38 pages • 1 hour read
Frantz FanonBlack Skin, White Masks
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6: "The Negro and Psychopathology"
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). The black man is coded as evil, while the white man represents civilization and goodness. “There is identification -- that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression” (114) -- an aggression that is symbolically directed toward the black man. Thus, black people internalize the anti-black views of the colonizer.
It is only his entrance into the white world (for example, when he travels to France to complete his education), that the Antillean becomes aware of his own blackness. From then on, the individual who desires to be and sees himself as good and civilized struggles with his own image: “As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro” (153). In order to embrace civilization and morality, he must embrace whiteness and reject blackness -- that is, himself, his family, and his community.
This encounter is the source of black psychopathology: “if his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego” (119). The black patient loses his self-esteem and begins to act only for the purpose of gaining the approval of The Other (the white man) who can give him worth. The white man has his neurosis as well; because the black man has been cast as a scapegoat, the black man is a “phobogenic object” (117) -- an object of horror and revulsion. In particular, because blacks are symbolically identified with the [merely] biological, and in particular with the phallus, the black man evokes white sexual anxiety. Thus, the racist symbology that is inscribed in Western culture on every level is unhealthy for black and white alike. Fanon suggests that it is possible for the races to coexist in a healthy way only to the extent that it is possible to reject the category of race altogether; while this may sound utopian, Fanon’s suggestions for dismantling racism include pragmatic measures such as creating stories for black children that do not employ the “Negro scapegoat” and ending the exploitation of blacks by “a colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white” (157).
Chapter 7: "The Negro and Recognition"
In this chapter, Fanon responds critically to Adler’s and Hegel’s canonical accounts of recognition. He argues that both make claims that do not apply to the black subject.
Fanon’s fundamental criticism of Adler’s psychology is that it is a psychology of the individual, and does not apply to the Antillean, whose psychopathology is fundamentally social in nature. Adler describes neurosis and its symptoms as projections of some “final goa [of the individual]” (163); however incomprehensible the patient’s ideas and behavior may seem, once the analyst knows this goal, the patient becomes legible. Neurosis is an essentially individual affair and the clue to understanding the neurosis lies within the patient himself.
According to Fanon, the source of the Antillean’s neurosis must be sought in his social environment. Fanon describes the black man as “comparison” (163), as being wholly contingent in relation to The Other. That is, the black man does not exist as a self-sufficient atom; because of his inferiority complex, he cannot provide his own self-validation. Validation can only come from outside him; therefore, he always exists in relation to The Other, to whom he compares himself.
Adler does have a theory of comparison, but his notion is of comparison between oneself and a second, more powerful figure, such as the father, the leader, or God. In contrast, Fanon states that the Antillean compares himself to his fellow Antillean in terms of who has more closely approximated the ideal determined by a third figure, the white man. “[The Antillean comparison’s] governing fiction is not personal but social” (168).
Let us turn to Fanon’s discussion of Hegel. According to Hegel’s account in The Phenomenology of Mind, full self-consciousness is possible only by means of recognition by another. Fanon elucidates Hegel’s view: “Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions” (169). This recognition is by nature reciprocal; everyone needs to secure the recognition of the other, so everyone also needs to grant it. This reciprocity implies an equal status.
Fanon argues that this sort of recognition has not occurred between black and white. At the moment of emancipation, the white master decided to recognize the black slave; however, this act of recognition does not lead to the former slave’s full self-consciousness. This is because it is not reciprocal; for full self-consciousness to develop, each side has to recognize the other, and then recognize itself as recognizing the other. Because the black man did not fight for his freedom, he did not demand and secure recognition from the white man. For this reason, Fanon says, rather than recognizing one another on equal terms, black and white people remain within the interpersonal framework established by slavery: “The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master. The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table” (171). The black man has yet to achieve full self-consciousness.
According to Fanon, French blacks are in the unfortunate position of having no overt opportunities to demand recognition from the white man; unlike in the US, there is no ongoing civil rights struggle. Rather, the subterranean nature of French racism creates an unbearable situation in which there is no open conflict that can serve as the ground on which the black man demands recognition.
