The Psychiatric Writings from Alienation and Freedom

Frantz Fanon's psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. The writing collected here was written from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work and reveals much about how Fanon's thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle. His political, revolutionary and literary lives should not then be separated from the psychiatric practice and writings that shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer. He was the author of classic works such as Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He was one of the most significant anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist thinkers of the 20th Century.
Jean Khalfa is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Poetics of the Antilles (2016) and an upcoming work on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. He is also the editor of the first complete edition of Michel Foucault's History of Madness (2006).
Robert J. C. Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. He is the author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) and Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015).
Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (2015) and The Lost Thread (2016).

Plates
Illustrations
Frantz Fanon: Works Cited

General Introduction, by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young
Fanon: A Revolutionary Psychiatrist, by Jean Khalfa
1. Mental alterations, character modifications, psychic disorders and intellectual deficit in spinocerebellar heredodegeneration: A case of Friedreich's ataxia with delusions of possession
2. Letter to Maurice Despinoy
3. Trait d'Union
4. On some cases treated with the Bini method
5. Indications of electroconvulsive therapy within institutional therapies
6. On an attempt to rehabilitate a patient suffering from morpheic epilepsy and serious character disorders
7. Note on sleep therapy techniques using conditioning and electroencephalographic monitoring
8. Our Journal
9. Letter to Maurice Despinoy
10. Social therapy in a ward of Muslim men: Methodological difficulties
11. Daily life in the douars
12. Introduction to sexuality disorders among North Africans 385
13. Currents aspects of mental care in Algeria
14. Ethnopsychiatric considerations
15. Conducts of confession in North Africa (1)
16. Conducts of confession in North Africa (2)
17. Letter to Maurice Despinoy
18. Maghrebi Muslims and their attitude to madness
19. TAT in Muslim women: Sociology of perception and imagination
20. Letter to the Resident Minister
21. The phenomenon of agitation in the psychiatric milieu:General considerations, psychopathological meaning
22. Biological study of the action of lithium citrate on bouts of mania
23. On a case of torsion spasm
24. First tests using injectable meprobamate for hypochondriac states
25. Day hospitalization in psychiatry: Value and limits
26. Day hospitalization in psychiatry: Value and limits. Part two: - doctrinal considerations
27. The meeting between society and psychiatry
Frantz Fanon's Library and Life
Franz Fanon's Library
Key dates of Fanon's chronology
Index