A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology by Daniel Jose Gaztambide

Author:Daniel Jose Gaztambide [Gaztambide, Daniel Jose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Social Psychology, History, Movements, Psychoanalysis, undefined
ISBN: 9781498565752
Google: q8vADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2019-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

Each of these thinkers built on a psychoanalytic tradition of critical reflection on psyche and society that began with Freud and the first generation of psychoanalysts, each one a tributary flowing into the river of liberation psychology. Fanon drew on this tradition in order to examine the “inferiority complex” suffered by colonized peoples, and how this “complex” results in “explosions” of both hatred and liberation.

Black Skin, White Masks: A Psychoanalysis of Colonization

In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon believed that only a psychoanalytic perspective (p. 3) can shed light on the distortions of self, affect and other that maintain racist, colonialist systems. Psychoanalysis for Fanon is concerned with language as a phenomenon providing a link to the other—the other person, the sociological other, the other of the unconscious—the act of what is said and left unsaid as an existence for the other (p. 8). The Black person and the colonized are forced into a relation of domination to the White man, the colonizer, the titular subject of Western civilization. This relation breeds a desire within the Black man exist for Whiteness and to become White—taking on the colonizer’s language, mannerisms, while also lusting to sleep with a White woman as an act of revenge. Just as the Black man desires to be White in order to be human, the White man enslaves to achieve humanity. Akin to Dubois’ double consciousness, Fanon diagnoses two dimensions to Black subjectivity—a self that conducts itself with other colonized people, and a self that lives for the White man, a split produced by social and pseudo-scientific discourses that defines Black people in a regressed stage in human evolution (p. 8). Fanon identifies the scala naturae of the Caribbean, with Whiteness and Europe at the top, with humanity defined by one’s relative closeness to Whiteness—whether by adopting the colonizer’s language, or bearing lighter skin. This hierarchy is as much bodily as it is geographic and national, a literal body politic defined by the relationship of center-periphery, civilizing nations and subjugated colonies.

This hierarchy and its associated body-maps are swallowed whole by the oppressed, who play this violence off against one another in a race to the top—or more properly, the bottom. Fanon (1952) describes this dynamic within his Caribbean context, noting how Black people from Antilles are irritated when there are suspected of being Senegalese, as if Afro-Caribbean people were somehow more civilized than Africans. He also shared a conversation with a fellow Martinican who expressed with resentment how Blacks from Guadeloupe were trying to “pass” as Martinicans. His friend scoffed at how their “passing” would be discovered due to how more savage Guadeloupans were than Martinicans, “which, again, means they are farther away from the white man” (p. 15). The narrative of “White is right” bleeds over into family and relationships with the credo “Whiten the race, save the race,” familiar among Latinx Caribbean and Latin American cultures as “mejorar la raza”—improve the race. Fanon clearly identifies how colonized and oppressed people internalize this identification with the values of the oppressor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.