The Psychiatric Writings from Alienation and Freedom

by Frantz Fanon, Jean Khalfa (Editor), Robert J. C. Young (Editor), Steven Corcoran (Translator)

Overview

Frantz Fanon's psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. The writing collected here was written from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work and reveals much about how Fanon's thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle. His political, revolutionary and literary lives should not then be separated from the psychiatric practice and writings that shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350125919
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/29/2020
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer. He was the author of classic works such as Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He was one of the most significant anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist thinkers of the 20th Century.

Jean Khalfa is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Poetics of the Antilles (2016) and an upcoming work on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. He is also the editor of the first complete edition of Michel Foucault's History of Madness (2006).


Robert J. C. Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. He is the author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) and Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015).

Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (2015) and The Lost Thread (2016).

Table of Contents

General Introduction, by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young

Part One: Theatre
Parallel Hands
The Drowning Eye

Part Two: Psychiatric writings
Fanon: A Revolutionary Psychiatrist, by Jean Khalfa
Mental alterations, character modifications, psychic disorders and intellectual deficit in spinocerebellar heredo-degeneration: on a case of Friedreich's ataxia with delusions of possession

Letter to Maurice Despinoy
Trait d'union
On some cases treated with the Bini method
Indications of Bini therapy in the framework of institutional therapies
On an attempt at readaptation of a patient with morpheic epilepsy and series character disorders
Note on techniques of sleeping therapy with conditioning and electroencephalographic monitoring
Notre Journal, introduction by Amina Azza Bekkat
Letter to Maurice Despinoy
Social therapy in a ward of Muslim men: methodological difficulties
Daily life in the douars
Introduction to sexuality disorders among North-African men
Current aspects of mental assistance in Algeria
Ethnopsychiatric considerations
Confessional behaviour in North Africa (1)
Confessional behaviour in North Africa (2)
Letter to Maurice Despinoy
Attitude of Maghrebin Muslims towards madness
The TAT with Muslim women, sociology of perception and imagination
Letter to the resident minister
The phenomenon of agitation in the psychiatric setting: general considerations, psychopathological meaning
Biological study of the action of lithium citrate in manic fits
On a case of torsion spasm
First attempts with injectable meprobamate in hypochondriac states
Day hospitalization in psychiatry: value and limits
Day hospitalization in psychiatry: value and limits. Second part: doctrinal considerations

Psychiatry in its meeting with society

Part Three: Political writings
Introduction, by Jean Khalfa
The Demoralized Foreign Legion
Algeria's Independence: an everyday reality
National Independence: the only possible outcome
Algeria and the French Crisis
The Algerian conflict and African anticolonialism
A democratic revolution
One more time: the reason for the prerequisite
Algerian revolutionary consciousness
Strategies of an Army with its Back to the Wall
The survivors of no man's land
The testament of a 'man of the left'
The rationale of ultracolonialism
The Western World and the Fascist Experience in France
Gaullist Illusions
The Cross of a People
The Anti-Imperialist Movement's Rise and the Retards of Pacification
The United Combat of African Countries
Richard Wright's White man, listen!
At Conakry, He Declares: 'World Peace passes via National Independence'
Africa Accuses the West
The Stooges of Imperialism
Letter to Ali Shariati, presentation by Sara Shariati

Part Four: Publishing Fanon (France and Italy, 1959-1971)

Introduction, by Jean Khalfa
Correspondence between François Maspero and Frantz Fanon
The Italian Fanon: unearthing a hidden editorial history, by Neelam Srivastava

Part Five: Frantz Fanon's library
List established, presented and commented upon by Jean Khalfa
Key dates
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is history happening in real time and at ground level ... An important book. The editors have performed a great service to present and future generations of 'Fanonistes' by assembling these texts with forensic care.” —Literary Review

From the Publisher