Black Skin, White Masks

This chapter is a critical response to Octave Mannoni’s “dangerous” (6) psychoanalytic study of colonizer and colonized, Prospero and Caliban: the Psychology of Colonization (1950). Mannoni’s premise is that the encounter between colonizer and indigenous population creates a unique situation that is best understood via psychoanalysis. Fanon shares this basic assumption and praises elements of Mannoni’s method and analysis. However, he argues that Mannoni has failed to take his own premise -- that the colonial situation produces psychological features distinct from those that characterized pre-contact societies -- seriously enough: “What M. Mannoni has forgotten is that the Malagasy alone no longer exists; he has forgotten that the Malagasy exists with the European. The arrival of the white man in Madagascar shattered not only its horizons but its psychological mechanisms” (72).

Mannoni attributes a “dependency complex” to colonized peoples: they are content to submit to Europeans because they have a deep-seated psychological need to depend upon others. According to Mannoni, colonization did not produce the dependency complex; the complex led to colonization: “Not all peoples can be colonized; only those who experience this need” (73). If a colonized subject does not embrace dependence, he develops an inferiority complex: “To the extent to which M.