ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the strange career of psychoanalysis as a political language in the age of decolonization. Octave Mannoni, the French psychoanalyst and author of La psychologie de la colonisation who lived on Madagascar for more than two decades, drew a spirited attack from Fanon for his theory of a 'dependency complex' among colonized people. Heralded as the key to the colonized unconscious, the idea of 'dependency' attracted attention across national boundaries. Long before the advent of European rule, according to Mannoni, a rigidly hierarchical Malagasy culture organized around ancestor worship and authoritarian patriarchs produced the 'dependency complex'. In the 1930s, Freudian thinkers advanced the theory of 'traumatic weaning', which held that breastfeeding until age four with babies constantly at their mother's side, fostered feelings of weakness and dependence and thus permanently warped the African personality.
