Neurotic Situations: A Critical Dialogue between Freud and Fanon

Abstract

This essay facilitates a critical dialogue between Freud’s early “cathartic method” and Fanon’s notion of a “neurotic situation.” Although Fanon does not explicitly develop this concept as a counterpoint to the Freudian understanding of neurosis, we can nevertheless glean from his work a robust understanding of the kind of psycho-political suffering it designates. To be in a “neurotic situation,” I argue, is to experience neurotic symptoms that are idiosyncratic to oneself and yet also a reflection of social and political structures of oppression that affect all members of an oppressed group. It is a situation that contains both idiosyncratic psychic disturbance and non-idiosyncratic political truth. As such, addressing a neurotic situation requires overcoming the strict separation between therapy and consciousness-raising that some activists espouse. Specifically, in a neurotic situation, therapy and emancipatory consciousness-raising come to shape and condition each other’s objectives: an emancipatory consciousness becomes a condition for the therapeutic alleviation of neurotic symptoms, and therapeutic relief for neurotic symptoms becomes part of what it is like to attain an emancipatory consciousness in a neurotic situation.

In 1973, when Kathie Sarachild, cofounder of the first feminist consciousness-raising (FCR) groups, spoke at a feminist conference in New York City, she was adamant that the purpose of FCR was “not to give someone a chance to get something off her chest” (1979, 148). With this, she and other radical feminists expressed a deep anxiety about distinguishing the radical political ethos of FCR from what they perceived as “merely” therapy. The gulf between feminism and therapy, they insisted, was—and had to be—insurmountable: “Therapy assumes that someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up!” (Hanisch 1969, n.p.).

In practice, however, FCR clearly resembled talk therapy in many of its aims and methods—such as “recalling and sharing our bitter experiences,” “expressing our feelings about our experiences both at the time they occurred and at present,” and “evaluating our feelings” (Sarachild 1970, 79). Even in the eyes of those feminists who dismissed therapy as reactionary, the therapeutic effects of FCR were undeniable: “The most important is getting rid of self-blame. . . . We are only starting to stop blaming ourselves. We also feel like we are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our lives. As the cartoon in Lilith puts it, I’m changing. My mind is growing muscles” (Hanisch 1969, n.p.). But even on this formulation, the “therapeutic” is at best a beneficial side effect of FCR. Hanisch’s concession that FCR has therapeutic effects is not a departure from the radical feminist disavowal of therapy but a further reduction of the “therapeutic” to a mere epiphenomenon of FCR.

While U.S. radical feminists sought to downplay the “therapeutic” dimension of FCR, my aim in this paper is to propose a different way of thinking about the relationship between therapy and consciousness-raising. In contrast to Hanisch and Sarachild, who were concerned that the radical political ethos of FCR might be subsumed under a reductive psychological narrative of “therapy,” I want to formulate a conception of therapy that can serve as a political tool in the struggle against patriarchy, racism, and other forms of oppression. While it might be true that certain kinds of therapy are too narrowly focused on “getting things off your chest,” ¹ not all forms of therapy understand their aim to be “emotional discharge.” If we understand therapy, instead, as a practice aimed at facilitating greater emotional responsiveness to the world, then an emancipatory political consciousness becomes more closely intertwined with a therapeutic concern for psychic suffering than either Hanisch or Sarachild wanted to allow.

My conceptual anchor in this endeavor is Frantz Fanon’s notion of a “neurotic situation.” Although Fanon does not explicitly develop this concept as a counterpoint to the Freudian understanding of neurosis, we can nevertheless glean from his work, in Black Skin, White Masks and elsewhere, a robust understanding of the kind of psycho-political suffering it designates. To be in a “neurotic situation,” as I will show later, is to experience neurotic symptoms that are idiosyncratic to oneself and yet also a reflection of social and political structures of oppression that affect all members of an oppressed group. It is a situation that contains both idiosyncratic psychic disturbance and non-idiosyncratic political truth. As such, addressing a neurotic situation requires overcoming the strict separation between therapy and consciousness-raising that Hanisch and Sarachild espouse.

I will contextualize the radical feminist critique of therapy in the first part of this paper, rejecting the view of therapy as emotional “discharge.” In the second part of this paper, I will develop Fanon’s concept of a “neurotic situation” and link it to the idea of therapy as being concerned with the cultivation of emotional responsiveness to the world. If we understand therapy in this way, then the therapeutic trajectory will, under certain conditions, become thoroughly intertwined with the aims of political consciousness-raising. More specifically, in a neurotic situation, therapy and emancipatory consciousness-raising come to shape and condition each other’s objectives: an emancipatory consciousness becomes a condition for the therapeutic alleviation of neurotic symptoms, and therapeutic relief for neurotic symptoms becomes part of what it is like to attain an emancipatory consciousness in a neurotic situation.

Therapy Beyond Emotional “Discharge”

Carol Hanisch coined the now well-known slogan “the personal is political” in the same 1969 essay in which she also formulated her antitherapy stance. This was no coincidence but a direct response to the political environment within which FCR sought to stake its claim. Indeed, when radical feminists first declared that “the personal is political,” other revolutionary groups remained convinced that attending to personal experiences could never amount to much more than therapy (see Echols 2019, 87). To label FCR as “merely” therapy was an effective means to both discredit its counter-hegemonic credentials, as well as to re-entrench a hegemonic notion of the “political” that did not include ostensibly “private” domains, like the family, marriage, or sexuality—precisely those topics around which FCR sessions revolved.

