Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Redux - Why Mannoni's Prospero Complex Still Haunts Us

Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Redux: Why Mannoni's "Prospero Complex" Still Haunts Us
Author(s): Christopher Lane

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Global Freud: Psychoanalytic
Cultures and Classic Modernism (Summer, 2002), pp. 127-150
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831859
Accessed: 05-04-2019 14:33 UTC
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Psychoanalysis and Colonialism
Redux: Why Mannoni's "Prospero
Complex" Still Haunts Us1
Christopher Lane
Northwestern University
Dislocation can do the job of analysis [Le dépaysement fait office

d'analyse ]. Being a white man among the blacks is like being an
analyst among the whites.
- Octave Mannoni2
A
xjLlthough psychoanalysis and colonialism share a long and fraught history, the 1986 reprinting
of Frantz Fanon's treatise Black Skin , White Masks doubtless altered the course of their relation-
ship, promoting in some academic circles even the possibility of a lasting truce. While for years
critics had disparaged Freud's notorious description of femininity as a "dark continent," using this
analogy to tarnish psychoanalysis with fin-de-siècle imperial fantasies, a sea change occurred
in the 1980s. Scholars began representing psychoanalysis not as complicit with colonialism, but
as indispensable to its critique. Emily Apter credits some of this transformation to the "return
of Fanon" that began in 1986 when Pluto Press reissued Fanon's best-known work.3 Homi K.
Bhabha's introduction renewed interest in Fanon's clinical role as a psychiatrist and his shared
1 . I thank audiences at Harvard, Emory, the University of Utah, and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture
and Society Conference at Columbia for responding acutely to an earlier draft, helping me sharpen several claims. I am also
grateful to Daniel T. O'Hara and Marshall Brown for comments on an earlier draft, and to Alain Vanier and Judith Feher
Gurewich for discussing Mannoni's work with me in some detail.
2. Octave Mannoni, qtd. in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France,
1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 234, and Roudinesco, La bataille de
cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France 2: 1925-1985 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 247.
3. Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (University of Chicago Press, 1999),
p. 77.
Christopher Lane, "Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Redux: Why Mannoni's 'Prospero Complex' Still Haunts Us," Jour-
nal of Modern Literature , XXV, 3/4 (Summer 2002), pp. 127-150. ©Indiana University Press, 2003.
128 Journal of Modem Literature
intellectual history with Jacques Lacan.4 Although

revolutionary icon, he insisted that Fanon's "psycho
of racism, the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy
vocabulary an ally for postcolonial theory.5
Many works on psychoanalysis and colonialism a
majority written by psychoanalytic feminists, inc
Fuss, Barbara Johnson, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silv
works, psychoanalysis is less the target of criticism
ceptually, of interpreting our relationship to coloni
lence about Freud has not disappeared from acade
increasingly is prized today for stressing "the impé
rigorous, historically exact accounts of colonial fanta
In light of such goodwill to psychoanalytic theory
tuals have sharpened their attacks on Freudianism, i
this rapprochement. The following essay does so, ho
to which the French intellectual and civil servant
for postcolonial critique than most scholars seem
recently that psychoanalysis strives to "assimilatf
notions, but finds itself "exposed in a setting con
of self- strangeness that all races experience, makes
psychically untenable.9 The resulting difference in
key point. Additionally, critics using psychoanalyt
the history of psychoanalysis, thereby limiting, and
Part of the rapprochement rests on an oft-cited but la
"feud"10 - between Fanon and Mannoni. It was Mann
4. Homi K. Bhabha, "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and t

Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chri
5. Bhabha, p. 114.
6. See Elizabeth Abel, "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Open
Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (Routledge, 1990), pp. 184-204; M
Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,"
sis (Routledge, 1991), pp. 209-48; Diana Fuss, "Interior Colonies:
tification Papers (Routledge, 1995), pp. 141-65; Barbara Johnson
Race, and Gender (Harvard University Press, 1998); Jacqueline
Question of Power," Critical Inquiry XX (1994), pp. 401-18; Kaja
ledge, 1996), esp. pp. 104-21; Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and
University Press, 1998). See also Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race
Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Sta
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (Routledge
Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Duke University Press, 2001
Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Abel, Barbara Christian, an
and The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (Columb
University Press reprinted Wulf Sachs's 1937 study Black Haml
Rose.
7. Apter, p. 18.
8. For invaluable elaboration on Mannoni's ongoing contribution to postcolonial critique, see Psychanalyse et décolo
nisation: Hommage à Octave Mannoni, sous la direction d'Anny Combrichon, avec la collaboration de Véronique Collomb
(Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999), especially the essays by Françoise Vergés, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Hassoun, Alain
Vanier, and René Major.
9. Jonathan Crewe, "Black Hamlet: Psychoanalysis on Trial in South Africa," Poetics Today XXII (2001), p. 413.
10. Apter, p. ix.
Lane: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Redux 129
nial unconscious and gave him the title for his best-known work, Black Skin , Whit
while irking him with a "psychology of colonialism" that allegedly promoted "nati
[and] full-blown cultural dependency."11 Among even diehard Freudians, there is b
that Fanon won this debate and that any knowing postcolonial critic using psychoa
therefore mount a critique using Fanon rather than Mannoni.
I would argue that the reverse is true, that Mannoni's mature work is ultima
useful. Despite claims to the contrary, Mannoni pushes for an understanding of
that is free of essentialism - indeed, for a perspective on otherness finally devoid
rationale, then, is neither willfully tendentious nor naive. I acknowledge profound
Mannoni's early work, including his incipient universalist psychology (which eclips
ferences altogether) and his reductive assumption, dating also from the 1950s, tha
politics follow psychological principles. But as Fanon's debate with Mannoni has
enced the ways in which postcolonial critics view individual and collective sufferin
whether Fanon's political account of psychic factors advances or impedes the un
such torment. As David Macey explains in a recent biography of Fanon, "Whereas p
speaks of fantasy, Fanon consistently speaks of trauma and explains mental illne
social alienation."12 At the very least, then, Fanon's debate with Mannoni crystalli
a fraught debate about the origins of colonial trauma.
Viewing psychic conflicts as politically determined, Fanon sought explanations f
in the patient's cultural world. His 1952 account of the "North African syndrome"
"Colonial War and Mental Disorders" are but two examples of his emphasis on c
tomatology.13 In a similar vein (and despite his temporary rejection of Jean-Paul S
analysis of négritude ), Fanon adopted Sartre's ontological account of racial tension
emphasis on dialectical conflict, this perspective is more rigid than Mannoni's, for
peans in a category of sameness and fixes the colonized as Europe's "Other." As
in these now-famous words, "the real Other for the white man is and will continue
man. And conversely [le véritable Autrui du Blanc est et demeure le Noir. Et inver
By the mid 1950s, by contrast, Mannoni tended to de-ontologize racial conflict,
tinguishing between prejudice and persons. He began offering a more nuanced
critique of colonialism, in which otherness in the broadest sense is a determinant of
than a guise that the colonized seem to represent to those who would subject them
the origins of violence need not be external, but can obtain from the power of
11. Apter p. 77.

12. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta, 2000), p. 194. According to Macey, "Fano
borrowings from psychoanalysis are not from Freud, but from the little-known Swiss analyst Germ
Névrose d'abandon appeared in 1950" (p. 195).
13. See Frantz Fanon, "The 'North African Syndrome,"' Esprit (février 1952), rept. in Toward the A
(Political Essays), trans. Haakon Chevalier (Grove, 1967), pp. 3-16, and "Colonial War and Mental Di
Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, preface Jean-Paul Sartre (1961; Grove, 1968),
declares, at the start of the first essay: "It must be possible ... to describe an initial, basic dimension of a
(p. 3). Near the start of the second essay, he insists: "That imperialism which today is fighting against
mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly e
and our spirits. . . . The defensive attitudes created by this violent bringing together of the colonized m
system form themselves into a structure which then reveals then colonized personality" (pp. 249, 250).
14. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; Grove Weidenfeld, 196
Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), p. 133n. Subsequent references to Fanon's study provid
English translation in main text, followed, whenever relevant, by references to the French edition.
130 Journal of Modera Literature
imagos. By stressing the influence of fantasies bea

external reality, Mannoni alters our conception of
something Apter almost concedes when summariz
wrangle with Mannoni still haunts us:
Fanon's famous attack on Mannoni . . . exemplifies m

conjugating race and psychoanalysis. It shows, on the
histories have been embedded within the conceptua
on the other, how vital psychoanalysis remains to a
dency; whether at the micro level {colon facing off a
(the politics of "dependent" nations within transnatio
know-how, and actuarial projection).15
In Apter 's study, however, Mannoni is too embarr

Although she is "tempted to retrieve shards of [his]
am committed to exculpating him from charges that
(taking the result of colonial brutality and economic
I think that in trying to map psychic dependency, h
worked out, or, alternatively, that he worked out in a
analytic theorization of fetishistic disavowal."17
Apter's reading gives us a strong sense of the br
work, as well as evidence that he was "strategically
And critics have indeed followed Fanon here by tend
inchoate aspects of Mannoni's theory. For these r
and Fanon deserves careful reconsideration. Accordin
transparent ethnocentricity of Mannoni's reading of
opments in his thought largely to luck and the benef
that Apter does not consider, I contend that his late
essays and that both sharpen our understanding of
choanalytic work on post- and neocolonialism. This, in
debate: Mannoni's account of "native character" is no
on cultural traits, psychic drives, and the moment b
symbolically empty - categories. Although colonia
the assertion of clear differences between whites
anti-colonial and anti-essentialist ends, effectively t
Revisiting this apparently well-known material he
have gained had it substituted Mannoni's insights f
from Mannoni and Lacan the suggestion that violen
This is one reason Fanon sometimes admitted that h
level ... the level of the 'failures,' in the sense in whi
15. Apter, p. 79.

16. Apter, p. 84.
17. Apter, p. 86.
18. Apter, p. 84.
19. Apter, p. 84.
20. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 23.
Fanon's belief that psychoanalysis is politically reparative, as it helps build a future in

"can already see a white man and a black man hand in hand,"21 Mannoni argued more
that social change alone cannot diminish racial tension and that it is naive to suggest
his formulation, aspects of racism defy logic and sense and thus should not be constru
extensions of political conflict.
In sum, I would revive Mannoni's arguments and their impact on Fanon by reint
large body of material dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s to the early 1970s,
Mannoni's and Fanon's respective debts to Freud and Alfred Adler, as well as thei
(and in Mannoni's case also clinical) relationship to Lacan. In this regard, I want to m
the obvious fact that Mannoni revised his earliest publications and that he and Fanon
colonial psychiatry as a conceptual horizon which we are now understandably anxio
To my mind, Mannoni's work helps us rethink a set of categories - principally, samen
erness - that we have inherited from colonial theory. Although we repeat these categ
often without considering their vexed history, they are tied to assumptions about per
racial difference that, traditionally conceived, offer little, if any, emancipatory potent
* * * *
In the spring of 1947, Mannoni was busy recording his drea

Lacan two years earlier but broke off treatment after three mon
post in Madagascar. Mannoni had lived in that country since 192
director general of the colony's information service.22
Unremarkable in themselves, these details form a startling
events. In March 1947, the Mouvement Démocratique de la R
nationalist party founded in February 1946 - organized a wi
Madagascar (a "holy war against colonialism," in Macey's words),
tion from the French authorities that resulted in up to one hund
the MDRM membership.23 Several months later, demoted from
before returning to Paris in January 1948, partly to recommen
began writing Psychologie de la colonisation (trans. Prospero
Colonization ), which Seuil published in 1950.24 Although he had
about the rebellion, his study - a psychological account of the ca
Madagascar - gave only a terse, impressionistic account of the
21. Fanon, p. 222.

