Psychoanalysis and Colonial Subjects

1. Psychoanalysis and Colonial Subjects Loomba 133-151 Also, some notes about Franz Fanon from McLeod and Wyrich

2. Franz Fanon • B. 1925 in Martinique • Educated Martinique and France • His experiences of racism during his education, his service in the army and while working in France affected his studies and thoughts • His field of study is psychiatric medicine and social psychiatry • Admired Aime Cesaire, another Martinique native, whose Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) had a profound affect on his assessment of his racial identity. (p. 88-90 of Global Voices)

3. Fanon • He worked as head of the Psychiatric Department in Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, but in 1954, he resigned his post, • And joined the Algerian rebels fighting against the French in the war of independence. • His books include Black Skin, White Masks, which examines the psychological effects of colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth, which explores the mechanics of colonialism, the effects on those who are caught in its we, and possible responses to colonial domination.

4. Black Skin, White Masks • “The Fact of Blackness.” p. 112-113 of BSWM • His identity is defined in negative terms by those in positions of power. • He is forced to see himself not as a subject (with his own desires and needs), but as an object (a peculiarity at the mercy of the group who identifies him as less than human) • He conveys the violence of this revision of his identity to amputation. He feels abbreviated, violated, imprisoned by a way of seeing him that denies him the right to create his own identity.

5. Black Skin, White Masks • BSWM explains the consequences of identity formation for the colonized subject who is forced into the internalization of the self as an “other.” • Those colonized by the French are doomed to hold a traumatic belief in their own inferiority • One response is to embrace the ‘civilized’ ideals of the French. But those who go this route will be forever frustrated by the way skin color bars them from acceptance no matter how “white” their behavior. • Fanon writes: A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man.” • This imaginative distinction between man (self) and black man (other) is an important part of colonial domination that imprisons the mind.

6. Black Skin, White Masks • For Fanon, the end of colonialism meant not just political and economic change, but psychological change, too. • Colonialism could only be destroyed once this way of thinking about identity was destroyed as well. • Psychiatric disorders caused by colonial situation – p. 249-251 – WofE. + list of disorders.

7. Loomba • Describes three different “instances of the maddening colonial encounter: • The Deceivers (summary?) • Heart of Darkness (summary?) • Confessions of an English Opium Eater (summary?)

8. The ‘mark of the plural’ • European subject is individuated • Colonized “drowns in an anonymous collectivity.” • Sanity is European, male adulthood, • Madness is everything else. • So, where does this leave the mad native? • In general, writes Loomba, “there was a great concern to describe and pathologise Africans in general in order to then define the European as inherently different.” • “By and large, therefore, ‘the literature on madness in colonial Africa was more concerned with a definition of Africanness than with a definition of madness.’”

9. African Madness?An early definition of a psychosis of colonialism. • “The mad African is understood as one who is insufficiently other, as one who crosses cultural boundaries and becomes European.” • Madness is the European who goes native. • Madness is the crossing of group identities.

10. Octavio Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonialism (1950) • Confrontation of “civilized” and “primitive” men creates a special situation that changes human attitudes and demands psychological analysis. • Understanding the “primitive mind” means understanding peoples’ cultural beliefs and practices. • European Civilization and its best representatives are not responsible for colonial racism. • People allow themselves to be colonized because they have a need for dependency. • Fanon agreed with the first two principles of Mannoni’s theory, but vehemently disagreed with the latter two.

11. Racism is Racism • Mannoni claimed that the French were the least racist-minded people in the world. • Fanon answered that racism is racism. Period. He asserted that French colonization was brutal, and that all French people, because they allowed these brutalities to happen, were responsible for them. • Fanon castigates the field of “ethnopshycology” as racist, claiming that “gaining access to ‘the savage mind’ made it easier to gain access to cheap labor, land and natural resources. . . . Producing the colonized Other as the object of Western study furthered the illusion of scientific and intellectual superiority that justified colonialism as a helpful, civilizing mission.

12. Need for Dependency • Fanon answers Mannoni’s statement that the colonized have a need to be dependent by claiming that this is a kind of blaming the victim. • Instead, he says that colonialism creates a sense of inferiority in the colonized. The colonized learn to measure themselves against the ego-ideal of the Other, of, in his case, the colonizing Frenchman. • This alienation can lead to neurosis; when black people compete among themselves to see who best mimics ‘white’ habits and values, the black man is “seeking to protest against the inferiority that he feels historically.” • Furthermore, Fanon claims that post colonial culture is significantly different from pre colonial culture. To claim a timeless tradition of dependence is absurd and ahistorical.

13. Not Different, but Equal • Unlike Mannoni, who claims that there are basic differences between the colonized and the colonizer, Wulf Sachs claims in Black Hamlet: The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis that there are no differences between blacks and whites. The Oedipal Complex (in which a boy wants to kill his father and marry his mother) works the same way in European and African contexts, according to Sachs.

14. Two problems here • Sachs doesn’t take into account that he’s using Western psychology to diagnose colonial neurosis, thereby practicing Eurocentricism. If Hamletism or the Oedipal Complex arise as diagnoses from the Western world, they are, perhaps, descriptions of phenomena from the dominant or hegemonic point of view. • This view tends to dehistoricise and depoliticise the notion of the psychic. Particular events happen at particular times to create particular psychic states. These must be accounted for by the psychiatrist and Sach’s theories do not do this. 3. Fanon claims that what creates the neurosis is colonialism – this is what dislocates and distorts the colonized’s psyche. (142-143, Loomba.)

15. Fanon, again • P. 144-146, Loomba • How does any of this connect to what we’ve read of Roy, so far? • Take a few minutes and think about that. • Write out your thoughts. • Bring them to class on Wednesday