The Wretched of The Earth
Page 33
31 This precautionary torture in certain regions becomes “precautionary repression.” At Rivet, for example, although the place was totally calm, the colonists were determined not to be taken by surprise (the neighboring regions had begun to show signs of unrest) and decided to eliminate purely and simply any member of the FLN. Over forty Algerians were killed in a single day.
32 In fact it is not foreign at all. The conflict is nothing more than the result of the changing dynamics of his personality where there is no question of “foreign body.” It would be better defined as being poorly assimilated.
33 We can also mention the case of psychiatrists running the “Présence française” groups who, appointed to examine the prisoner, started off boasting they were great friends with the defense lawyer and claiming both of them (the lawyer and the psychiatrist) would get the prisoner out. All the prisoners examined by this method were guillotined. These psychiatrists boasted in front of us of this neat method of overcoming “resistance.”
34 In the U.S. there is a trend toward social therapy. Supporters of this school believe that the plight of contemporary man lies in the fact that he no longer has a role to play and that he is nothing but a cog in the social mechanism. Social therapy, therefore, allows man to play several roles as part of a genuine recreational activity. Anyone can play any role and even change roles during the course of the day, symbolically substituting for anybody. Occupational therapists in the U.S. apparently achieve miracles in group social therapy among factory workers. The workers are allowed to identify with role models and employer-employee relations are considerably less strained.
35 This term which expresses an idealist notion is being used less and less. The cortico-visceral terminology, in fact a legacy of Soviet research —especially Pavlov—has at least the advantage of putting the brain back in its place, i.e., of considering it the matrix where precisely the psyche is elaborated.
36 The higher one is on the neurological scale, the less one is extrapyramidal. Manifestly everything seems to tally.
37 It is irrelevant to add this is not a case of hysterical contraction.
38 We know for a fact that Islam forbids eating meat from an animal that has not been drained of its blood. This is why the animals have their throats cut.
39 Professor A. Porot, Anuales Médico-Psychologiques, 1918.
40 In the words of a senior magistrate at a court in Algiers this aggressiveness of the Algerian is expressed in his love for “fantasia.” “All this unrest,” he said in 1955, “we’d be wrong to think it was political. From time to time this love they have for knocking themselves about has to come out!” For the anthropologist the elaboration of a series of projective tests and games capable of channeling the overall aggressive instincts of the colonized would have stopped the revolution in the Aurès in 1955–56.
41 J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (World Health Organization).
42 Ibid., p. 157.
43 Ibid., p. 158.
44 It is evident, moreover, that this identification with the image invented by the European was highly ambivalent. The European in fact seemed to be paying an equally ambivalent tribute to the violent, excitable, brutal, jealous, proud, and arrogant Algerian who stakes his life on a detail or a word, etc. Let us mention in passing that in their confrontations with the French from metropolitan France, the Europeans in Algeria increasingly tend to identify with this image of the Algerian in their opposition to the French.
* Translator’s Note: Fanon uses the phrase “peck order” in English in the original text.