22. See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., p. 234.
23. Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life, p. 189. The term "French army" would be
composed of many Senegalese conscripts. For details, see Jacques Tronchon,
d'interprétation historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974), pp. 72-73. See also Anthony
tion (Longman, 1994), pp. 81-86.
24. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. P
of Michigan Press, 1990); Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Presses Univers
erences to Mannoni's study provide pagination to the English translation in the m
references to the French reprint. Although the prefix Prospero et Caliban was ad
Mannoni's book, after its use in all three English editions, to avoid confusion I hav
See the next note, as well, for further elaboration.
25. See Prospero and Caliban pp. 76-79 and 87-88, as well as Jean-Françoi
its most recent reprinted edition, notably retitled (in a phrase that Mannoni,
Le racisme revisité : Madagascar, 1947 (Paris: Denoël, 1997). Aimé Césaire was
apparent unconcern at the time about the massacre: "Start the forgetting mac
During these years, Mannoni recorded his dream

journal, published posthumously in 1990 as Nous no
is, We're Parting.26 Clearly allusive, the title invoke
from Madagascar.27 But the course he would take
to Lacan in Paris and an attempt to replicate Freud's
Lacan later rendered as " Whatever it is , I must go the
of the drives as executing an elaborate "adventure" o
lisher, Mannoni's journals address "un 'lecteur fant
devoid of character, race, and nationality - a Malag
neither.29
Partly owing to this national and ontological indeterminacy - the ambiguous, shifting refer-
ent for "Nous" in Mannoni's title - the experience of reading his memoirs is unsettling, creating
a type of dislocation or dépaysement , to adopt the Surrealists' word, that troubles narrative bear-
ings and political expectations. Behind the "sharp, clairvoyant eye of the I," he writes, lies "a
cone of shadow more and more dense [cône d'ombre de plus en plus dense ]" (p. 314), a statement
complicating the idea that we respond predictably to colonial events. According to Apter, this sen-
tence signals Mannoni's discovery of "the colonial unconscious" (p. 82), a point with hermeneutic
repercussions that are worth parsing, because they determine how we represent colonial events and
related psychic distress. The book's narrative perspective shifts erratically from haunting dreams
about jealousy, regrets, and Mannoni's administrative burdens to assessments of extreme politi-
cal violence. But the order of events described in the book - registered somewhat chaotically in
dreams and diary form - is contingent more on insights provoked by analysis with Lacan than by
external events. Nous nous quittons combines elaborate discussion of Mannoni's emerging thesis
on psychoanalysis and colonization with scattered commentary on what Maurice Bloch calls "one
of the bloodiest episodes of colonial repression on the African continent."30
Mannoni's journal is thus a testament to connected, but nonidentical realms - what Lacan in
1936 called "a relation between the organism and its reality . . . between the Innenwelt and the
UmweWm Mannoni's similar stress on gaps between our "inner reality" and "the outer world" is
arguably one of his work's heuristic - and, for some, exasperating - values. His dreams partly
Madagascans who are being tortured today, less than a century ago were poets, artists, administrators? Shhhhh! Keep your
lips buttoned! And silence falls, silence as deep as a safe!" Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1947; quatrième édition;
Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), p. 35, trans, by Joan Pinkham as Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review, 1972), p.
32. 1 return to Mannoni's and Césaire's treatment of the massacre later in this essay.
26. Mannoni, Nous nous quittons. C'est là ma route: Carnets (Paris: Denoël, 1990). Subsequent references give refer-
ences in main text. All translations mine.
27. Although the connection is doubtless fortuitous, the start of Prospero' s Books, Peter Greenaway's 1991 adaptation of
The Tempest, begins with a comparable pun: "We split, we split, we split."
28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho -Analysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11)
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Norton, 1981), p. 33, original emphasis, and pp. 162, 179. See also Lacan,
qtd. in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (1993; Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 266, and Lacan, The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John For-
rester (1975; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 194 n. 8.
29. Mannoni, Nous nous quittons. C'est là ma route: Carnets, p. 5.
30. Maurice Bloch, New Foreword to Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, p. v. According to Raymond F. Betts, the French
first showed colonial interest in Madagascar in 1643 by building Fort Dauphin, but established hegemony over the Merina
kingdom after "two particularly nasty little colonial wars, . . . first in 1885 and then in 1896." Betts, France and Decoloni-
sation 1900-1960 (St. Martin's, 1991), pp. 8-9.
31. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1936),
Ecrits : A Selection , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Norton, 1977), p. 4.
replicate personal and political conflicts while distorting externally verifiable

