Abstract
This article situates the role of psychological investigations in analyses of social problems like colonialism and racism, via a phenomenological reading of the writings of Frantz Fanon. Emerging scholarship on Fanon’s use of psychology is beginning to elucidate how his style of analysis enables an interweaving of psychological insights with sociopolitical ones. The present paper builds on this research by explicating the essential moments of Fanon’s approach. Fanonian investigations are shown to be characterized by a focus on: experience, concrete examples, evidence, meaning, unprejudiced seeing from multiple perspectives, delineation of essential structure, and critical and liberating praxis. Fanon is then compared to other theorists operating at the nexus of psychology and society in order to delineate an overall structure of psychopolitical investigations. Overall, the paper attempts to sketch ways in which psychology can be advanced as a science and praxis of human liberation.
This article situates the role of psychological investigations in analyses of social problems like colonialism and racism, via a phenomenological reading of the writings of Frantz Fanon. Emerging scholarship on Fanon’s use of psychology is beginning to elucidate how his style of analysis enables an interweaving of psychological insights with sociopolitical ones (e.g., Hook, 2004, 2005, 2012). The present paper builds on this research by explicating the essential moments of Fanon’s investigations, specifically those found in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/1967). The paper details the structure of these Fanonian investigations, which include a focus on experience, concrete examples, evidence, meaning, unprejudiced seeing from multiple perspectives, delineation of essential structure, and critical and liberating praxis.
Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born psychiatrist, influenced such varied fields as philosophy, politics, history, communications, literary theory, and postcolonial and cultural studies (e.g., Gibson, 1999a, 2003; Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, & White, 1996; Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Martinez, 2000). A key component of Fanon’s writings was his ability to scrutinize oppressive social structures with incisive psychological analysis, in effect, bringing psychiatry and psychology to subject matter typically considered under the purview of other disciplinary frames (McCulloch, 1983). Consequently, his work has been usefully noted as a form of “psychopolitics” (Hook, 2005; Lebeau, 1998) or “psychophilosophy” (McCulloch, 1983). Along these lines, Bhabha (2004) argued that Fanon’s great contribution to ethics and politics was his ability to relate topics like colonialism and nationalism to the “psycho-affective realm” of the body, the emotions, dreams, and the imagination (p. xix).
Until recently, and despite Fanon’s training as a psychiatrist and consistent use of psychological concepts, the literature on Fanon and psychology has been limited (e.g., Adams, 1970; Bulhan, 1985; McCulloch, 1983). There is now an emerging line of scholarship that investigates his progressive clinical practice, his political psychology, his influence on the history of psychiatry, and his application to critical psychology, psychoanalysis, and multicultural counseling (e.g., Bulhan, 1999; Hook, 2004, 2005, 2012; Keller, 2007; Lebeau, 1998, 2005; Ponterotto, Utsey, & Pedersen, 2006; Utsey, Bolden, & Brown, 2001; Vergès, 1996). Hook, in particular, has advanced our understanding of Fanon’s contributions to critical psychology by outlining the possibility of a psychologically informed politics and a politically informed psychology. Examples of Fanon’s body of work in this respect include the ideas of sociodiagnosis, the internalization/epidermalization of inferiority, and cultural trauma under colonialism (see Hook, 2004, for an excellent exposition). Hook’s (2012) work has provided a space for psychology to offer positive contributions to critical analyses of racism and colonialism while remaining politically astute—which this current paper hopes to build on. Of importance here is the continued elaboration, utilizing Fanon’s work, of a “worldly” psychology, that is, a non-psychologistic psychology that does not remain naïve to the social, political, and historical dimensions of experience (Davidson & Cosgrove, 1991, 2002).
The literature on Fanon’s use of psychology is growing, but more research is needed on the specifics of his multi-perspectival approach. Today, an increasing number of psychologists are interested in exploring, and responding to, complex and problematic social structures (see Bhatia, 2007; Davidson, 2003; Desai, Divan, Wertz, & Patel, 2012; Felder & Robbins, 2011; O’Hara, 1989, 2010; Ponterotto et al., 2006). Few in Fanon’s own time, apart from contemporaries like Erich Fromm (1941, 1956; cf., McCulloch, 1983), made as critical a use of psychological insights as Fanon in examining the complex social, economic, and political dimensions of phenomena. An explication of the essential constituents of Fanonian investigations may thus help inform contemporary research and critical praxis related to the social problems of our day.
