Psychology,the psychological,and critical praxis: A phenomenologist reads Frantz Fanon

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

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.