The Ambivalence of Fidelity: Frantz Fanon and the Cultural Unconscious
Linda Belau (University of Texas - Pan American)
Antillean society is a neurotic society,
a society of “comparison.” Hence we
are driven from the individual back to
the social structure. If there is a “taint,”
it lies not in the “soul of the individual”
but rather in that of the environment.
Frantz Fanon
I am overdetermined from without.
Frantz Fanon
While Frantz Fanon is less known as a Caribbean postcolonial writer and is seen more as a radical anti-colonial theorist and outspoken advocate of violence in the African decolonization process, I would like in this essay to focus on what I would argue is his most fundamental identification: that is, as a subject of the Caribbean postcolonial context who has trained as a psychoanalyst in France. It is precisely this mix of margin and center, of colonized and colonizer, that is most salient for his particular identity as an intellectual, a reformer, and a psychoanalyst.
While Fanon has, perhaps, gained his reputation as a theorist of the African situation, and while he is best know through his work The Wretched of the Earth, which discusses the role of class, race, and culture in the struggle for Algerian national liberation, he is, first and foremost, a psychoanalyst. And, I would argue, it is precisely this subject position that defines him throughout his entire oeuvre of postcolonial writings. In fact, even in a book such as The Wretched of the Earth, which is often read as a call for the violent process of decolonization and as one of the most radically engaged critiques of the racism of colonialism, Fanon functions, largely, as a psychoanalyst. He thinks, he argues, and he theorizes, that is, as a psychoanalyst. His call for social change is driven by his professional training and perspective as a psychoanalyst, and his concern about the harmful effects of institutionalized racism on the colonized subject are always centered on the psyche of that subject. So, despite the theoretical sections of this most famous and most defining book of Fanon’s, which are devoted to the efficacy of violence (sections, by the way that have seemed to garner the most attention for Fanon and which, incidentally, have come to be seen as the essential subject of the text, especially in English translations), the practical sections are all written as psychoanalytic case studies. So here we see that, even in the book that seems most politically radical, most devoted to social change and to a critique of colonialism, Fanon was never far from his most fundamental identification: that is, as a psychoanalyst.
It is toward his work as a psychoanalyst that I would now like to focus, especially since his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, offers a psychological study of what Fanon calls “the disalienation of the black man” in the specific context of the Caribbean as it offers an extended analysis of a certain complex, a certain psychic structure, that determines both the identity of the colonial subject of the French Antilles and his investment in the colonial enterprise itself. “This book is a clinical study,” Fanon writes of the text, and, while it is clearly concerned with a psychoanalytic, and, therefore, French, account of the people of Martinique, it also provides a means by which to critique this same French, and therefore, colonial, attitude toward the colonized of Martinique.1 In this sense, the book is an oddity, a kind of paradoxical formation, for it is both an affirmation and a critique of France and the colonial enterprise that France clearly signifies for Fanon.
I would like to consider more closely this ambivalence in the text, especially since it defines Fanon himself. In fact, Fanon the colonized Caribbean subject is reflected in much of the text. In many places, it reads positively autobiographically. For example, Fanon uses the first person narrative structure, and he often makes comments about his own experiences and frequently launches into extended arguments that are clearly expressions of his personal opinions and attitudes. He talks about himself in the book, letting his reader know who he is and where he comes from. He is an Antillian, born in Martinique, witness to the atrocities of colonialism under French rule. Beyond that, however, he is educated in Europe and trained in continental literature, philosophy, and, most importantly, French psychiatry. In this sense, he is divided between two subject positions: a white, European identity and a black Caribbean identity. It is precisely this division, Fanon argues, that characterizes him and his fellow Antillians as colonial subjects: “White civilization and European culture,” Fanon writes, “have forced an existential deviation on the Negro…what is often called a black soul is a white man’s artifact. The educated Negro, slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth, feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. Or that he no longer understands it” (BSWM 14). With this quote, which appears toward the close of the Introduction to the text, Fanon might as well be talking about himself, especially since later in Chapter 6, which is significantly entitled “The Negro and Psychopathology,” he rejects this same Negro myth specifically in relation to his own experiences: “For my part,” he writes, “I refuse to consider the problem from the standpoint of either-or….What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the French people” (BSWM 203).
It is as a “Frenchman,” I would argue, that Fanon most visibly organizes his approach to psychic phenomenon and his professional identity as a psychoanalyst. And, as a matter of fact, it is very much as a “Frenchman” that Fanon writes Black Skin, White Masks, which was composed while he was still living in France. But, more importantly, it is as a psychoanalyst that a strong ambivalence toward this identification plays itself out, especially since he dedicates the subject matter of Black Skin, White Masks to an analysis of the effect of colonial subjugation on the black man’s psyche. In the Introduction to his book Fanon writes,
I believe that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex. I shall attempt a complete lysis of this morbid body….