First, I attempt to detail the key constituents of Fanonian investigations by beginning with a concrete example of Fanon’s analyses and discovering its invariant structure. I approach this task from a phenomenological perspective (e.g., Giorgi, 1970; Wertz, 2010; Wertz et al., 2011), taking Fanon’s investigations as the phenomena of interest. By treating Fanon’s investigations as phenomena, the current analysis brings to mind Husserl’s (1977) lectures on phenomenological psychology, in which he describes how to render a creative process intelligible by examining the creative experience, including its essential acts, objects, motives, and goals. Specifically, he states that one can help illuminate the origin of a work of art by systematically describing the artistic experience from the artist’s perspective, that is: “to project oneself into the living and striving of the artist, to bring it to an appropriate and fully living intuition and to make intelligible on the basis of his motives the system of goal-positings and realizing activities” (p. 7, section on Dilthey). Though not specifically examining an artistic creation, the first task of the present paper adopts these same phenomenological principles. That is, in order to understand the structure of Fanon’s investigations, I will study the experiences on which these investigations were based, including their acts, objects, meanings, goals, and motives. This phenomenological approach aims for fresh descriptions of, emerging from direct access to, the phenomena.
For the second task, the emergent structure of Fanonian investigations is compared to other writers, theorists, and movements operating at the nexus of psychology and society, thereby contributing to a sketch of a larger psychopolitical project. The paper focuses on those traditions familiar to psychological audiences, such as psychoanalysis, critical psychology, humanistic psychology, and cultural psychology. In concluding, the paper attempts to demonstrate ways in which Fanonian-style investigations contribute to a science and praxis of human liberation, capable of combining insights from psychological, political, economic, and even geographical domains.
Black Skin, White Masks
To focus the current analysis, I analyze Fanon’s (1952/1967) investigation of childhood trauma under colonialism in his early work Black Skin, White Masks. This investigation has been identified as one of Fanon’s distinctly psychopolitical moments (Hook, 2004). Scholars have recently argued that the psychological sphere plays an important role in both the early and later Fanon (e.g., Hook, 2012, p. 97), despite previous tendencies in the literature to significantly separate the two periods. However, given the current paper’s specific focus, the question of whether the current analysis applies to his later use of psychology is not explicitly addressed.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon announced his study of race and colonialism as rooted in love and understanding with the intention of setting humans free. He explicitly stated it was a work of psychology with an emphasis on socioeconomic realities, and also a “clinical” work with cultivation of insight and life movement in mind. Fanon’s approach is now detailed, proceeding first with the fruits of his labor then working back to describe its essential constitutive moments, that is, what makes it what it is. This kind of descriptive analysis of a researcher’s approach has been previously done with respect to Freud (Wertz, 1993) and others in the history of psychology (See also Giorgi, 1970, 2009; Spiegelberg, 1972). The primary task of the present analysis is to read Fanon phenomenologically. In doing so, certain affinities of Fanon’s mode of analysis to phenomenology become apparent, including a focus on experience, concrete examples, meaning, unprejudiced seeing from multiple perspectives, and attention to structure. In Fanonian investigations, all of these are employed in the service of critical and liberating praxis.
Reflections on Fanon’s approach
Choice of phenomenon
Fanon investigated childhood trauma and adult psychopathology under colonialism. In one particular section of Black Skin, White Masks (1952/1967), he investigated the process by which blacks come to feel threatened when venturing into colonial society beset by racial inequalities. 1 In Fanon’s words, it was to elucidate how “a normal Negro [sic] child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world” (p. 143). In the course of his investigation, he was able to delineate how this type of “neurosis,” rather than being a mere individualistic phenomena, traced its origins back to early exposures to racist values and sociopolitical inequities (Hook, 2004). This type of analysis of psychopathology and trauma extended a classical Freudian formulation insofar as the trauma experienced by black children in the French colony of the Antilles, as will be shown, was constituted by colonizer–colonized encounters, geopolitical power structures, storybook media, and racist structures. He reflected on the experience of blacks in the French colony of the Antilles, including his own, students’, and workers’.
