Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

Author, Researcher, or Creator

Nigel Gibson, Emerson CollegeFollow

Department

Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies

Author(s)

Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce

Resource Type

Other

Publication, Publisher or Distributor

Rowman and Littlefield International

Publication Date

2018

Related Information

Reviews from Rowman International “At last a conspicuous gap in the literature has been addressed, and brilliantly so: Gibson & Beneduce guide us through Fanon's explicitly psychiatric work in a way which reorients us to Fanon's own radical history and to our own Fanonian historical moment. A path-breaking contribution to thinking the 'psychic life of power'.”--Derek Hook, Associate Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University “First of all, the writing is superb. Second, the historical nuance and meticulous analysis make the book more than a work on Fanon's psychiatric thought. It's a political history of psychiatry both as a colonial and anti-colonial practice. The former is its unfolding under colonial conditions. The latter is the fact of agency among psychiatrists and psychologists from below … It's a marvelous work (in its own right) of political psychology and even better: it addresses the lacunae in other works--namely, their failure to address colonization, race, and sexuality.”--Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut

Brief Description

Gibson and Beneduce draw focus upon psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary, who was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice. This book focuses on Fanon’s key psychiatry texts, psychiatric writings, and better known work written between 1952 and 1961 (Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth). Offering both a clinical and political perspective, the authors draw upon a notion that shows psychiatry intersecting history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and ethnology. Gibson and Beneduce argue that his work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry that is based upon a new concept of culture anchored to historical events, situations, and experiences, while also drawing upon the relationship the psychological and cultural. The authors deduce that from Fanon’s writings his wish, as put in The Wretched of the Earth is to “develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity”.