ABSTRACT
In the debate on ethnopsychiatry and how to cure immigrant patients has raised questions and conflicts on the role of cultural belonging in the forms of symptoms, in the experience of suffering, and in the choice between different types of treatment. In his last book, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon devoted an entire chapter to the mental disturbances that had arisen during the colonial war, and once again formulated a radical criticism of colonial psychiatry and of one principle: the supposed criminality of Algerians. Fanon would later make a fundamental contribution to thinking in America where, from the 1930s on, psychologists and psychiatrists made the racial question central to their practice. Ethnopsychiatrist, like the anthropologist-messenger Crapanzano writes of, becomes the archive of confiscated memories and voices, and with its work reactivates forms of historical consciousness that, although they combine in the course of time with other historicities, memories or cultures, never see their differences wholly saturated.
