ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a clinical case illustration based on the theory and work of Frantz Fanon. It examines the complexities of using Fanon’s ideas in a cross-racial therapeutic relationship. The therapist would need to recognize that social oppression is real and is maintained on many levels, including the interpersonal level. The therapist would need to adopt Fanon’s view that social oppression creates not only symptomology involved in many “mental disorders” but also a learned helplessness and internalized oppression that thwarts liberation and healing. Fanon offers that these roles and functions play out interpersonally as well as structurally and this interpersonal oppression brings a particularly devastating blow. Fanon’s work is built on concepts and ideas involving psychological trauma, primarily that the “colonial situation” or racial power structures are created and maintained not only through human violence against the bodies of people of color but in their minds as well.