Hanisch and Sarachild responded to these criticisms of FCR by echoing, rather than challenging, the left-wing disavowal of therapy as reactionary. Sharing personal experiences and feelings in the context of FCR, they argued, belonged squarely within the realm of revolutionary politics and action—not therapy. From its inception, therefore, the feminist challenge to the personal versus political dichotomy was predicated on upholding another kind of dichotomy: between a feminist politicization of the personal on the one hand and a therapeutic, “nonpolitical” approach to personal issues on the other. Politicizing the personal was a legitimate feminist strategy; doing therapy was not.

In insisting that FCR was not about “getting things off your chest,” Sarachild could appeal to our intuitions about “catharsis,” the Aristotelian idea that we can get rid of negative emotions by “discharging” or “purifying” them. ² Like “crying oneself out” or “blowing off steam,” “getting things off your chest” suggests that we can relieve ourselves of negative emotions by expressing them, in words, tears, or otherwise. These narratives of emotional discharge or “cathartic” release have a powerful hold on our intuitions about therapy because they allow us to make sense of the relief that we sometimes feel after a good cry or intensive chat.

Rendered in this way, therapy is indeed antithetical to a feminist project of harnessing women’s emotions for counter-hegemonic theory and action. From the point of view of counter-hegemonic political struggle, “discharge” signifies as an “unproductive” release of emotions, a “wasteful expenditure” of emotional energy:

The purpose of hearing people’s feelings and experience was not therapy, was not to give someone a chance to get something off her chest . . . the importance of listening to a woman’s feelings was collectively to analyze the situation of women, not to analyze her. The idea was not to change women, not to make “internal” changes except in the sense of knowing more. It was and is the conditions women face, it’s male supremacy, we want to change. (Sarachild 1979, 149)

But despite insisting here on a firm separation between “internal” and “external” change, in Sarachild’s earlier “Program for Feminist Consciousness-Raising,” FCR and therapy were not as clearly demarcated as she later made them out to be. FCR, she wrote then, does require women to change internally: it requires overcoming “classic forms of resisting consciousness,” such as “repressions and delusions” (Sarachild 1970, 79), but also “romantic fantasies, utopian thinking and other forms of confusing present reality with what one wishes reality to be,” “glorification of the oppressor,” and “self-blame” (ibid.). She also acknowledged that this would not be an easy task, as there are complex emotional reasons for resisting feminist consciousness: “fear of feeling the full weight of one’s painful situation,” “fear of feeling one’s past wasted and meaningless,” and “fear of despair for the future” (ibid.).

As a strategy for overcoming these fears, Sarachild insisted on the need to analyze “which fears are valid and which invalid” (ibid.), to examine whether and to what extent these fears were justified, given women’s social and political condition. FCR wanted to get women to a point where they could “perceive their situation correctly” (ibid.). This required a certain kind of emotional responsiveness to the world—the ability to understand that at least some of my emotional responses are not about myself or my immediate environment but are reflective of my social and political oppression. In the remainder of this section, I argue that therapy is not concerned with facilitating emotional “discharge” but with cultivating a kind of emotional responsiveness more compatible with Sarachild’s initial understanding of FCR than either she or Hanisch would go on to acknowledge in their later work.

For this, I turn to Freud’s early psychoanalytic work. I do this not because I want to demand from the reader full allegiance to (Freudian) psychoanalysis but because in the Studies in Hysteria Freud and Breuer laid the groundwork for exploring the link between psychic suffering and a lack of emotional responsiveness. Although Freud’s early “cathartic method” appears, at first glance, to be exactly the kind of therapy that Hanisch and Sarachild would disavow as a politically unproductive expenditure of emotional energy, I want to read Studies in Hysteria for what it reveals about the therapeutic effects of being emotionally responsive. Following Lear (1990), this requires reading Freud against his own understanding of his and Breuer’s “cathartic method.” I reconstruct Lear’s rereading of Freud as much as it is useful for my own argument before returning to the question of FCR’s relationship to therapy.

Lear’s central point is that Freud’s “cathartic method” cannot be understood in terms of emotional “discharge”—despite his and Breuer’s (2004) own attempts to make sense of their therapeutic method in precisely these terms: as a practice of emotional “chimney-sweeping” (34), of “talking the pain away” (Freud 2004, 152). Lear shows that these narratives of “discharge”—or, as Freud put it, “abreaction”—cannot explain the actual therapeutic trajectory of the patients they treated.

A telling example of this is the case of Elisabeth von R., who was referred to Freud by a colleague because she suffered from pains in her legs to the point of finding it difficult to walk. The colleague who referred her already suspected that hers was a case of neurotic—rather than organic—pains. After seeing the patient, Freud found himself in agreement: “It was no easy matter for me to reach a diagnosis, but I resolved . . . to agree with that made by my colleague. First, it was striking that all the statements made by this highly intelligent patient about the nature of her pains were so indefinite. A patient who suffers from organic pains will . . . give a definite and calm description of them” (Freud 2004, 140).

Besides the “indefinite” nature of her symptoms, the other aspect that pointed toward a neurotic basis of the pain was the fact that the patient responded to Freud’s touching of her leg with an expression closer to pleasure than to pain: “The facial expression was not appropriate to the pain that was supposedly excited by the pinching of the muscles and skin, it was probably more in keeping with the content of the thoughts that lay behind this pain . . .” (141). But what were these thoughts?

During her therapy, it became clear that Elisabeth’s pains stemmed from the time when she was nursing her sick father. She’d gone out one night with a young man whom she liked very much and upon her return, found that her father’s condition had deteriorated. Recounting these events to Freud, Elisabeth eventually realized that the pain was located at the exact point where her father used to rest his leg when she was changing his bandages. In the sessions following this realization, Freud noticed that her painful legs “started to join the conversation”: “the patient was, for the most part, free of pain when we set to work together; if I then wakened a memory . . . the first response was a painful sensation, for the most part so vivid that the patient would start and put her hand on the painful area” (152). Freud then started to use the patient’s pain as a “compass”: whenever she fell silent but admitted she still had pains, he pressed her to continue talking until “the pain had been talked away” (ibid.). This initially led to significant improvements in the patient’s condition: “In this period of ‘abreaction,’ the patient’s condition, both physical and psychical, was so markedly improved that I was only half joking when I used to maintain that on each occasion I was carrying away a certain quantum of her motives for pain, and that once I had cleared everything away she would be healthy” (152f; my emphasis).

