Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities

315 Pages·2019·2.552 MB·English

by  Lou Turner (editor), Helen Neville (editor)

Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches
to Clinical Work
Recognizing Frantz Fanon’s remarkable legacy to applied mental health and therapeutic
practices which decolonize, humanize, and empower marginalized populations, this text
serves as a timely call for research, education, and clinical work to establish and further
develop Fanonian approaches and practices.
As the first collection to focus on contemporary clinical applications of Fanon’s research
and practice, this volume adopts a transnational lens through which to capture the global
reach of Fanon’s work. Contributors from Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America offer
nuanced insight into historical and theoretical methods, clinical case studies, and community-
based innovations to place Fanon’s research and practice in context. Organized into four key
areas, including the Historical Significance of Fanon’s Clinical Work; Theory and Fanonian
Praxis; Psychotherapeutic and Community Applications; and Action Research, each section of
the book reflects an impressive diversity of practices around the world, and considers the role
of political and socioeconomic context, structures of gender oppression, racial identities, and
their intersection within those practices.
A unique manifesto to the ground-breaking and immensely relevant work of Frantz Fanon,
this book will be of great interest to graduate and post graduate students, researchers,
academics and professionals in counseling psychology, mental health research, and
psychotherapy.
Lou Turner is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional
Planning, and College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
USA.
Helen A. Neville is Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Department
of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.
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Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues
An Islamic Perspective
G. Hussein Rassool
Africana Peoples in China
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration Experiences, Identity, and Precarious Employment
C. Jama Adams
Perspectives on Intercultural Psychotherapy
An Igbo Group Analyst’s Search for his Social Identity
Okeke Azu-Okeke
Pet Loss, Grief, and Therapeutic Interventions
Practitioners Navigating the Human-Animal Bond
Edited by Lori Kogan & Phyllis Erdman
Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work
Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities
Edited by Lou Turner and Helen A. Neville
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Explorations-in-
Mental-Health/book-series/EXMH
Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic
Approaches to Clinical Work
Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities
Edited by Lou Turner and Helen A. Neville
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Lou Turner and Helen A. Neville to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-61157-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46530-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
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To Mabili and Nadif, and to Ruby, who makes my futures possible, and for all our “rides
on the elephant.”
—Lou Turner
To Lillian and Krisman Neville and Sundiata Cha-Jua for modeling courage and fighting
for the freedom of Black people everywhere.
—Helen A. Neville
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
LOU TURNER
Introduction
LOU TURNER AND HELEN A. NEVILLE
SECTION 1
Fanon’s Clinical Work in Historical Context
1 Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry
CAMILLE ROBCIS
2 “Psychiatry Has to Be Political”: The Préterrain to a New Fanon
LOU TURNER
3 History of the Fanon Research and Development Center in Los Angeles: A Narrative of
Dr. Lewis M. King
LEWIS M. KING, LOU TURNER, AND HELEN A. NEVILLE
SECTION 2
History, Theory and Fanonian Praxis
4 Therapy of/for the Oppressed: Frantz Fanon’s Psychopolitical Pedagogy of
Transformation
ERICA BURMAN
5 The Psychic Life of History: Migration, Critical Ethno-Psychiatry, and the Archives of
the Future
ROBERTO BENEDUCE
SECTION 3
Fanon in Clinical Action: Psychotherapeutic and Community Applications
6 Subversive Healing: Fanon and the Radical Intent of Surviving Torture
HAWTHORNE E. SMITH AND JOSEPH GONKAPIEU GUEU
7 The Ideas of Frantz Fanon and Practices of Cultural Safety With Australia’s First
Peoples
LUKE MOLLOY
8 The Case of K: Looking to Frantz Fanon to Guide Cross-Racial Trauma-Informed
Therapy
MARIA JUDITH VALGOI
9 “When I Was Growing Up, It Was Important to Be Identified as a Revolutionary”: A
Conversation With Community Activist Imani Bazzell
IMANI BAZZELL, HELEN A. NEVILLE, AND LOU TURNER
SECTION 4
Fanonian Research in Action
10 Mending a Crack in the Sky: An Evolving Community Healing Case Study Among
Somali Canadians
NKECHINYELUM A. CHIONESO, MAHAD A. YUSUF, AND SHAMSO M. ELMI
11 Race and Recognition: Pathways to an Affirmative Black Identity
HELEN A. NEVILLE, BRIGITTE VIARD, AND LOU TURNER
List of Contributors
Index
Preface and Acknowledgements
Lou Turner
One of the strategic aims of this collection has been to make the pedagogical case for the
global incorporation of Fanon’s socio-psychotherapy into the curricula of psychology
programs of study for training psychologists and psychiatrists of color, or any student of
psychology, interested in servicing underserved communities of color on the margins of
mental health systems. It is a source of consternation that the response to the search question
“Frantz Fanon” entered into the APA’s DSM 5 search engine comes back “No Matching
Records found.”
To rectify this academic-professional neglect, we have compiled a compelling collection of
work that intersects Fanon’s theoretical discourses and clinical applications. In demonstrating
how they represent cases of Fanonian applications of psychotherapy, the contributions to
Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally
with Marginalized Communities not only illuminate the contours of Frantz Fanon’s
therapeutic practices but the collateral effects of disclosing how seldom his therapeutic
practices have been researched, analyzed, applied, or tested for their therapeutic efficacy or
pedagogical potential. Until this collection of intense texts, Fanon’s unique socio-
psychotherapy existed on the margins of psychological disciplines, curricula, and pedagogy.
Along with clinical papers documenting contemporary Fanonian mental health practices,
Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work is a “mixed-tape” of historical
and theoretical engagements with the revolutionary psychotherapeutic practices of the radical
anti-colonial therapist whom Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the global health journal The
Lancet, calls the originator of the global health paradigm (2018). In that spirit, our aspiration
for Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work is that it provokes sorely
needed discussions of Fanon’s clinical and psychotherapeutic practices in contemporary
research and clinical and therapeutic spheres.
In the course of conceptualizing, collecting, and editing the contributions to this
outstanding body of work, we have incurred the debt of a specific cohort of practitioners and
scholars, beginning with the original set of prospective contributors we approached to
contribute to this text. We were bolstered in our efforts by the immediate agreement of those
we approached to contribute to this book. Even those few who for different reasons having to
do with personal or professional reasons had to withdraw from the project were helpful in
adding their views to the conceptual framework of the project. Whether it was Matthew B.
Johnson, Associate Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City
University of New York, who widely published in the area of interrogation and false
confessions, as well as in other areas involving psychology and law. Saths Cooper, who with
the PAG (Psychology and Apart-heid Group), formed in the mid-1980s by a group of Black
psychologists, was instrumental in leading an academic boycott of organized psychology
because its association with the Psychological Association of South Africa (PASA) failed to
publicly show its abhorrence of apartheid, which produced deleterious consequences for the
Black population’s mental and psychological well-being. Ibrahim Makkawi of Birzeit
University, on the West Bank of Palestine, who researches community psychology and
contributed to the development of a master’s program at Birzeit University in community
psychology. Professor Makkawi traces community psychology on the West Bank back to the
community organizing and grassroots activism of the first Intifada of 1987. Hussein A.
Bulhan, Founder and President/Chancellor of Frantz Fanon University (FFU), Somaliland. FFU
is an academic institution devoted to training a new cadre of professionals and
paraprofessionals whose practice and social commitment follow the example of Frantz Fanon,
while integrating state-of-the-art knowledge and technology with the culture, history, and
beliefs of all individuals and communities served. Dr. Bulhan is a Fanon scholar whose book,
Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985) is still widely read since its publication
almost 30 years ago.
While our greatest debt is to the extraordinary ensemble of scholars, researchers, and
practitioners assembled in this first of its kind Fanonian text, we also want to acknowledge
several key figures whose work and encouragement is reflected in Frantz Fanon’s
Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work. Two seminal Fanon scholars have been of
inestimable value to the trajectory of Lou Turner’s work on Frantz Fanon over the years. Nigel
Gibson (Emerson College) and Robert Bernasconi (Penn State University) provided engaging
venues to present my theoretical research and to engage in invaluable discussions on the latest
Fanon discourse and social movement activities inspired by Frantz Fanon. Conference,
symposia and book opportunities were always forthcoming from Nigel and Robert, such that
their selfless intellectual labors in the service of the work of others has been responsible for
some of the profoundest discourse in Fanon Studies. More than 30 years of generosity of spirit
and serious philosophic engagement in the thought of a revolutionary thinker as fertile as
Fanon’s, naturally, can never be repaid in full. However, for my part (Lou Turner), it is my
hope that the turn that Helen A. Neville and I have taken Fanon Studies in editing this unique
collection of Fanonian practices, research, and theoretical/historical engagements will be
viewed as advancing our collective efforts to recover a “new Frantz Fanon” for a new