Miranda (Excerpt)

THE FUTURE OF ALIENATION AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF FANONIAN

SOCIODIAGNOSTICS

O FUTURO DA ALIENAÇÃO E AS POSSIBILIDADES DA SOCIODIAGNÓSTICA

FANÔNICA

Dana Francisco Miranda1

Abstract: The work of the Afro-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon is crucial

to understanding the psychological and socio-political causes of disorder. Drawing upon his corpus,

this article details the radical potential for disalienation located within his sociodiagnostic method

and argues that personal and structural well-being can only be achieved together. This article will

also both psychiatric and phenomenological models of depression as experienced by Africana

people in order to better illuminate the usefulness of sociodiagnostics.

Keywords: psychosocial; disorder; situatedness; depression; dysbeing.

Resumo: O trabalho do psiquiatra e filósofo afro-martinicano Frantz Fanon é crucial para a

compreensão das causas psicológicas e sociopolíticas da desordem. Com base em seu corpus, este

artigo detalha o potencial radical de desalienação localizado em seu método sociodiagnóstico e

argumenta que o bem-estar pessoal e estrutural só podem ser alcançados juntos. Este artigo também

abordará modelos psiquiátricos e fenomenológicos de depressão vivenciados por africanos, a fim

de esclarecer melhor a utilidade dos diagnósticos sociodiagnósticos.

Palavras-chave: psicossocial; desordem; situação; depressão; disfunção

Introduction

There are branches of psychiatry that view psychological symptoms and causes as

endogenous or not attributable to any external or environmental factor. Yet, if psychiatry is the

branch of medicine focused on the proper diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders

then it must be attentive to the particular psychosocial factors that cause maladaptation, even if

these causes lie outside the body. Fortunately, there are psychiatric branches that take seriously

etiological factors that are exogenous and are thus typically categorized as psychosocial or

environmental stressors. For instance, in versions of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of

Mental Disorder, such stressors include social environment problems, educational problems,

occupational problems, housing problems, and economic problems. However, even these models

fail to connect mental disorders to forms of structural oppression, such as antiblack racism.

Moreover, they do not provide a systematic analysis of how alleviating such societal problems

might be integral to the treatment of mental illness.

The work of the Afro-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon is here a

worthy antidote insofar as he was not only opposed to these dehumanizing and alienated forms of

psychiatry, but also offered a situational diagnosis of alienation. In analyzing the brutalities of the

colonial situation, Fanon aimed to not only accurately diagnose such an unhealthy environment, he

also urged his patients to become actional and change the colonial order of Algeria. This

psychological methodology, called “sociodiagnostics,” reveals how racism and colonialism function

as socio-etiological causes of disease requiring both patients and mental health practitioners to

restructure the disordered socio-political arrangements that make such conditions possible.

1.The derelict method

Sociodiagnostics as a psychiatric methodology not only accounts for socio-etiological

causes and the lived-experience of alienation, but also more importantly offers treatment beyond

the psyche. In this respect, sociodiagnostics begins from the premise that one’s psyche is intimately

connected with the environment and therefore both the diagnosis and treatment of disorder

necessarily deals with restructuring unhealthy social conditions. As the literary critic Frederic

Jameson argues, “When a psychic structure is objectively determined by economic and political

relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally

cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political

situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a baleful and crippling residual effect”

(JAMESON, 1986, p. 76). In terms of diagnosis, sociodiagnostics provides clarifications that can

account for general symptoms of Africana subjects, within socio-cultural situations, as well as the

personal idiosyncratic experiences of depression.

Fanon was one of the foremost pioneers of sociodiagnostics in his studies and treatment of

colonial psychopathology. Working at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, Fanon 

found himself treating both perpetrators and victims of colonial violence. As Paul Adams writes,

“During 1954 and 1955, and into 1956, he functioned as a double agent while earning his living at

that post. He was officially and publicly a psychiatrist for the French colonial establishment, but

underground he became ever more deeply involved in the anticolonial struggled led by the Algerian

Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)” (ADAMS, 1970, p. 810). The anticolonial activities that

Fanon found himself enacting were not, however, simply political acts. They can also be read as a

continuation of his psychiatric method. Thus, when Fanon resigned from his post at Blida-Joinville

to work openly with the FLN it was done in the name of enacting or creating the possibility of a

healthy environment in Algeria. As Fanon argues, “my objective, once [the patient’s] motivations

have been brought into consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity)

with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is, toward the social structures” (FANON, 1986,

p. 75). In other words, if racism and colonialism provoke mental disorders, treatment must also be

directed externally to the environment.