Although Freud described his own therapeutic process as an emotional “abreaction” or discharge, Lear insists that this is not an adequate description of what Freud’s “cathartic method” consisted of. We can find support for Lear’s reading in the previous quote. Despite using the term “abreaction,” Freud also explains that the goal of his process was not to “discharge” pain but to “carry away . . . the motives for her pain.” While the first formulation would suggest that any kind of discharge of pain is cathartic, the latter makes explicit Lear’s point that catharsis only occurs once the patient has been able to identify, and “carry away,” the right “motives” for her pain.

Indeed, despite the improvements to which Freud referred, Elisabeth von R. was not “cured” from her symptoms in the initial stages of the analysis, even though she did “discharge” the feelings of guilt and grief that she experienced in the aftermath of several tragedies occurring in her family: the deaths of her father and second sister, the estrangement of the first sister and brother-in-law, and her and her mother’s subsequent isolation. She had relived these painful memories and experiences with Freud, but the pain in her legs was still there: “It was impossible to see what kind of beneficial influence Fräulein Elisabeth might draw from telling the story of her suffering of recent years to a stranger, who received it with a moderate degree of sympathy, when it was already well known to all the members of her family. Nor did the confession have any visibly curative effect” (Freud 2004, 148).

Elisabeth was not “cured” by these initial confessions because what she was confessing was not the genuine “motive for her pain.” Although she did express feeling guilty for going out with somebody on a night when her father’s condition was getting worse, and for arriving too late to be with her sister on her deathbed, there was a deeper feeling that she was not yet able to articulate: all along, and unbeknownst even to herself, she had been secretly in love with the husband of her second sister. When this sister died, she found herself having a thought that later became much too terrible to contemplate: “Now he is free again, and I can become his wife” (Freud 2004, 160).

Freud stumbled upon the patient’s secret affection for her brother-in-law through a chance perception. The “decisive explanation” (159) came to him only after he observed his patient’s response to hearing someone else’s footsteps in the room next door, upon which she asked Freud to finish the session early because her brother-in-law was asking after her. After this request, the pain in her legs, which had subsided during the session, suddenly came back (ibid.). Having witnessed this change in his patient, Freud decided to present her with his explanation: “Summarizing the matter drily, I said: ‘You had been in love with your brother-in-law for a long time, then’” (161). At this moment, the therapy became very challenging for the patient: “She complained of the most dreadful pains . . . and made one more desperate effort to reject the explanation—it wasn’t true, I had talked her into it, it was impossible, she wasn’t capable of such wickedness” (ibid.).

If Freud’s cathartic method had merely consisted of allowing for the “discharge” of emotions, then he would have been forced to give up at this point. Elisabeth von R. was simply unable to acknowledge her secret love for her brother-in-law—let alone “discharge” it. Confronted with the now-deteriorating condition of his patient, Freud realized that the right explanation does not cure in and of itself; it will only relieve the patient of her symptoms if she is able to accept the explanation as hers rather than as an interpretation imposed on her by the analyst. If Elisabeth von R. was at first unable to do this, this is because Freud’s explanation was still too terrible for her to accept.

From this point onwards, Freud’s “cathartic method” therefore had to focus not on “abreaction” but on diminishing “the terribleness of the terrible idea” (Lear 1990, 58). Elisabeth had to be reassured that falling in love with the wrong person did not make her bad (Freud 2004, 161). Only then could she accept what—or rather who—the pain in her legs was about. This acceptance, in turn, brought about a transformation in the phenomenological quality of the pain: what initially presented as a vague and inexplicable pain could eventually be experienced by her as a determinate pain that got its specific shape and texture from the objects towards which it was intentionally directed: guilt, vis-a-vis her family, and love, for her brother-in-law.

According to Lear, the fact that this turned out to be a successful therapeutic strategy for not just alleviating but eliminating Elisabeth’s pain is because reuniting an emotion with its intentional object(s) does not only transform how the pain is experienced; it ontologically transforms the emotion itself. Elisabeth’s neurotic pain was only the form that her love took whilst its intentional object was severed from it. Once the pain’s intentionality was established in her conscious awareness, the pain disappeared, not because it was successfully “discharged” but because it turned into a different emotion altogether: painful love.

According to Lear, the unification of an emotion with its right intentional object can also be understood as a process of rationalization within the emotion. Rationality is here not taken as a cognitive or epistemic achievement, but as the quality of a well-formed emotion. In Lear’s teleological conception of emotions, neuroses are the products of emotions which are unable to rationalize themselves. Lear (1990) takes this view from Aristotle, for whom an emotion “makes a claim to its own rationality” (50)—it “comes packaged with its own justification” (ibid., 49). For example, if I am angry at my mother, then according to Lear, my anger will only be well-formed (non-neurotic, rationalized) if it is able to justify why I am angry at her. Conversely, if my anger cannot express a justification for itself, it will seek out a different route toward expression—one that is most likely paved with neurosis.

The language of “expressing justification” and “rationalization” might seem counterintuitive in the context of emotions because we are used to thinking of “expression” as agential and of “justification/rationalization” as epistemic, but Lear and Aristotle are not using these terms in this way. They are making an ontological claim about what emotions are: they are affective states that have a “natural” tendency to express justification for themselves, just as water will naturally seek out a pathway to flow. Some of these pathways will look like confusing labyrinths; others will be clearer and more straightforward. The most straightforward path is the one that is taken by a rationalized, well-formed emotion: an emotion that is united with its right intentional object.

