The Antiracist Clinic: Political Freudianism and Black Psychoanalysis in the 20th and 21st Centuries

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The proposed project breaks new ground in the history and theory of psychoanalysis by examining a transnational tradition of psychoanalysis that sought to understand and undo the psychosocial roots of anti-Black racism. At its core, this project closely examines together, for the first time, the clinical and theoretical writings of the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), African American psychoanalysts and activists William Grier (1926-2015) and Price Cobbs (1928-2015), and Haitian Canadian analyst and anthropologist Willy Apollon (1937- ). By focusing on their understandings of the gendered forms of racial oppression as they manifest in published case histories and clinical vignettes, I argue that Fanon's, Grier's & Cobbs', and Apollon's insights push contemporary psychosocial theory in new directions and radicalize current public debates about racism and antiracism.Unlike mainstream Freudian theory, Black psychoanalysts of the antiracist clinic practiced in community mental health clinics, and developed innovative theories of anti-Black racism out of their work treating Black/women patients. Accounting for Fanon's, Grier's & Cobbs', and Apollon's combined work not only fills crucial gaps in the history of psychiatry but advances contemporary psychosocialtheory: their analysis of the "psychosomatic" form of racial suffering displaces the very foundations of Freudian social criticism, which are based on the "normal" neurotic's psychic conflicts. Using a cutting-edge method of psychoanalytic case reasoning, I argue that the antiracist clinic illuminates the limits of traditional psychoanalysis-as both a theory and practice-by showing how 1) the psychic suffering of racism has a social cause (i.e., mental illness is political) and that 2) the structural nature of racial violence requires therapeutic interventions that go beyond the medical framework of "health," "normality," and the "individual."