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Fanon submitted the manuscript of Black Skin, White Masks as his medical thesis, but it was rejected. Instead he wrote a 75-page thesis on Friedrich’s Ataxia, a hereditary neurological condition often accompanied by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers – Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always questions!’ In his thesis, reprinted here in its entirety, we see him cutting through the compartmentalising assumptions of his profession: the ‘systematic indifference’ of neurologists towards the ‘psychiatric symptom’, the rigid opposition of mind and body, physical and mental. He is not yet prepared to call for a politicised psychiatry, but he insists on seeing ‘the human being … as a whole, an indissoluble unity’, and on the need to investigate what Marcel Mauss called the ‘total social fact’ – the intricate web of relations, institutions and beliefs that forms social reality. The mentally-ill person, he writes, is above all an ‘alienated individual’ who ‘no longer finds his place among men’, and needs to be reintegrated into ‘the heart of the group’.
These ideas were very much in tune with the theories of the man who became Fanon’s mentor at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in the Massif Central. Like Fanon, François Tosquelles was both a doctor and a resistance fighter, having led the Spanish Republican Army’s psychiatric services before crossing the Pyrenees in 1939. Under Tosquelles’s leadership, Saint-Alban had become a sanctuary for partisans and left-wing intellectuals, including the poet Paul Eluard and the historian of science Georges Canguilhem. Tosquelles pioneered ‘institutional’ or ‘social’ therapy, which tried to turn the hospital into a recognisable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying social therapy – and Fanon’s thesis – was that patients were socially as well as clinically alienated, and that their care depended on the creation of a structure that relieved their isolation by involving them in group activities. Fanon spent 15 months at Saint-Alban, and observed there for the first time patients playing a part in their own recovery.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized -- Support Louis Proyect biography project https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/publish-the-biography-of-socialist-louis-proyect#/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
