On Madness as Subjection: Fanon's Political Psychiatry

Abstract

Frantz Fanon's contribution to psychiatry is foundational and constitutive to the politics of commitment. This political commitment can be seen in the manner in which Fanon made psychiatric interventions to counter subjection which was inherent in colonial psychiatry. The argument here is that madness in relation to black subjects is subjection. As such, colonial psychiatry, instead of apprehending madness, served as an auxiliary of the colonial enterprise which institutionalised, naturalised and normalised madness. So then, the facility of the psychiatric hospital in the colony which houses black subjects – who are at the receiving end of racist colonial psychiatry – is in fact trapped in the colony itself. This kind of psychiatric facility cannot be clinical as it is contaminated by subjection directed to black bodies as things inherently plagued by madness.