The following is an essay on the influence of Jacques Lacan on the work of Frantz Fanon. Specifically, I want to re-read the early Lacan in light of the recently published and translated work of Fanon, which includes his greatly under-read thesis.^[1] Here, continuing similar work I have done, and following the work of Gibson and Beneduce (2017) I make an attempt at reading continuities as opposed to discontinuities in the work of Fanon and Lacan. Moreover, I take a different approach to that of some of the previous literature on these two thinkers. Sekyi-Otu (1996) and Lewis Gordon (1995) read the work Fanon and Lacan as discontinuous. To be sure, the attempts by Gordon and Sekyi-Otu to distance Fanon from Lacan were to try and prevent attempts to evacuate the political project that Fanon stood for and undertook. Gibson (2003) eloquently describes the context for these defenses throughout the late 1980s and 1990s describing Fanon, ‘as political theorist of national liberation … [had] been eclipsed by [those with] concerns about race and representation’ (Gibson 2003, p.1). Gibson correctly references the work of Homi Bhabha as influential in this regard, noting his 1986 preface to Black Skin White Masks (BSWM). There Bhabha reinterprets Fanon’s work in terms of the ambivalences of a young man’s search for identity, shifting the focus away from the social and economic ‘realities’ of colonial rule.

While I am in agreement with Gibson’s assessment, my work here draws on what I see as breakthroughs in terms of interpreting the question of subjectivity and practice psychiatry in Fanon offered by Alice Cherki (2006) and Gibson and Beneduce (2017). In both of these works, the emphasis is to show the continuities in the work of Fanon and Lacan as well as the important differences.

In addition, I will argue that the difference between these two thinkers lies in the question of context, something that I hope to bring out in the latter section of the paper. Specifically, this question of context has something to do with their theorizations, and in particular their conceptions of the ‘real’. The paper closes by suggesting that what Gibson and Beneduce see as Fanon’s ‘critical ethnopsychiatry’ might be better understood, within certain contexts, as structuralist psychiatry. I make my case below.

Lacan’s innovations to Freudian psychoanalysis

Yet before discussing the differences between Fanon and Lacan, I will begin with a general discussion of Lacan and his innovation to Freudian psycho-analysis. This is by no means intended to be exhaustive, but I have added it here since in my opinion, several readers of Fanon may have not seriously engaged with Lacan’s work. Moreover, it is my opinion that much of the scholarship on Fanon and Lacan (e.g. Bhabha) tends to be unnecessarily obscure and abstruse.

For me, the early Lacan does not need to be abstruse, and with the aid of a few key concepts, much of his work starts to look quite clear. The obvious starting point of my reading would begin where Lacan himself felt his psychology originated. This was the concept of the imago.^[2] Lacan, who rejected Freud’s idea of the reality principle and the subsequent coherence of the ego, sees the imago as his way of noting that one (or the subject) has no status or being of its own. Rather, for Lacan, in his phenomenological fashion, one’s being is not ‘coherent unto itself’. This is not to say that it does not exist, but for Lacan, it is always oriented to others, or elsewhere.^[3] For example, in his article ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’, Lacan notes:

[T]he first effect of the imago that appears in human beings is that of the subject’s alienation. It is in the other that the subject first identifies himself and even experiences himself. (2006, p. 148)

Lacan goes on to explain that this insight is not necessarily his, but rather it is in line with certain readings of Hegel at the time.^[4] On Hegel, he writes:

Man’s very desire is constituted, [Hegel] tells us, under the sign of mediation; it is the desire to have one’s desire recognized. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. (Lacan 2006, p.182)

Lacan’s use of Hegel is very useful for our purposes. Lacan is bringing a reading of Hegel, and the conception of alterity and intersubjectivity, to the idea of human desire and thus psychology, in a sense perhaps formalizing some psychological insights that were latent in Hegel’s system. No longer, Lacan notes, does desire originate from the ‘subject;’ it is located in ‘other people’ as it were.^[5] Lacan stops short of using Hegel to invoke something like a resolution of a dialectic. In fact, Lacan’s disputatious, or unfaithful reading of Hegel is to render him an open, partial dialectician, away from the direction of an ‘absolute knowledge’ towards a conception of the dialectic as a series of truncations or encounters with the other.

