ABSTRACT
In December 1956, Frantz Fanon resigned from his position as medical director of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville in Algeria. Fanon was articulating a point that he reiterated throughout his life: colonialism had a direct psychic effect. As Fanon explained in his letter to Lacoste, he had finally come to realize that his “absurd gamble” to promote progressive psychiatric reforms while serving the French State was hopeless. Institutional psychotherapy played a key role in Fanon’s thought and medical practice not only by giving him the tools to diagnose what Tosquelles called the concentrationist logic of asylums. Fanon left his native island of Martinique to study medicine in Lyon in 1946. He chose to specialize in psychiatry in 1949 under the supervision of Jean Dechaume, an expert in psychosurgery, neuropsychiatry, and neurology. Fanon’s essay on “The North African Syndrome” provides yet another confirmation of the interdependence of psyche and soma, of medicine and politics.
