Frantz Fanon’s
Social Therapy

The symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ‘To Give Body to an Institution’ explores Frantz Fanon’s political, clinical, and aesthetic approach to institutions along three interrelated lines. First, it delves into the impact of Saint-Alban on Fanon’s conception of madness and the institution as both in need of a cure and capable of curing — a sociogenic and phenomenological perspective attentive to embodiment, subjectivity, and history. Second, it turns to his work at Blida-Joinville and Charles-Nicolle, where colonial alienation thwarted the implementation of social therapy, yet where Fanon and his collaborators experimented with media, spatial, and aesthetic practices to propose new forms of collective life. Finally, it considers the legacies of Fanon’s clinical practice, tracing how his insights into the entanglement of psychiatry, politics, and colonial violence continue to inform contemporary understandings of trauma, resistance, and institutional life in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts.

In the 1955 editorial of Notre Journal — the intra-hospital newspaper published by patients and staff of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria — Fanon confronts the question of the institution and the dangers of its vitiation: ‘Does not every attempt to give body to an institution [donner corps à l’institution] risk taking directions that are fundamentally opposed to the open, fecund, global and nevertheless qualified character of the institution?’ His answer unfolds, tracing an embodied idea of the institution: ‘You have to place yourself at the heart of the institution and interrogate it.’ For it is the entangled social and material sensorium that mediates the institution’s therapeutic efficacy. Fanon’s emphasis on the constant reactivation of the institution from within — as a social body, a ‘movement’ that fosters ‘interminable and fruitful encounters’ — points to the transmission of experience from the Saint-Alban clinic in the French Lozère to Blida-Joinville. In the 1940s, the Catalan psychiatrist, anarcho-syndicalist Francesc Tosquelles prompted, in a collective effort, to transform the psychiatric hospital into a ‘place of exchange’. Institutional psychotherapy integrated psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Gestalt psychology in its practice, aiming first at curing the institution — its ‘milieu’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘ambience’ — before any individual treatment. In Tosquelles’s words, its process entailed a ‘disalienation of the total fact of madness: the sick person, the asylum, and the psychiatrist at once’. Saint-Alban became the point of departure for an environmental approach to the cure, a géo-psychiatrie fostering ‘migrant work’ and opening the clinic to its social and human geography. Between studying medicine in Lyon and his psychiatric work in Algeria and Tunisia, Fanon worked at Saint-Alban (1952–1953) together with Tosquelles. This experience shaped Fanon’s psychiatric approach and his understanding of the institution as an ‘experimental milieu’. Instituting such a milieu meant actively engaging both patients and staff through social therapy, film, and media practices, all designed to work in concert with medical treatment.