Unlike Hegel, for Lacan, ‘there is no fully developed, perfected cognition’.^[6] In taking distance from Hegel, Lacan explains his conception of the dialectic in this fashion:

This dialectic, which is that of man’s very being, must bring about, through a series of crises, the synthesis of his particularity and his universality, going so far as to universalize his particularity.

This means that, in the movement that leads man to an ever more adequate consciousness of himself, his freedom becomes bound up with the development of his servitude. (2006, p. 148)

Thus, for Lacan, this dialectic is played out in the realm of the psyche or more precisely in interpersonal relations, a point that draws upon the work of Hegel and Kojève, Hegel’s famous post-war French interlocutor. Lacan’s deployment of Hegel is indeed novel for its time and certainly very influential to the linguistic and post-structuralist turn of the times. What was seen as especially novel, from the point of view of theory in France, was his reading, or insertion of Hegel into psycho-analysis. The negative, as it is understood in Hegel’s language, is for Lacan not outside the person, nor is it wholly internal to the person either. The ego is thus always in the process of mediation, i.e. in the relations one has with the other. In other words, it is found in the way the self perceives of him/herself in the face of the Other.^[7]

Lacan notes,

Returning to my notion of paranoiac knowledge, I tried to conceptualize the network structure, the relations of participation… and the palace of mirages that reign in the limbo regions of the world that the Oedipus complex causes to fade into forgetting. (2006, p. 150)

I will return to Lacan’s differences with Freud later on, but suffice to say that this formulation takes the question of identification outside of the nuclear family and places it within the larger ‘network structure’ or ‘relations of participation’.^[8] As such, Lacan, in typical phenomenological fashion, moves from Hegel to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights. Lacan notes that Merleau-Ponty’s work,

decisively demonstrates that any healthy phenomenology, that of perception, for instance, requires us to consider lived experience prior to any objectification and even prior to any reflexive analysis that interweaves objectification and experience. (2006, p. 146)

To state, as Lacan does, that lived experience exists prior to objectification is not to say that something (or some kind of being) pre-exists and forms the subject as it were. Rather, it is to say that the formation of the ego (what Merleau-Ponty (1964) calls objectification) is not independent of lived experience.

This enables Lacan to question previous understandings of the ego in psycho-analysis, including that of Henri Ey (1962) (who adopted an ‘organo-dymanic approach) as well that of Freud himself. In his article ‘Mirror Stage as Formative of the I experience in Psycho-Analysis’ Lacan notes that the mirror stage, and this quest for recognition in subjects, is in part a fundamentally anti-Cartesian concept.

Lacan notes that the mirror stage is relevant given (2006, p.93):

[t]he light it sheds on the I function in the experience psychoanalysis provides…It should be noted that the experience [the mirror stage] sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.

Thus, given that the mirror stage is directly connected to his theory of the imago, Lacan notes the following:

It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place when he assumes (assume) an image – an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, ‘imago’. (2006, p.76)

What is crucial to note here is that for Lacan, the mirror stage is the assumption of an image. The reason that this is a rejection of the Cartesian approach, specifically the concept of the cogito, is that it destabilizes the concept of the ego as that thing which can be known internally and secure its foundations of knowledge.^[9]

This leads Lacan to develop the other signature concept of his system, that of mis-recognition. As Lacan noted, also in ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’:

What then is the phenomenon of delusional belief? I say that it is misrecognition, with everything this term brings with it by way of an essential antinomy. For to misrecognize presupposes recognition, as is seen in systematic recognition, in which case we must certainly admit that what is denied is in some way recognized.^[10]

Thus, contrary to Freudian ‘ego psychology’, which posits a solidified ego (and by extension an Oedipus complex), Lacan declares that consciousness, or more specifically delusional consciousness, via the imago, is potentially always misrecognizing itself. No longer is the thinking subject autonomous as in the Cartesian frame. Rather, the subject exists in a mirrored, doubled (and sometimes misrecognized) relation to the world and as a result adopts the imago as real, or in Lacan’s words, the assumption of one’s image. Thus, it is the function of psychoanalysis to alter this conception of the imago, according to Lacan.^[11]