p. 338). Obscurely, the content of his dreams informs a theory of colonialism,
la colonisation , itself staging a confrontation between two different registers of
dependent and the inferior. Critics often forget this doubled (even multiple) stress
when disparaging Mannoni's colonial theory. But his emphasis on psychosocial disto
where psychic and external reality part company. Indeed, since Mannoni's dreams
the legacy of his analysis with Lacan preceding the MDRM revolt, their content is
ible to social commentary and conventional meaning, thereby frustrating expectat
transparency. Certainly, the memoir gives us no clear answers about colonialism o
determination - one reason that we should read it carefully rather than throwing i
Nous nous quittons complicates political causality by failing to attribute violenc
to either the French or the Malagasy. Additionally, the book's language is highly a
capturing through puns the surreal landscape of dreams and the unconscious. For
noni records a dream - dated 6 August 1947, five months after the French auth
suppressed the anti-colonial revolt - during which his feet sink slowly into the m
Tananarive in Madagascar. Torn between a sense of paralysis and fear that he is "p
too much fuss," he "ask[s] for aid and stretch [es] out [his] hand," only to discover
women, small and young, pass by in the rain, blurred. I stretch out my hand to the
me and pass." When in the dream Mannoni comes across an excavation and barr
the latter quite literally as a color bar. Indeed, since the sign on this barrier apparen
"propaganda" written in English (as is this section of Nous nous quittons ), Mannon
the sign is meant to inform the Malagasy and to dupe the French, an idea that in t
him feel "almost indignation" (p. 373). 32
Although the dream's symbolism seems overdetermined, one might best approa
ing the famous opening words of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, published six yea
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."33 Often taken as
because it seems to eclipse reality, this oneiric emphasis in fact betrays the idea th
colonialism are epistemologically certain. Such emphasis also complicates any si
of European sameness, including the idea that European fantasies, dreams, and p
a single aim.
In passages from the book that are not marked as dream sequences, Mannoni insists on
"treating philosophy like delirium," the better to uncover "its profound roots in consciousness,
the unconscious, and the social." Treating philosophy as a kind of "madness" helps expose what,
of colonialism, doesn't add up or make sense. "The right to psychoanalyze metaphysics," he
adds, "stems from a certain dissatisfaction in the physical realm. It's an evasion. A successful
psychoanalysis ought to help us return to this [doit nous permettre ďen revenir ]" (p. 290). But to
ask, to what are we returned, and is this equivalent to what we feel compelled to revisit seems in
this context especially vexing and difficult to answer. As Mannoni later realized, psychoanalysis
defeats - rather than enables - reparative approaches to colonialism. A successful psychoanaly-
sis could neither return the French and the Malagasy to life as it had been, nor reconcile them to
32. Apter engages with this dream in Continental Drift, pp. 91 and 255 n.32. Many other examples of such perceptual
"dislocation" appear in Mannoni's roman à clef Lettres personelles: Fiction lacanienne d'une analyse (1951; Paris:
Denoël, 1990); see Continental Drift, pp. 91-93.
33. L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 5. See also Vergés, '"Pays rêvé, pays réel':
Décolonisation et discours du 'self,'" Psychanalyse et décolonisation: Hommage à Octave Mannoni, pp. 73-85.
life as they imagined it to be; this explains why Hartl

and relevant, highlighting aspirations that are both an
analysis, a type of "dislocation" occurs that permanentl
and its reality," Mannoni provocatively likening the re
ics might balk at this metaphor, deeming it opportuni
strictly conceived, is integral to postcolonial critique
the interpretive path of psychoanalysis transform - e
"it's undoubtedly the unconscious that pushes [us] on
qui me pousse vers la rupture ]" (p. 145). Shattering
structures, such crises of meaning are essential to any
break up colonial patterns, including the fantasies that
One might fault Mannoni's purportedly "objective"
for representing politics as if it were an extension of p
it, "on psychoanalytic theories that supply facile motiv
sight are meaningless to the foreign observer" (p. vi) -
claims and ignore almost all of his other work. Moreov
If such "motivational explanations" are meaningless "at
retrospectively? Although Mannoni certainly though
not resolve political crises - not because it is apolitical,
frustrate strategy. Such an approach, in his words, "ca
permet pas de mieux dessiner un plan de politique colo
analysis pushes us in the opposite direction, where p
they are shown to lack meaning.
This itself is surely a valuable political point, signali
representation in order to give colonialism the appea
idea. He ignores the fact that it is impossible, in Mann
as a nonpsychic phenomenon. This point becomes ev
and its now famous critiques by Aimé Césaire, Fano
journals; his subsequent commentary on Lacan's ear
colonial psychiatry; and his retraction of much of Pr
Decolonisation of Myself" (1966) and "Terrains' de m
his arguments in several articles preceding, anticipatin
de dépendance et la structure de la personnalité" (19
personnalité malgache" (1948); "Colonisation et psych
malgache" (1950); and "La plainte du noir" (1951).36
* * * *
34. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Reveale
also Roudinesco, "La décolonisation de soi: Un souvenir d'analyse," Psychanaly
Mannoni , pp. 97-106, in which she discusses, among other things, the recept
analysis with Mannoni.
35. Mannoni, "The Decolonisation of Myself" (1966), Race VII (April 1966), pp
pour l'imaginaire, ou l'autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 290-300; and "'Terr
299-300 (juin-juillet 1971), pp. 2351-53, rept. in Prospero et Caliban: Psyc
216-17. Subsequent references give pagination in main text, and references to
rains de Mission?" are to the journal versions.
36. Mannoni, "Le complexe de dépendance et la structure de la personnal
Psyché: Revue internationale de psychanalyse et des sciences de l'homme XII
As Mannoni's knowledge of psychoanalysis deepened in later y ears - Psychologie

