What would it mean to view Frantz Fanon as first and foremost a psychiatrist? What presiding portrayals of Fanon would be challenged in doing so? This, the image of Fanon as primarily a psychiatrist, is a difficult image to hold in focus, especially given the competing attempts to appropriate Fanon to various rival conceptual domains (psychoanalysis, revolutionary Marxism, post-colonial theory, etc.). We also have to take into account the standard narrative of Fanon as abandoning psychiatry so as to pursue revolutionary political action. While Fanon's revolutionary calling cannot be doubted, and while Fanon himself was insistent that the socio-historical and political realities of colonialism not be reduced to the psychical, we should also insist that Fanon's political thought and action never completely superseded the realm of the psychiatric. The clinical vignettes contained in “Colonial War and Mental Disorder,” the closing chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, makes this abundantly clear. Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce's Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics is thus both a well-overdue and very welcome addition to the existing literature on Fanon, especially given their assertion that “Fanon never abandoned the possibility of the authentic practice of psychiatry, which attempts to treat and liberate humankind” (246). Or, as they put it in the book's final chapter: “[T]he more Fanon the political revolutionary advanced in imagining the new society, the more Fanon the psychiatrist could not forget the wounded society on which the new society would be built” (232).Working through and reflecting upon Fanon's early psychiatric writings allow Gibson and Beneduce to take aim at a series of caricatured depictions of Fanon. Fanon, they argue, was not “a dreamy anti-empiricist, critical of all scientific methods, dismissive of history” (4). They take umbrage at the oft-espoused view (in David Macey's work, for example) that, for Fanon, psychological emancipation can only occur through the catharsis of anti-colonial violence: despite what is often read into Fanon's ideas on violence, we don't think he made the jejune argument that trauma is cured by political action. Fanon's psychiatric writings … trouble the view that he had a singular therapy … and] that [political change] was not brought about by a talking cure but by a sudden … painful encounter with the real. While maintaining that the end of colonialism is necessary for mental health, Fanon's psychiatric research … challenge[s] the idea that violence became the therapy, functioning as a kind of psychotherapy of the oppressed … or that only violence could remediate the psychical damage by colonialism. (5) To anticipate a potential misreading: Gibson and Beneduce certainly do insist that for Fanon the work of healing trauma and mental disorders can only begin “as the result of individuals taking political action based on self-reflection,” and by the subsequent “bringing [to] an end the violence of colonial domination” (5). Concrete political action, or, indeed, the bringing to an end of the violence of colonial domination, is still an absolute priority. However—and this is the benefit of reading Fanon's early psychiatric writings in conjunction with The Wretched of the Earth—decolonization must be “viewed as a social struggle for freedom and mental liberation [which] requires the creation of reflective, actional and social combatants through praxis” (6). Fanon's psychiatric writings are thus, as Gibson and Beneduce proclaim, helpful in elucidating Fanon's politics. In their own words: “Fanon's psychiatric writings help us to reconsider whether his thinking is reducible to an unambiguous notion of counterviolence” (7).What would then be a decolonizing form of psychiatry? From what sources might it take its inspiration, and what might be its agendas? Perhaps foremost here is an underscoring of the plight of those who one is endeavoring to treat, and a radical realignment of how suffering is to be understood. “The tragedy of the exploited and subjugated African colonized masses,” wrote Fanon, “is first of all a matter of life or death, an issue of material order: the spiritual divisions of the “elite” are luxuries that they cannot afford” (cited 79). In short, Freudian understandings of neurotic uncertainty, of unconscious psychical conflicts, are of limited—if any —use in the clinical treatment of those whose life—as Fanon memorably puts it in A Dying Colonialism—has been made “something resembling an incomplete death” (1965, 19). It is for this reason that in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon eschews the notion of neurosis in favor of what he calls epidermalization, that is, the psychological internalization of oppressive social and economic realities which requires not only a psychological treatment, but a broader level of social and political involvement.We might say then, returning to an earlier conceptualization in Fanon's work, that clinicians working