International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961)

Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique and died on December 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C. He is best known for his work in fighting against colonization.

Fanon was the son of a native Martiniquan father (the descendant of slaves and a member of the island's middle-class community), and a French (Alsace) mother (herself the daughter of a mixed marriage). Between 1939 and 1943 he studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he was taught by Aimé César, a poet who helped destroy the image of the African created by European colonization. In 1943, then a young man, Fanon became a dissident and agitated against representatives of the Vichy regime in the Antilles. He traveled to the island of Dominica to rally the free French forces in the Caribbean. In 1944 he fought on the European front. Wounded near the Swiss border, he received a citation for his courage, signed by Colonel Raoul Salan, whom he would later fight against in Algeria.

After receiving his baccalaureate at the special session of March 1946, he went to Lyon, France, to study medicine (1946-1951). After a brief stay in Martinique at the end of 1951, he returned to Lyon to specialize in psychiatry under the direction of Professor Tosquelles. There he met Octave Mannoni. The two men became friends, but Fanon was highly critical of Mannoni's Psychologie de la Colonisation (Psychology of colonization). He became a psychiatrist in June 1953. In 1954 he was appointed to a post in Blida, Algeria. He saw patients during the day and, at night, participated in the struggle for Algerian independence. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957. At the end of the summer of 1958, Fanon settled in Tunis to resume his double life. He died in 1961 from leukemia.

He developed an interest in psychoanalysis fairly early in his career; he speaks of it in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1967a), published when he was twenty-seven. His attitude is that of a colonized subject who, disappointed by racism, grows skeptical of European universalism. Yet he began this work with the following statement: "Only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes." Fanon saw Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung as more or less the same. His form of psychoanalysis is more of a social therapy based on liberation than of a talking cure.

His ideas, as represented in his books—Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965a), The Wretched of the Earth (1965a), and Toward the African Revolution (1967b)—can be summarized as follows: There is a specific pathology associated with colonization. The core of the emotional disturbances affecting black people is an inferiority complex, in the Adlerian sense. The Oedipus complex does not occur in families from the Antilles. The unconscious, as described by Jung, is collective. Analysis of the social-historical development of the individual must take precedence over any other approach. Freud, Jung, and Adler were not thinking about black people when they formulated their theories. He rejected the idea of determinism, believing that humankind was abandoned to its own fate.

He was unable to overcome his resistance to psychoanalysis at the time of his premature death at the age of thirty-six.

GUILLAUME SURÉNA

See also: Martinique; North African countries.