Sadler's Lectures

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks - Negrophobia, Nature, And Sexuality

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, psychoanalyst, and social critic Frantz Fanon's work Black Skin, White Masks

It focuses specifically on his discussions bearing on what he calls "Negrophobia", which involves the reduction of black people to nature, to animals, and to their sexuality, on the part of the racist feeling fear, anxiety, or disgust towards them.

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Duration:: 18m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Sadler Lectures Podcast. Responding to popular demand, I'm converting my philosophy videos into sound files you can listen to anywhere you can take an MP3. If you like what you hear and want to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. I hope you enjoy this lecture. In chapter six of his work, "Black Skin, White Mask," which is titled "The Negro and Psychopathology," Franz Fanon is going to be examining what he calls negrophobia, a sort of direction, you could say of anti-Black racism, particularly characterized by fear and other affects that are connected with each other. And the reduction of the Black person, particularly the Black man to nature and to sexuality. And when we look at the things that he has to say, like with much of this work and Fanon's thought in general, the configurations of Black and white, colonized, colonizer, these are in some respect, they're not simply contingent or accidental, but they're not essential either. These sorts of dynamics can be found in many other places as well. And he notes that the sort of structures of exploitation, they wind up being similar wherever you look. And he begins this particular discussion by saying that there's a need for a psychoanalytic interpretation, which is what he's doing in this chapter of two things. The first is a psychoanalytic interpretation of the life experience of the Black man. And then he says a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Negro myth. Now, what does he mean by the Negro myth? Something that is projected out there within the culture made available for individuals to take up as part of their psychic life, probably without even realizing it. And then to use to interpret their relations to other people in particular to Black people. And so he talks about the Negro as a phobogenic object. So, Genesus, the bringing into being phobos is fear. So a fear generating object, a stimulus to anxiety. And he says, you know, there's a lot of discussion in psychoanalysis about the Negro and distrusting the ways in which it might be applied. I prefer to call this chapter the Negro in psychopathology, well aware that other psychoanalysts, Freud, Adler, even the cosmic young did not think of the Negro in all their investigations. And he says, one of the things that we want to keep in mind, particularly when we're thinking in psychoanalytic terms, says it's too often forgotten that neurosis is not a basic element of human reality. Interestingly, if you were to read Freud, only certain works of Freud, you would definitely get the sense that like, hey, we're all neurotics, unless we're psychotics. Now, we don't typically use this term of neurosis anymore in contemporary psychotherapy, except in certain areas. We tend to talk in terms of disorders, but that sort of vocabulary would work just as well. There is this complex that doesn't actually have to be part of the human response to its environment, including the environment of other people. And he has a little interesting thing here about the Atticus complex. He says that like it or not, the Atticus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes. There could be different reasons for this. And this actually echoes something. He brings up Jacques Lacan in this chapter. Lacan himself said, the Atticus complex, not something that is across every culture, systematic. This is something in Western culture, and it may not even be something that applies in every case. And if you read Freud carefully, you see that the goal is not to diagnose the Atticus complex everywhere, but to actually get past the Atticus complex to develop into something more serious. So we can't just, in a cookie cutter way, take psycho analytic concepts and then apply them to this situation. And he talks about something quite interesting here. He says that there is a sensitizing action that takes place when the Negro makes contact with the white world. Because it's not so simple as black people being merely objects for white people in whom all the psychical development is taking place. No, black people are equally people, equally human beings. They have rich inner lives. And those are gonna be characterized by the contact with the dominant culture that has imposed all sorts of ideas, social relations. Those are the things that Fanon is paying attention to. So he says that if the black person's psychic structure is weak, you observe a collapse of the ego. They stop behaving as an action person. The goal of his behavior will be the other in the guise of the white person for the other alone can give worth. And that is on the ethical level self-esteem. But there is something else. And here he comes back to the notion of the phobogenic. What is it to be? Phobogenic in the sense that he is using this term. He says, well, what is phobia? And