It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view….I should like to start from there. I shall try to discover the various attitudes that the Negro adopts in contact with white civilization. The ‘jungle savage’ is not what I have in mind. That is because for him certain factors have not yet acquired importance. I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it. (BSWM 10, 12)
Not only is this a classical description of psychoanalytic practice with its attention to affect and its relation to an underlying complex, it is also, paradoxically enough, a radical departure from the traditional analytic methodology that constitutes Fanon’s European training since it moves away from an analysis of the individual toward an analysis of an entire culture. It is precisely this paradox, I would argue, that comes to define the entire text, both on the level of its content as well as its form.
To begin with, what I think is most telling from the quote is the type of black man that interests Fanon. He is not that much interested in an essentialist notion of the black man; that is, in any man who happens to have a darker complexion. This is why he dismisses the psychic significance of what he, seemingly, dismisses as “the jungle savage.” Fanon’s exclusion of what we might here call this particular “type” of man simply shows that he does not see the black man as one homogenous entity; he does not reduce the black man to one essential trait: his skin color. Instead, Fanon is interested in the black man as a particular kind of subject. For his analysis in Black Skin, White Masks, he is mostly interested in the colonial subject who is divided between a white and a black identity who, in other words, suffers what he calls the “psychoexistential complex” that results from the process of colonization. Throughout his text, Fanon returns to the psychic structure of this particular “type” of black man who suffers a split subjectivity. While such an argument merely reflects a basic Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic insight, Fanon uses this point of departure to move beyond the traditional approach that focuses on the individual to one that attempts to analyze an entire cultural unconscious since he sees the educated “Negro of the Antilles” not as an individual but, rather, as a cultural category.2
While Freud has famously written “What does the woman want?”—a question directed to Marie Bonaparte in a personal correspondence, and which has given Freud quite a bit of notoriety, especially where his attitudes about women are concerned—Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks with a similar question: “what does the black man want?”( BSWM 8).3 Here we see how Fanon will follow Freud with the utmost fidelity. While the content of his procedural question might change from the woman to the black man, the form of the question, its very methodological significance, will remain the same. In this sense, Fanon functions very much like the proper European. He maintains a dogmatic relation to the Freudian practice of conflict formation in the unconscious. In his overall methodology and his manner of carrying it through, Fanon is also properly Lacanian. In the very first line of Chapter 1, entitled “The Negro and Language,” for example, Fanon writes, “I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man’s comprehension of the dimension of the other. For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other” (BSWM 17). Now for anyone familiar with Lacan’s French revision of Freudian psychoanalysis, this line is like a bolt of lightning since it so closely articulates Lacan’s basic insight into the structure of the subject as split between the signifier and the signified in the field of the other. Desire is always desire of the Other, Lacan argues, and it is precisely this idea that seems to be the starting point for Fanon’s study.4
While Fanon’s debt to his European predecessors is quite evident in the opening of his text, it is even more marked in his overall argument, especially as he quotes several French authors and other European intellectuals as the fundamental authorities for his study. In Chapter 1 alone, for example, he either quotes or refers to the work of Michel Leiris, Jean Piaget, Paul Valéry, John-Paul Sartre, Roger Caillois, Jean Paulhan, André Breton, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. Then, of course, there are the appropriations of Freud’s and Lacan’s work. But Fanon is not just some one-dimensional European-educated intellectual who over identifies with the oppressor. He is, rather, a sort of hybrid identity, one who both embraces his European training and uses it in order to critique the institutionalized oppression that the European system has imposed on his Caribbean homeland. This is why, in his analysis of “The Negro and Language” in Chapter 1, he writes, “a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched. Please understand me: watched in the sense that he is starting something” (BSWM 35). Fanon is not simply parroting the European’s ideas, his idiom, his language. He is starting something. By embracing his identity as the European intellectual, Fanon is deploying it in the interest of his “other identity,” that is, in the interest of his identity as a black man, as a subject of colonization, and as a psychoanalyst who is interested in political change. One sees this “other side” of the divided Fanon in his deference to the work of Aime Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was arguably the most influential work on Fanon’s intellectual development. Césaire, also educated in Europe, was both a friend and mentor to Fanon, and the two men shared a hatred for colonialism and a desire to work toward political change. And, while Fanon does not skimp on textual references to all sorts of heavy-hitters on the European intellectual scene, the presence of Césaire persists throughout the entire book as Fanon continually evokes his work and his name throughout the text of Black Skin, White Masks.5
Further demonstrating his unwillingness to identify completely with the French psychoanalytic scene, and thus with his European identity, Fanon is also very critical of the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who also wrote an analysis of the colonial mindset in his book entitled Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. According to Mannoni, his work is concerned primarily with “the phenomena which occur in a colonial situation and the way in which colonials as well as natives react to that situation.”6 Fanon takes specific issue with Mannoni’s theory of the Dependency Complex, which, according to Fanon, maintains that the colonized has some sort of inferiority complex that antedates colonization. This very assumption, Fanon continues, is possible only because of the mechanism of explanation proper to psychoanalysis, which insists on the development of an individual’s psyche in relation to latent unconscious determinants. Fanon further argues that the particular organization of the unconscious, as traditional psychoanalysis sees it, focuses too narrowly on the ontogenetic; that is, on the origin and development of individual organisms. In fact, Fanon contradicts this psychoanalytic tendency right from the very beginning of his book when he writes in his Introduction,
Reacting against the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic theory the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny. (BSWM 11)
With his notion of a sociogenetic horizon, Fanon is able to critique what he sees as Mannoni’s limited perspective on the psyche of the colonized since the black man’s misery is not simply an issue of the individual’s unconscious conflict formation. “One must concede,” Fanon writes, “that in some circumstances the socius is more important than the individual” (BSWM 105).
