patients to a non-psychiatric context. In this article, I examine French colonial psychiatric thought on Muslim North African women with the help of the often-related ‘fact’ which gives this article its name, namely, the desire of Muslim women to seek sexual intercourse with madmen. Indeed, this is one of the few points concerning Muslim women that colonial psychiatrists did write about, even though it concerns normal, sane Muslim women who were, therefore, never part of their patient group. This curious story, which appears repeatedly as part of the standard repertoire of colonial psychiatry, about North African women seeking sexual intercourse with madmen either for good luck or because they wanted to give birth to children who would become divinely protected madmen, encapsulated the perceived backwardness and superstition not of a few segregated and carefully observed patients, but of all North African women and even, by extension, of all Muslim women. The notion of this union with a fool crops up in colonial psychiatric sources again and again, the almost literally timeless story being applied as easily to 1843 Beirut as to 1939 Algiers. The American historian Alice Bullard gives an interpretation of this story that places the scene of public sexual intercourse into the larger context of attempts by French psychiatrists to set out differences between a typically North African and a typically French madness. North African insanity is represented in terms ∗ St. Cross College, Oxford 1 The numbers of Muslim women patients range from 12.5% in 1896 (Abel-Joseph Meilhon, ‘L’aliénation mentale chez les Arabes: Études de nosologie comparée’, Annales MédicoPsychologiques 8(3/4) (54th year) (1896), p. 25), to 10% in 1907 (Camile-Charles Gervais, ‘Contribution à l’étude du régime et du traitement des aliénés indigènes d’Algérie au point de vue médical et administratif’, dissertation of the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, Lyon, 1907, p. 48) to 18.8% in 1939, compared with the female population of the asylum alone (Maurice Desruelles and Henri Bersot, ‘L’assistance aux aliénés en Algérie depuis le XIXe siècle’, Annales Médico-Psychologiques 15(2) (97th year) (1939), p. 589. 440 NINA SALOUÂ STUDER that are the exact opposite of what French madness was supposed to be in the 19th century, the former being characterized as public, shared and superstitious.2 Bullard sees the desire of women to have sexual intercourse with madmen, which she dismisses as a colonial invention, as an inversion of an idealized French insanity. While I share her general assumptions, the question of whether the reported instances did in fact take place or were only invented is not germane to this article. Instead I look at the reports as a manifestation of what I will call a colonial medical myth and understand myth as a shared, common knowledge of these psychiatrists, which can either be based on fact or not. The ‘truth’ behind the reports is not as important as the fact that they were accepted and propagated as such by countless psychiatrists. I wish to look at the development of this myth, draw a family tree, so to speak, of its persistence and developments through a collection of comments by colonial psychiatrists, and analyse what the story means with reference to opinions about and treatment of both patient and non-patient North African women. Pregnant with Madness3 The...
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Dec 10, 2012
Isabelle Charpentier 
Open Access
