The Social Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon
PAUL L. ADAMS M.D.1
1 Professor of psychiatry and pediatrics and director of the Children's Mental Health Unit, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla. 32601
Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist, was both concerned with human liberation and committed to a cult of violence. His own life exemplified the lack of gratification in practicing a psychiatry focused on the individual in a social milieu where the glaring ills were not intrapsychic fantasies but real problems of poverty, racism, and colonialism. Fanon's experience in denouncing a bourgeois psychiatry and becoming a revolutionist points up some contrasts with the North American style of social psychiatry.