Process of investigations
Fanon (1952/1967) proceeded with his investigations of psychopathology via a return to their origins in lived experience, or “Erlebnisse” (p. 144). Invoking psychoanalysis, this move allows Fanon to examine experiences and meanings that are outside of immediate awareness. Gibson (2003) highlighted Fanon’s (1952/1967) “method of regression” (p. 123) as a move “backward” (Gibson, 2003, p. 213, n. 39). A type of looking back into the development of a phenomenon, similar to Freud’s investigations of neurosis, the Fanonian difference was that he remained open to a full experiential analysis that considered sociopolitical influences, not merely familial ones. Fanon’s simultaneous utilization and critique of psychoanalysis has been called a “demonstration by failure” (Gordon, 1996, p. 76), a de-colonial reduction of psychoanalysis (Maldonado-Torres, 2008), a breaking of new ground for psychoanalysis in investigations of racism (Lebeau, 2005, p. 142, n. 5), and a movement between the psychological and the political (Hook, 2005). In the present analysis, Fanon’s extension of psychoanalysis takes on another role: it is part of an approach that heuristically uses, but is not dependent on, the received theoretical constructions of psychology. Any preconceptions may merely point to new phenomena, which themselves must be originally investigated via a return to lived experience and the lived world. In these types of investigations, there is an insistence on the primacy of seeing and unprejudiced observation to which Freud was also committed in his philosophy of science (Wertz, 1993).
Fanon extended this approach to subject matter that Freud had not touched, namely racism and colonialism. However, a version of Freud’s psychoanalytic analysis of overdetermination, or multiply layered meanings of experience, can remain operative in Fanonian investigations. 2 Fanon, mirroring Sartre’s (1946/1965) analysis of anti-Semitism and overdetermination “from within,” keenly noted that overdetermination in a racist world necessarily involves sociopolitical infections on one’s embodied presence. As Fanon (1952/1967) stated: “I am overdetermined from without” (p. 116).
Focus on experience and concrete examples
Fanon’s (1952/1967) analysis of childhood trauma in the colonies will be delineated via a concrete example: his exposition of the insidious nature of racist childhood storybooks. These concrete descriptions gave Fanon ample material by which to pursue his transdisciplinary reflections on colonial trauma. The specific section is selected for its psychological richness, links to the history of psychology, and anticipation of contemporary scholarship on cultural/historical trauma. It has also been identified as distinctly illustrative of Fanon’s psychopolitics by his most prominent commentators in psychology (e.g., Hook, 2004). Further, Bhabha (1994), in his postcolonial theoretical and psychoanalytic engagements with Fanon, notably identified the passage as an instance of a “primal scene” of racism (p. 108; see also Hook, 2012). This selection from Fanon is analyzed in the present paper for purposes of a descriptive phenomenological inquiry into the core structure of Fanonian investigations.
Fanon (1952/1967) wrote: In every society, in every collectivity, exists—must exist—a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released … each type of society, of course, requiring its own specific kind of catharsis. The Tarzan stories, the sagas of twelve-year-old explorers, the adventures of Mickey Mouse, and all those “comic books” serve actually as a release of collective aggression. The magazines are put together by white men for little white men. This is the heart of the problem. In the Antilles—and there is every reason to think that the situation is the same in the other colonies—these same magazines are devoured by the local children. In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary “who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.” (pp. 145–146)
The child of color in the colony identifies with the storybook hero, who is the white aggressor conquering “savages” of color. He does not identify with the latter group or as a black man, who are instead perceived to be of distant, African origin, foreigners, and hunted enemies. Fanon noted that it was only afterwards that the Antillean, upon traveling to Europe, recognized that the category of “Negro” had all along been applied to himself. Here, Fanon described the process by which the person of color in the colony, who had originally identified with colonial aggressors in stark opposition to supposed “savages,” lives through psychological conflict once realizing the full global reach of colonialism and its racist values. He is now and was always the hunted object of murder and humiliation. What was once a childhood dream of being a hero is now a childhood nightmare of being a hunted savage. As Fanon (1952/1967) stated, the “Negro is made inferior” (p. 140). His embodied presence has been “epidermalized” (p. 11), that is, dehumanized and made to feel like an inferior object.
Analysis of meaning
Fanon attempted reflections on the meaning of his and others’ lived experience. 3 Fanon rigorously described various psychological phenomena and processes in his analyses of life under colonialism, with description serving a critical and liberating function. These processes included: trauma, identification, the imagination, aggression, internalized oppression, stereotyping, prejudice, anxiety, death, overdetermination, psychological conflict and paradox, and family systems. In his descriptions, Fanon was influenced by Karl Jaspers and the phenomenological psychological tradition that placed emphasis on meaning, not on mere abstract facts or behaviors. Fanon (1952/1967) stated: “What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but to find their meaning” (p. 168). This intention involved understanding the meaning of the world, self, others, objects, media, race/ethnicity, political and economic structures, and collective traditions, as they are given in lived experience and the lived world. His interest was an “intuitive,” in-depth understanding of concrete examples. 4 Through such a method, Fanon discovered that their experiential meanings were all tied to the colonial structure.
