The Revolutionary Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon

“It comes as a great shock,” confessed James Baldwin in his speech, The American Dream and the American Negro, “to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.” The intensely personal writings of Baldwin, observing poignantly the internal experience of racism, can be seen to echo the manner in which Fanon’s excoriation of colonialism was conducted. For Fanon, it seems that the most telling theatre of the colonial experience, the one that runs throughout his seminal The Wretched of the Earth, is the one that cannot be seen; the one that reveals itself only in violence, dance, illness, but that is the central component of imperialism nonetheless. For it is the condition of the minds of the colonisers and the colonised; the foreigner and the native; the human and the beast, to which Fanon orients our perspective. Such is the prism through which his politics are refracted, his provocations and propositions influenced inextricably by his training as a psychiatrist.

This positioning, attuned to the spiritual warfare at the heart of colonialism, thus provides us with a uniquely intimate examination of a vast socio-political process. From here, Fanon unravels the psychological dimension of imperial rule, whereby the humanity of the natives is shed in the eyes of the colonisers, reducing them “to the level of superior monkeys,” as Sartre writes in the preface. He takes us to the pseudo-science such dehumanisation is predicated upon, and to the function of the contempt levelled at the native culture. It is not only their land and resources that are stolen by the Europeans, but their very ethos too; bred over centuries yet snatched away by the frantic imposition of ‘Western’ values, mercilessly trodden into the dirt as nothing but the “sign of [the natives] poverty of spirit.” Where this leads, what this spiritual violation must necessarily entail, is the collective exorcism of the foreign body. Done not only through materialist means, dismantling the colonial structures so as to realise the “genuine eradication of the superstructure .. built from the bourgeois colonialist environment.” But so too is it conducted through finding salvation in the catharsis of revolutionary violence, shedding the skin of the subhuman, cowered and obsequious, as “man recreat[es] himself.”

If colonialism succeeded through the creation of a debased ‘species’ of man, existing only in the parallel subjectivities of the coloniser and the colonized, then the impetus of liberation must be found in the “veritable creation of new men.” This imperative — of resurrecting both the collective and the individual mind of the native people to a dignity so brutally denied afore — is where we may see the clearest indication of how, for Fanon, his sensitivity to the psychological crafts his visions of the political.

Fear may be seen as the primary tool of all oppressors. The paranoia of informants waiting on your every word, waiting to pounce on whispers of disloyalty. The secret and not so secret police that, with their truncheons and bullets, batter and murder all dissenters. The colonial world bore all of these same marks; the lynchings, tortures, and quotidian brutalities. But imperialism brought with it an internalisation of hatred, whereby the sense of inferiority was etched onto the minds of the colonised. The mechanisms by which this was achieved we will explore in the next section, but first let us note how, in placing the internal universe at the forefront, Fanon was able to carve a deeply humanist portrayal of the colonial experience.

Speaking of the ‘Manichaeistic’ world the Europeans constructed, where the vast gulf between Good and Evil is too the demarcation between White and Black, Fanon notes that the natives would seek liberty in their dreams. Imprisoned in the Manichean “compartments of the colonial world,” the native, here represented by Fanon’s own subconscious fantasies, dreams “I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing;… that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motor cars that never catch up with me.” In this Freudian adventure, the impossible freedom of the dream world is an outlet for the intense frustrations, the palpable “aggressions”, that the violent heteronomy of imperialism shackles the native with. Here, the extension of this psychoanalysis to the native, in a sense, returns their humanity to them; to confer an internal world on a ‘creature’ deemed to lack such complexity is in itself a radical political statement against the depersonalising doctrines of imperialism. When Fanon writes that, in realising their humanity, the glance of the coloniser “no longer shrivels me up, nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone,” he betrays the fact that the authority of the European does not totally arise from external power, but from the malicious infection of the natives mind by the narratives of superiority told by their oppressor. It is a reflexive control; exercised from within rather than without. Thus, the mind becomes a battlefield, with Fanon’s lens equipping us to see this front. And the revolutionary implications of the psychiatric framework Fanon adopts can be seen once again in the final chapter, Colonial War and Mental Disorders, which shakes off the thundering tone employed prior and adopts a forensic inquisitiveness to relay the depths of harm inflicted by the imperial relation on both sides.

Detailing the experiences of a number of his patients treated at an Algerian hospital during the civil war, Fanon is able to link the individualised traumas of those he treats to the wider eruption of violence within which their psyches were encompassed, and to the mental attrition that defines the nature of the colonial experience as a whole, beating down the humanity of both the oppressor and the oppressed. We hear the story of “a European police inspector,” referred to only as ‘R’, tormented by nightmares and “fits of madness” whereby “as soon as someone goes against [him] he wants to hit [them].” When someone asked him to wait his turn in the queue, he “want[ed] to beat them up.” This fury, conditioned by the abhorrent misanthropy bred in his role as a torturer, spread like a disease into his home life, where he would strike his “baby of twenty months with unaccustomed savagery.” It reached its zenith when he “tied [his wife] to a chair, saying to himself, ‘I’ll teach her once and for all that I’m the master in this house.’” We may despise this man for his actions, but I find myself sympathising with the monster that has seized his mind; a creation of Imperialisms need to transmute all into megalomaniacs, drunk on superiority. In treating his fellow humans like animals, it seems R himself is gradually becoming one, ruled by the rage that Empire harnesses to strike down it’s victims. So too does Fanon lead us through the assorted pathologies of those on the receiving end of the brutality of men like R, the various phobias, “nervous depressions”, “localised or generalised cenesthopathies” that arose in the aftermath of torture. In place of the European humanism that, as Sartre wrote, merely “claimed to be universal,” Fanon, through the preeminence he places on the psychological dimension of colonialism, disseminates an authentic humanism, one that is truly universal, not the “ideology of lies” used to conceal the brutality of Empire from the European conscience.

