First, let's consider what a decolonial turn in psychology means. Traditional psychological perspectives examine the struggles of an individual as existing almost within a vacuum. Research within the field traditionally points out differences within subpopulations, demonstrating how women are often more emotional or how young people often participate in deviant behaviors. Therapists then approach patients through this lens, helping them to cope and assimilate in ways that align with the overall goals of society.
Yet a person is more than just a mind. Each person has a body which has been impacted by unique knowledge, life experiences, personal beliefs, and historical actions. A person's mind has been shaped over time by interacting with their environment and with society as a whole. When people suffer with mental illness, it is important to thus consider how society has shaped an individual's mental struggles. If a person has experienced violence, discrimination, or inequality,...
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those experiences must be considered as a psychologist approaches their interventions. This is what a decolonial turn for psychology implies—a consideration of the way social interactions have shaped an individual's mental health and differences.
The introduction to Alienation and Freedom uses the comments of François Maspero as he discussed Fanon's work:
At the same time, he carried on a remarkable medical activity, innovating at many levels, deeply, viscerally close to his patients, whom he regarded as primarily victims of the system he was fighting. He collected clinical notes and developed analyses of phenomena of colonialist alienation as seen through mental illnesses.
This quote demonstrates Fanon's effort to decolonize psychology. Fanon exhibited a clinical perspective which sought to validate the experiences of his patients, attributing their struggles to the battles they had faced with their social world. These patients had been alienated by their communities, and Fanon recognized the way this fragmented their mental health.
The introduction also mentions that Fanon sought to explore the way the consciousness is alienated when social relations are hindered. His work establishes the importance of considering "culture in its relation both to the body and to history." This is the foundational essence of decolonial psychology—to formulate a complex understanding of existence that leads to more sustainable modern lifestyles by allowing for the psychological impact of social constructs.
How do Fanon's Psychiatric Writings show the decolonial turn in psychology?
In "Frantz Fanon and the Decolonial Turn in Psychology: from modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude," Maldonado-Torres writes of the decolonial turn in psychology as "the questioning attitude of the psychologist who seeks to 'understand' rather than to punish." This aligns with the decoloniality that Maldonado-Torres, heavily influenced by Fanon, writes about in more general terms.
Maldonado-Torres, borrowing from Fanon, understands modern coloniality, beginning with the European conquest of the Americas, as having generated a new category of human based on racial categorization. The nonwhite person, as defined by Europeans, was a non-being. He was the damné, or "condemned." This being was stripped of power and subjected perpetually to the abandonment of ethics that formerly was only a characteristic of war: death, rape, and enslavement. Because he was stripped of all power, the damné could no longer give gifts, as he had nothing to give. Understanding, along with Levinas, that reciprocity, or the ability to give and receive gifts, is the essence of one's humanity, Maldonado-Torres sees the damné or colonial subject as stripped of their essential humanness.
This aligns with Fanon's theory of psychology as described in the introduction to The Psychiatric Writings from Alienation and Freedom. In this book, Fanon pushes back against the Freudian notion that a person's psychological problems are an individual issue. For native peoples, who live with the ongoing trauma of colonialism, seemingly individual psychiatric problems can only be understood through the broader lenses of history and sociology. As the introduction states, Fanon insisted on "the essential role of culture in the development of mental illness" and understood psychiatry as a "dialectic of psychiatry and sociology, of subjectivity and history.”
Fanon, like Maldonado-Torres, also rejected a racialized approach to psychiatry, common in the 1950s, that located Black "maladjustment" in the biological or neurological makeup of the "primitive." When white psychiatrists of that period write that Black people are innately more "impulsive" or "aggressive" than white people due to "primitivism," Fanon insists that these responses are a result not of innate biological difference but of the trauma of being colonized and having their history erased to be replaced by an idea of themselves as innately inferior.
Both Fanon and Maldonado-Torres want to decolonize psychology and psychiatry so as to make the practices in these fields less top-down and institutional. Both would like to involve the community in these practices and to make treatment less about objectifying or pathologizing those identified as needing help and about understanding them as fellow humans.