with the radically marginalized should begin by grasping the severity what he calls the zone of non-being, that is, by understanding that “the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceive life not as a flowering or development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death” (Fanon, 1965, 128).In a single stroke Fanon thus dismisses the optimism of the humanistic person-centered school of psychotherapy (which does indeed perceive life “as a flowering … of an essential productiveness”) just as he implicitly interrogates the white clinician's ability to empathize with those whose life approximates incomplete death. Fanon's point is that the governing presumptions of much psychological theory—that the unconscious, for example, is the primary site of conflict, or that the individual themselves is a sufficient locus of change—proves woefully inadequate in such circumstances. Inadequate also, accordingly, are many of the techniques of treatment prioritized in much contemporary psychotherapy—behavioral change, an emphasis on a depth psychology and unconscious contents, a foregrounding of the role and agency of the singular individual.Fanon is, however, too nuanced a thinker to dismiss everything contained within the western psychiatric tradition. One unexpected ally in his attempt to formulate a de-colonizing psychiatry turns out to be Jacques Lacan. Lacan often maintained a more iconoclastic relation to the mores and stereotypes of Freudianism than is often assumed. Bearing this in mind, it is, upon reflection, unsurprising that Lacan's ideas of a fundamentally symbolic (that is, social) unconscious would offer something of conceptual promise to Fanon: For Fanon, thinking about madness meant taking into consideration theories of biological, social and cultural structures as well as political domination and recapturing the intersecting arenas and meanings among psychic conflict, alienation, and symptoms…. Lacan's interest in the social dimension of [the] unconscious offered Fanon an important perspective…. For Lacan, like Fanon, mental disorders have to be understood within a “social tension” and their meaning is to be found in intersubjective relationships. (44) The distaste that many Fanon scholars have shown toward Lacanian psychoanalysis (not always without good reason) perhaps now needs to be reconsidered, especially in light of how many of Lacan's psychiatric ideas appeared to have had a considerable influence on the young Fanon.The priorities of a properly Fanonian psychology are highlighted by Gibson and Beneduce. Language, they remind us, “affects bodily experience in the material world. For the colonized, language is lived in the flesh and inscribed on the body” (65). A phenomenological engagement with bodily experience also remains crucial. The body of the colonized is always a body “whose senses (sight, hearing, touch) are informed by politics” and as such “the decolonization of the senses is just as urgent as that of sexuality or the imaginary” (72). Moreover: what so sharply distinguishes “white” and “black” experiences of bodily self-consciousness, for Fanon is, as Gibson Beneduce stress, how they are very differently positioned within the historico-psychical network of race.Within the colonial situation—and, no doubt, present “post-colonial” contexts—the diagnostic realm is a domain of both epistemic and political struggle. The closing chapters of Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics revisit such debates, noting how, for Fanon, notions of psychosis, certainly as applied within the colonial domain, cannot be merely psychological. In his psychiatric writings Fanon denies the notion of a “psychotic” reaction to trauma in favor of a consideration of the bloody and frequently horrific atmosphere engendered by the inhumanity of colonization. Gibson and Beneduce make the point via an effective comparison: “Whereas [psychoanalyst Sandor] Ferenczi emphasized the unique character of war neurosis in terms of the ‘peculiarity and oddness’ of its symptoms, Fanon stressed the uniquely malignant nature of mental suffering experienced by victims of colonial violence” (232).At the beginning of this review I cited Gibson and Beneduce's comment that Fanon never abandoned the authentic practice of psychiatry “which attempts to treat and liberate humankind” (246). In the light of dominant trends in today's psychiatry which, as Alice Cherki notes in the book's preface, is “governed … by the principle of efficiency … by the triumph of cognitivism and behavioral practices for treating suffering” (xiv), this statement sounds paradoxical, even oxymoronic. In what ways could contemporary psychiatry, so often a fundamentally de-politicizing form of practice, one that results in the medicalization and individualization of suffering, be considered a means of “liberating humankind”? There is surely a contradiction here, an error of conceptualization. Perhaps the error lies less with how Fanon thought of psychiatry than with what we have allowed psychiatry to become.