When Lear talks about uniting an emotion with the “right” intentional object, this “rightness” should not, therefore, be understood in an epistemic sense, but as the teleological endpoint of an emotion. It marks the point at which an emotion has arrived, as it were, at the form of expression it needed to be in. Crucially, on Lear’s understanding of psychoanalysis, the form that an emotion needs to be in is the one that will relieve the analysand of her neurotic suffering. There is, therefore, no objective telos for emotions, but only a subjective one: what the telos is depends entirely on the analysand being able to no longer suffer from her emotions. The reason that fully developed emotions do not make us suffer is because they are emotions that we can afford to consciously feel rather than ones we must banish to the realm of the unconscious. Insofar as the anger I feel toward my mother can express a justification for itself, it is also an anger that I do not need to hide from myself: I can feel it and feel justified in feeling it, without neurotically punishing myself.

Likewise, justification, as Lear talks about it, is not epistemic in the way it is usually conceived. As a psychoanalyst, Lear is less interested in his analysands being justified than he is in their feeling justified. Analysands feel justified when their emotions have realized their telos and are no longer causing them neurotic suffering, but it does not matter to Lear whether the justification that an emotion expresses also makes it be justified. This point will become important in the second half of the paper, where I suggest that in a neurotic situation, therapy must also become an epistemic endeavor of sorts.

For now, it’s crucial to understand that for Lear, therapy is not an epistemic activity. Psychoanalysis, on his view, cannot be a process of obtaining greater knowledge, because knowing one’s emotions and their intentional objects is still consistent with taking what he calls a “third-person attitude” (Lear 1990, 66) towards them—I can know my emotions without genuinely accepting them as being mine. Cathartic relief only occurs once I am able to take a first-person attitude toward my emotions, to “accept responsibility” for them without “holding [myself] responsible” like a third-person observer might do: “Accepting responsibility is essentially a first-person relation. In accepting responsibility I acknowledge who or what I am” (Lear 1990, 66).

Elisabeth von R. could overcome her pain once she was able to accept that she was in love with someone she was not supposed to be in love with, without blaming herself for having these feelings. Freud’s “decisive explanation”—“you are in love with your brother-in-law”—allowed her love to reattach itself to its right intentional object, and therefore, in Lear’s terminology, to express a justification of its own occurrence. In the context of Freudian psychoanalysis, justification is therefore what takes place once an explanation of a neurotic symptom allows the analysand to unify the emotion with its proper intentional object. The analyst might assist in the process of gathering and formulating explanations, but the work of justification is only complete once the analysand comes to experience their emotion as intentionally directed towards the right object. According to Lear, this experience should not be understood as a moment of cognitive insight or epistemic advancement, but of affective catharsis: what is crucial is not that the analysand knows more about herself, but that she feels a relief in her suffering once an emotion is unified with its right intentional object.

I’ve discussed Lear’s reconstruction of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to suggest that we understand therapy as a guided practice of cultivating emotional responsiveness. By emotional responsiveness, I mean the subject’s ability to experience her emotions as directed towards their right intentional objects. Insofar as therapy offers alleviation from psychic suffering, it does this not by facilitating the “discharge” of emotions, but by cultivating emotional responsiveness: “Relief is provided not by the mere expression of feeling, but by the expression of feeling directed onto the right object.” (Lear 1990, 46).

Lear’s explanation of cathartic relief helps us substantiate our intuitions about the therapeutic nature of FCR, but, as we shall see, it also falls short of explaining how therapy operates under conditions of systematic political oppression and psychological alienation. From Lear’s understanding of catharsis, it is clear that cathartic relief is not a threat to the radical political ethos of FCR, but a constitutive part of it. One of FCR’s achievements was precisely to put women on a psychically and politically rewarding path towards unifying some of their emotions with their proper intentional objects. Prior to FCR, they might have directed their anger at themselves or each other, but afterwards, they were able to take the patriarchal structures of society as the intentional objects of their anger, sadness, or grief.

Lear would call this catharsis, but we can also call it feminist consciousness, to name a subjective condition in which cathartic relief goes hand in hand with an expanded consciousness of the causes of one’s oppression. ³ Understanding therapy in terms of emotional responsiveness allows us to do justice to the therapeutic thrust of FCR without thereby pitting a concern for individual psychic suffering against collective political emancipation. Feminist consciousness does not require privileging the former over the latter; it is, rather, the name for a subjective condition in which these two objectives become intertwined with each other.

However, what Lear’s framework cannot account for is the fact that catharsis will be different for groups who are systematically oppressed and alienated. For example, cathartic relief for women’s neurotic symptoms in a patriarchal society will also have to incorporate an epistemic element, showing that there is political truth in precisely those emotions which patriarchal society deems to be “irrational”: “We’re saying that when we had hysterical fits, when we took things ‘too’ personally, that we weren’t underneath our feelings, but responding with our feelings correctly to a given situation of injustice” (Sarachild 1970, 78).

What Sarachild is gesturing toward in this quote is a point that, I will argue later, is made explicit in Fanon’s notion of a “neurotic situation.” While Lear’s reconstructive Freudianism would suggest that “hysterical fits” are the product of emotions that we cannot yet experience as justified, Sarachild’s formulation points to a different interpretation. Women might not yet be able to experience the emotions underlying their “hysterical fits” as justified, but the “hysterical fits” are nevertheless already justified by the patriarchal way the world is—they are “responding correctly to a given situation of injustice.” As I will show in the following section, this is exactly what Fanon’s notion of a “neurotic situation” captures: it accounts for neurotic symptoms that are not the result of emotions unable to be experienced as justified, but neurotic responses that are justified by the way the world is.

