Psychiatric Writings from Alienation and Freedom, The

Explosante

by Frantz Fanon, Steven Corcoran (Translator), Jean Khalfa (Editor)

Frantz Fanon's career as a psychiatrist had a crucial impact upon his thinking as an anti-colonialist thinker and activist. Indeed, much of the iconic writing in The Wretched of the Earth is shaped by his powerful experiences as a young doctor working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia.

The writing collected here, written during his professional career as a neuro-psychiatrist between 1951 and 1960 and in parallel to his political work, reveals much about how Fanon's thought developed. The trajectory of this volume shows that for him, it was increasingly impossible to separate a human's surrounding culture from their psychopathology, and most essentially, from their development of mental illness. Ethnopsychiatry was influenced by its surroundings, and in Algeria, Fanon noted that they were decidedly colonial, arguing that for his North African and largely Muslim patients, treatment within the standard Eurocentric psychiatric-hospital system was therefore ineffective. For Fanon then, his psychiatric practice represented only part of a much larger struggle.

Although he enjoyed the life of a revolutionary, an ambassador and a journalist, as soon as freedom was won, Frantz Fanon's plan was to devote the next part of his life to psychiatric work and the resolution of psychiatry's institutional and ethnocultural problems. This volume elucidates then, how it is completely impossible to separate his political, revolutionary and literary lives from the psychiatric practice and writings that indelibly shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Africa, History, Psychology

500 pages, Paperback

Published October 29, 2020

About the author

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.

Reviews

[Chloe]

DNF’ing because it was a little too challenging for me atm. Making it a personal goal to come back to this later when I feel like I will have a better understanding of what he’s writing about.

[Mahdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential reference

[Pedro Adão · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessante edição da Bookbuilders, com toda uma tradução e anotações de excelência

[Marta D'Agord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trabalho editorial excelente, com uma importante apresentação sobre a formação intelectual e os trabalhos filosóficos e políticos do autor precocemente falecido. Além disso, as notas pontuais esclarecem o leitor brasileiro. O volume é composto por quatro partes, com textos escritos entre 1951 e 1961, com as contribuições de Fanon para a reforma psiquiátrica (que estava em curso na França desde a lei de 1938 que incentivava a instituição de Hospitais-dia).
Quando assumiu em 1953 a direção do maior Hospital Psiquiátrico de Argélia, Fanon atuou segundo os princípios da terapia institucional da qual participara como médico-residente em Saint-Alban. A quarta parte do volume contém a Tese de Psiquiatria (Tese de Exercício, 1951) de Fanon. Vale lembrar que “Peles negras, máscaras brancas” era a Tese de Fanon, mas, ao ser impedido apresentá-la, escreveu essa outra sobre um caso de doença de Friedreich, a partir do qual ele apresenta um ensaio sobre a relação entre organogênese, psicogênese e sociogênese em Psicopatologia. O diálogo com H. Ey e Lacan é fundamental.
Eu destaco dois momentos: “Pessoalmente, se tivéssemos que definir a posição de Lacan, diríamos que consiste numa defesa obstinada dos direitos nobiliárquicos da loucura”. Ele ainda faz uma fina análise da tese de Lacan e do escrito de 1946, “Acerca da causalidade Psíquica”: “Lacan extrapola o conceito de imago, assumindo o fenômeno projecional, que Lévy-Bruhl apresentou como indicador de uma mentalidade primitiva, como a pedra angular de seu sistema”. Para concluir a tese, ele escreve: "Os delírios sistematizados, as manifestações histéricas e os comportamentos neuróticos devem ser considerados condutas reacionais de um ego em ruptura de relações intersociais”. Fanon faz uma contribuição ainda atual para a Psicopatologia.

[Keelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This great new collection offers many of psychiatric writings, which is really where he is at his best. Now he does discuss some very outdated and barbaric practices, like shock-therapy, but the modern reader will be able to identify that as belonging in the past. Otherwise, many of his writings at Blida-Joinville and the Tunisian day clinic offer a rich new perspective on Fanon’s life and thought. Readers interested in Black Skin, White Masks will find his 1951 dissertation to be particularly interesting, for it was used instead of BSWM for the completion of his doctorate. Overall, this is necessary reading for anyone interested in Fanon, and this book is at its best with (most of) the sections on Fanon’s psychiatric work.

[Derek Fenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

2 years to read this book and time well spent.

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection of Fanon's psychiatric and political writings (but not all, there are still a few other books of his collected writing that I'm working through at the library right now). You get to see how he grows in the context of what he's seeing and witnessing in Algeria and how he decides to try to get that through to those in power. Also fascinating to see the smaller things (like a bibliography of his library).

[رؤى · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The French find themselves in Algeria faced with one of those groundswells of opposition that arises in the life of a people only once or twice and whose irrepressible action leads to the emergence of factors propitious to giving history renewed momentum and rhythm."

[Joseph Christensen]

Readings Carlton

[Jacob Piazza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Fanon’s early attempts at creating surrealist plays reminds the reader of Fanon’s humanity and his desperate to be human.

[Sara Sofea]

I probably shouldn’t have gone into this book blindly