Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa

by Richard C. Keller

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship.

Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.

Genres: History, Psychology, Nonfiction, European History

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

Reviews

[Edith]

I really enjoyed this book. Being interested in both French colonial history and history of science and medicine, this was a wonderful pick.
Keller does well balancing historical data with analysis of why it is important. The section of Fanon was interesting, but the exploration of madness in post/colonial literature (like Kateb Yacine) was fresh and original.

There were no real downsides to this book, as it was clearly thoroughly researched and well-written. I look forward to reading further work that Keller may publish on this topic.

[Joel]

this is an amazing and very disturbing study. if you have any interest in frantz fanon, or historical/ongoing rationalisations for imperialism, then make sure to check it. for instance:


‘Hospitalization opened an unbridgeable gap between local and European knowledge about madness. Sick Muslims who sought maraboutic treatment received constant attention to their suffering; in the rare cases when a marabout “hospitalized” a patient in a zaouia, confinement lasted for several weeks, rather than several years, and the marabout attended the patient constantly. Interaction between healer and patient consisted of an untiring effort to restitute the patient to himself or herself, in terms the patient understood. By contrast, an overcrowded colonial hospital often shocked patients who anticipated quite different responses to their illnesses than the long-term confinement and aggressive treatments they received at the hands of colonial physicians.’ (116-117)


‘Although noted for their early hostility to psychoanalysis, psychiatrists in metropolitan France reveal a powerful Freudian influence in their writings on primitivism in the interwar period. By the 1930s they had begun to consider parallels between “primitives” and mentally disordered Europeans, noting especially the connections between paranoia and primitive mentality. Some considered “paranoid” aspects of primitive mentality—such as the belief in sorcery—to be evidence of psychological underdevelopment: one student compared such beliefs to medieval European psychoses. Another psychiatrist described a “striking” congruity between “the paranoid mentality and the primitive mentality,” but also noted a crucial difference: primitivism was a social phenomenon, where paranoia was an individual affliction. A change of environment could thus initiate a transformation of a primitive mentality as the subject adapted to a new social milieu by transforming thought and behaviour, while the European paranoiac could only follow the “psychobiological laws of his thoughts”. The psychiatrist Jean Levy-Valensi echoed this idea. Like the paranoiac, the primitive suffered from deliria of persecution and ambition; and just as paranoiacs were “hallucinatory,” Levi-Valensi argued that “the savage is so in his normal state”’ (135-136)

[Teija]

Beginning with the origins of psychiatry as a field of study, this book focuses on the language and ideology behind mental health and its management as well as the inherent racism found in the example of French North Africa.

Keller asks how an advanced, sophisticated medical field, at the cutting edge of technology and science, can also be inherently racist. He puts forward the idea of “colonial dehumanization,” the tendency of psychiatrists from mainland France to treat citizens of its colonies as less than human and as test subjects, and the implications that the psychiatric field not only worked within the confines of a racist cultural definition but simultaneously perpetuated and legitimized this racial construct by encoding the psychiatric field of study with these preexisting social norms. By looking at psychiatry in a wider historical context, he attempts to come to a clear understanding of the psychological field of study.

Keller delves into the origins of psychological reform in French colonies in the 20th century, looking at the state of psychological institutions and patients in the Maghreb – Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. Because the system in Europe was in decline and near crisis, the colonies seemed like the perfect place to institute sweeping reforms, almost a blank slate on which to avoid the flaws of the existing system. Keller then tracks the way these new institutions worked, the studies done on patients, and the knowledge that was produced from the institutions, after which he moves on to a look at Frantz Fanon and the resistance to the institution of psychological study.

From there, Keller widens his scope to look at psychiatry in relation to France and North Africa, rounding off his study with a conclusion that looks at the move from asylums and institutional psychiatry to a chemical-based community psychiatry.

Overall, a thorough study of colonial psychiatric development and institutional racism.

[Peter]

Richard Keller is a historian of Medicine, Public Health, and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Keller’s 2007 book, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa is a detailed and well-done history of psychiatry in French Colonial North Africa (present-day Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) with a focus on how the colonial environment interacted with psychiatry, including in the settler colony of Algeria. The monograph provides context for the writings of the Martinique-born anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who worked in Colonial Algeria for a period of time. In the early twentieth century, the treatment of the mentally ill in North Africa was one of the officially stated reasons for why the French government became more involved in its North African colonies (Keller 46). Keller follows the history of psychiatry in French Colonial Africa through the creation of psychological warfare based on the research of the Algiers School during the Algerian Revolution. This was during the time that Fanon was writing about colonialism and psychiatry (Keller 156). Keller’s Colonial Madness tries to complicate the narrative that colonial psychiatry was just about enforcing racism (Keller 17). For example, Keller’s research demonstrates that many North Africans in the early days of the creation of ‘Western’ mental institutions under French colonial rule sought out the help of Western psychiatry when they felt they could not cope with the mental illness within their family units (Keller 109-110). An example was a trial of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); only fourteen of ninety-four Tunisian patients were asked to discontinue the treatment, even though other methods existed to mitigate the pain (Keller 106). Keller’s Colonial Madness is an excellent study of colonial psychiatry in French Colonial North Africa.