APAAmerican Psychological Association

For a long time, academic interest in Fanon’s work focused mainly on his “political” texts, notably Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, which analyze the cultural and political oppression of the dominant over the oppressed in a colonial and postcolonial system. This was done at the expense of his little-known writing on psychiatry. In fact, Fanon...

The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums ... Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people that is missing.

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He left the island in 1943 to join the Free French Army. By the time he had been deployed to North Africa and then to France to take part in the Battle of Alsace in 1945, his enthusiasm for the French had soured. About his decision “to fight for an obsolete ideal,” he wrote to his mother that “he was questioning everything, even...

As a psychoanalyst, I must help my patient to consciousnessize their unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification, but also to act along the lines of a change in the social structure.

For a short time in 1952, Fanon served as a doctor in Martinique, practicing forensic and general medicine, redacting autopsy reports,1.“After exhuming a body of a woman who...

It is necessary to analyze, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions of the colonized, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama—that of the impossibility of finding a meeting ground in any colonial situation.

In 1951, Fanon escaped the intellectual desert of University of Lyon’s psychiatry department to work and study with François Tosquelles, becoming a resident at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a rural area about two hundred kilometers southwest of Lyon. Fanon acknowledged Tosquelles as a mentor...

Psychiatric hospitals tend to create institutionalized patients, thus further alienating them from their communities. One way in which Fanon attempted to address this was through the use of sociotherapy, which we discussed in chapter 5. But what became clear to him while working at Blida-Joinville Hospital between 1953 and 1956 was that this kind of integration...

Fanon’s departure from Paris for Tunis in early 1957 marked a break with France. He would never return. As Macey (2000: 305) opined,

One of the most significant pieces Fanon wrote after leaving Blida-Joinville Hospital was an article on the value and limits of day hospitalization in psychiatry for Tunisie Médicale in 1959. The article was the first to be written on this subject about an institution outside Europe, and it was written in two parts. The first was by Fanon alone and second by Fanon with his colleague...

In the important collection Le peuple algérien et la guerre: Lettres et témoignages (The Algerian people and the war: Letters and testimonies) first published in 1962, Patrick Kessel and Giovanni Pirelli wrote about...

In other words, our actions never cease to haunt us. The way they are ordered, organized, and reasoned can be a posteriori radically transformed. It is by no means the least of the traps history and its many determinations set for us.

Two points about the process of translation seem to me to flow through this book, even though the translations of Fanon’s psychiatric work are not reproduced in full here. The first is the deeply unsatisfactory yet necessary choices and decisions that the act of translation demands. In other words, translating often means having to make choices even when no satisfactory solution presents...

~~Abane, Beläid, 179