Attaining cathartic relief in a neurotic situation will differ significantly from the Freudian trajectory. This is because understanding how one is justified in one’s neurotic symptoms is more akin to attaining an emancipatory political consciousness than it is to therapy in the narrow sense. However, this does not mean that we should, therefore, reject therapy as antithetical to political liberation. Rather, it means that therapy and consciousness-raising will have to become closely intertwined with each other, to the point where they come to shape and condition each other’s aims. On the one hand, attaining emancipatory consciousness in a neurotic situation becomes a condition for attaining cathartic relief from justified neurotic symptoms. On the other hand, cathartic relief from justified neurotic symptoms becomes part of the first-person experience of attaining such an emancipatory consciousness. I will explore and develop these points in the following section, where I will confront Lear’s reconstructive story of catharsis with Fanon’s deep understanding of the psychic and political predicament of the oppressed.

Neurotic Situations

Unlike Freud and Lear, Fanon draws our attention to psychic suffering that does not principally originate from internal conflicts but from “a distorted dialectic between ego and the world” (Macey 2012, 320). In Black Skin, White Masks, he refers to such a distorted dialectic as a “neurotic situation” (Fanon 1986, 100). ⁴ I develop Fanon’s concept of a neurotic situation below and argue that in such situations (i) the therapeutic alleviation of psychic suffering requires the cultivation of an emancipatory political consciousness and (ii) that the emergence of such a consciousness allows the oppressed person to experience cathartic relief along the lines sketched by Lear, even if an emancipatory political consciousness alone cannot cure the psychic and political harms of being in a neurotic situation.

Fanon explains his idea of a neurotic situation in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks entitled “The So-called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples.” One of his black patients had shared the following dream with him:

I had been walking for a long time, I was extremely exhausted, I had the impression that something was waiting for me, I climbed barricades and walls, I came into an empty hall and from behind a door I heard a noise. I hesitated before I went in, but finally I made up my mind and opened the door. In this second room there were white men, and I found that I too was white. (Fanon 1986, 99)

In analyzing the patient’s dream, Fanon discusses two possible explanations. The first is psychoanalytic: “When I try to understand this dream, to analyze it, knowing that my friend has had problems in his career, I conclude that this dream fulfills an unconscious wish” (99f). The second explanation follows from the incorporation of this first explanation “into the context of the world” (100):

1. My patient is suffering from an inferiority complex. His psychic structure is in danger of disintegration. What has to be done is to save him from this and, little by little, to rid him of his unconscious desire.

2. If he is overwhelmed to such a degree by the wish to be white, this is because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that derives its stability from the perpetuation of this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race; to the identical degree to which that society creates difficulties for him, he will find himself thrust into a neurotic situation. (100, my emphasis)

From a psychoanalytic perspective, a black man’s desire for a “hallucinatory whitening” (ibid.) is an unconscious desire that will always cause psychic suffering in some form or another. It is the kind of desire that will produce neurosis if it remains buried in the unconscious, and a psychotic “disintegration” of the patient’s psychic structure (ibid.) if consciously pursued in opposition to reality. The treatment that follows from this understanding of psychic suffering would focus on bringing to conscious awareness the emotions that are contained within the desire—here, “an inferiority complex.” Over time, the patient would be able to experience this feeling of inferiority not as a “hallucinatory” desire but as an emotion directed toward specific intentional objects—for example, the fear of disappointing loved ones.

On Lear’s (1990) reading of Freud, this is what allows for catharsis: the conscious unification of emotions and their right intentional objects (46). Crucially, what makes an object “right” is, for Lear and Freud, purely a matter of feeling justified: it does not matter whether the world might make it so that my emotion is justified; what matters is only that I feel justified in having this emotion. So, in Elisabeth’s case, it would not matter if she was justified in blaming herself for loving her brother-in-law because, unbeknownst to her, her brother-in-law, aware of Elisabeth’s feelings for him, had told Elisabeth’s sister that he wanted to leave her for Elisabeth and that this news contributed to the sister’s premature death. What matters to Freud and Lear is not whether the world might, unbeknownst to us, cause our neurotic symptoms to be justified, but only that the analysand be able to rid herself of these symptoms by rationalizing her emotions to herself.

Fanon, too, is concerned with bringing his patients’ emotions to conscious awareness, but he is also aware of the limitations of therapeutic treatments that do not at all concern themselves with the epistemic status of oppressed patients’ emotions. In the case of the black man who dreamt of being white, Fanon writes that this patient must “become conscious of his unconscious [inferiority complex]” (100). This is consistent with Lear’s understanding of cathartic relief: I can only experience an alleviation of my neurotic symptoms if I am conscious of the underlying emotion. Yet there is also a crucial difference between the kind of neurotic symptoms experienced by Elisabeth von R. and those of Fanon’s patient. In the case of the former, her neurotic symptoms resulted from her love for her brother-in-law being unable to rationalize itself. By contrast, Fanon’s patient’s neurotic symptoms are already rational—he lives in a racist world that perpetuates and requires his inferiority. His neurotic symptoms are thus already justified by the racist way the world is, regardless of whether he also feels justified in having them.

