Christopher Chamberlin

Christopher Chamberlin is a Candidate Psychoanalyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. He is also a researcher whose work examines the history and afterlife of racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles, with an emphasis on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon.

Chamberlin is an active member of a number of psychoanalytic organizations based in Berlin, Quebec, and California, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Frantz Fanon occupies a space between psychoanalysis and institutional psychiatry, pledging allegiance to neither but working through both. His brief but explosive career as a writer and practitioner in North African psychiatric hospitals (1953-1960) was marked by a continuous re-purposing of technical concepts from both fields, which today offer fertile moments for gauging the distance between these discourses’ distinct objects and for re-appraising previously dormant lines of inquiry into the logical relations and impasses between human freedom and madness. Can a forensic and speculative examination of these conceptual exchanges give a new sense to the psychopolitical axiom that Fanon recited in his later career: that ‘madness is a pathology of freedom’?

This project explores the mediations between Fanon, psychoanalysis, and institutional psychiatry from three distinct but related angles. First, it proposes revising Fanon’s concept of sociogeny by rooting it in the framework of the ‘social genesis of the personality’ that Jacques Lacan elaborated (but mostly left behind) in his 1932 medical dissertation on paranoid psychosis. Second, it explores how wartime transformations in European ‘area psychiatry’, especially those pioneered by the British psychoanalyst W.R. Bion in his group work with ‘shellshocked’ soldiers, offered Fanon an unexpected template for conceiving the role of psychoanalysis in future mass democracies. Finally, it seeks to clarify the obscure notion of ‘burst transference’ developed by François Tosquelles in his work with psychosis by re-appraising Fanon’s adjacent notions of cathartic or ‘purifying’ violence, which he conceived as clinical and political acts for the liquidation of institutional transferences.

This project examines a transnational tradition of black psychoanalysts who retheorized the human subject through their clinical experience treating the psychic effects of political oppression. At its core, I examine the work of the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), African American psychoanalysts and activists William Grier (1926-2015) and Price Cobbs (1928-2015), and Haitian Canadian analyst and anthropologist Willy Apollon (1937- ). Unlike their Freudian and post-Freudian contemporaries, these analysts of the ‘antiracist clinic’ practiced in institutional settings – hospitals and community clinics – and advanced new metapsychologies by reconceptualizing the link between ‘madness’ (or psychosis) and the repression of blackness and femininity.

Accounting for Fanon’s, Grier’s & Cobbs’, and Apollon’s combined work not only fills crucial gaps in the history of psychiatry but advances contemporary critical and psychosocial theory: their analysis of ‘psychosomatic’ symptoms and ‘untreatable’ psychic structures displaces the foundations of Freudian social criticism, based as they are on the ‘normal’ neurotic’s conflicts with the cultural milieu. I argue that the antiracist clinic reinvents psychoanalysis — as both a theory and practice — by rethinking the social and historical determinants of psychic suffering (i.e., how mental illness is political) and by demonstrating how the structural nature of racial and gender violence requires ‘therapeutic’ interventions that go beyond the medical framework of ‘health’, ‘normality’, and the ‘individual’.

The project develops a critique of the libidinal economy of antiblackness in light of the history of the clinical discourses on racism—from the denunciation of ‘negrophobia’ in 19th century abolitionist writing to the psychoanalysis of racial hatred in 20th century clinical literature. How does the analysis of the subject of the unconscious, as distinct from the subject of political representation, account for the morbid resilience of antiblackness? At its core, this project closely reads a heretofore-unexamined set of clinical case histories — published by Freudian practitioners during the American Civil Rights Era (1947–1971) — that sought (and invariably failed) to isolate the personal and political determinants of their patients’ violent attachments to racial blackness.

The Subject of Racism critiques the reduction of racism to an Oedipal structure and draws on feminist contributions to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as interim developments in clinical methodology, to reinterpret the clinical literature and reanimate its insights. Going beyond the critique of identity politics, this project argues that the production and social organization of symptoms—the senseless and idiosyncratic ways that blackness is enjoyed—compels the libidinal investment in racial hierarchy. The jouissance of antiblackness constitutes a scandal to contemporary biopower.