Those who claimed Fanon for antipsychiatry distorted his classical Freudian psychiatry
Evidence
Fanon’s take-up has been uneven, to the point of lopsided. His work was initially embraced enthusiastically by the student and countercultural left in the 1960s as part of their general anticolonialism. Once African independence came and brought civil wars and a whole lot of other complications in its aftermath, many of this generation turned towards more home-grown interests and pursuits: green politics, feminism, and finally, of course, postmodernism. The antipsychiatry movement, strong in both France and Italy, and linked to the libertarian left, claimed Fanon as one of its chief inspirations in the struggle to de-institutionalize mental health care, close the asylums, and end compulsory medication and ECT treatments. But the romantic view of madness - and more especially schizophrenia - as a metaphor for capitalist alienation, the attempt to portray the schizophrenic as a poet or revolutionary manque, which came to be associated with antipsychiatry through the work of R. D. Laing (e.g., 1959) and David Cooper, (e.g., 1971), would have horrified Fanon who not only accepted the classical Freudian distinction between neurosis and psychosis, but as we’ve seen equated both with political false consciousness. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1349
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to how intellectual movements appropriate and distort canonical figures - parallels to how Foucault, Nietzsche, and Marx have each been claimed by movements that betray their actual positions.
Related
- Antipsychiatry romanticizing of madness would have horrified Fanon, who kept the neurosis-psychosis distinction (similarity 0.94)
- Scholarly Fanon studies remain celebratory rather than critically advancing his thought (similarity 0.80)
- Psychoanalysis ignored Fanon partly because he lacked clinical and theoretical innovation (similarity 0.78)