Temporality, change in meaning, and invariant structure
The importance of the role of examining changes in meaning, and how these changes in meaning occasion conflict, is now discussed. What is evident is that Fanonian investigations, in order to reveal the full scope of colonial trauma, necessitate the explication of structure, meaning, and temporal shifts in each. Regarding temporality, Fanon (1952/1967) introduced the entire book as “rooted in the temporal” (p. 13) and referenced Jaspers’ views on historicity (p. 112). This was an essential turn for Fanon because the colonial situation remained a quite unprecedented global and historical event in which exploitation permeated so much of everyday life and so many sociopolitical institutions in its wake (Maldonado-Torres, 2008). In the passage analyzed for this article, Fanon focused his witnessing on both individual and world history. Specifically, Fanon delineated the temporal shifts in meaning from the developmental context of early childhood in the colony (Antilles) to adulthood in the colonial core (France), all in the context of a structural unity of part-to-part and part-to-whole correlations. Fanon delineated how a child in the colony entered into a world that communicated violent messages in the form of stories and illustrations concerning foreign, “wicked,” black “savages.” As he traveled away from home, the meaning of the storybook characters changed, along with the identification process. He went from identifying with the adventurous hero (Self as hero—Other as savage) to identifying with the hunted savage (Self as hunted—Other as hunter). In terms of the logics of identification, he was made to hunt himself. The occasion for this conflict and shift in meaning was rooted in the temporal: from childhood innocence to adult awareness of transnational colonial relations, which themselves were historically situated.
Further, in order to move up in French colonial society—meanings and goals that implicate the horizon of the future—Fanon described how the Antillean must reject himself and his family: “The Antillean has therefore to choose between his family and European society; in other words, the individual who climbs up into society—white and civilized—tends to reject his family—black and savage—on the plane of imagination, in accord with the childhood Erlebnisse that we discussed earlier” (Fanon, 1952/1967, p. 149). This situation brings to mind Alfred Schutz’s penetrating phenomenological description of the stranger in which the stranger is denied a central core of humanity: history. He observed: “Seen from the point of view of the approached group, [the stranger] is a man without history” (Schutz, 1976, p. 97). 5 In Fanon’s analysis, colonialism strips the Antillean of his childhood innocence, his family, and his culture. In a way, colonialism makes him a stranger, not only to the approached group, but to himself as well. His history then gets usurped by trauma—psychological, historical, and cultural.
Characterized by dehumanizing motives, the colonial world was now experienced as hunting him due to the color of his skin. This shift in meaning, which conflicts with the earlier one from his childhood, is revealed through anticipatory anxiety and in the person’s embodied presence, as a “racial epidermalization.” This type of “neurosis” is not exactly “unconscious” insofar as the neurosis is “on the surface”: sociopolitical reality is internalized, and inferiority is epidermalized (Hook, 2004, p. 121). Further, Fanon situated conflict in the context of the person’s life goals and trajectory and also the goals of the colonial world; that is, he described the reasonable desire to move up in society as directly requiring the horrific condition of abandoning one’s family and home culture.
Fanon showed that colonial trauma is essentially given through various experiential planes: through the imagination, the body, colonial relationships, cultural materials, and geopolitical power dynamics. The explication of an invariant, general meaning of trauma across these manifestations gave Fanon’s analysis its most powerful evidence regarding the destructive nature of colonialism. Fanon was evidently seeking a high level of generality that held across all imaginable instances of colonial trauma and racism of this kind, as evidenced by his varying the structure that he found in order to determine its essential core. What he found was that a comprehensive understanding of racist trauma under colonialism is unthinkable without attention to psychological and political processes. As Fanon (1952/1967) stated regarding racist childhood storybooks: “… there is every reason to think that the situation is the same in the other colonies” (p. 146).