colonisation , his first book, appeared just three years after he had begun analysis with L
seems necessary to read this book in light of what he came to understand about colonialis
unconscious, and the real, an order of experience that is "impossible" because it opposes
creating "a certain void in a symbolic structure."37 Mannoni's arguments show what ha
perspectives on colonialism when the unconscious either is seen as determining all conflic
cally, Fanon's critique of Mannoni) or is foreclosed entirely from discussion (Bloch's a
anthropological remedy). But while Fanon's and Bloch's arguments point up many wea
in Mannoni's thesis, they cannot explain the ferocity of the French authorities' retaliation
Madagascan revolt, or account for a genocide incomprehensible within even the twisted, p
istic frame of French colonialism.
An impasse arises here concerning the motivation for ethnic violence, which corresponds
roughly to Mannoni's and Fanon's competing emphases. But whereas Mannoni initially tried to
interpret the ontology of colonial structures, suggesting radically that "the negro ... is the white
man's fear of himself [le Nègre, alors , c'est la peur que le Blanc a de lui-même ]" ( Prospero , pp.
200; 191), Fanon offered a more blanket assessment of racial violence, insisting "It is the racist
who creates his inferior [c'est le raciste qui crée V infériorisé]" {Black Skin, pp. 93; 77). Fanon's
and Bloch's perspectives represent psychic conflict as largely an effect of colonialism; Mannoni's
is close to inverting this claim, viewing psychic and "extrasocial" concerns as not only paramount,
but also a possible explanation for colonial aspirations. More important, Mannoni underscores that
there's "no watertight barrier [aucune barrière étanche] between the psychology of the colonized
and that of the European," because both constituencies are " only too similar " in their apprehension
of hostile thoughts and drives.38
In April 1950, Mannoni published a brief article in Esprit - "Psychologie de la révolte
malgache" - that ostensibly is just a précis of his forthcoming book, Prospero and Caliban. But
the Esprit essay - one of four in a special issue on "Humanisme contre guerres coloniales" - is
more subtle, acute, and politicized than Prospero. For a start, Mannoni engages at length with the
MDRM revolt - a phenomenon that his book condensed into six pages - and in his essay's open-
ing paragraph, he refutes conclusively the ethnographic and sociological "pretension" that objec-
tivity is possible, a point that neither Fanon nor Bloch properly heeded. "In every inter subjective
situation," he explains, "what is human in the relation manifests itself [s'établissent des rapports
humains ], and the actions of the 'indigenous' attach themselves as well to this relation. Man is
never a pure object . . (p. 581). The unconscious not only thwarts reciprocity, in other words, but
betrays the particularity of individuals' fantasies. Unlike Fanon, Mannoni stresses the collapse of
objectivity and meaning, as well as the aggressive transference that replaces both. Adding to an
subsequent extracts in Psyché XIII-XIV (novembre-decembre 1947), pp. 1453-79; Psyché XV (janvier 1948), pp. 93-96;
Psyché XXI- XXII (juillet-août 1948), pp. 941-45; Psyché XXIII-XXIV (septembre-octobre 1948), pp. 1160-63; and "Le
complexe de Prospero," Psyché XXV (novembre 1948), pp. 1275-95; "La personnalité malgache. Ebauche d'une analyse
des structures," Revue de psychologie des peuples III (juillet 1948), pp. 263-81; "Colonisation et psychanalyse. Madagas-
car" Chemins du monde V (octobre 1948), pp. 89-96; "Psychologie de la révolte malgache," Esprit CLXVI (avril 1950),
pp. 581-95; and "La plainte du noir," Esprit CLXXIX (mai 1951), pp. 734-49.
37. Slavoj Žižek, "Which Subject of the Real?" The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 169. This
is also Mannoni's claim, voiced especially in "The Decolonisation of Myself," p. 333, and '"Terrains' de mission?" p.
2352. For elaboration on the wider implications of this claim, see Tim Dean, "The Germs of Empires: Heart of Darkness,
Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS," The Psychoanalysis of Race, esp. pp. 308-10; and Cynthia Dyess and
Dean, "Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning," Psychoanalytic Dialogues X (2000), pp. 735-56.
38. Mannoni, "Le complexe de dépendance et la structure de la personnalité," Psyché XII (octobre 1947), p. 1230.
1 36 Journal of Modem Literature
argument that he would repeat in Prospero , Mannoni

hension of other people is transparent, direct. Our perc
and this helps to explain the existence of prejudice amo
countries nor had any contact with other races. "The o
the thoughts he encounters in his own mind, and it seem
people he is observing" ( Prospero , p. 20; also pp. 12
recovered "by accusing someone else of what he conside
According to Mannoni, these projections have materi
tinguishable from acts (see "Decolonisation," p. 329; "
while projection seems, to the colonizer, to rationalize h
symmetry between him and the colonized, making clear
precursor to Lacan's interest in part objects (objets peti
nor reducible to people or objects, and thus have no int
ing to Mannoni, we should probe - and try to disma
reactions [caractère ' imaginaire * de ces réactions ]"
psychanalyse," p. 94), while recognizing that the subj
and real dimensions.
Mannoni's article provides a significant account of the anti-colonial revolt. He argues tha
the whites in Tananarive organized a conspiracy ("petit comploť ), hoping to paralyze military
conflict by exploiting the Malagasy's divided loyalty between the French and the new authoritie
These were now the "beneficiaries of a transference from which the French had for a long time
profited [ bénéficiaient seules de ce transfert affectif dont ils avaient longtemps profité ]" (p. 58
This argument is much subtler than Mannoni's discredited account of dependency in Prosper
"Not all peoples can be colonized," he had explained in a notorious phrase later recanted; "on
those who experience this need [ceux qui possèdent ce besoin ]" (pp. 85; 88). Citing this and other
passages, Fanon shows where Mannoni's study appeared complicit with colonization. "Whereve
Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering," Mannoni had written, "it ca
safely be said that their coming was unconsciously expected - even desired - by the future su
ject peoples [attendus, et même désirés dans l'inconscient de leurs sujets ]" (pp. 86; 88, also qtd
in Fanon, Black Skin , pp. 98-99). But Mannoni revised these claims in 1956 and 1964, before
rejecting them in 1966 and 1971. When reading Prospero alongside Mannoni's later articles, on
witnesses the evolution of a thesis that is not identical to its origins, a conceptual lag that revea
important, often misunderstood elements of French intellectual and psychoanalytic history.
* * * *
Mannoni's thesis about inferiority and dependence in Prospero

