Frantz Fanon on Reading and Writing as Social Therapy,“Lines of Force,” and “Higher Acts”

Abstract

Across his clinical career, Frantz Fanon engaged with the theory and practice of institutional psychotherapy (also called social therapy). Social therapy aimed not only to treat individual patients’ psychic suffering but also to critically interrogate and intervene upon the psychiatric asylum’s isolating and hierarchical social organization. Later in his career, Fanon arrives at important critiques of social therapy. However, he never stopped implementing social therapy interventions as the director of psychiatric hospitals in Algeria and Tunisia, including the creation of hospital libraries, reading groups, and patient-run journals. In his own editorial contributions to these journals, Fanon discusses these kinds of collective reading and writing practices as privileged technologies that can be engaged toward both individual and collective disalienation. Upon contextualizing Fanon’s various uses and critiques of social therapy, this article focuses on how Fanon’s editorials in hospital journals posit reading and writing as “higher acts.” Within these editorials, Fanon illuminates how reading and writing practices are uniquely endowed with the ability to disrupt the isolated and isolating nature of inpatient psychiatric care.