Multi-perspectival renderings via meaning and structure
Fanon’s multi-perspectival mode of inquiry contained a genuine psychology while meaningfully integrating it with other human scientific modes of analysis. Fanon did not reduce reality to the psychological alone and ventured into the terrains that economics, geography, sociology, communications, and, particularly, politics typically thematize. That is, as he explicated psychological structures, he simultaneously related them to social and collective structures, given his comprehensive view of the lived world. In the above analysis, he situated the experience of trauma within complex socioeconomic spheres. He incorporated knowledge of cultural geography and geopolitical connections between the Antilles, Europe, and Africa, including the processes of forced and unforced displacement. He examined the sociology of children’s magazines and storybooks, which was also an investigation within the field of communications. Above all, his understanding of the workings of racist, colonial power structures gave him an entrenched vantage point by which to approach the relationship between politics and psychology.
A note on Fanonian investigations and the meaning of psychology
Though it is impossible to place Fanon as a theorist of only one particular field of study, it is possible to utilize Fanon’s groundbreaking ideas to advance various human studies disciplines in their own right; the use of Fanon’s thought for the purposes of disciplinary generativity is known as the “5th stage” of Fanon studies (Gordon et al., 1996, p. 6). The contribution of the present study, however, is not as much on the “traditional” discipline of psychology. The emphasis is on how the “psychological” can be meaningfully related to other human structures to address complex social phenomena like racism. Fanon, who was once called “the chronicler of colonialism” (McCulloch, 1983, p. 4), indeed relied heavily on psychological perspectives in his analyses of racism, as shown above and elsewhere (e.g., Bulhan, 1985; Gaines, 1996; Hook, 2004, 2005, 2012; Lebeau, 1998; McCulloch, 1983). However, Fanon never clarified his particular approach to psychological subject matter, which the above attempted.
This explication of approach may seem out of place given that Fanon (1952/1967) himself had eschewed such a task: “It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves.” (p. 12). However, I do not think it is mere coincidence that Fanon mentioned the methods he found in the mathematical and natural sciences of his day as being inadequate to the task of explicating the all-too-human phenomenon of colonialism. As was shown in the above analysis, Fanon indeed relied on principles consistent with approaches that free themselves of naturalistic biases and instead respond to the human demands of the subject matter through an exploration of experience, meaning, embodiment, temporality, and so forth. This non-naturalistic methodological turn places Fanon in consonance with the traditions springing from both Dilthey and Husserl who criticized naturalism vis-á-vis psychological life, and, as Wertz (2010) notes, placed focus on: “intentionality, embodiment, efficacy, values, temporality, sociality, holism, motivation, unity, and the potential for change, … features [which] are also mutually implicit and inconceivable apart from each other” (p. 268). Radically and fundamentally social, human experience is inconceivable without relations to others, institutions, and moral orders, given that what is human is essentially constituted by community and history (Husserl, 1952/1989; Wertz, 2010). Though the achievement of a precise disciplinary meaning of psychology has yet to be achieved (Giorgi, 2009, p. 183), it may one day be able to offer much towards investigating trenchant social pathologies, given the principles suggested above. The allied Fanonian imperative for this kind of psychology necessitates the ability to link psychological structure—directly and meaningfully—to the world around it.
Toward a structure of psychopolitics: Connections to existing movements in psychology
This section delineates how the above portrait relates to the existing literature on Fanon and psychology in addition to literatures from the critical psychological, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and cultural psychology traditions. Implications for critical praxis are also discussed. In connecting Fanonian-style investigations to other work situated at the nexus of the psychological and the social—thereby identifying convergent and divergent themes—the remaining sections attempt to contribute to delineating an overall general structure of psychopolitics. Though politics is the main interrelating sphere, the intent of the sketch is to suggest ways of connecting the psychological to other human domains, be it the psychosocial, the psychocultural, the psychoeconomic, or even the psychogeographic. This general effort can be considered a type of phenomenological meta-analysis of extant theory and research.
