Translating Fanon in the Italian context: Rethinking the ethics of treatment in psychiatry

2016

Theory & Psychology

In this article I juxtapose three critical resources for theoretical psychology: Fanon, Foucault, and feminisms. While the primary focus is on Fanon, some shared methodological assumptions—arising from the influence of Marxism and psychoanalysis on all three—are noted, albeit giving rise to mutual tensions. I then apply this critical frame to a close reading of a clinical case discussed by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. As a psychiatrist, but also political revolutionary and psychoeducator, Fanon’s account is read here as indicative of his pedagogical address in motivating for sociopolitical as well as personal change and his therapeutic approach, albeit in need of a feminist re-reading of the gendering of violence, including sexual violence. The paper concludes by suggesting that Fanon’s psychoaffective analysis, first, indicates how resistance and transformation are simultaneously intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical, but also that, second, attending to their shifting unstable and relational features works not only to renew and reinvigorate theoretical psychology but also the interventions and perspectives informing psychological and pedagogical activisms.

Section: Methodological Strategies Analytical Presuppositions: Readimentioning

confidence: 99%

Fanon, Foucault, feminisms: Psychoeducation, theoretical psychology, and political change

2016

Theory & Psychology

“…21 Fanon's radical humanism (Gilroy 2010) is seen in how he ran his wards at Blida-Joinville which, during the revolution, which became a space of sanctuary not only for those distressed by political events but also for revolutionaries in need of hiding, and in need of psychological treatment for being tortured (see e.g. Giordano 2011;Keller 2007;Razanajao, Postel and Allen 1996). Even the torturers sought out his help -Fanon describes a police chief whose symptoms were interfering in his capacity to carry out his torturing duties.…”

Section: The Empirical Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fanon’s other children: psychopolitical and pedagogical implications

Race Ethnicity and Education

2016

Discussions of the writings of theorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, in the fields of education and childhood typically focus on his account of a traumatic encounter with a white child, whose fear at the sight of a black man is said to create a vilified, racialized identity and installs an irreversible social and corporeal alienation. Yet Fanon's writings include a range of other depictions of children, childhood and education which reflect his broader views of colonial and decolonisation processes that include recognisable tropes of classic developmentalism, including gender chauvinisms. Nevertheless it is suggested that the diversity and complexity of child-related allusions across his texts allow for other critical readings that can inform educational debates on anticolonial analyses, of children, childhood and of their more general role in post and anti-development discourse.

“…10 Relevant also is Macey's report that Fanon attempted to present BSWM as his thesis for medical qualification, but it was rejected (unsurprisingly, given both its form and content), and so he submitted some more conventional clinical, psychiatric case studies instead. At the very least, what can be read from this is Fanon's engagement with Lacan from his position as a doctor, a psychiatrist, and from this a particular tradition of radical psychotherapeutic practice can be traced (Giordano, 2011).…”

Section: Oedipal Triangle or Racist Symbolic Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Fanon’s Lacan and the Traumatogenic Child: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Dynamics of Colonialism and Racism

Theory, Culture & Society

2015

This paper revisits Fanon's relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood -primarily as mobilized by the 'Look, a Negro!' scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man's sense of alienation from his own body and his inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child to reconsider Fanon's ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan and some aspects of Lacanian theory opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon's writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful.