Algeria Fanon example essay topic

After leaving the army, Fanon trained as a doctor before specializing as a psychiatrist. During his training in France, he came under the influence of the Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles. Tosquelles had been a support of Catalan nationalism as a young man but by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was an active member of the Partido Obrero de Unifacion Marxist a or POUR. He served on the Aragon front, where he helped to organise a psychiatric service, and selected soldiers for machine-gun and tank units. From early 1938, he was responsible for psychiatric services for the whole of the Republican Army. After the Republican defeat, Tosquelles fled Spain to France, crossing the Pyrenees on foot.

It appears that Fanon was a diligent student and an idealistic and hard working doctor. He participated in innovative movements that were leading towards more humane treatment of psychiatric patients. Fanon primarily employed medical approaches to the treatment of mental illness but was well able to place symptoms in their social context, not something all doctors or psychiatrists can do easily to this day. He did not adopt the fashionable approach of the time, based on Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud and his followers traditionally observed politics (Freud famously gave this advice to his adherents in Germany on the coming to power of the Nazis).

By this time he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with France, with mainstream medicine and psychiatry. Because Fanon studied in France, he conceived of himself as French because of his background. Fanon believed that the French associated blackness with evil and sin, and in an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask. I think he was referring to him self when he was discussing this issue. Because he grew up in France, he felt that way. He thinks that black or white do not exists without the other.

Once Fanon moved to Algeria, once he gave up his interpellation and joined the colonized in their desperate, bitter struggles in the colonies, he turned his gaze totally away from the colonizers. Nevertheless, in his writings Fanon continued to be extraordinarily careful not to move too quickly or too easily from the dialectical operations of colonial domination to anti-colonial nationalist resistance. Recent debates over Fanon's work miss the mark in placing the central tension of the Fanons oeuvre on the issue whether his theory privileged Manichean, polarized opposition between colonizer and colonized or, conversely, exposed the futility of such binary demarcations of identity and community. A careful reading of Fanons writings would reveal that he in fact moved back and forth between these two poles. Sometimes it happened fitfully and haphazardly, but quite often Fanon was as a heuristic tactic to apprehend the colonial dialectic both at moments of centered, consolidated, and brutal rigidities and at moments of flux, of the play of energies, forces, and desires that exceed the conscious, intelligible, and rational internationalities of the actors in the agony of colonization and resistance. In Algeria Fanon continued his pioneering work.

He helped found the first psychiatric day hospital in Africa and attempted to introduce social treatments. Soon, however, Fanon was distracted by the outside world. During his tenure in Blida, the war for Algerian independence broke out. Frantz Fanon was horrified by the stories of torture his patients both French torturers and Algerian torture victims told him.

In Algeria Fanon became involved with the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), the main Algerian nationalist grouping. Fanon began by treating wounded FLN fighters and then became a journalist in the FLN press. He was forced soon to resign his medical position and to leave the country as his life was in danger. He became a sort of roving ambassador for the struggle in a number of African capitals and a FLN spokesperson at international conferences.