calls "a failure in adaptation" (p. 102), an Adlerian idea implying
with powerful Lacanian implications, suggesting that our only rep
is through psychosis. At his most Adlerian, as Fanon later obser
structures as fixed, even predetermined. At his most Lacanian, b
psychosocial patterns that flounder and misfire. As Mannoni's two
colonialism, he suggests that the colonizer's inferiority complex is
and repressed form in the European's psyche" (p. 97). He is discu
here and (like Fanon) has little to say about women. But as Husse
Mannoni is chiefly concerned with the means by which "the Europeans and the co
psychologically conditioned for colonial relations long before colonization occurr
arguing that the social tie in Europe responds to the infant's need for attachment, M
that this tie "exerts a certain pressure on the individual" (p. 97), its effects generally r
foreign soil, where hitherto undetectable traits in Europe can flourish as domination,
misanthropy, each granting significant "emotional satisfactions" (p. 98) .40
Although Mannoni's thesis is quite interesting, it evidently betrays signs of a
hypothesis" - an expectation that cultural suppression translates into psychic repress
a way that the former's removal permits the latter's emancipation. This is a non-Fre
of repression, however, as is clear when Mannoni invokes Adler, Karl Abraham, and
order to describe the child's guilt at breaking ties with his parents (p. 33), an argumen
close to representing culture as the troubled outcome of unresolved psychic antagonis
especially toward the end of Prospero, these hydraulic assumptions recede, and an
ist perspective on colonial failure and what is "barely accessible to the conscious m
them (p. 82). As Jock McCulloch put it, referring to the thesis of Prospero and Caliba
is emphatic that there is no constitutional imperative governing the Malagasy's depen
plex. If a Malagasy were brought up in Europe he would exhibit inferiority and not de
Later still, the functional dimension of racism further transformed Mannoni's underst
symbolic and practical collapse of colonial ideals.
Since Mannoni refused to "draw a hard-and-fast demarcation line between the civilized and the
non-civilized" ( Prospero , p. 19), he ended up formulating two accounts of dependency. We could

call these "the evidential," based on materialist perspectives on colonialism, and "the counterintui-
tive," which highlights the unconscious satisfactions that become attached to colonial structures.
When Mannoni's study comes closest to the latter approach, the symmetry binding "Prospero" to
"Caliban" breaks down, exposing the commitment of Europeans to unfair social arrangements,
including those resulting in personal and collective harm.42 At such moments, Mannoni destroys
suggestions of interpersonal and interracial complementarity, arguing that unconscious aggres-
sion and resistances mediate both. To many critics, this conclusion blocks transformation and
discredits psychoanalytic perspectives on colonialism.43 But the point is better put the other way:
the failure of Mannoni's Adlerian claims about complementarity in fact made room for his more
sophisticated perspectives on enmity and relationality, including ones based on culturally- and
psychically-contingent traits.
Consequently, Mannoni's argument focuses on the unpredictable drives composing individu-
als, regardless of race. This can tilt into a de-historicizing gesture, to be sure, in which policies
39. Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (Plenum, 1985), p. 108.
40. The insight itself arose on foreign soil, too. As Mannoni records in Nous nous quittons : "/7 juillet [1947]. Sujet: La
tentation d'un monde sans hommes. Prospero et Crusoé" (p. 371).
41. Jock McCulloch, Black Soul , White Artifact: Fanon' s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983), p. 23, original emphasis.
42. In his introduction to Prospero, Mannoni claims that "contact is made, not between abstractions, but between real,
live human beings, and the closest contact often occurs at the least desirable level" (p. 23), an argument that establishes
more complexly the possibility and difficulty of interpersonal relations.
43. See for instance Antoine Bouillon, Madagascar: Le colonisé et son 'âme': Essai sur le discours psychologique
colonial (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1981), pp. 198-232; Gustav Jahoda, White Man: A Study of the Attitudes of Africans to
Europeans in Ghana before Independence (1961; Greenwood, 1983), pp. 108-13.
manifest as personae. But Mannoni uses this last term t

and propensities that make the individual a member of
peans in a structure from which they "derive . . . some
are "greedy for certain other - psychological - satisfact
( Prospero , pp. 88, 32). Rather than fixing Europeans an
words, he views their "emotional satisfactions" relati
including domination, and ones that are harder to unde
of other people (p. 98).
In "Psychologie de la révolte malgache," for instance
to "justify" the genocide they had caused, the fact tha
brutality, and their conviction that their behavior had
but necessary, even inevitable. As he states in bitter
untroubled torturers, without a sense of wrongdoing, wh
wouldn't have dared give up [besoins auxquels elles n
chologie," p. 592).
The psychological truism that man is, in Freud's wor
context that highlighting the gap between Enlightenme
ans') behavior "as untroubled torturers" might seem w
in 1921, in a devastating indictment of human cruelty
differences should lead to an almost insuperable repu
the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white
critiques truncate these psychic emphases, as Fanon d
scribed. By contrast, Mannoni tried to invert this exp
psychic life exercises obscure but determining effects
allowed themselves to experience was, he argues, a terr
Malagasy, and then recast as a form of persecution, be
tims. "The danger is above all imaginary," he stresses,
against himself" (pp. 591-92).
Mannoni does not trivialize this argument about psyc
insists that the French sustained a treacherous illusion
trust, government, and colonial rule. We could call thi
which the "enemy," the colonial neighbor, is perceived as
of their supposedly persecuted fellow nationals, the res
"disavow not only a specific colonial situation, but also,
our politics concerning the population of Madagascar
tion could represent these arguments as apolitical, indi
44. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, p. 1