The different status of justification between the two cases shows that a neurotic situation cannot be treated in the way that Lear suggests. Even if we grant that Lear’s interpretation of early Freud is right in the case of treating individual neurotic symptoms, a neurotic situation incorporates elements of epistemic justification that Lear would not consider as falling within the domain of therapy. In a neurotic situation, we need to have an account of truth according to which the “right” intentional object for resolving the patient’s neurotic inferiority complex does not just depend on his own emotional constitution but also on wider political and social structures that “derive [their] stability from the perpetuation of this complex” (Fanon 1986, 100). What we need is some understanding of the insight, developed in many different iterations of feminist and anti-racist standpoint epistemologies, that the emotions of the oppressed contain objective social and political truths. ⁵

My aim is not to reduce therapy in neurotic situations to a matter of standpoint epistemology. To the contrary, I want to show that even in cases where patients’ neurotic symptoms are justified by the way the world is, it is nevertheless important for their psychic well-being that they also have an affective/existential (and not just epistemic) grasp of this justification. For this, we still need to keep in mind Lear’s point that knowledge is not an appropriate idiom for understanding cathartic relief. I might know that I am oppressed and yet experience no cathartic relief after obtaining this knowledge.

My point is not that catharsis is necessary for emancipation or that emancipatory struggles should make therapeutic relief an explicit goal. Rather, I am saying that we can hold onto therapy and emancipation as separate, irreducible endeavors while nevertheless holding space for the possibility that their objectives might productively intertwine. Fanon, as I see it, offers a way to conceptualize this possibility that does not require us to subscribe either to an “emancipation first, therapy later” view or to a view that says emancipation is all the therapy we will ever need. Emancipation might be the only way to achieve a complete elimination of neurotic situations, but elimination of neurotic situations is not the only way to bring about therapeutic relief from neurotic situations. It is not anathema to our political liberation to seek therapeutic relief from neurotic situations. To the contrary, as Fanon shows, emancipatory consciousness for oppressed groups might do both—facilitate cathartic relief in the current neurotic situation and point to the possibility of a world beyond that situation.

Before exploring in more detail what it means to be in a neurotic situation, as opposed to experiencing neurotic symptoms in the Freudian sense, it is worth emphasizing that I am concerned here with the relationship between emancipatory consciousness and therapy and not between emancipatory politics and therapy. As I see it, there is no straightforward path from emancipatory consciousness to emancipatory politics, even as the question of how to forge such a path is at the heart of all social and political movements against oppression. I grant that emancipatory politics might offer forms of therapeutic relief that cannot be conceptualized within the therapeutic paradigms discussed in this essay, but for the purposes of my argument, I am focused on demonstrating the possibility of obtaining cathartic relief through the formation of an emancipatory consciousness. Although catharsis, as I use it in this essay, cannot and does not exhaust the domain of therapy, I want to show that it offers a useful way of understanding how, in a neurotic situation, psychic suffering and political oppression converge.

But what, exactly, does catharsis in a neurotic situation look like? To begin answering this question, let us grant that to be neurotic in a nonneurotic situation is to experience the kind of failure of justification sketched previously by Lear. The therapeutic trajectory from here is clear: to find the explanation of my neurotic symptom that allows my emotion to be experienced as justified. By contrast, to be neurotic in a neurotic situation is to have a justified neurotic response to one’s oppression while being as yet unable to experience this neurotic response as justified. Cathartic relief, in these cases, requires me to develop an affective grasp of the way in which my neurotic response might already be justified by the way the world is. People in neurotic situations experience cathartic relief when they develop an emancipatory political consciousness—a consciousness that reflects Sarachild’s insight that certain neurotic symptoms of oppressed groups are “responding . . . correctly to a given situation of injustice.” Under these conditions, cathartic relief, as Lear conceptualizes it—as the unification of one’s emotions with their proper objects—cannot be a self-contained psychic event but must always also be an eruption of political consciousness regarding the true source of one’s oppression.

What Fanon understood, and what Hanisch and Sarachild did not, is that the cultivation of an emancipatory political consciousness is not anathema to the kind of cathartic relief that Lear and Freud envisage for their patients. To be in a neurotic situation is to be in a position in which a political consciousness of one’s group oppression is necessary for achieving psychic relief from individual neurotic symptoms. Although this kind of consciousness enables cathartic relief, it also points to a political horizon that reaches beyond the alleviation of individual neurotic symptoms, toward collective liberation from the oppression facing all members of the group.

Fanon’s notion of a neurotic situation designates a particular convergence of neurotic suffering and political oppression. Although not all individuals facing the same oppression will develop neurotic symptoms, those that do will do so for reasons that are partly reflective of their group oppression and partly reflective of individual idiosyncrasies that are irreducible to said oppression. In the case of Fanon’s patient, it is necessary that he is living in an anti-black society for him to feel the way that he is feeling (neurotically inferior), but this political condition is not sufficient for making him feel this way. More generally, not all individuals facing a certain kind of group oppression will be in a neurotic situation due to that oppression, and not all individuals in a neurotic situation will be neurotic in the same way. ⁶

Moreover, it is possible to face the same group oppression as others who are in a neurotic situation due to that oppression and yet develop neuroses that cannot be explained in terms of this oppression. In this case, the concept of a neurotic situation might appear to track a convergence of psychic suffering and political oppression, but its application would end up falsifying the idiosyncratic nature of the neurosis in question. In chapter three of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon raises this possibility with the case of Jean Veneuse, a black man who found himself unable to accept the love of a white girl he loved in return. Fanon (1986) describes Veneuse as an “abandonment-neurotic” (77) whose inability to love is encapsulated by the attitude “not to love in order to avoid being abandoned” (76). His blackness, Fanon writes, “is only an attempt to explain his psychic structure” (78). It is not an explanation of his neurosis but an expression of it: “If this objective difference had not existed [i.e., his blackness], he would have manufactured it out of nothing” (78). The patient could explain his inability to love a white woman in terms of his blackness because “by coincidence [he was] black” (79), but if he hadn’t been black, then his abandonment neurosis would have found a different explanation for itself that, likewise, would not be an explanation for the neurosis, but a manifestation of it.

