Psychoanalysis
and Colonial Subjects
Loomba 133-151
Also, some notes about Franz
Fanon from McLeod and Wyrich
Franz Fanon
• B. 1925 in Martinique
• Educated Martinique and France
• His experiences of racism during his education, his
service in the army and while working in France affected
his studies and thoughts
• His field of study is psychiatric medicine and social
psychiatry
• Admired Aime Cesaire, another Martinique native, whose
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) had a
profound affect on his assessment of his racial identity.
(p. 88-90 of Global Voices)
Fanon
• He worked as head of the Psychiatric
Department in Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria,
but in 1954, he resigned his post,
• And joined the Algerian rebels fighting against
the French in the war of independence.
• His books include Black Skin, White Masks,
which examines the psychological effects of
colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth,
which explores the mechanics of colonialism, the
effects on those who are caught in its we, and
possible responses to colonial domination.
Black Skin, White Masks
• “The Fact of Blackness.” p. 112-113 of BSWM
– His identity is defined in negative terms by those in
positions of power.
– He is forced to see himself not as a subject (with his
own desires and needs), but as an object (a
peculiarity at the mercy of the group who identifies
him as less than human)
– He conveys the violence of this revision of his identity
to amputation. He feels abbreviated, violated,
imprisoned by a way of seeing him that denies him
the right to create his own identity.
Black Skin, White Masks
• BSWM explains the consequences of identity formation
for the colonized subject who is forced into the
internalization of the self as an “other.”
• Those colonized by the French are doomed to hold a
traumatic belief in their own inferiority
• One response is to embrace the ‘civilized’ ideals of the
French. But those who go this route will be forever
frustrated by the way skin color bars them from
acceptance no matter how “white” their behavior.
• Fanon writes: A man was expected to behave like a man.
I was expected to behave like a black man.”
• This imaginative distinction between man (self) and
black man (other) is an important part of colonial
domination that imprisons the mind.
Black Skin, White Masks
• For Fanon, the end of colonialism meant
not just political and economic change, but
psychological change, too.
• Colonialism could only be destroyed once
this way of thinking about identity was
destroyed as well.
• Psychiatric disorders caused by colonial
situation – p. 249-251 – WofE. + list of
disorders.
Loomba
• Describes three different “instances of the
maddening colonial encounter:
– The Deceivers (summary?)
– Heart of Darkness (summary?)
– Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(summary?)
The ‘mark of the plural’
•
•
•
•
•
•
European subject is individuated
Colonized “drowns in an anonymous collectivity.”
Sanity is European, male adulthood,
Madness is everything else.
So, where does this leave the mad native?
In general, writes Loomba, “there was a great concern to
describe and pathologise Africans in general in order to
then define the European as inherently different.”
• “By and large, therefore, ‘the literature on madness in
colonial Africa was more concerned with a definition of
Africanness than with a definition of madness.’”
African Madness?
An early definition of a psychosis of colonialism.
• “The mad African is understood as one
who is insufficiently other, as one who
crosses cultural boundaries and becomes
European.”
• Madness is the European who goes
native.
• Madness is the crossing of group
identities.
Octavio Mannoni’s
Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonialism
(1950)
• Confrontation of “civilized” and “primitive” men creates a
special situation that changes human attitudes and
demands psychological analysis.
• Understanding the “primitive mind” means understanding
peoples’ cultural beliefs and practices.
• European Civilization and its best representatives are
not responsible for colonial racism.
• People allow themselves to be colonized because they
have a need for dependency.
• Fanon agreed with the first two principles of Mannoni’s
theory, but vehemently disagreed with the latter two.
Racism is Racism
• Mannoni claimed that the French were the least racistminded people in the world.
• Fanon answered that racism is racism. Period. He
asserted that French colonization was brutal, and that all
French people, because they allowed these brutalities to
happen, were responsible for them.
• Fanon castigates the field of “ethnopshycology” as racist,
claiming that “gaining access to ‘the savage mind’ made
it easier to gain access to cheap labor, land and natural
resources. . . . Producing the colonized Other as the
object of Western study furthered the illusion of scientific
and intellectual superiority that justified colonialism as a
helpful, civilizing mission.
Need for Dependency
• Fanon answers Mannoni’s statement that the colonized
have a need to be dependent by claiming that this is a
kind of blaming the victim.
• Instead, he says that colonialism creates a sense of
inferiority in the colonized. The colonized learn to
measure themselves against the ego-ideal of the Other,
of, in his case, the colonizing Frenchman.
• This alienation can lead to neurosis; when black people
compete among themselves to see who best mimics
‘white’ habits and values, the black man is “seeking to
protest against the inferiority that he feels historically.”
• Furthermore, Fanon claims that post colonial culture is
significantly different from pre colonial culture. To claim
a timeless tradition of dependence is absurd and
ahistorical.
Not Different, but Equal
• Unlike Mannoni, who claims that there are basic
differences between the colonized and the
colonizer, Wulf Sachs claims in Black Hamlet:
The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by
Psychoanalysis that there are no differences
between blacks and whites. The Oedipal
Complex (in which a boy wants to kill his father
and marry his mother) works the same way in
European and African contexts, according to
Sachs.
Two problems here
1.
2.
3.
Sachs doesn’t take into account that he’s using
Western psychology to diagnose colonial neurosis,
thereby practicing Eurocentricism. If Hamletism or the
Oedipal Complex arise as diagnoses from the Western
world, they are, perhaps, descriptions of phenomena
from the dominant or hegemonic point of view.
This view tends to dehistoricise and depoliticise the
notion of the psychic. Particular events happen at
particular times to create particular psychic states.
These must be accounted for by the psychiatrist and
Sach’s theories do not do this.
Fanon claims that what creates the neurosis is
colonialism – this is what dislocates and distorts the
colonized’s psyche. (142-143, Loomba.)
Fanon, again
• P. 144-146, Loomba
• How does any of this connect to what
we’ve read of Roy, so far?
• Take a few minutes and think about that.
• Write out your thoughts.
• Bring them to class on Wednesday