For the Breathless to Breathe: Frantz Fanon’s Clinic
摘要
There is a curious (though not entirely mystifying) paradox that psychology has been excruciatingly slow, if not loathe, to engage seriously with the work of Fanon considering that, for all else he has done, he remained steadfastly committed to the theory and practice of psychology and psychiatry throughout his regrettably short life. Of those few scholars who bucked the trend, mostly from broadly psychoanalytic, community and liberation psychology, and phenomenological and critical phenomenological psychology, the task seemed to entail an engaged extrapolation to psychology from Fanon’s theoretical philosophical writings, and the few examples of clinical work and case studies interspersed throughout the canonical texts. Fanon himself, we are reminded, famously declared that he would be willfully “derelict” and was not to provide a systematic psychology. The emphasis of this chapter is to tack very closely to the actual clinical examples and case studies from this period of the 1950’s especially—heretofore quite inaccessible to a scholarly audience—for the way in which they give practical and professional flesh to theoretical and philosophical insights. Given the recency of these publications, this undertaking is wholly novel and promises to be a valuable contribution to the practice of radical therapy.