The present sketch of Fanon’s methods supports Hook’s (2004, 2005, 2012) work on Fanon’s psychopolitics, which involves critically applying psychological insights to politics and political insights to psychology. As Hook, following McCulloch (1983) and Lebeau (1998), argued, Fanon’s greatest originality came from examining colonialism via the lens of psychopathology and personal identity via the lens of colonial violence. Hook (2005, 2012) articulated Fanon’s “materialist psychology” that demonstrated how racist encounters and gazes strip away a person’s embodied subjectivity and resources for personal and cultural identity. Drawing on Fanon, Hook (2012) encouraged returning critical psychology—which had ironically abandoned psychological forms of conceptualizing—to those very psychological and bodily workings of oppression, albeit via methods that are capable of accessing these in a non-psychologistic fashion. The methodological foundation articulated in the current paper supports and extends this critical praxis by describing the meaning-oriented approach that was operative for Fanon in building his psychological/multi-perspectival lens in the first place, including the problem of (dis)embodied subjectivity under colonialism. 6 The essential moments presented here further delineate a place for (non-psychologistic) psychological research on complex sociocultural phenomena, analogous to or beyond the ones Fanon had examined himself. Conversely, Fanonian investigations also call attention to the need for transdisciplinary analyses of traditional topics in psychology such as psychopathology, trauma, and child development. To be sure, as Gibson (1999b) notes, Fanonian thought both informs and limits psychology’s role in addressing the scope of phenomenon like colonial racism, given that psychology cannot account for the world as a whole. Adams (1970) similarly highlighted Fanon’s strong critique of psychologism, in which social ills like poverty, anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism were minimized to mere mental states. As was suggested above, Fanonian investigations necessarily connected psychological structures to political, socioeconomic, and geographical ones.
The emergent structure of Fanonian investigations also suggests a template for accessing other psychological theorists and researchers who have examined the nexus between the psychological and the sociopolitical. For instance, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s (1950) investigation of the supposed “problems” of federally funded education of Sioux children bears close resemblance to Fanon’s analysis from the Antilles. Erikson himself was aware of and praised Fanon’s insights regarding the damages of colonialism (Friedman, 1999, p. 369; also for comparisons of Fanon’s thought to Erikson’s psychobiography of Mahatma Gandhi). Erikson’s analyses showed that educational problems of Sioux children were not to be localized in the person, but were mostly a consequence of indigenous conflicts with the colonialistic imposition of free-market values, bureaucratic structures, harsh internalized consciences, and routinized and hostile attitudes towards children’s bodily functions. These forces threatened to destroy longstanding indigenous values and practices such as generosity, the giving away of property, and centrifugality, or outward- and other-oriented behavior. As in Fanon’s analysis, the forced imposition of colonialist values had drastic effects on the psychological lives of the indigenous populations, suggesting a direct and meaningful link between individual and world history (see also, Gone, 2004). In each grassroots investigation, colonialism was found to permeate both political and psychological structures.
Other relations to psychoanalysis have already been discussed above and in much greater detail elsewhere (Gibson, 1999a, 2003; Gordon, 1996; Hook, 2012; Lebeau, 2005). For the purposes of the present paper, two themes related to common practices of both Fanonian and psychoanalytic investigations are discussed: the analysis of meaning and the method of reflection. Freud and Fanon both shared a focus on uncovering meaning in their historical investigations of “psychopathology,” Freud having noted psychoanalysis’ discovery that “symptoms have a sense [emphasis added] and are related to the patient’s experiences” (p. 318; see Wertz, 1987, 1993, for a fuller discussion). For Fanon, the emphasis on meaning was necessary to reveal the structure of colonial trauma. This emphasis allowed access to the unique temporal structure of colonial trauma, which was not a process caused by some prior factual occurrence, but was characterized by shifts in experienced meaning. This same focus on meaning and structure applies to Erikson’s cultural-developmental analysis above (see also Wertz, 1986, on Erikson and the meanings of the body). The overall sensitivity to the change in the meaning of prior experiences is related to Freud’s notion of nachtraglichkeit, revivified by Lacan and others, and generally translated as deferred action or afterwardsness (see Judy, 1996, pp. 68–69). In the experience of nachtraglichkeit, new experiences change the meaning of prior ones, possibly engendering a conflict between the new and old understandings (e.g., what was once considered a trustworthy relation is now and was always, on the basis of new information, a traumatic one). Freud and Breuer’s (1895/2004) early case studies provide the most in-depth descriptions of this phenomenon, particularly in the case of Katharina. The non-causalistic phenomenon of nachtraglichkeit is rendered intelligible only if the investigator is sensitive to changes in meaning that can re-structure the totality of experience: past, present, and future.