This brief review of the articles I have cited allows one to see that for Lacan the main features of human psychic development (and thus psychosis) revolve around phenomenology, interpersonal relations, as outlined in the cognate concepts of the imago and the mirror stage. The subject is always in relation to others, and depending on the veracity or authenticity of those relations, may or may not lead to psychosis. Moreover, on the question of madness, or psychosis, Lacan offers that there is a split between the madman’s (sic) view of the world and how the world exists in its ‘actuality’. Lacan notes that the mad person ‘misrecognizes’ the world ‘precisely so as to split its actuality from its virtuality’ (2006, p.140). He goes on to say, and this will have interesting repercussions in our discussion of Fanon below, that ‘he can escape this actuality only via this virtuality’. In other words, the madman (sic) exists in a fantasy world divorced from the world as it is.^[12]

On Bhabha and Lacan

The ultimate aim of this section of the paper is to show the continuities between Fanon’s work and Lacan’s. By now, it may already be clear to readers of Fanon how influential Lacan’s ideas are to Fanon. For Fanon, as we can see below, there is a distinct appropriation of the idea that the subject (in racism) as constituted via the gaze of the other. This permeates the entirety of BSWM for example, as well as the bulk of his psychiatric writings. However, before we pay full attention to the continuities in Fanon and Lacan I will detour somewhat by using my brief overview of Lacan to allow us to understand –or perhaps re-read – more clearly the claims made by Homi Bhabha, the noted Lacanian thinker who put forward very novel yet quite controversial readings of Frantz Fanon in the 1990s.

Bhabha’s reading of Fanon is now widely known. In short, his reading of Fanon is based on both an appreciation of the latter’s radical insights and a suspicion of Fanon’s ‘deep hunger for humanism. .Bhabha’s distrust of humanism mirrors to some extent that of Lacan, which is that it offers the subject a (false) promise of Cartesian stability, concepts commonly referred to in post-structuralism as ‘totalization’.^[13] On the denial of the possibility of recognition, or the omni-presence of misrecognition, Bhabha does not invoke Descartes, as he well could have, he chooses rather to invoke Hegel, here construed as that ghost which haunts modernity. In contrast to the Hegelian humanism he sees in Fanon, he famously decrees that:

No, there can be no reconciliation, no Hegelian ‘recognition’ no simple, sentimental promise of a humanistic ‘world of the You’. (Bhabha 1994, p. 88)

Bhabha’s anti-Hegelian and anti-Cartesian position would be surely to suggest that wounds (or injustices) of colonialism cannot be healed as it were merely via a restoration of things to their proper place, a theme that of course occupied Fanon. Bhabha’s focus, borrowing from Lacan, is on the very liminality, or truncated nature of human desire and its contribution to the making of the self. In his introduction to BSWM, Homi Bhabha examines the process of identity and says,

Unlike Fanon, I think the non-dialectical moment of Manicheism suggests an answer. By following the trajectory of colonial desire – in the company of that bizarre colonial figure, the tethered shadow – it becomes possible to cross, even to shift the Manichean boundaries. (2008, p. xxxiii)

As we can see above, the point for Bhabha is to pay attention to rupture as opposed to suture. Moreover, the innovation in Bhabha would be to pay attention or to place ultimate emphasis on doubling as a fundamental psychic process which is engendered or inherent to human desire. For this reason, Bhabha can refer to the relation between colonizer and colonized as akin to not the master and slave, but rather to the master and his double: ‘the tethered shadow’ in his words. Whereas Fanon’s emphasis was on the confrontational element found throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology, what Sekyi-Otu would call a ‘dialectic of experience’, Bhabha’s emphasis veers towards what one might call the fetishism of the double.^[14] In short, Bhabha sees colonialism as a constant process of creating doubles. This would mean paying attention to the same thing in Lacan, who, believes that:

[In] the case of display…the play of combat in the form of intimidation, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death. (1964/ 1998, p. 107)

For Bhabha, and of course here his anti-foundationalism is on full display, the whole point of interpersonal relations would be that they reveal the fragmentary and mirrored nature of human existence, and not attempt to suggest it could be otherwise. For Bhabha, as is well known, the liberatory potential comes from the very instability created by doubling. Perhaps on first glance, it may seem difficult to argue with this line of reasoning. This is especially so if we want to suggest, as Fanon (ever the dramaturge) did, that racism was an ‘absurd drama’ in which members play their parts within a pre-given script. Yet there are subtle and not-so subtle differences between Fanon’s own reading of Lacan and that of Bhabha that are important to spell out.

