From the Clinic to the Colony: Frantz Fanon’s Psychiatry of Dis-alienation

Sara Saba, PhD candidate at Emory University

“…There is work to be done, human work,...there are tears to be wiped away, inhuman attitudes to be fought, condescending ways of speech to be ruled out, men to be humanized.”
                                          -Frantz Fanon, The North African Syndrome

In this talk, I will explore Frantz Fanon’s critique of the medical profession and its complicity in racial dehumanization. In his essay, The North African Syndrome, Fanon reflects on his experiences as a psychiatrist working in a French hospital in Lyon, where he witnessed firsthand the ways in which French doctors systematically alienated their Algerian Muslim patients. How can the universal 'duty to care' for all patients also be employed to devalue certain groups of people? 
Fanon argues that medicine, far from being a neutral or purely therapeutic practice, can actively contribute to the marginalization and alienation of colonized people by treating them as objects rather than as full human beings. He outlines three key theses on how medical doctors can perpetuate this alienation, which he then connects to broader societal structures that relegate some people to the status of non-human sufferers. We will examine how Fanon’s analysis continues to resonate in contemporary discussions about race, the concept of the "human", and the impact of colonial legacies on health care.  As Fanon challenges us, how do we confront these evolving forms of dehumanization as they manifest today?