The critical impact of Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb: Race, gender, and personality testing of North and West Africans

Abstract

In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General declared publicly that culture counts in mental health care. This welcome recognition of the role of culture in mental health appears somewhat belated. In 1956, Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb both presented culturally sensitive studies of the Thematic Apperception Test at the major French-language mental health conference. The contrast between these two studies and between the careers of Fanon and Collomb reveals some of the difficulties in creating cultural and gender sensitivity in psychiatry or psychology.

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.…”

Notes for a Critical Personality Psychology: Making Room under the Critical Psychology Umbrella

“…As Nicholson convincingly weaves into his analysis the influence of structural and ideological factors such as Mormon ideology, the American discourse that makes aggressive self-aggrandizement more important in men's lives than personal attachments, and the general cult of empiricism in the early 20th century, his interpretation works on multiple levels and draws on several disciplines to produce a very complex and compelling story about science. For another example of the importance of multilevel research, see Bullard's (2005) fascinating study of the lives and work of Franz Fanon and Henri Collomb. She understands their related yet different personality measurement efforts in Africa with the Thematic Apperception Test as expressions of interdependent links between all of the following internal and external pressures: their idiosyncratic professional and political life projects -some dimensions of which they were aware, others of which they were not aware; their embodied lives and illnesses; the cultural practice of psychological testing; race, gender, desires, and mental health needs -their own and those of the Africans with and for whom they sought to work; colonial and postcolonial psychiatry; and other military and government institutions.…”

“…With a US administration that shrugs at the suggestion that they have lied, the rise of many forms of religious fundamentalism, experiences of alienation too often relieved by excessive consumerism, US psychologists' involvement in torture in ways that too easily remind us of psychiatry's role during colonialism (cf. Bullard, 2005), and other threats on our cultural and political horizons, we can no longer afford scholars' neglect of issues like the moral authority of the single individual and the possibility of authentic change. Personality psychologists need to be involved in the project of imagining a radically different kind of future and the psychology it will require.…”

Africanization versus transculturalism: examples from history

“…Kilroy-Marac details the genesis and subsequent reorganization of Fann under Collomb in 1959. He modelled Fann on his edict that western psychiatry had to be adapted to Senegal, a culturally relativist approach which necessitated the complete overhaul of therapeutic practices at Fann in order to throw off western psychiatric hegemony (Bullard, 2005). In order to achieve this, Collomb and his team at Fann actively sought out local interpretations of psychiatric illness, employed the services of traditional healers, and inaugurated pénc sessions as therapeutic interventions.…”