Bhabha and the Literature on Fanon

Bhabha’s critique of Fanon sparked a firestorm in the relatively new field of Fanon studies in the late 1990s. On the one hand, it inspired a series of novel readings by scholars investigating Fanon through the lens of psycho-analysis and post-structuralism. Most of these post-structuralist innovations in Fanon studies came from queer scholars and scholars critical of what they saw as Fanon’s humanism and masculinism. Such scholars included Stuart Hall, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, and Francoise Vergès.^[15] These same scholars, it should be noted, were suspicious of the more ‘Third Worldist’ readings of Fanon and the subsequent ‘loss of the subject’ that such readings engendered. Initially, this Bhabha-led insertion of the psycho-analytic to our understanding of Fanon was not necessarily welcomed among several critics. Perhaps the most notable in this regard was, and remains Ato Sekyi-Otu. His perspectives are expanded in his work, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Sekyi-Otu’s position is not perhaps as widely known as that of Bhabha, but it is becoming increasingly seen as a mainstay of anyone seriously engaging Fanon’s work. On Fanon and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu writes (1996, p. 7)

The general lesson that Fanon brings from his devotional explorations of Lacanian and other psychoanalytic narratives is that the neurotic alienation that defines the colonial relationship is an open secret, a condition whose genesis and nature are by no means ‘invisible’.

Sekyi-Otu continues by citing Fanon’s famous phrase on the impossibility of the ‘unconscious’ among the blacks in the colonial setting. He then concludes with this observation about Fanon, Bhabha and psychology (1996, p.9):

These observations make it difficult to accept without serious qualifications Homi Bhabha’s reading of Fanon as ‘privileging the psychic dimension’. In Fanon we have the remarkable phenomenon of a life devoted to psychological inquiry and clinical practice that results in an antipsychologist understanding of the human situation.

Unfortunately, the tendency in Sekyi-Otu toward political and collective action leads him ultimately to read Fanon as a left political theorist, in dialogue with Marx, Gramsci and others within this tradition. In doing so, Sekyi-Otu’s deployment of a dialectics of experience means that he forecloses the possibility of seeing Fanon as having a simultaneous, or perhaps dialectical interest in psychiatric and political questions.

Yet, more recently, Bhabha’s psycho-analytic reading of Fanon has not been seen as solely seen as detrimental to Fanon’s political project as it were. In their recent book Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics, Gibson, along with his co-author Roberto Beneduce offer a different reading on the impact of Homi Bhabha to Fanon studies. They note (2017, p. 5):

Homi Bhabha, perhaps more than anyone else, helped insert the psychoanalytic into our understanding of Fanon by emphasizing his debt to Lacan. After Bhabha, readers could not ignore the significance of psychoanalysis in Fanon’s thinking.

While I agree with this assessment, it should also be noted that Bhabha’s work made the connection between Fanon and Lacan unnecessarily obscure and overly theoretical. Moreover, and here I concur with Gibson and Beneduce, the task at hand is to understand Fanon and Lacan independent of Bhabha’s reading. In other words, my task is to note that there are some significant differences that are worth noting when we consider Fanon and Lacan, whereas Bhabha’s reading tends to equate them, or as some critics have noted, to turn Fanon into a Lacan Noir or Black Lacan.

The primary distinction between Bhabha and Fanon that I would like to make surrounds the question of context. Bhabha is reading Fanon within the larger framework of post-structuralism and its cognate tenets of irony, contingency and so on. Moreover, the few places where Bhabha cites Lacan is to support his own argument about colonialism and the process of doubling ormimicry. While this may or may not be a useful approach (I will leave this to the reader), what needs to be underlined is that this is not the way that Fanon read Lacan. As Gibson and Beneduce note, Fanon read Lacan as one psychiatrist to another, and was grappling with Lacan (and others) to deal with certain questions he had concerning psychiatry and mental disorders (what we might today call mental health). Moreover, while the later Lacan explored these questions in more detail, his early work, specifically the two early essays I cited above, are related not so much to doubling, but simply to the way in which the imago and misrecognition serve as hallmark conceptions of his psychology.

Cherki’s defence of the Psychiatric Fanon

In addition to the work of Gibson and Beneduce, the key text in understanding the relation between Fanon and Lacan is that of Alice Cherki. Her Fanon: A Portrait, published in 2006 implicitly sought to revise some of the earlier psycho-analytic readings of Fanon, perhaps most significantly that of Bhabha. Her main means of doing so was to provide much needed and very rich context to Fanon’s psychiatric endeavours. For Cherki, a psychiatrist who interned with Fanon both at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria as well as in the Charles-Nicolle Hospital in Tunis, Fanon was in fact loyal to or at least a close reader of Lacan. Cherki notes that one of the main influences of Lacan on Fanon was that both were unwilling to follow Freud’s idea of the ego and were thus ‘greatly preoccupied with the impact of crushing historical factors, as well as of language and culture on subjectivity’^[16] (2006, p. 72). Moreover, as states in the foreword to Gibson and Beneduce, Fanon began to see, following Lacan, ‘the imbrication of social reality with the organization of mental disorders’ (Gibson and Beneduce 2017, p. x)

Yet crucially, according to Cherki, Fanon was not content to repeat Lacan’s innovations, as it might appear via a reading of Bhabha. Cherki notes that the main difference with Fanon and Lacan’s early work lies in their differing conceptions of trauma and its source (Cherki 2006). This undoubtedly has to do with the differences in context between Lacan and Fanon. Fanon himself refused certain psychoanalytic categories primarily since they did not apply to the context(s) in which he was working.^[17] These contexts primarily included that of colonial Martinique, and specifically the condition of middle class évolués: the dire situations of Algerian migrant workers in France, as well as Algerians in the context of a bitter and profound anti-colonial struggle.^[18] Cherki supports her position by borrowing Lacan’s own vocabulary, to invoke a different meaning of the ‘real’, drawn from Fanon’s own work. Against a conception of ‘the real’ as something that is hidden from the ego or buried in language, which we would get from a reading of Lacan, she writes (2006, p. 216):

[Fanon] made a case for the real that one ‘slams up’ against and for the desperate necessity of making it symbolic and narrative in order to become a subject.^[19]

She continues by noting that Fanon’s ‘real’ (Cherki 2006, p. 216), refers to that which:

Language cannot dislodge [which] comes knocking at our doors in the person of those whose grandparents died in the Holocaust and of the children of immigrants who have lived not so much in exile so much as immured in their bodies.

Cherki’s novel contribution points us to the difference in the Fanonian and Lacanian ‘real’. For Lacan, as is widely known, ‘the real’ resists symbolization, and it is precisely the aim of psychoanalysis, through its use of language, to dislodge, or to draw this out, in order to return the subject to a sense of normalcy. For Fanon, unlike Lacan, ‘the real’ is definitely symbolized yet not hidden. This is what Sekyi-Otu meant when he referred to Fanon’s understanding of madness among the colonized as an ‘open secret’. As Cherki reminds us, ‘the real’ is continuously symbolized by those who bear its brunt (2006, p.217). Thus, Cherki shows us that more than Lacan, Fanon, due to his surroundings, was forced to take a more exoteric (and structuralist) view of human psychology than the former.

Yet what is clear from Fanon’s work, and this is substantiated by Gibson and Beneduce, is that these differences in context did not entail a rejection of psychology. Rather, as I noted above, it allowed Fanon to build on one of the most influential of Lacan’s ideas –seeing the psyche as a social as opposed to individual phenomenon. This has been well clarified in the work of Gibson and Beneduce. They write:

Lacan’s interest in the social dimensions of [the] unconscious offered Fanon an important perspective, which he used to interpret family relationships, childhood and ‘inferiority complexes’ in Martinican society…For Lacan, like Fanon, mental disorders have to be understood within a ‘social tension’ and their meaning is to be found in interpersonal relationships. (2017, p. 44)

Fanon’s reading, or rather debt to Lacan is demonstrated in Fanon’s own thesis, (Alterations mentales, modifications caracterielles, troubles psychiatriques). There, he pays close attention to the way Lacan offered a ‘phenomenology of personality’. Gibson and Beneduce have outlined the important passages from Lacan in Fanon’s thesis. I offer the following as exemplary:

Applying his method to self-punishing paranoid psychosis, Lacan highlights its value as a phenomenology of the personality by the coherent development of the delusion and lived experience of the subject, by its simultaneously conscious (delusion) and unconscious (self punishing tendencies of the ego ideal) manifestations, by the dependence of psychical tensions related to social relations. (Gibson and Beneduce 2017, p.45)

