Thesis ID: CBB001562410

Action Psychologique: French Psychiatry in Colonial North Africa, 1900--1962 (2001)

unapi

Keller, Richard Charles (Author)


Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Smith, Bonnie G.


Publication Date: 2001
Edition Details: Advisor: Smith, Bonnie G.
Physical Details: 370 pp.
Language: English

After 1900, French psychiatrists honed their discipline's cutting edge in the Maghreb, not in Paris. When German psychiatric innovations overshadowed French accomplishments, French doctors saw the colonies as an experimental space for rejuvenating their profession. Unlike metropolitan practitioners, colonial psychiatrists embraced new strategies for managing insanity as they produced medical and social knowledge about North Africans. But these achievements reveal an ambivalent history, where doctors' contributions to colonial rule counterbalanced therapeutic progress. Modern facilities improved patients' conditions, but the institutional structures of colonial psychiatry facilitated the production of politically charged knowledge that undermined the benevolent image of colonial medicine. This dissertation narrates the development of psychiatric theories, institutions, and practices in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Legal, ethnographic, literary, and medical documents expose the relationship between French psychiatry's renewal in the colonies and the dehumanization of North African Muslims. Psychiatric reformers mingled professional and humanitarian motives as they proposed the liberation of indigenous patients from what they considered barbaric medical traditions. With their mental hygiene and outpatient services, the new institutions that opened across North Africa in the 1930s departed drastically from the European asilary tradition and signaled French psychiatry's entrance into new domains. Innovation took a grisly turn, however, as chronic patients inundated the new hospitals. Radical somatic procedures offered risky but cost-effective means for easing caseloads, and the contrast between such methods and traditional practices reveals an implicit breach in the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The most significant innovation that colonial institutions brought to the profession was the development of an ethnopsychiatric sub-discipline. Far from neutral, knowledge about North Africans' "primitive mentalities" encouraged educational, judicial, and professional discrimination against colonial subjects. Declassified military papers show that psychiatric research also provided the scientific background for the French army's psychological warfare campaigns during the 1950s. This knowledge met with intense resistance, however: the project concludes with an analysis of reactions against French ethnopsychiatry that places revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon in an anti-psychiatric tradition that spanned the twentieth-century Maghreb.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 3529. UMI order no. 3027986.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562410/

Similar Citations

Article Keller, Richard C.; (2005)
Pinel in the Maghreb: Liberation, Confinement, and Psychiatric Reform in French North Africa (/isis/citation/CBB000620000/)

Article Clark, Hannah-Louise; (2013)
Civilization and Syphilization: A Doctor and His Disease in Colonial Morocco (/isis/citation/CBB001252858/)

Book Keller, Richard C.; (2007)
Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (/isis/citation/CBB000772376/)

Article Marianna Scarfone; (2021)
‘Psychosis of civilization’: a colonial-situated diagnosis (/isis/citation/CBB368791802/)

Thesis Dodman, Thomas W.; (2011)
Homesick Epoch: Dying of Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary France (/isis/citation/CBB001567271/)

Article Osborne, Michael A.; (2000)
Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science (/isis/citation/CBB000671219/)

Article Lorcin, Patricia M. E.; (1999)
Imperialism, Colonial Identity, and Race in Algeria, 1830-1876: The Role of the French Medical Corps (/isis/citation/CBB000111788/)

Article Deprest, Florence; (2011)
Using the Concept of Genre de Vie: French Geographers and Colonial Algeria, c. 1880--1949 (/isis/citation/CBB001034142/)

Book Macey, David; (2001)
Frantz Fannon: A Biography (/isis/citation/CBB000630094/)

Essay Review Gallagher, Nancy; (2012)
Medicine and Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa (/isis/citation/CBB001566255/)

Authors & Contributors
Keller, Richard Charles
Clark, Hannah-Louise
Éric Gobe
Greenfield, Jerome
Scarfone, Marianna
Dodman, Thomas W.
Concepts
Colonialism
France, colonies
Medicine
Psychiatry
Geography
Imperialism
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
18th century
Places
Algeria
France
North Africa
Morocco
Tunisia
Levant and Near East
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment