slk 320 critical psychology exam notes, use these notes along with lecture slides and tutorials and you guaranteed a distinction. i used these notes and got a high distinction for the exam and am currently doing my honors at tuks.
Chapter 5:
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Fanon and the psychoanalysis of Racism:
The psychological analyses of power:
• Psycho politics: Critical awareness of the roles that political factors (relations of power) play within the
domain of the psychological. (explicit politicisation of psychological)
✓ An understanding of both how politics impacts upon the psychological
✓ How personal psychology may be the level at which politics is internalised, individually entrenched
• Fanon’s work moves between the socio political and the psychological, for this reason his critical
psychology may be called psychopolitics
Aspects of such a psychopolitics:
a) The explicit politicisation of the psychological – occurs through the placing of a series of ostensibly
psychological concerns and concepts within the register of the political.
• Fanon shows up the extent to which human psychology is intimately linked to socio political and historical
forces.
b) A second route of a psycho politics lies in employing psychological concepts and explanations to
describe and illustrate the workings of power.
• By being able to analyse the political in such a psychological way, we might be able to think
strategically about how we should intervene in ‘the life of power’
Fanon brings politics into psychology; he also brings psychology into politics by analysing power through a
series of psychoanalytic conceptualisations which help to dramatize exaggerate) the logic and working of
such forms of power, and particularly that of colonial racism. –Fanon’s analysis of the ‘psychic life of the
colonial encounter’
The objective of such psychological descriptions:
• To subject such forms of power to critique
• To understand them better
• More effectively to challenge them
These two approaches – the politics of psychology and the psychology of politics – should be seen as
complementary and, more than that, as in fact necessary to one another.
A person has not sufficiently grasped Fanon if one is unable to see both the political within the
psychological and the psychological within the political.
Rather than being repetitive, the aim here is to provide, as Fanon does, a layered theoretical approach to
the problems of black identity in racist/colonial contexts.
The aim is to use complementary theoretical explanations to build a unique analytical framework able to
critique aspects of colonial experience from a variety of perspectives
The psychic life of colonial power: The dream of turning white:
Fanon declares at the beginning of his book ‘Black skins, white masks’, that his book is a clinical study,
which will psychoanalyse race as well as various aspects of the colonial encounter (such as the ‘black white
relation’)
, The prime focus of his psychoanalytic attentions is the comparison of white and black races in the
context of colonisation.
The white coloniser and the black colonised exist within the grip of a ‘massive psycho-existential complex’,
he suggests, that has multiple detrimental psychological effects.
Such effects are realized in the dreams of the colonised and in the psychic life of the colonised, who, in
many ways, thinks of themselves as white.
Psycho-existential complex: Psychic conflict about the existence of the individual person –as a free and
responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will –leading to abnormal
mental states or behaviour.
In accordance with psychoanalytic theory, Fanon looks to the underlying desire motivating the dreams, the
actions and the personality of the colonised, and claims to find there a simple wish.
• ‘What does the black man want?’ (Mimicking Freud’s famous ‘What does a woman want?’)
• He answers that ‘The black man wants to be white’
• We contextualise this wish within the colonial context, that is, within a context in which the white
subject has – in relative terms – everything and where the black man or woman has nothing.
Desire to be white is not in any way trans-historical or universal; rather, it is an outcome of a specific
configuration of power, of real material, economic, cultural, socio political conditions that continually
celebrate, empower the white subject and continually denigrate and dispossess the black man/ woman
Fanon tracks the implications of this answer –of wanting to be white – and finds persistence of this wish
across the domains of:
a) Language –taking on of the white’s language and culture.
b) Sexuality –desire of a white spouse or sexual partner.
c) Dreams –the dream of turning white.
d) Behaviour –action of skin whitening, hair straightening
This fundamental wish & affects, the kinds of identity, conflict and pathology it leads to, that form the
focal points of Fanon’s analysis, and that he is alluding to with the title of Black skin, white masks
Even in his use of a psychoanalytic interpretative approach, Fanon points out that such ‘pathologies of
affect’, even once ‘wired through’ the sexual realms, through unconscious processes, are ultimately
derived from inequalities present in wider social structures and cannot as such be reduced to the internal
psychical workings of individual subjects
Neuroses of blackness:
Fanon saw this dream of becoming white as a neurotic condition.
Fanon analyses this pathological desire through Freud’s explanation of the neuroses (plural of Neurosis),
making various changes to Freud’s conceptualisation along the way.
Neurosis: Emotional disorder, manifest at the level of personality, which stems from the conflict between
a fundamental (often instinctual) impulse or wish and the need to repress this instinct.
Also called psychoneurosis: Relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving
symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of
touch with reality. –according to online dictionary.
Neuroses can lead to a whole series of irrational behaviours and beliefs that are the result of the conflict
between powerful unconscious urges and the social/cultural need to keep these urges outside of the
conscious mind.
, Neurosis of blackness: ‘dream of turning white’ (the wish to attain the level of humanity accorded to
whites in racist/colonial contexts) as it comes into conflict with one’s being in a black body, and in a racist
society, which make this wish impossible
Rather than framed within the limits of individual psychology, as was Freud’s intention with the concept of
neurosis, Fanon’s use of the idea of neurosis makes it an explicitly social psychological phenomenon,
rooted in the specific historical and political contexts of colonisation.