Thus, the work of Gibson and Beneduce, as well as Cherki, offer two main insights or openings into both the relation between Fanon and Lacan and also Fanon’s own relation to psychiatry. The first is that there was a deep engagement with Lacan’s work, the culmination of which was the borrowing of the seminal idea that psychic tensions are correlated to the social relations and not just existent in a ‘mirror stage’. In this regard, Gibson and Beneduce (2017, p.21) note that Fanon inaugurates a ‘critical ethnopsychiatry’ in contrast to the colonialist ethno-psychiatry of Antoine Porot and the ‘Algiers School’. This critical ethno-psychiatry takes a more socio-therapeutic view of psychology, in contrast to the colonial psychiatry that sees the person, or the Algerian, as merely an effect of the biological cause of race. The second main insight of this work is that while Lacan’s innovations are not counter to Fanon, yet, given the context in which Fanon found himself, they proved too general, or not radical enough as it were.^[20]

Fanon’s extension of psycho-analysis

Aside from differences of context, the main difference in Fanon’s extension of Lacan, is that Fanon remained not only influenced by Lacan but also perhaps equally by psychiatrists such as Francois Tosquelles (2007), and then subsequently, Sandor Ferenczi (2018).^[21] This meant that Fanon was not solely ‘theoretically’ interested in psycho-analysis, but that he was also clinically interested in testing hypotheses as verifiable within an actual clinical setting. ^[22]

This, after all, is the central message of the ethnopsychiatric writings, those that now appear in Alienation and Freedom. This is crucial to remember and is borne out via Cherki’s work who, while noting Fanon’s debt to psychoanalysis and his ‘great erudition’ concerning the unconscious, reminds us that Fanon’s view of human psychiatry is deeply influenced by his training in St. Alban in the early 1950s. Tosquelles’ La Borde clinic was famous for its attempts to decriminalize and destigmatize mental illness and to also locate mental illness as a social, rather than a personal phenomenon.^[23] Essentially, the main claim of Tosquelles, and the work at St. Alban, was that mental illness originates via a dis-connection of the patient with the larger social milieu. Tosquelles, who went on to influence others such as Jean Oury (1989) and Felix Guattari (1972), believed, with Lacan, that madness was not to be pathologized and separated from a study of ‘normal’ human psychology, but that it should be understood as a whole.^[24] As such, Fanon’s use of Ferenczi and Tosquelles is very significant in his attempt to understanding both the nature of desire in the colonial context and the way that trauma works on the psyche. Fanon reads Tosquelles (and subsequently Ferenczi) as saying that desire (and madness) in a context of inequality does not operate in the fashion the way that it operates among (or within) the dominant group. Fanon’s contribution to the question of the place of desire and trauma in understanding the human psyche is to offer a dual approach to the question. While Fanon felt, with Lacan, that desire was structured in large part from the outside or via the ‘network structure’, he noted quite crucially that the other was not simply other subjects, as it would appear given our reading of the early Lacan above. ‘The other’ in Fanon is thus the racist society itself, which is what I call la structure alteritisant or the differentiating structure. As such, in line with Sandor Ferenczi, Fanon argues for a theory of psychiatry incorporating both trauma and fantasy or, both structure (from the outside) and post-structure (from the inside). In BSWM, Fanon calls this differentiating structure a ‘cultural imposition’. I will explain this in detail below, but it is worth underlining the fact that for Fanon, it is not a question of a doubling of whiteness per se (as in Bhabha’s formulation), nor is it of having the psyche merely split by desire (as in Lacan) but rather of a differentiating structure with the intention of splitting (temporarily it is hoped) the psyche of the colonized.

The psychic split: Fanon’s reading of Lacan

In my opinion, one of the most convenient places that we can see Fanon’s analysis of la structure alterisant borne out is via his demonstration of the splitting of the psyche in colonialism, a concept he no doubt borrowed, but significantly altered from Lacan.^[25] I think there are strong arguments to be made by working through all of Fanon’ writings, but in this final brief section of the paper I have merely brought forth what I see as a representative selection of instances from both BSWM and Fanon’s published scientific essay ‘The “North African” Syndrome’.^[26]

For the sake of clarity, it is worth reiterating, as have Cherki and Gibson and Beneduce that Fanon’s difference with Lacan was to note that in a colonial situation, there is more than one ‘ethno-psychic’ structure in operation. This is the main thrust of both the ‘The “North African” Syndrome’ (Fanon’s first published scientific essay) and the first and final three chapters in BSWM. In ‘The North African Syndrome’ Fanon makes two arguments about the treatment of North Africans within the medical system in France and thus two conclusions about the origins of this split. The first thesis in the essay is that ‘the behavior of the North African causes a medical staff to have misgivings as to the reality of his illness’ (Fanon 1967, p. 5). In other words, the fact that the North African is not believed about his medical illness results in a ‘cultural imposition’ of the North African. That makes him less than a person. This leads us to Fanon’s second thesis in the essay, which is that (1967, p. 7):

‘the attitude of the (French) medical personnel is an a priori attitude. The North African does not come with a substratum common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African…enters into a pre-existing framework’.