45. Sigmund Freud, " Homo homini lupus," in Civilization and Its
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. a
1953-74), 21:p. 111.
46. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921),
47. See Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, pp. 40-43.
48. The phrase is Eric L. Santner's, in My Own Private Germany:
(Princeton University Press, 1996), p. xii.
49. Mannoni later voiced an argument about the implications of disa
bien, mais quand même . . .," Clefs pour l'imaginaire, ou l'autre sc
* * * *
Two years after Mannoni's book appeared in France, the Ma

Fanon - then twenty-seven and working in a residency program
in central France - published Peau noire , masques blancs (1952
Masks), including a well-known critique of Mannoni's book, "Th
dency Complex of Colonized Peoples" (pp. 83-108). Strongly infl
Mannoni's articles from the 1940s, Fanon faults Mannoni's book
and apparently divorcing colonialism from economics (pp. 83, 86);
coordinates" of the Malagasy revolt (p. 84); advancing opinions
(p. 88); misinterpreting various Malagasy's dreams (p. 106); "mak
something that antedates colonization" (p. 85); and arguing that
for dependency (pp. 98-99). 50
Fanon's critique is both compelling and measured. But while h
Mannoni's argument, it is necessary to stress that uninterest in ec
As Mannoni emphasizes in his introduction to Prospero - and
Second Edition - "we must not . . . underestimate the importanc
[are] paramount; indeed, it is very likely that economic conditions
of the colonial peoples" (p. 32; also p. 8). 51 Moreover, Fanon men
Mannoni's theory of colonial violence - "The Prospero Complex"
critical to say about it. "What is interesting in this part of his book,"
which M. Mannoni makes us feel the ill-resolved conflicts [ conflits
the root of the colonial vocation" {Black Skin , pp. 107; 89). He then
ing account of colonial misanthropy, the suggestion that the coloni
and so rejects "a world in which Others have to be respected . . . b
they are. Rejection of that world is combined with an urge to dom
in origin and which social adaptation has failed to discipline" Ç Pro
Skin , pp. 107-08). Rejection of a world of other people, we migh
adaptation. It is a drive that no society can master or fully eradicat
According to McCulloch, Fanon accepted Mannoni's account of
he agreed "that there was a connection between colonial racism
similar account of the psychology of colonial violence."52 Indeed, s
[Fanon's] and Mannoni's work were strikingly similar," McCulloc
parts of Prospero et Caliban "in some respects surprising" (p. 122
although for important reasons Mannoni does not limit racism t
links between colonial misanthropy and the collapse of political str
la révolte malgache"; arguably, the insights it raises- which Mannoni revisited in "T
mine her suggestion that Mannoni "was onto something that he never properly wor
50. See also John Gaffar LaGuerre, Enemies of Empire (St. Augustine, Trinidad
1984), pp. 166-90.
51. As McCulloch observes, "Apart from [the] inaccuracy [of Fanon's suggestion
economics], the general weakness of his attack upon Mannoni results from his own
nature of the relationship between political-economic conditions and psychologic
political and economic system he would favour for the Antilles" ( Black Soul, White
52. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and " The African Mind " (Cambridge Unive
references give pagination in main text.
the process by which enmity becomes actual, a quali

or tolerate.
Taking the dependency complex as Mannoni's so

readers have greatly exaggerated the scope of Fan
admired about Mannoni's study.53 His chapter on
begins by suggesting that Mannoni's "grasp ... of t
relations between the colonized and the colonizer"
ambiguous assessment to say the least. He also app
"conscientious . . . desire to examine the problem f
his "investigating] ... the unconscious of the Mala
stress on "the ill-resolved conflicts that seem to be
Fanon criticizes his thesis about the path of these
Complex" - hatred stemming from unresolved guilt
as the symptom par excellence of colonial rule. The
into their shared intellectual concerns.54
* * * *
Despite Fanon's debt to Lacan, whom he acknowledged for helpin