Fanon also featured a method of reflecting on others’ and his own experiences for service in psychopolitical and cultural-historical investigations of colonial neurosis. Hook (2005), for instance, illustrated Fanon’s “materialist psychology” by describing a racially objectifying encounter in which a white child shrieks in fear at Fanon, due to the color of his skin. Here, Fanon reflects on his experience as an “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that splattered my body with black blood” (Fanon, 1952/1967, p. 112), indicating that sociopolitical violence had been inflicted on his embodied subjectivity. In addition to serving the aims of inquiry, a type of critical self-reflection has also been identified by Biko and others as a key component in consolidating forms of political agency capable of challenging racist structures, such as apartheid (Hook, 2012, pp. 27–30). While perhaps less acknowledged as an explicit source of psychological knowledge in contemporary scholarship, reflection on others and self featured prominently, for instance, in Freud’s psychoanalysis (Wertz, 1993) and later developments such as Kohut’s self psychology—Kohut’s (1979) notable “two analyses of Mr. Z” were likely based on himself (Geller, Norcross, & Orlinsky, 2005). Fanon’s version of reflection is related to this tradition in psychology that uses one’s own experience as a source of general knowledge, but, importantly, extends this enterprise into the realm of analyzing collective structures. Fanonian investigations rely on, and indeed may require, multiple sources of “data”: self, other, and cultural materials like children’s storybooks. On the issue of personal materials and documents in particular, Allport (1942) wrote an extensive scientific justification for their use in psychology. These documents, Allport stated, can ably provide a “touchstone to reality” for the psychological investigator (p. 184; Giorgi, 2009; Wertz, 2001). Allport encouraged the use and development of personal documents as a legitimate method via “bold and radical experimentation” (1942, p. 190). Though writing in a different time and place, Fanon, in his own way, accomplished such bold and radical experimentation in his psychopolitical investigations. Wertz (2010), building on Husserl’s eidetic analysis, detailed the phenomenological basis for utilizing the varieties of experiential data in generating valid—and scientifically justifiable—insights: one’s own experience, communication with others via empathy, and cultural expressions and objects (of particular value in interdisciplinary research). Thus, Fanonian, humanistic, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological psychology all feature an “experimental” method, that is, bold and radical experimentation with multiple sources of insight. The continued links between Fanonian investigations and the phenomenological tradition are discussed next.
Fanon’s approach began with a return to experience and the lived world. This emphasis on investigations from the grassroots puts him in consonance with the phenomenological movement (see Bernasconi, 2004; Gibson, 2003; Gordon, 1996; Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Martinez, 2000). Gordon (1996) articulated much of Fanon’s underlying existential-phenomenological approach, including his emphasis on “evidence” akin to Edmund Husserl’s usage, 7 appeals to context, and concrete descriptions of embodiment in a racist world (pp. 77–78). In fact, Fanon’s fifth chapter title, although first translated to English as “The Fact of Blackness,” was “l’éxperience vécue du Noir” in the original French, or the lived experience of the Black (Gibson, 2003; Gordon, 1996; Judy, 1996). Further, Maldonado-Torres (2008) identified Fanon’s deeply loving attitude, critical philosophy, and commitment to the dehumanized as the basis for a novel kind of phenomenological reduction and attitude, which allows for a “de-colonial” ethics and politics. One horizon of assuming this de-colonial attitude is revealing the “inhuman pathologies of social structures” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 93).
Previous treatments of Fanon’s analytic of lived experience outlined his relevance for philosophical concerns, whereas the present paper thematizes his applications for human science and critical praxis. Consistent with and in support of the outlining of Fanon’s phenomenological affinities, the preceding discussion delineated his approach to describing what colonial trauma is on the level of the psychological and how this rendering relates to what colonial trauma is in other spheres of existence (e.g., the political, the economic, the sociological, and the communicative). Fanon’s grassroots psychological investigations, based on experiential evidence in cultural-historical context, provided a crucial foundation for his overall project of prosecuting social pathology. Often noted as a friend of Sartre’s (1961/2004), who wrote the preface to Fanon’s (1961/2004) The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon embodied the phenomenological spirit as distinctly indicated by: the focus on concrete examples and evidence, the use of Jaspers’ fact-meaning distinction, the delineation of an essential core structure of trauma as given through numerous variations, the emphasis on intuitive and deep understandings, the critique of psychologism, and complex descriptions of the body, the imagination, and temporality (see Davidson, 2003; Davidson & Cosgrove, 1991; Giorgi, 2009; Husserl, 1900–1901/1970a, 1954/1970b, 1913/1982, 1952/1989; Wertz et al., 2011). In the phenomenological movement founded by Husserl and extended to psychology, emphasis is placed on examining living or lived experience from the grassroots, from below, in a return to the “things themselves” in the “lifeworld” (Husserl, 1900–1901/1970a, 1954/1970b; Spiegelberg, 1972).