Chapter 8 Summary: "By Way of Conclusion"
Fanon summarizes his main aims and conclusions: “I have ceaselessly striven to show the Negro that in a sense he makes himself abnormal; to show the white man that he is at once the perpetrator and the victim of a delusion” (175). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to Fanon’s stance toward the past, his vision of the future, and his ideas about how a world without racialized social structures and their accompanying psychopathologies might be achieved.
Concerning the past, Fanon states clearly that it cannot guide the present. While some black thinkers have sought to establish their humanity by rediscovering the black civilizations of antiquity, Fanon distances himself from such approaches and those who identify themselves only with the history of their race: “I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo” (176).
For Fanon, letting go of the past, and of the racist structures of the present, is the only way to achieve psychological well-being: “Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive” (176). For Fanon, it is crucial to look forward rather than backward.
In this final chapter, Fanon embraces the individual's agency and radical freedom from history: "I am my own foundation" (180). He seems to envision a future in which race is no longer a salient concept, and people relate on a fully equal, purely individual and authentic basis: "Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?" (181). That said, Fanon does not think that this future will simply come about, nor that books and therapy are all that are needed to achieve it: "I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality. For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation at Le Rober, there is only one solution: to fight" (174). Thus, psychoanalysis in general, and Black Skin, White Masks in particular, is not intended to replace or obviate revolution or the struggle for full social and political equality. Rather, these very disparate ways of responding to the colonial situation are best thought of as many tools serving a single goal.
Chapter 6-8 Analysis
Understanding Chapter 6 requires understanding the racial/national hierarchy in place in Fanon's milieu. Antilleans did not think of themselves as "Negroes"; they were French citizens, "called on at all times to live with white compatriots" (115) and thought of themselves as such: "The Antillean does not think of himself as a black man; he thinks of himself as an Antillean. The Negro lives in Africa" (114). (In its treatment of this subject, Chapter 6 hearkens back to Chapter 1, in which we saw that mastery of French confers whiteness on the Antillean subject.)
For Fanon, this is the root of black psychopathology: he has subconsciously identified himself with the white man, and has identified blackness with evil, sin, intellectual inferiority, and savagery. When he makes contact with the white world – for instance, when he goes to France to complete his education, as any upwardly-mobile French citizen ought – he must confront the fact that he is black. This confrontation is the origin of his abnormalities. He must now reconcile his own self-image with what Fanon calls elsewhere the "racial-epidermal schema" imposed from without.
Fanon implicates what we would now call a lack of positive representation of black people in media as the cause of black people's deeply ingrained anti-black attitudes. He makes a suggestion that sounds quite familiar to modern readers: "I should like nothing more nor less than the establishment of children's magazines especially for Negroes, the creation of songs for Negro children, and, ultimately, the publication of history texts especially for them […] I believe that if there is a traumatism it occurs during those years" (115).
Fanon's critique of Adler in Chapter 7 demonstrates that the black subject's neurosis is not individual; it is social. If something has a social origin, it is connected with the individual's experience of others. In order to understand exactly what has gone wrong, Fanon turns to one of the Western canon's richest and most complex accounts of the relationship between self and other: Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Although he does not state this conclusion explicitly, the implication of his discussion appears to be that the black man cannot be cured of his neuroses until he secures recognition from the white man. Some sort of demand needs to be made. Fanon's discussion of the differences between the United States (where the existence of Jim Crow laws provided a ground on which to demand recognition) and France (where there was no such obvious ground for making this demand) ends in an impasse. It is unclear how exactly the black French subject ought to demand recognition, but he must do so in order to achieve full self-consciousness.
Chapter 8 is the focus of some interpretative controversy, as scholars disagree about how seriously to take the universal humanism Fanon expresses here. Some contend that this universal humanism commits Fanon to rejecting the notion of race (and, therefore, the categories of black and white) completely; others argue that the relatively few pages he spends promoting this view ought not to dominate our interpretation of Black Skin, White Masks as a whole, and that Fanon merely meant that we should strive to create a future in which racial categories are no longer relevant because racist social structures have been eliminated.
In any case, we see Fanon expressing views to which the Sartre of "Black Orpheus" would have been sympathetic: “Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color” (176). As Fanon wrote in Chapter 5, Sartre was probably right in his assertion that Négritude would eventually fade, replaced by a solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the world, but the moment for this assimilation had not yet arrived. Black Skin, White Masks ends on a positive note, but one that makes clear that a great deal of difficult work must be done before the future Fanon describes can be achieved.