The fact that the concept of a neurotic situation could be wrongly applied to all situations in which oppressed people suffer from neurotic symptoms does not undermine the usefulness of the concept. We might never be able to fully know if we are applying the concept correctly, but full transparency of application conditions should not be a requirement for adopting a concept into our political vocabulary. Even in cases where we might wrongly attribute a political explanation to a neurotic who does not experience any cathartic relief from identifying with that explanation, the concept of a neurotic situation will allow us to discuss why we might be wrong and then consider what our being wrong might mean for the emancipatory projects to which we are committed: Are they expansive enough to allow for the irreducibility of individual idiosyncrasies, or do they require a sameness of suffering that individual psyches must mold themselves into?

As I conceptualize it, the concept of a neurotic situation can account for a contingent convergence of psychic suffering and political oppression without either eliminating psychic idiosyncrasies in favor of systematic social analysis or attending to psychic idiosyncrasies only at the expense of systematic social analysis. The patient who dreamt of being white suffered from individual neurotic symptoms that are both idiosyncratic to him and his psyche and yet also nested in a wider structure of whiteness, anti-black racism, and coloniality. The point of therapy and/or consciousness-raising is not to triangulate exactly what has been caused by what but to confront the neurotic situation in a holistic way: that is, to attend to the social and political root causes of the neurotic situation without rendering the individual’s psychic life as reducible to said causes.

In his work with Elisabeth von R., Freud did not attend to his patient’s social and political position as an upper-class white European woman and the gendered expectations that came with this position. Although such a gendered lens would have no doubt enriched his interpretation of the patient’s neurosis, he was nevertheless able to achieve therapeutic success by connecting her neurotic symptoms to salient events and experiences in her individual biography. During the treatment, Freud was able to use her pain as a “compass” because he (correctly) assumed that there must be a specific, idiosyncratic connection between the neurotic symptom and its intentional object. The pain did not develop by coincidence but already contained within itself its own justification, striving to express itself by mobilizing regions of the body psychically charged with feelings of love, guilt, and duty.

In the case of Fanon’s patient, the connection between the repressed emotion (feelings of inferiority) and the neurotic symptom (the dream expressing a desire to be white) does not only lie in the patient’s individual psychic history but also in the wider social and political structures that tether whiteness to superiority and blackness to inferiority: “the black man [is] confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear . . . he [cannot] take cognizance of a possibility of existence” (Fanon 1986, 100). So, while Fanon’s patient’s neurosis is not necessarily worse than the neurotic symptoms faced by people in nonneurotic situations, what makes it worse is the fact that his overall situation is impossible: he is experiencing a neurosis that is both idiosyncratic to him and yet also a reflection of a society in which he is only ever treated as a token instance of dehumanized blackness.

What it means to be neurotic in a neurotic situation is therefore fundamentally different from having a neurotic symptom in the Freudian sense. To be in a neurotic situation is to have neurotic symptoms without being allowed access to the hermeneutic resources required for understanding one’s inner life as some complex amalgamation of social influences and individual idiosyncrasy. Cultivating an emancipatory political consciousness is therefore necessary but not sufficient for psychic health in a neurotic situation. It is necessary because there cannot be cathartic relief in a neurotic situation without directing some of my emotions toward the social and political structures that are, to some significant degree, responsible for putting me in this situation in the first place. And it is not sufficient because individual idiosyncrasy remains irreducible to the social and political structures that condition my oppression. If I am still suffering from neuroses after developing a feminist and anti-racist political consciousness, then this is not because an emancipatory consciousness cannot bring about genuine cathartic relief but because there are things going on in my psychic life that cannot be reduced to my political subject position.

For Elisabeth von R., the true intentional object of her emotion was her brother-in-law. In the case of a neurotic situation, the intentional objects of our emotions become infinitely more complex: these objects are vast social and political structures that are mediated by past and present historical developments, on the one hand, and by individual psychic projections and fantasies on the other. The suffering of one neurotic in a neurotic situation can give some insight into the suffering of other neurotics in similar neurotic situations, but we cannot read off from the suffering of one neurotic in a neurotic situation exactly what it is like to be another neurotic in a similar neurotic situation. Individual idiosyncrasy remains irreducible in all cases where psychic life is concerned.

Multiple members of the same oppressed group might feel angry at the same political structure and indeed use this anger as a springboard for political mobilization, as has been done countless times by feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial movements. Yet, even when the intentional objects are shared across members of an oppressed group, individuals will retain an idiosyncratic psychic relationship to these objects that cannot, and should not, be eliminated as part of a process of collective mobilization. We can mobilize around the shared fact of being in a neurotic situation without assuming that other neurotics suffer and find relief in exactly the same way as we do.

Fanon already laid the foundation for this insight into the relationship between political oppression and individual neuroses when he was still training to become a psychiatrist. His 1952 essay “The North African Syndrome” discusses his experiences as a young doctor in France, trying—and failing—to treat North African patients with pain symptoms that did not seem to have an obvious organic explanation:

Except in urgent cases—an intestinal occlusion, wounds, accidents—the North African arrives enveloped in vagueness. He has an ache in his belly, in his back, he has an ache every-where. He suffers miserably, his face is eloquent, he is obviously suffering. “What’s wrong, my friend?” “I’m dying, monsieur le docteur.” His voice breaks imperceptibly. “Where do you have pain?” “Everywhere, monsieur le docteur.” (Fanon 1964, 4)

Fanon was aware that effective treatment, at minimum, required a better understanding of his patients’ symptoms. Yet, all his efforts to engage them in a conversation about their pain proved futile:

You must not ask for specific symptoms: you would not be given any. . . . It is not lack of comprehension, for he often comes accompanied by an interpreter. It is as though it is an effort for him to go back to where he no longer is. The past for him is a burning past. What he hopes is that he will never suffer again, never again be face to face with that past. This present pain, which visibly mobilizes the muscles of his face, suffices him. He does not understand that anyone should wish to impose on him, even by way of memory, the pain that is already gone. He does not understand why the doctor asks him so many questions. (4)

Fanon speaks in these passages of “The North African” to indicate that he is dealing with a neurotic situation rather than with individual neurotic symptoms in the Freudian sense; but of course, he is not saying that all North Africans living in France suffer from the same neurotic symptoms. The individual idiosyncrasy of each North African patient does not become reducible to politics, but it is strongly mediated by social and political considerations that are, in turn, irreducible to individual idiosyncrasy.

