In “Series B,” Fanon collects cases with less direct causes. The violence of war, and the feeling of disempowerment within it, leads some men to want to assert their power at home. In one case, a European police officer develops uncontrolled violent urges, even torturing his wife and children. Colonists are not immune from these disorders either. In another case, a 37-year-old witnessed a massacre of his village and, as a reaction, developed homicidal impulses of his own. For instance, after one Algerian man witnessed the rape of his wife, he become incapable of sexual arousal himself. He divides these cases into four different groups, or “series.” In “Series A,” he considers “reaction disorders.” This is when people develop a disorder in direct response to a specific traumatic event. If colonialism is maintained by violence, then perhaps those under colonialism will have similar disorders.Īfter this theoretical introduction, Fanon turns to actual case studies he has observed in his capacity as a psychiatrist in Algeria from 1954 to 1959. Soldiers who witnessed destruction as well as “civilian refugees and bombing victims” displayed a number of disorders. Here, Fanon notes that, after WWI and WWII, psychologists observed an upsurge in disorders we would now identify as something like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Another source of disturbance can be from the violence the colonized and colonist witness or perpetuate.

From this a number of psychological disturbances can follow. Philosophically, he notes the effect dehumanization has on how the colonized conceptualize something like “reality”: “Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’” In other words, because colonialism constantly denies that the colonized are fully human, the colonized also asks if they truly are what they think they are (i.e., human beings). In this chapter, he goes further in discussing the great variety of psychological disturbances the colonized can experience, and he also discusses how colonialism psychologically damages the colonists, too.įanon begins with a general and more theoretical discussion of possible sources of psychological disturbance. He also talked about how colonialism represses men’s “muscular power,” their violent desire for freedom. Fanon foreshadowed this line of inquiry in Chapter 1, where he argues that the colonist creates the identities of colonist and colonized, and in turn instills in the colonized an entire subjectivity of submission and inferiority. In this final chapter, Fanon turns to the psychology of colonialism-more specifically, the kinds of psychological disorder colonialism produces.

The wretched of the earth on violence