Hegel, Freud and Fanon by Bird-Pollan Stefan

Author:Bird-Pollan, Stefan.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783483020
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2014-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

CONTACT WITH THE WHITE MAN AND THE REVERSAL OF THE SUPER-EGO

How, then, does contact with the white man damage the Antillean psyche? The question, to put it in terms of the two issues we have so far identified, is: What is it about the particular instantiation of the phobogenic object as black that is so damaging to the Antillean psyche?

The first thing to note, Fanon argues, is that the Antillean child does not see him- or herself as black. Everywhere it looks, we might extrapolate, the child sees children like itself, not black or white children. This is not to say that children do not notice that different children have different skin tones, but it is to say that the difference in skin tone is not understood as the racist difference between black and white that constitutes different types of ontologies. It is only later that this difference appears. We are concerned with this moment of the reification of a contingent feature of the body.

On the developmental axis it is a little difficult to locate the moment at which this damage occurs. We should perhaps assume that the Oedipus complex has already occurred, for only in this way can there be talk of the superego. The Antillean child, Fanon argues, goes through the Oedipus complex participating in the collective catharsis of the French culture, which means that “the identification process that the black child subjectively adopts [is] a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his aggressiveness—which at this age closely resembles self-sacrifice: a self-sacrifice loaded with sadism” (BS, 126). The important point is that by participating in the collective catharsis with this particular French—that is, racist—flavor, the Antillean child directs its aggression outward toward a phobogenic object that is coded as black.

In school, the Antillean child identifies quite naturally with its Parisian “colleagues.” “The fact is that the Antillean has the same collective unconscious as the European,” Fanon writes. Even “the anima of the Antillean male is always a white woman. Likewise the Animus of the Antilleans is always a white male. The reason for this is that there is never a mention in Anatole France, Balzac, Bazin, or any other of ‘our’ novelists of that ethereal yet ever-present black woman or of a dark Apollo with sparking eyes” (BS, 168). In the cultural store from comic books to the “great” literature, everything is coded white. Thus “subjectively and intellectually the Antillean behaves like a white man” (BS, 126). Or, perhaps more accurately, the child behaves like a child of no particular color, rather living its ambiguity neurotically. That is, any differences between itself and its white peers that the child notices are not brought out into the open until actual contact with the white man.

The key point of Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychopathology—and the one that corroborates his claim about race being essentially sociogenic—is that the phobogenic object has to be constructed and coded as “black.” The Antillean only becomes black on contact with the white man.

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