Fanon’s observations in this early essay allow us to further develop our understanding of the relationship between neurotic symptoms, neurotic situations, and psychic resistance. While Freud would likely understand the North African patients’ demeanor as a classic instance of psychic resistance seeking to prevent unconscious content from entering into conscious awareness, Fanon shows that individual psychic resistance alone cannot explain why his North African patients are unable to articulate their symptoms. In certain discursive and political environments, the patient might indeed be justified in his resistance to speak about his pain, because this inability to speak accurately reflects his social and political position in a racist society. Resistance to treatment is then not a failure of justification/rationalization, as Lear would say, but a true reflection of a political environment in which colonized subjects are silenced.

To see, again, what difference attending to external justification makes for understanding the therapeutic process, recall Lear’s formulation of the kind of emotional transformation that therapy seeks to bring about. In the case of Elisabeth von R., psychoanalysis enabled her to stop blaming herself for being in love with her brother-in-law and, instead, accept responsibility for the fact that she was in love with him. According to Lear, this required moving away from “holding herself responsible” for her emotions, in the sense of judging herself for them like an external observer would, toward accepting responsibility for her emotions as being hers. It required transforming a third-person attitude toward her emotions into a first-person attitude.

By allowing himself to be consumed by his pain, Fanon’s North African patient is taking the kind of third-person attitude that, for Lear, characterizes a neurotic relationship to one’s emotions. The pain, Fanon’s patient insists, is not for him to even describe; it is a powerful external force that is doing something to him: “It visibly mobilizes the muscles of his face.” Fanon shows that this is not just a neurotic failure on his patient’s part. It is, rather, in the nature of the neurotic situation that society has thrust upon him to be trapped in a third-person (alienated) relationship with his pain. Insofar as he feels alienated from himself, this alienation is a true reflection of what it means to be a colonized subject living in the colonial metropole. To accept responsibility for my pain in the context of systematic social and political alienation, therefore, means something quite different than it meant for Elisabeth von R. It means developing a political consciousness of the structures that make my neurotic symptoms justified. Only then can I experience any cathartic relief from these symptoms.

Yet cathartic relief is by no means a cure for a neurotic situation. Elisabeth von R. was cured of her neurotic symptoms when she no longer felt the debilitating pain in her legs. As far as we can tell, she achieved this relief from her neurosis through catharsis—that is, by restoring the severed connection between her love and the object toward which that love was directed. The result, for her, was an expanded consciousness able to incorporate emotions she could not previously acknowledge within herself. Neurotic situations, by contrast, cannot be cured by the emergence of an expanded political consciousness—no matter how cathartic this consciousness might also be for the individual subject. Insofar as neurotic situations are the product of a society that “decerebralizes a people” (Fanon 2017, 434)—literally drives them mad—the only true cure is the “replacement” of such a society with a better one: “A society that forces its members into desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society that needs replacing” (ibid., 435).

As a psychiatrist, Fanon was well aware of the limits of his profession. He eventually resigned from his post as medical director of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville, in Algeria, on the grounds that psychiatric treatment in a narrow sense was impossible under conditions of systematic oppression and depersonalization: “If psychiatry is the medical technique that sets out to enable individuals no longer to be foreign to their environment, I owe it to myself to state that the Arab, permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization” (ibid., 434).

In order to treat patients living under conditions of “absolute depersonalization” and “systematic dehumanization” (Fanon 2017, 433), the therapist/revolutionary must not only treat the idiosyncratic shape of her patient’s neurosis but also help them cultivate an emancipatory political consciousness of the social and political structures that contribute to the neurotic situation. Allowing the voice of the psychotherapist to converse with that of the revolutionary, Fanon formulates his objective for the black patient who dreamt of being white in this vein: “My objective, once his motivations have been brought to consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is, toward the social structures” (Fanon 100, my emphasis).

Fanon is not saying that psychic health requires “choosing activity with respect to the social structures”—that is, a life of political activism. This would likely lead to a pathologization of “passivity” on the one hand and to a romanticized idea of political activism on the other. Rather, his point is that the patient cannot experience relief from his neurotic symptoms without being able to consciously experience his emotions as intentionally directed toward the “real source of [his] conflict.” What the patient then chooses to do with that consciousness—whether it makes him choose “activity” or “passivity”—is of course an important question for all social and political movements and indeed an important one for consciousness-raising, but in terms of Fanon’s therapeutic objectives, political interpretations and actions cannot be foisted upon the patient. The patient must be able to choose for herself what she is going to do, in full consciousness of her neurotic situation, and she will experience cathartic relief by cultivating this consciousness, even if it never leads her to take political action.

Sarachild and Hanisch were right to insist that consciousness-raising cannot cease once all the participants feel better; it can only cease once society has been transformed into one that no longer requires oppressed people to raise their consciousness. Yet they were also wrong to suggest that seeking cathartic relief through consciousness-raising is an obstacle to a radical transformation of society. Cathartic relief is what accompanies the first part of the journey out of a neurotic situation: the emergence of an emancipatory political consciousness regarding the true source of one’s oppression. The journey that comes after that can only be one of seeking, not just to alleviate the suffering of neurotic situations but to overcome such situations altogether.