Introduction

The position of psychoanalysis in the intellectual culture of the French Caribbean is a strange mixture of pervasiveness and obscurity. Freudian psychoanalysis has also been widely seen as a necessary element in understanding racism and colonialism. Fighting for racial equality produces a different emphasis from that involved in promoting the right to cultural difference: whereas the former can make positive use of the universalist basis of psychoanalysis, the latter uses psychoanalysis to undermine the universal humanist values of 'civilization'. They all have in common, however, the fact that their use of Freudianism is never orthodox, but requires a significant degree of revision and adaptation to the particular needs of postcolonial societies. Suzanne Cesaire and Frantz Fanon have usually been studied separately, from within the different disciplines of literary criticism and political theory respectively, but their writings on psychoanalysis reveal how closely Fanon follows Cesaire.