The main point here is that metropolitan racism causes a split whereby the North African is unable to constitute him or herself and thus is rendered only knowable by the ‘pre-existing framework’, or la structure alterisant of the European way. Here, the split refers to the difference between the ‘foundation built by the European’ and the perceived ‘substratum common to his race’.

These ideas carry over into the early pages of BSWM. There, speaking on the topic of language, Fanon notes (2008, p. 9), ‘the fact that the newly returned Martinican adopts a language different from that of the community in which he was born is evidence of a shift and a split.^[27] This ‘split’ is the result of the different way that the Black person is perceived in his/her home environment and the environment he finds when he arrives in Europe and confronts the second structure as it were. This split, as such, is societal and leaves a scar on the psyche of the colonized. This scar, which initially exists externally and is then internalized, is the basis for the psychosis of the colonized.^[28]

Fanon’s claims regarding the splits are that there is a difficulty of self-constitution among the colonized and the permanence of a split, which we could also call the fractured imago, is a recurring phenomenon. The key point to note here is the fractured nature of the imago leads the colonized to be constantly in search of the world of the other. Thus, Fanon suggests that racism mars all of the standard ways of constituting a self and necessitates this dual awareness of trauma and fantasy. In the same passage cited above, he notes that, as a result of this psychic split, the process of ego-formation is impossible for the colonized in the context of colonialism. In other words, because the colonized is constantly seeking approval from outside i.e. from whites, it is impossible to form an ego independent of others and particularly the white world. He writes of a (2008, p. 33):

constant preoccupation with attracting the white world, his concern with being as powerful as the white man, and his determination to acquire the properties of a coating: i.e. the part of being or having that constitutes an ego.

Fanon here cites Anna Freud, who astutely points out the nature of trauma in relation to this split. Anna Freud (1968) notes that such egos are unable to withdraw, or assimilate, from painful experiences; they thus develop a rigidity that makes them ‘obsessionally fixated to a method of flight’, Fanon notes in this vein that this explains the impossibility of a ‘coating’ that makes for normal ego identification on the part of the colonized (p. 33). In other words, the colonized self is constantly seeking external approval, and the more they do so the less it is possible to obtain their autonomy/authenticity.^[29]

In the sixth chapter of BSWM, Fanon rearticulates the main idea of the psychic split or shift. In speaking about popular culture in racism, he notes that the main form of folklore, morality, popular culture et cetera, always work to re-enforce whiteness at the expense of those other than white. This is what he means via his deployment of the idea of collective catharsis, a concept he reworks from Jung. For this reason, Fanon speaks in that chapter of the Black being faced with a (2008, pp. 168-170) ‘cultural imposition,’ meaning the imposition of the fantasies of the white culture on to the Black. This imposition, Fanon would go on to argue, means that there is always another image that the Black is confronted with than the one s/he understands prior to contact with the white world. This is indeed another way of articulating the split that is different or extended from that of Lacan. On this, Fanon writes that (2008, p.169) ‘un nègre a tout instant combat son image.’ ^[30]

Conclusion

This essay has paid attention to both the continuities and discontinuities between the work of Lacan and Fanon. I have shown that Fanon sought to extend Lacan’s exoteric view of psychology to suit the exigencies of the colonial context. Finally, I hope I have show shown this to be evident in Fanon’s idea of the split psyche in his early writing. In addition, I suggest that while some critics, namely Bhabha, have attempted to see Fanon and Lacan as somewhat synonymous, I have shown, via Fanon’s concept of the split, Fanon’s use of splitting is by no means universal or linked to ‘normal’ child development as it is for Lacan. Fanon’s innovation, via both a reading of Ferenczi and Tosquelles, as well as his unique psychiatric context, is that he moved the idea of a split from the interpersonal (Lacan) to the structural or colonial realm. No longer were actors, at least in the pathological sense, relatively autonomous; they were rather enmeshed in a differentiating structure.

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