In traditional Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, as Frantz Fanon describes it in his book Black Skin, White Masks, fantasy and trauma reference the infantile experiences and psyches of individual subjects. However, Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on the origins and possibilities of transmission of trauma and fantasy can hardly be so neatly encapsulated, and, in fact, Fanon’s writings on psychoanalysis and race—in that he argues that racism and colonialism operate not just at the level of economics and power, but also at the level of cultural fantasy—in many ways build on Freud’s work, even as Fanon sought to diverge from the Freudian tradition. But while Fanon’s theories of the origin and transmission of trauma may not have as radically diverged from Freud as Fanon often claimed, perhaps Fanon’s greatest intervention in psychoanalytic thought was his focus on the psychical reality of race and his contention that all subjects in a racialized colonial context—black or white, colonized or colonizer—are constituted in and through cultural fantasies of race.

Fanon, a colonial psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary figure, theorizes in Black Skin that certain subjects enter into culture as stereotypes, as already “overdetermined” phobic objects in representation (155). As a black man, Fanon writes, he finds himself continually trapped by preconceived images and ideas of blackness that permeate his society. He argues that the Black (or “Nègre,” in the original French) “is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety” (151). As a phobic object—a person caught in the bind of racial/racist fantasies and stereotypes—the black man (for Fanon specific about speaking about the experiences of men) enters the cultural sphere as a predetermined repository for cultural aggression and violence.

Continually dissecting the trope of blackness in Black Skin, Fanon explores the ways phobic fantasies and stereotypes engender material and psychic violence, focusing extensively on theorizing the neuroses (psychical illnesses) that arise from living in a racist society. Stuart Hall claims that Fanon’s work in this regard is crucial, in that “an account of racism which has no purchase on the inner landscape and the unconscious mechanisms of its effects is, at best, only half of the story” (Hall 17). Hall looks to Fanon, especially Black Skin, to begin to construct an account of the unconscious mechanisms and effects of racism in contemporary culture. In this chapter, I interpret Fanon’s writings on violence and trauma in the colonial sphere as an argument for the necessity of a theory of cultural fantasy in psychoanalysis, and I contend that such a theory is crucial to an understanding the work of racism in “the inner landscape” of the psyche.

Works Cited

• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
• Hall, Stuart. "The Afterlife of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Ed. Alan Read. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. 12-37.