L’Oedipe Africain, A Retrospective

Abstract

L'Oedipe Africain is a vital text from the early years of postcolonialism and transcultural psychiatry. Psychologist Marie-Cécile Ortigues and her philosopher husband, Edmond Ortigues produced this study after 4 years of clinical work (from 1962 to 1966) at the Fann Hospital in Dakar, Senegal. These were years of intense creativity at Fann, as Dr Henri Collomb set in motion a series of innovations that transformed a classical asylum into an open-door, culturally sensitive therapeutic center. L'Oedipe Africain confronts the transcultural project in the early post-colonial era with such candor and insight that it continues to speak to the profession today. The discussion of transference in situations of racial and cultural difference, and the theorizing of the cultural and universal dimensions to the psyche, emerge as enduring contributions of this text. The assumptions about history, tradition and modernity, and the gloss on female patients prove less durable.

Historicizing transcultural psychiatry: people, epistemic objects, networks, and practices

“…Additional papers have been offered to this Special Issue by participants at the workshop: on TA Lambo (Matthew Heaton) and Barry Nurcombe (David Robertson). Although some key women were involved in the practice of transcultural psychiatry – such as Marie-Cécile Ortigues, Jane Murphy, 12 Margaret Field – we were not able to find scholars working specifically on the contributions of these important figures, and we are aware that this is a shortcoming (for more discussion of M-C Ortigues, see Bullard, 2005).…”

Henri Collomb and the emergence of a psychiatry open to otherness through interdisciplinary dialogue in post-independence Dakar

“…On the initiative of the Ghanaian historian Emmanuel Akyeampong, a seminar was held at Harvard University on the recent and past practices of psychiatry in Africa; the papers were published by Akyeampong et al (2015). An American historian interested in the history of French psychiatry in West Africa, Alice Bullard (2005aBullard ( , 2005bBullard ( , 2011Bullard ( , 2015, proposes a new historiographic approach to this historic study area, with a sensibility very close to the trends of colonial and post-colonial studies and to some categories of gender studies as well.…”

On the history of cultural psychiatry: Georges Devereux, Henri Ellenberger, and the psychological treatment of Native Americans in the 1950s

“…Ellenberger and Devereux met at least one more time, at a 1968 conference in Dakar that was dedicated to African psychiatry and psychopathology. They were invited by Collomb, who worked with the Ortigues (Bullard, 2005b). In this way, Topeka, Montreal, Paris, and Dakar are interrelated pieces of transcultural psychiatry's scholarly networks in transition after the war.…”

“…who emphasize the postcolonial stakes of transcultural psychiatry (e.g., Fassin, 1999Fassin, , 2000Fassin & Rechtman, 2005). Careful to inscribe these developments in the perspective of longue dure´e, I will adopt Alice Bullard's analytic framework (Bullard, 2005a(Bullard, , 2005b(Bullard, , 2007 which describes the professionalization of the field of transcultural psychiatry and its transformation into an academic discipline as a "transition" propelled by intellectual fermentation during the period of decolonization 2 and by policies enabling the integration of postwar immigrants (the period is called "Trente Glorieuses" in French, "Wirtschaftswunder" in German, "Pop Years" in English).…”