With this insight, Fanon pushes his analysis forward. He writes, “So the purpose of our study becomes more precise: to enable the man of color to understand, through specific examples, the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negroes” (BSWM 79). True to classic psychoanalytic form, however, the “examples” that Fanon provides come from dream analysis. He gives, for example, an account of a black man who dreamed that, after he climbed a series of barricades and walls, he found himself in an empty hall with a door at the end. He hesitated before the door, and when he finally opened it and went in to the second room, he found it full of white men and found that he, too, was white (BSWM 99). Fanon’s analysis of this dream shows his own deep ambivalence as a psychoanalyst. He writes, “when I try to understand this dream, to analyze it, knowing that my friend has had problems in his career, I conclude that this dream fulfills an unconscious wish” (BSWM 99-100). Thus we see Fanon act in accordance with the teachings of traditional psychoanalysis. With the theory of wish fulfillment, he attends to the individual psyche of his analysand, to his unconscious wish formation. Fanon says quite a bit more, however, as his text continues:
But when, outside my psychoanalytic office, I have to incorporate my conclusions into the context of the world, I will assert: If [my patient] is overwhelmed to such a degree by the wish to be white, it is because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that derives its stability from the perpetuation of this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race; to the identical degree to which that society creates difficulties for him, he will find himself thrust into a neurotic situation. (BSWM 100)
Through attention to the part played by the cultural context in the development of an unconscious conflict, Fanon moves beyond the scope of classical psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, however, he still embraces the fundamental methodology of this discourse. That is, with his assumption that “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” Fanon engages a Freudian approach while still maintaining that “the real source of the conflict…is toward the social structures” (BSWM 100).
With his desire to go beyond Freud’s ontogenesis to a theory of sociogeny, to go beyond an individual to a cultural unconscious, Fanon shows how he is able to account for the psyche of the colonized. This, presumably, is why he calls for “a combined action on the individual and the group” (BSWM 100) in his analytic practice. Here we see the complexity of the figure that is the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon: he is not opposed to Freud or to the European mode of analysis. He is, in fact, quite supportive of Freud and is also faithful to the teachings of other French psychoanalysts. He is, at the same time, however, willing to go beyond this body of knowledge, to use it and to push it beyond its boundaries in order to pursue an analysis of the “alienation of the black man” that is itself as alienated and as ambivalent as its subject.
Notes
1 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1994, p.39. Hereafter cited in the text as BSWM.
2 I think it important here to mention that Fanon is not leaning in the direction of a Jungian analytic psychology in favor of the Freudian argument. In fact, in Chapter 6, entitled “The Negro and Psychopathology,” Fanon briefly evokes Jung only to dismiss him as he ponders the question of certain fundamental Erlebnisse, which are repressed in the unconscious: “What do we see in the case of the black man? Unless we make use of that frightening postulate—which so destroys our balance—offered by Jung, the collective unconscious, we can understand absolutely nothing….If we want to answer correctly, [however], we have to fall back on the idea of collective catharsis” (BSWM 144-45). In this study, it is quite clear that Fanon does not want to lose his Freudian balance. Later in the text, Fanon says, “Personally, I think that Jung has deceived himself….Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But the collective unconscious [as Fanon imagines it—the cultural unconscious] without our having to fall back on the genes, is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group” (BSWM 187-88).
3 Confronted with the question of the woman of color’s desire (what does the black woman want), Fanon emerges as very much the traditional Freudian: “Those who grant our conclusions…may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing of her” (BSWM 179-80).
4 Fanon also quotes from and/or refers to Lacan a number of times in his text.
5 For example, Fanon writes, “Once again I come back to Césaire. I wish that many black intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration” (BSWM 187).
6 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press, p.22
Previous Article | Next Article