Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

Frantz Fanon's psychiatric writings are essential to his work, but they have been largely overlooked due to their untranslated nature. Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics explores Fanon's psychiatric texts as precursors to and companions to his better-known works, highlighting their clinical and political significance. The authors argue that Fanon's work establishes a critical ethnopsychiatry grounded in a new concept of culture and the relationship between the psychological and the cultural.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 322 pages
Publication date: 11 March 2019
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his psychiatric work still has only been studied peripherally. That is in part because most of his psychiatric writings have remained untranslated. With a focus on Fanon’s key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon’s psychiatic writings as materials anticipating as well as accompanying Fanon’s better known work, written between 1952 and 1961 (Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth). Both clinical and political, they draw on another notion of psychiatry that intersects history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The authors argue that Fanon’s work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry based on a new concept of culture (anchored to historical events, particular situations, and lived experience) and on the relationship between the psychological and the cultural. Thus, Gibson and Beneduce contend that Fanon’s psychiatric writings also express Fanon’s wish, as he puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, to “develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity.”

Weight: 484g
Dimension: 155 x 228 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781786600943