he answers the question by relying on a definition. Phobia is a neurosis. Once again, we could use the term disorder characterized by what? Anxious fear of an object or in the broadest sense of anything outside the individual or by extension of a situation. So we've got a fairly broad generic definition here. If you are phobic of something, anxious fear, not just rational fear, not just ordinary fear, but a fear that's pervasive and stays with you. And it can be of particular objects or it can be of things that are connected to it that remind you of that object. If you have a rachnophobia, you're afraid of spiders. And it could be like actual spiders crawling around. You're watching movies and, you know, spider crawls across somebody's shoulder and you're like, oh, I hope it doesn't bite them. It's scary, you know, or something like that. But you could also be, you know, walking through a house and there's cobwebs and you're like, ooh, I'm burning the spiders here. I mean, there's cobwebs. Or you could just be like laying in bed and imagining that something crawled over your leg. And instead of saying, oh, that's just a random feeling, you could be like, I bet that's a spider. I better, you know, pull all the covers off and turn the lights on and take a look to make sure there isn't. And so you can have all sorts of possibilities of this. The one that fun one is most interested in is fear of black people and a fear that is rooted at a very basic level. So he says, naturally, the object of the phobia must have certain aspects. It must arouse both fear and revulsion, right? And then he says, you know, how can we make sense of this psychoanalytically? Well, we need to look at the infantile structure that produces the phobic. And here he brings up a very important point. So the choice of phobic object, he says, is over determined. What does he mean by that? He explains, this object does not come at random out of the void of nothingness. In some situation, it is previously evoked an affect in the patient. His phobia is the latent presence of this affect at the root of the world. There is an organization that has been given a form, right? And then he goes on and he says, for the object naturally need not be there, it's enough that somewhere it exists. It is a possibility. It is endowed with evil intentions and with the attributes of a malefic power. And he says that affect has a priority that defies rational thinking. So you learn that the black person is scary and then you don't actually need an actual black person to be afraid of. You can just be afraid of black people in general and have all sorts of things playing out in your head when you see them in media or reporting on the news or you have to go on public transport and mix with people of different races. Pick whatever it is that you want. And what's happening is an entire complex of thoughts and affects is getting implanted or projected out onto things in the world which include other human beings. So he says the phobic is a person governed by the laws of rational pre-logic and affective pre-logic methods of thinking and feeling that go back to the age at which he experienced the event that impaired his security. And then Fanon says the difficulty indicated is here is this. Was there a trauma harmful to security in the case of negrophobic men? Has there been an attempt at rape and attempt at fallatio? And the answer is gonna be there could be some cases where that actually is the case but most of it it's gonna be no. Or if it was, it didn't have anything to do with black people. It just got transposed onto them. It was within the family dynamic or a teacher or pick whoever you want. The trauma isn't necessarily directly tied to the object of the phobia. You have the phobia as a symbol of the trauma if there actually is one. And he says that you've got terror mixed with sexual revulsion. Contact alone is enough to evoke anxiety. Why? Because contact is at the same time the basic schematic type of initiating sexual action. And so he talks about things happening on the phenomenological level. And then he talks about this instance of inversion, right? So what contradictory desires does the neigrophobic person actually have? What's going on in their head or their heart you might say, right? And so he identifies this with the, and this is where we get to the Negro myth as he's gonna call it. The sexual potency of the Negro. And he actually uses a very interesting term here. He talks about hallucination. And he says that this is actually the right term. The sexual potency of the Negro is hallucinating. That's indeed the word. This potency must be hallucinating. Psycho analysts who study the problem soon enough find the mechanisms of every neurosis. Sexual anxiety is predominant here. All the neigrophobic women I have known have had abnormal sex lives. They endowed the Negro with powers that other men did not have and there was an element of perversion, the persistence of infantile formation. So there's a lot of different moving parts going on here. But again, Fanon is making the case that this is really sort of a cultural artifact rather than anything reflected in the nature of things. So he says in this chapter, if we actually want to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, we cannot afford to look away from sexual phenomena. And he says there's this eroticization that's taking place. And he