Black Skin, White Masks

This chapter asks whether Sigmund Freud’s and Alfred Adler’s conclusions about psychopathology can be applied, unmodified, to Antillean patients. Fanon argues that they cannot. For Adler and Freud, neurosis is particular to the individual. In contrast, “the Negro lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic” (148) -- that is, the source of an individual black patient’s neurosis is not to be found in some idiosyncratic experience. Rather, it is to be found in experiences and modes of consciousness shared by black people in an anti-black world; the black neurosis is social in nature. 

The cause of this neurosis is the colonized patient’s contact with the white world: “A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world” (111). The patient need not have had a traumatic experience with whites, such as seeing his father lynched; simply entering the white world is enough.

This is because Antillean children, who think of themselves as Frenchmen, are raised on stories written by and for white Frenchmen in which the black man serves as a scapegoat, a figure onto which French society projects its notions of evil, corruption, and savagery, and onto which it releases its aggression in an act of “collective catharsis” (112).