Chapter 5: Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism

• Fanon's work integrates sociopolitical and psychological concepts, forming 'psychopolitics.'

• Psychopolitics links human psychology to sociopolitical and historical forces.
• Psychoanalytic concepts are used to analyze power, particularly in colonial racism.
• The goal is to critique and understand power to challenge it.
• The politics of psychology and the psychology of politics are complementary and necessary.
• Understanding Fanon requires seeing both the political within the psychological and the
psychological within the political.
• The chapter provides a layered theoretical approach to black identity in racist/colonial contexts.

The ‘psychic life of colonial power’

Fanon's "Black Skins, White Masks" Study
• Analyzes race and colonial encounters.
• Focuses on the juxtaposition of white and black races.
• Explores the'massive psychoexistential complex' between white colonizers and black colonized.
• Discusses the desire to be white, reflecting underlying desires of the colonized.
• Highlights the specificity of the desire to be white in the colonial context.
• Examines the wish across language, sexuality, dreams, and behavior.
• Highlights the identity conflicts and pathologies arising from the wish to be white.

Neuroses of blackness
Neurosis Concept in Fanon's Theory:
• Views the dream of turning white as a neurotic condition.
• Analyzes this desire using Freud's neuroses concept.
• Neurosis results from conflicts between unconscious urges and social/cultural need to repress
them.
• 'Neurosis of Blackness' is defined as the 'dream of turning white' in a racist society.
• Frames neurosis as a social psychological phenomenon, rooted in specific historical and political
contexts of colonization.

Infantile trauma
Neurosis Causes and Cure
• Freud suggests examining childhood history to identify neurotic disturbances.
• Symptoms are linked to psychical trauma, forming individual character.
• Multiple traumas often cause neurotic symptoms.
• Traumas are expelled from the conscious mind to protect the neurotic.
• Psychoanalysis can focus on fantasy elements for curative efforts.
• Neurosis in black individuals can stem from fantasized experiences or cultural oppression.
• Traumatic racist violence or abuse in colonial environments contributes to neurotic disturbances.
Neurosis and cultural trauma
• Traumatizing Causes: Neurosis can stem from non-real or physical traumas, such as 'neuroses of
race' in black individuals.
• Difference from Freud: Fanon suggests neurosis can be shared and cultural, not just intrapsychic
and individualistic.
• Colonial Environment: Characterized by racism, violence, and oppression, these can cause
neurosis.
• Infantile Trauma: Exposure to racist values in the oppressive colonial environment can cause racial
neurosis.
• Social and Political Inequalities: Solid social and political inequalities underpin intrapsychic
problems.
• Cultural Trauma: Early traumatic events causing neurosis are culturally introduced.
• Logic of Racism: Collective catharsis channels and releases aggression, with cultural expressions
often racist in colonial contexts.

Racial scapegoating
Scapegoating in Narratives:
• Narratives often portray victims as unworthy of violence.
• Legman's myth of the 'bad Indian' in American media allows blame projection.

Mechanism of Projection:
• Projection is a psychoanalytic concept where oneself is imagined to be in someone else.
• Fanon uses this in his analysis of racism, highlighting the logic of hating victims in proportion to guilt.

Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Racism:

• Racism arises from dealing with guilt from acts of violence, injustice, or oppression.
• This explanation explains the escalation of racism but not the origin of the first racist action.

Sexuality and Racism:

• Fanon references Freud's theory of sexual content in neurotic symptoms.
• Understanding racism requires reference to the sexual sphere.

Neurosis on the surface

• Fanon's 'cultural neuroses of race' exist on the surface, not deeply unconscious.
• Neurotic reactions in black subjects are triggered by devaluing'myths of blackness' and constant
exposure to racial drama.
• Black individuals face daily reminders of their social and existential inferiority in oppressive colonial
reality, differing from Freud's neurosis.
• Fanon's concept is becoming distinct from Freud's, with differences in how neurosis is experienced
by black individuals.
• Internalisation and Epidermalisation are key concepts in Fanon's theory.
The Phobogenic Object
Psychoanalysis and Ambivalence
• Ambivalence refers to the coexistence of contradictory emotions or impulses.
• Powerful emotional reactions often contain their opposites at an unconscious level.
• Love contains elements of hate; fear contains elements of attraction.
• Racial hatred contains unconscious elements of desire or attraction.

Phobic Object
• A phobic object evokes phobia or intense fear.
• Fanon describes black people as 'phobogenic' objects for whites.
• Further explanation of phobia and ambivalence will follow.

Phobia and Paranoia Overview

• Subjective Insecurity: The phobic object triggers feelings of fear or dread.
• Emotional Components: The object involves revulsion and fear, leading to revolt and detestation.
• Irrational Reaction: The object induces a powerful, irrational reaction, prioritizing affect over rational
thinking.
• Attribution of Evil Intentions: The object is perceived as having evil intentions and malefic powers,
exaggerating potential danger.
• Reactions to the object include fear, hatred, and paranoid anxiety.

Phobia and Unconscious Attraction

• Phobia triggers subjective insecurity, causing fear or dread.
• Emotional components involve revulsion and fear, often containing hate.
• Phobic reactions are irrational and excessive, with affect preceding rational thinking.
• The object is often associated with evil intentions and malefic powers, exaggerating potential
danger.
• Responses to phobic objects include fear, hatred, and paranoid anxiety.

Negrophobia
• Fanon explores white racism, questioning the irrational fear and hatred towards black individuals.
• He uses Jung's concept of the collective unconscious to explain racism, highlighting innate,
universal archetypes.
• Fanon criticizes Jung's theory for its potential to naturalize racism and its Eurocentric bias.

The Negro Myth Overview

• Rejects Innate Devaluation: Fanon denies the idea of blackness as inherently problematic or inferior.
• Acknowledges White Racism: Fanon acknowledges the widespread white racism and the existence
of a derogatory 'Negro myth'.
• Uses 'European Collective Unconscious': Fanon uses this term to describe the systematic
derogatory images of blackness.
• Views 'Negro myth' as a social and political system of negative values and understanding, not a
genetically inherited blueprint.
The 'European Collective Unconscious': A Historical Perspective
• Not a universal concept: The 'Negro myth' is not a universal concept but a political tool.
• Political Function: It symbolizes lower emotions and baser inclinations of whites.
• Mechanisms of Scapegoating and Projection: Racism involves externalizing reprehensible qualities
onto others.
• European Collective Unconscious: It's a tool to understand racism, not a product of genetic
inheritance but a culture's imposition.
• Transformation of Concept: Fanon aims to transform the collective unconscious into a historically
specific psychic structure open to social reinforcement.

Racial Distribution of Guilt and White Souls'

• The 'racial distribution of guilt' refers to the practice of scapegoating and superiority through
inferiorisation of others.
• The European working classes often scapegoat oppressed groups, a process known as the 'racial
distribution of guilt' or 'hierarchy of prejudices.'
• The hierarchy of prejudices is a way for individuals to project undesirable traits onto another group.
• Colonial contexts prevent oppressed groups from projecting undesirable impulses onto others.

Internalisation of Racism
• Racist cultural values and prejudices become a mode of self-understanding for black men and
women in colonial contexts.
• The 'racial neurosis of blackness' is a surface-level neurosis, not deeply rooted in the unconscious
mind.
• Black subjects often recognize their blackness in omnipresent racist contexts, but may adopt white
cultural trappings and conduct themselves as if they were white.
• Blackness is equated with 'ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality' in racist settings, leading to a
detachment from negative associations.
• Psychological detachment allows black subjects to recognize their physical blackness while
mentally and morally identifying with whiteness.

Manichean Thinking
• Systematic separation is created between white and black across various dimensions, including
physical and spatial, moral and psychological, and spiritual.
• Racism operates through physical, psychological, and cultural separations.
• Racism is resistant to change due to its multi-layered approach.
• Racism employs both physical and psychological elements to justify and reinforce itself.
• Manichean thinking leads to the perception of racial groups as mutually exclusive and
fundamentally opposed, resulting in mutual exclusivity and the perpetuation of racism.
Definitions
Psychopolitics The understanding of how political factors impact the psychological
domain.
It involves understanding how personal psychology may be the level at
which politics is internalized.
Neurosis An emotional disorder manifesting at the personality level.
It stems from the conflict between a fundamental impulse or wish and the
need to repress this instinct.
Neurosis of Blackness The 'dream of turning white' as it conflicts with one's being in a black body
and in a racist society.
Register A conceptual framework stemming from a particular school of thought
and/or criticism.
Reification/Reification The speaking about concepts or ideas as if they are real concrete objects.
Catharsis A psychological process where distressing or damaging emotional material
is 'purged'.
Scapegoating A way of avoiding feelings of guilt and responsibility.

Projection A process by which specific aspects of self are imagined to be located in

something or someone else.

Symptom A compromise between the need to express a repressed wish and the need
to keep this wish repressed.
Phobic Object A thing or person causing irrational feelings of dread, fear, and hate.
Ambivalence A phenomenon where powerful emotional reactions coexist with contrary
affective impulses.
Phobogenic A fear-causing person or object.
Paranoid Anxiety An irrational belief that one is being systematically undermined,
persecuted, or attacked by a 'bad' object.

Collective The idea that all humans share a supply of innate ideas or archetypes that
Unconsciousness are genetically supplied and universal.
Negro Myth A racist system of representations and values where the figure of the black
man or woman represents all their lower emotions and baser inclinations.