Infantile trauma:
• According to Freud; to find the neurotic disturbance, one must always look to the childhood history of the
individual (if we are looking for a cause of neurotic disturbances and a means to cure them)
• The symptoms of neurosis are always linked to a kind of psychical trauma, which lends them their
individual character.
• We are not always looking for a single events, the cause of the symptom usually arises out of ‘multiple
traumas, frequently analogous (similar) and repeated’.
• Such traumas are expelled from the conscious mind as means of saving the neurotic from great suffering
• Traumatic examples of brutal racist violence are characteristic not only of the colonial setting but also, of
recent South African history.
• This trauma need not have happened ‘in the real’. It need not have been an actual event, but may just as
well have been fantasised.
• This is the conceptual leap which means psychoanalysis can focus its curative efforts almost completely on
elements of fantasy rather than on elements of reality.
• The neurosis of the black man or woman need not then have stemmed from actual experiences (the
witnessing of the lynching of one’s father is the example Fanon gives (1986)), but rather from fantasised
experiences or, more to the point, from indirect or cultural forms of oppression or trauma.
• One might argue, it would seem that real examples of traumatic racist violence or abuse would seem quite
common- place in the colonial environment.
Inventing a new language and critique:
First time readers find Black skin, white masks a difficult text because it combines the registers (that is, the
theoretical vocabularies) of numerous schools of European thought without relying on one particular
form.
Register: Particular vocabulary, or conceptual framework, stemming from a particular school of thought
and/or criticism
Concepts from Marxism exist alongside concepts drawn from psychoanalysis and existentialism, each
somewhat individualised by Fanon’s own voice.
Fanon’s references are mixed and diverse.
In addition to a set of rich philosophical resources, his argument is built up on personal, autobiographical
anecdotes, and extended references to literary as well as scholarly works.
Scheff= Fanon’s first book is an unshapely mixture of personal reminiscence, philosophical analysis,
literary criticism and psychiatric case history.
Fanon’s writing, often reads like a patchwork of critical concepts and ideas that is still in the process of
being brought together.
As a result, one often gets the sense of Fanon formulating a new critical language where one had not
previously existed, of Fanon generating a new – even if hybrid – set of concepts with which to critique
relations of power in racist and colonial environments.
, Like Feminism and Marxism, post- colonial critique ultimately aims to do just this, to formulate a unique
register through which forms of discrimination and disempowerment that would have otherwise remained
effectively invisible, indiscernible, ‘naturalised’ within a society, come to be brought into sharp relief.
One should note here that Fanon had an extremely ambivalent relationship with psychology and
psychoanalysis, that he was extremely aware that both disciplines transmit, reinscribe or reify certain
ideologically loaded Eurocentric notions that work to serve one dominant (oppressive, racist, colonial)
social- political grouping over another. (The power exercised by racial, ethnic, gender and sexual majorities
over minorities)
Fanon is aware of the strategic value of deploying certain psychological and psychoanalytic terms in his
analysis – and does so to great political effect – without becoming too reliant on them.
He compounds his psychological and psychoanalytic terms of analysis with so many other forms of
criticism that his critique never becomes dependent on psychological terms alone.
Neurosis and cultural trauma:
Meaning to emphasise the extreme conditions of colonial racism, Fanon suggests that ‘a normal black
child … will be made normal by the slightest contact with the white world’ (1986, 117)
It is not necessarily real events or necessarily physical real evens – then what are the traumatising causes
of Neurosis and how can it be that black people who may not even have had direct contact with the
whites still develop neuroses of race?
Fanon agrees with Freud that the basis of neurosis must be that of some or other kind of infantile trauma.
(similar to Freud)
He also suggests that this original trauma can be shared and cultural rather than simply intrapsychic and
individualistic in nature. (different from Freud)
Fanon argues that the colonial environment is characterised by racism, violence and oppression.
These material and cultural forms of trauma may act as the causes of neurosis. (different from Freud’s
fantasised bases)
According to Fanon the racial neurosis of the black subject lies; in the infantile trauma caused by the
black child’s exposure to the racist values of the oppressive colonial environment.
Fanon takes solid social and political inequalities to be at the bottom of the exclusively intrapsychic
problem of psychological neuroses.
In Fanons conceptualization the early traumatic event to be found at the origin of neurosis appears to be
cultural in form –its source being a type of cultural trauma.
Reify/reification: Speaking about concepts or ideas as if they are really existing concrete objects.
Psychological constructs like ‘mind’ and ‘personality’ are good examples.
Fanon claims that each society has a form of collective catharsis through which a certain amount of
aggression can be ‘channelled’ outward and released. –logic of racism in cultural victimisation.
✓ Happens in cultural forms of expression.
✓ Cultural forms in colonial context overwhelmingly take on racist coloration –Negroes represent
bad/evil characters in television, comics etc.
Catharsis: psychological process where distressing or damaging emotional material is ‘purged’, ‘gotten rid
of’ via the means of some or other activity which externalises it.
Collective catharsis simply refers to this process as it happens on a mass social level.
Racial scapegoating:
• Scapegoating: Projection of blame onto another person or object, who then becomes blameworthy or
punishable for something I am in fact guilty for.
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