Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics by Gibson Nigel C.; Beneduce Roberto;

Author:Gibson, Nigel C.; Beneduce, Roberto;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International

When the woman doesn’t forgive the man, she neutralizes him by destroying the statue (“statuette-substitute”). The man can recover only through the intervention of a taleb. The ritual healer can prepare amulets or write Qur’anic verses for the patient to absorb by drinking water in which the ink from the pages has been dissolved. In serious cases, the patient has to eat the penis of a fox or a wild ass seasoned with Indian spices. In another case of impotence, the taleb pronounces incantations, or writes Qur’anic verses on an axe, which will symbolically cut the binding. The axe is heated to a red-hot temperature and then cooled in water. The patient breathes in the steam, thus absorbing the therapeutic power carried by the sacred words (1955: 6–7).

Other techniques included the writing of cabalistic formulas on a hardboiled egg, or “on a vase filled with oil, which the man and woman lather over their sexual parts.” The inquiry explored many traditional healing strategies, pointing out the martial logic animating the ritual therapy: “As we can see, the taleb tackles the magical spell with a kind of counter-magic” (Fanon, Azoulay, and Sanchez 1955: 8) At the same time the authors seemed to recognize the full value of witnessing the declarations of the effectiveness of these treatments, and they recorded the words of a marabout who told the story of a man who had been “bound” for ten years and was then “unbound” in only seven days by the marabout.

Quoting Mircea Eliade, Jean Desparmet, and classical Islamic scholars such as al-Suyuti, the three authors engaged in an analysis of symbolic effectiveness. While admitting that such actions “are most often related to the practice of magic and must therefore be treated as such,” they emphasized the performative power of words in magical practices and traditional medicine that has since become a central issue in research on popular medicine and magical thinking.22 No doubt, an investigation of the structure and logic of magical (or “magico-medical”) practices in the analysis treatment of “mental disorders” could form another chapter in a genuine study of ethnopsychiatry. As Fanon, Azoulay, and Sanchez observed, “In casting spells, there is always an invocation, an incantation to accompany the act. That is why it is necessary to know the lineage of the person being bound, especially their mother’s name. In magic rites, the act of binding comes with statutes of limitations, orders, and outright verbal indictments” (Fanon, Azoulay, and Sanchez 1955: 6).

In their considerations, Fanon and his colleagues tried to systematically explore popular representations of a disorder that they saw as particularly rife in Maghrebi society. They argued that impotence represented not simply an “obsessive concern for virility,” as Porot and Arii (1932: 592) had described it, but also the social failure of men, and a crisis of male symbolic power in traditional patriarchal hierarchies.

In their article, they also explored how magical binding operated on women. The most common example cited was the binding provided by a family to preserve a girl’s virginity until she married.

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.