“The layout of the cerebral structures of the North African,” writes Fanon, elucidating the supposed ‘scientific’ reasoning behind the natives barbarity, “are responsible both for the natives laziness, for his intellectual and social ineptitude and for his almost animal impulsivity.” Such is the role of race science is justifying colonial attitudes, essentializing the behaviour of the natives as determined by an objective inferiority in the structure of their brains. Whereas, in the European, the frontal cortex — the central “characteristic of the human species” — is fully developed, the same cannot be said of the native, who is apparently ruled by the diencephalon, “one of the most primitive parts of the brain.” The distinction, then, between the humanity of the settler and the primitivism of the native is solidified by the truisms of science, to the point where even some of Fanon’s fellow Algerian doctors accept this inconvenient truth. “It’s a hard pill to swallow,” they say, “but it’s been scientifically established.” In hindsight, we know this is nonsense. But at the time, this systematic effort to dehumanise the native was a key mechanism of colonial rule, with this pseudoscience working in conjunction with a destruction of their culture.

As Sartre observes passionately, “everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.” In doing so, a perverse relationship of dependence is fashioned where independence used to reign. To transcend their innate barbarity, their superstitions and tribal squabbling; to be pulled from the “darkness” of the past into the bright light of modernity, imperial domination must be required. The colonists, wishing to make their task easier, to bend the natives to their total whim, seeks to manufacture a sort-of stockholm syndrome across the collective consciousness of the colonized, where they come to love their own chains, believing that “if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.” The continent wide banishing of any notion of civilisation prior to conquest has been aided by the indoctrinated class of the inchoate bourgeois that Fanon reserves much contempt for. Pampered middle-class intellectuals, groomed by colonialism “accepted the cogency of [Western] ideas” and harboured “deep down in his brain … a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Graeco-Latin pedestal.” This cultural extermination; a colonisation of the superstructure, if you will, functioned to inculcate a deep sense of inferiority and reverence for the colonizing powers. As Fanon notes, “As soon as the native begins to pull on his moorings” he is told confidently of “the specificity and wealth of Western values.”

For Fanon, the most potent way to banish this occupation of the “unconscious plane” was in the psychological cleansing of the act of violence. The tension here that arises in realising the nobility of humanity through the barbaric means of murder is a point of contention for many against Fanon. Yet, in his continual emphasis on the psyche of the native, we can see how it may only be through such a profoundly cathartic release that the devils of oppression are finally expelled from the natives soul, allowing for the regeneration of a traumatized mind. Indeed, “No gentleness can efface the marks of violence,” observes Sartre, “only violence itself can destroy them.”

The colonisers wish they could reduce their victims to animals; to “domesticate” them to the level of a “farmyard man.” But by the imperatives of profitability, they must “stop the breaking in half-way.” However hard they try to convince the native of their impotence, of how much they need their “colonial mother” to protect them from their “very essence” of infantile atavism, the humanity of the native remains; dug deeper and deeper into their soul, protected from the surface that denies it. What remains is concentrated into intense anger, that sense of injustice which is so closely interwoven with the human condition, which they must “bury deep down” as the “last refuge of their humanity.” In reclaiming their self-hood, Fanon contends, they must let this fury flow, each catalysing the other. As Fanon writes, “it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapon with which he will secure its victory.” In the white heat of the liberatory struggle, the “artificial sentinel,” most entrenched in the minds of native intellectuals, but present in the minds of all colonized, “is turned into dust.” Through a plunge of the knife or the pulling of the trigger, the native self is asserted, united with his comrades as “a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence” that has turned the settlers language of domination back onto them. And so, “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same times.”

Thus we can see that this violence plays out in the internal theatre of the natives as a sort of rebirth; how, in reversing their position as the victim, in refusing to turn the other cheek, in ceasing to lay supplicant for their White Rulers, the psyche of the native is truly liberated from the clasps of Imperialism. In other words, “Violence,” declares Fanon, “is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” Without such visceral self-assertion, the truly post-colonial world may never come into being.

Thus, Fanon the psychiatrist is inseparable from Fanon the political theorist. The fingerprints of his discipline are to be found covering the entirety of The Wretched of the Earth. From the novelty of the analytical perspective he adopts, and the implicit philosophy encoded in his universal fascination with the psyche; to the sensitivity to the interplay between the ideological and our conception of our selves — the role scientific ‘truth’ and cultural traditions play in forcing the native into a mould of subordination. But, most prominently, it is found in his provocative call for revolutionary violence; how, once again, “this irreparable violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage impulse.” Rather, it is the ugly task of “man recreating himself”; a task that is the first step to liberation.