Decolonizing Trauma with Frantz Fanon

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has critically engaged with the concept of trauma, interrogating its role in political processes such as commemoration, post-conflict reconciliation, and identity formation. Together this scholarship has called for a rethinking of trauma in order to more accurately represent the social and political dynamics of the concept. However, while offering insights into the politics of trauma, this literature remains distant from the concept's original discipline—psychiatry. This article contends that Frantz Fanon, as a psychiatrist and political revolutionary, presents a unique viewpoint from which to problematize the relationship between psychiatry and politics as it continues to structure trauma (and trauma scholarship) in the present day. Drawing on Fanon's sociogenic psychiatry, it argues that both Fanon and contemporary approaches to trauma are constrained by an exclusive, Eurocentric psychiatry. Subsequently, it contends that a rethinking of trauma is insufficient. Rather, a decolonization of psychiatry is required. Three themes in Fanon's practice—the universal, morality, and gender—demonstrate the necessity of engaging with psychiatry's positionality within the contemporary sociogenic principle. Here, international political sociology provides for an analysis of trauma attentive to the relationship between society, health, and power.</jats:p>

Unbracketing the multiplicity of trauma in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo

“…At each site, decisions about what trauma is (at least initially) are deferred to experts elsewhere (in Geneva, Kinshasa, or a Belgian medical school that once dispatched colonial psychiatrists to the region). Yet efforts to understand contingent articulations of trauma through classifications and criteria imported from elsewhere are partial and replicate the ‘coloniality of the universal’ in global health research conducted across vast distances of alterity (Goozee, 2021: 3). The amutwe alluhire experienced by Sifa was, for instance, enacted through the local interplay of the regional geopolitics of genocide, mineral extraction and forced migration.…”

“…For modern humanitarians trained in Western trauma theory, trauma has a direct relationship with clinical need and is useful in the context of therapeutic humanitarianism for triaging resources to the traumatized. Trauma, for these humanitarians, is shorthand for a 'suffering without borders, and a suffering that knows no cultural barriers' (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009: 239) This claim to a 'boundless' trauma has been challenged within transcultural psychiatry, where research has focused on cultural markers and idioms of trauma (Kohrt & Hruschka, 2010); the efficacy of recovery interventions across different ethnopsychiatric contexts (Hinton & Good, 2015); resilience, survivorship and healing (Clark, 2016); and the colonization and decolonization of trauma (Mills, 2014;Goozee, 2021).…”

Trauma apps and the making of the ‘smart’ refugee

“…Against this background, PTSD has risen as a dominant framework of analysis, diagnosis and treatment of refugees who are increasingly seen as victims of multiple traumatic experiences including wartime violence, dangerous escape journeys, protracted displacement, xenophobia, structural racism and precarious living conditions. As a diagnosis, PTSD firmly locates trauma in the biological and cognitive explaining its symptoms as a defect in the individual’s processing function (Goozee, 2020). As a treatment, it targets behavioural change and cognitive transformation in the individual sufferers and their ability to learn to tolerate their symptoms.…”

Reconciling a Broken Heritage: Developing Mental Health Social Work in Guyana

“…the internalisation of social conflicts" [14] (p. [64][65]. Hanna Goozee makes a related point when she argues "Fanon's sociogenic psychiatry, his belief that the traumatic suffering of individuals resulted from their environment and his recognition of the complicity of psychiatry in colonial oppression, necessitated [what Fanon called] a 'complete calling into question of the colonial situation'" [15] (p. 112). This analysis offers much in understanding the situation in contemporary Guyana, allowing us to see the severe levels of ethnic and racial tension, of violence toward women and girls and of suicide, as rooted in the internalization of the dynamics of the colonial period.…”

“…Goozee notes that despite Fanon's sociogenic adaptation of the principles of psychiatry to engage in a "highly political theorization of colonialism and violence", he largely fails to discuss issues of gender within this [15] (p. 117). However, she notes that the same principles on which his argument is based should be extended to include this, a point which strongly concurs with the argument in this paper.…”