By bringing parallel rigor to the problems of colonialism and racism, Fanon ventured into previously untouched phenomenological territory. 8 What is suggested by Fanonian investigations may be the adoption of a phenomenological psychopolitical attitude towards the lifeworld that does not negate but places the psychological in relief. 9 The task here is to return to lived experience in order to intuit the psychological and political structures of phenomena like oppression, in a manner akin to what Hook (2005) described as a shifting of “registers.” Just as Maldonado-Torres (2008) found in Fanon the possibility of a new type of de-colonial philosophical phenomenological reduction, the present analysis finds the possibility of a psychopolitical phenomenological reduction for use in the human sciences.
Fanon’s approach anticipated other contemporary research themes in psychology as well, including stereotype threat (Steele, 1997), 10 traumatic racial microaggressions in everyday experience (Sue et al., 2007), healthy cultural mistrust of societies with histories of slavery and oppression (Whaley, 2000, 2001), and the Westernization of mental illness (Watters, 2010). In each research domain, there is an understanding that cultural-historical traumas are experienced on the individual level and that psychological structures directly relate to sociocultural ones. Fanon’s distinct approach, however, was to contribute understandings of what these traumas mean in the lives and worlds of the persons involved. Therefore, the extent to which various paradigms in psychology investigate experience, meaning, and social structure may determine whether they are able to access the complex lives, loves, and societal-level traumas in a manner like Fanon.
Implications for critical praxis, or clinical psychopolitics
Fanon’s approach to psychology carries implications for not only research, but also for critical practice, or praxis. As Fanon (1961/1963) stated, critical writing is done with the “intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope” (p. 232). One of his major motivations was the possibility of healthy and harmonious racial relations (Fanon, 1952/1967, p. 80). Accordingly, Fanonian investigations contribute to the larger revolution in psychology in which, as Wertz (2011) suggests, methodological diversity is positioned to advance the urgent concerns of social justice and human liberation.
To begin this final discussion on praxis, I ask: What would a “clinical psychopolitics” look like? This question remains an open-ended one, but some suggestions will be offered here. Fanon provided evidence of the destruction inflicted by oppressive social structures, on both an individual and community level. Thus, “interventions” must operate at both levels. Fanon himself practiced a form of decolonized psychiatry characterized by “social” and “emancipatory” therapy in which community empowerment and the therapeutic relationship were emphasized; in addition, the culture of the institution respected and aligned with the culture of the person (Vergès, 1996). This type of psychiatry also respected the indigenous ways of addressing suffering (Bulhan, 1999; see also the indigenous psychology movement, Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006). However, at the same time Fanonian investigations call for an applied “mental health” that is not merely applied psychology but is one that also addresses the traumatizing social structures, racist narratives, and humiliating practices that suffocate human experience. This expanded concept of mental health dates back to scholar-practitioners like Erich Fromm (1956, 2006), who articulated the possibility of moving towards a loving society, that is, a mentally healthy one. Similarly, contemporary scholars have begun moving us towards psychologies of love, dignity, and liberation with a strong emphasis on culture and community (Davidson, 2011; Felder & Robbins, 2011; Lindner, 2010; Martín-Baró, 1994; O’Hara, 2010; Watkins & Schulman, 2008). Even the current evidence-based practice movement in psychology seeks to respect individuals’ values, cultures, contexts, and experiences (APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice, 2006), but Fanonian investigations necessitate a radically expanded view of both evidence and practice.
The liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), working in a Latin American context, warned against excessive individualizing that ignores pathological social realities. He instead argued for a praxis rooted partly in a non-psychologistic psychology that was at once personal, contextual, and historical. In the final analysis, Fanonian investigations too call for practices that do not colonize psyches or ignore social realities, but instead deeply listen to, bear witness, collaborate, and eventually liberate people from the structures of oppression.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An early draft of this paper was presented at the 117th Convention of the American Psychological Association – Society for Humanistic Psychology. I would also like to express gratitude to Larry Davidson for helping me bring this paper to light. Many thanks also go to Fred Wertz – for comments on earlier drafts – and to Sarah Kamens, Emily Sachs, the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Network, and the Minority Fellowship Program. The views presented here are those of the author and do not represent the position of any federal agency or of the United States Government.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
