Racism, Psychosis, and a West African Practice of Psychoanalysis in 1960s Paris

In the early 1960s, a group of West African psychoanalysts clinically engaged with the situation of African migrants in Paris. In the process, the group thought about subject formation in new ways, pointing out the salience of racist hostility for subject formation. With this, the paper argues, the group represents a crucial link to posit decolonization as an analytic frame for the 1960s’ avalanche of experiments in subject-formation.

Mischa Suter teaches history at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland and is currently a fellow at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies. He is writing a history of psychoanalysis between West Africa and Western Europe in the sixties. Retracing experiments with the talking cure in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, France, and Switzerland, he studies the political and epistemological challenges decolonization posed for European understandings of subject formation. Previous research has dealt with the question of what a cultural history of economic life might look like. His work has been published in English, German, French, and Chinese.

Readings
Ortigues, Marie-Cécile, and Edmond Ortigues. Oedipe africain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1966.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Suter, Mischa. “Pathologien der Freiheit: Fanon und die Psychiatrie.” Soziopolis (2021).

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