talks about in a number of places the reduction of the Negro to nature, to sexuality. He uses the term genital level a little bit later on. And you know, why? Well, because these stems from a sort of concern about one's own sexuality then projected out onto the other. And he says that, you know, he talks about this in the contrast between Negro phobia and anti-Semitism. The Negro is attacked and feared and even in some cases castrated as a corporeal being as somebody who is there as a body, why? Because they are effectively being reduced to their body or to, as he's gonna say, the biological, right? He says, with the Negro, the cycle of the biological begins. So there's a projection, he says, of desires by the white man onto the Negro man stemming from a sort of insecurity that really has nothing to do ultimately with the black person, but is just taking desires, wishes, that can't be adequately addressed within the overarching dominant white society and projecting them onto somebody else who the culture has set up as a useful target for this. So he says, every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential. The civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual areas of sexual license or geastic scenes on punished rapes, unrepressed, incensed. In one way, these fantasies respond to Freud's life instinct. Projecting his own desires onto the Negro, the white man behaves as if the Negro really had them and he says the Negro ends up being fixated at the genital or at any rate, he has been fixated there, right? The Negro symbolizes the biological danger and he says that Negrophobia means being afraid of the biological because the Negro in culture is reduced to the biological. That's not the real situation, but that is the cultural situation within a racist society. So he goes on and talks about, you know, Senegalese soldiers, this is a little bit harder to relate to, but notice in our own contemporary cultures, some of these ideas that he's gonna bring up. The Negro symbolizes the biological. First of all, he enters puberty at the age of nine and is a father at the age of 10. He's hot blooded, his blood is strong, he is tough. And he's like, I mean, there are some people like that. There's also some white people like that. There's nothing inherent in being black that leads to this like biological vitality as such. That's a cultural construct. And he winds up talking in more philosophical or psychoanalytic terms about how this works. He says the white person is convinced the Negro is a beast, right? It's the sexual potency. And he says face to face with this man who is different from himself, he needs to defend himself. In other words, to personify the other. Now, to personify the other means to give the other, which is a general category, a face, a mask, a persona to use the old fashioned Latin term. And he says this other will become the mainstay of his preoccupations and desires. Now, is this only about men? No, it's also about women too. You know, he goes on immediately to talk about a prostitute who he had mentioned earlier, right? And what is actually going on with this? And he talks about fantasies of rape, of aggression. And he ends up saying that this is an infantile fantasy that stems from childhood and doesn't actually get resolved. And we could look at it psychoanalytically and he does actually provide you with that. And then he says that there's a free-floating aggression that requires an investment. There's something going on in the person's psyche that is not resolved. So what do they do, says this is the age at which the child begins to enter the folklore and the culture along roads that we know. So, given the current configurations, the Negro becomes the predestined repository of this aggression. The aggression is projected out into an other who is there because of the culture. So you've got a myth plus this free-floating aggression. The two of them can come together as a complex. And then he says, if we go farther into the labyrinth, we discover that when a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a Negro, it is in some way the fulfillment of a private dream and inner wish. Accomplishing the phenomenon of turning against self, it is the woman who rapes herself. Now, this isn't to deny that that rapes occur or anything like that. But there's much more going on in the mythology than in the actuality and it's not tied in any real respect to race or stuff like that. It's the person who is trying to make sense of their own screwed up desires. And, you know, this is where most of us are in society, right? This is what psychoanalysis, when it's done right, is supposed to help with, who has externalized that onto another, which then they can fear as merely biological, as a beast, as nature. And so, all of these things come together in a complex that Fanon says, yeah, we can kind of pick this apart and see where it's coming from, which also then affords the possibility of unraveling those threads on the part of people who are stuck in that sort of racist mindset. - Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter @philosfer70 on YouTube at the Gregory B. Sadler channel and on Facebook on the Gregory B. Sadler page. Once again, to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. Above all, keep studying these great philosophical works. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [MUSIC PLAYING]