Social Pathologies and Collective Liberation. Frantz Fanon's Decolonial Project.

Frantz Fanon’s framework lies at the intersection of psychiatry and politics: in it, he analyses the relationship between individual pathology, social origins and collective liberation. Specifically, he observes how colonialism, which he describes as a total project, alienates the colonised and leads to the emergence of mental pathologies. This thesis aims to outline the stages of this process and understand how, according to Fanon, the colonised can de-alienate themselves. The first chapter focuses on the authors and movements that influenced Fanon’s work. He borrows terms and concepts which he applies to the experience of the colonised, demonstrating how they are trapped in an oppressive cycle and overdetermined from the outside, through the gaze of the white colonisers. As they internalise what is dictated by the colonisers, they become alienated: Fanon explains this process through the concept of sociogeny. I then explore the relationship between the psyche and power dynamics as per Fanon. The author draws on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to explain how it is the colonisers’ failure to recognise the colonised that produces the alienation from which the colonised suffer. The oppression to which the colonised are subjected finds its highest expression in the pathologies encountered by Fanon in his practice. Awareness of this situation leads Fanon to develop a revolutionary theory centred on the concept of violence. At last, I examine Fanon’s legacy within psychiatry and sociology. His approach stands in contrast to that of his contemporaries, who portray the colonised “Others” as primitive and devoid of rationality. Inspired by sociotherapy, which he learns in France, Fanon introduces, first in Algeria and then in Tunisia, programmes and activities that are still in use today. Similarly, he can also be considered a precursor of the decolonial approach, which critically examines the structural and epistemological violence perpetrated by coloniality.