antagonism in its imaginary register (see Black Skin , pp. 61n., 80,
Mannoni initially used Adler's individual psychology to "help us un
world held by the man of color" (p. 62).55 These words are Fanon
respects their mutual turn to Adler is the most surprising and lea
ni's claims about dependency and superiority - clearly the weake
directly from Adler, who broke with Freud in 1911 to advance con
about "self-boundedness," psychological archetypes, compensator
53. See for instance David Caute, Frantz Fanon (Viking, 1970), pp. 14-15; Irene L
Study (Pantheon, 1973), pp. 58-59; Richard C. Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutio
1983), p. 42; Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Harvard University P
perspectives, see Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, p. 107
Fanon: The Psychology of Colonization and the Decolonization of Personality," N
54. This is something many critics ignore or downplay. See especially Sekyi-O
pp. 6-8, one of the best books published on Fanon, which nevertheless radically u
psychic life. Mannoni's and Fanon's conceptual and political proximity is perhaps cle
essay "La plainte du noir" alongside Fanon's "L'expérience vécue du noir," which a
657-79). Mannoni examines at some length the injustice, exploitation, and humiliatio
focuses perhaps more tersely on "the actual experience" of racial anger and shame. T
fueling both essays, one need only read H. Aubin's fragment on "primitive patholog
chez le noir," Hôpital XXVIII (mai 1940), pp. 185-87.
55. In including this material, I am partly responding to Nigel Gibson's compl
"result[ed] in a Fanon rooted in Lacan against Hegel." See Gibson, "Fanon and th
Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini (Routledge, 1999),
Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Rowman and Littlefie
ses, see Chester J. Fontenot, Jr., Frantz Fanon: Language as the God Gone Astray
Studies No. 60 (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 30; Stuart Hall, "The After-Li
Now? Why Black Skin , White Masks?" The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and
(Bay, 1996), p. 28; Bhabha, "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial C
appearing in "After Fanon," a special issue of New Formations XLVII (2002).
complex {Minderwertigkeitskomplex, or "Min ko" for short), never the clearest con
of times.56
Adler deemed individuals neurotic if their "striving for perfection" did not occur "within . . .
the goal of an ideal community." The logical corollary of this absurd claim is that psychic health
stems only from compliance with one's culture, an idea preempting - because pathologizing - all
forms of social criticism and political defiance. But while Fanon's and Césaire's contempt for
this argument is quite understandable, Fanon briefly charges Mannoni with loyalty to a critical
paradigm that none of them fully supported. His critique of Mannoni becomes disingenuous and
tautological here, replicating an argument about inferiority that both anticolonials, in different
ways, rejected (see "The Negro and Adler," a later section in Black Skin).
Even at his most Adlerian, Mannoni never took the argument this far. He raised implicitly the
dream of a "nondysfunctional" colonialism - not through "assimilation," but rather through the
"mutual adaptation of two groups," rather than two races, "with different mentalities [la co-adap-
tation psychologique de deux mentalités collectives ]" (pp. 28; 36). In theory, such coexistence
would dissolve colonial inequities; in practice, as Mannoni soon conceded, it could as easily leave
them intact. Later, he accompanied Freud and Lacan in calling the very insistence on adaptation
an intolerable stress on conformity, a coercive pressure partly responsible for the violence that
Adler hoped to eliminate.57 Mannoni came to view the ensuing "failure in adaptation" politically,
in other words, reading Adler's stress on maladaptive individuals as a symptom of colonial forces
thwarting social change (p. 102). For Mannoni, this "failure in adaptation" henceforth would rep-
resent a break with colonial patterns rather than a demand for their enforcement.
* ^ ^ *
Seven years later, in Portrait du colonisé précédé du portra

Colonizer and the Colonized ), Albert Memmi joined Mannoni
colonialism could be repaired. Memmi also insisted that "the
fashionable notions of 'dependency complex,' 'colonizability,'
but note, too, that Memmi also echoed Mannoni's theory of c
" The Usurper's Role (or, the Nero complex)" (p. 52). In his 19
Colonized, he even acknowledged retrospectively that "certain
tance to me were obscured - such as my analysis of what I ca
56. See Alfred Adler, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Sys
Writings, ed. Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher (Basic, 1956),
Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Heinz L. A
western University Press, 1970), pp. 53-55.
57. Adler, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, pp. 106-07. In Lac
Theory," for instance, Mannoni remarks: "After Lévi-Strauss one has the imp
of culture and nature. He destroys them. The same is true for the ideal of
adapted simply means being alive." Mannoni, in Lacan, The Seminar of
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55, ed. Jacques-Alain
by John Forrester (1978; Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 39. Subsequen
also Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 109-11; and Lacan, The Sem
of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter
58. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized , trans. Howard Gr
Beacon, 1967), p. 88.
conceptual understatement seems inevitable, given

ism and his concomitant desire (resembling Fanon's)
To his critics, then, Mannoni sometimes seems to d
colonizer and colonized locked in their respective pe
his main respondents, Mannoni signaled the nonrepar
subject's rapport with an impersonal phenomenon, t
the colonizer's projections of enmity a basis for, ra
volatile bond. More controversially, but no less impo
helps explain how tyranny may persist in countries t
are in fact ruled by despots emulating former coloni
ducing Memmi, later called this bond "a relentless r
nized" ( The Colonizer , p. xxviii), he did so because
faith, rather than as an unconscious structure. The f
to change; this might account for its greater popular
While Memmi followed Sartre in adopting this e
influenced the work of Lacan. Actively involved in
brilliant interventions into the meaning of repetitio
Lacan's de-anthropomorphic account of otherness.5
postcolonial theory, it seems vital to stress that M
of colonial critique: the master-slave dialectic that
adopted from Hegel (see esp. "The Negro and Hegel
perspective, which rejects sublation and reciprocity,
relative to the real. Instead of representing an order
creates "'holes' in . . . meaning," indicating where se
There is no shortage of critics arguing that these a
history, amount to little more than allegory. Mann
historicists universalizing political conflicts in order
this charge against Mannoni, so, surprisingly, give
film, Stephen Heath voices the same complaint again
and the symbolic is crucial to Lacan exactly becaus
socio-historical determinations."62 Such mispercep
deferred action, and the symbolic order have, in tur
59. This is not to say that Lacan always agreed with Mannoni's fo
II, pp. 15-16, 19, 20, 33, and 319). But he did acknowledge that Ma
a question save in the form of a problem" (Seminar II, p. 35). W
seminar: "At this point, ... I find myself at a watershed and I no
ficulty. I don't have a solution, just a difficulty" (p. 34), a point t
would acknowledge in "The Decolonisation of Myself," pp. 333
60. For elaboration on this model, see Fuss, Identification Pap
Fanon engages clearly with the Hegelian/Sartrean model, but enga
fication. Missing from her account is a sustained assessment of sy
arguably gestured when discussing trauma. See, for instance, "T
"this pain without lesion, this illness distributed in and over the
brief account of this essay in Identification Papers, pp. 162-63.
61. Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of
Selection, p. 299.
62. Stephen Heath, "Le Père noël," October XXVI (1983), p. 77
ated claims, including Henry Louis Gates's suggestion, in an essay citing nothing b
the analyst's "motto [sic] would turn out to be: Never historicize, never explain."63
Ironically, Heath's and Gates's mischaracterizations of Lacan betray a faulty gr
choanalysis and an ahistorical understanding of its complex development - mischar
ironically, that Lacan came to view as emblematic of North America after encounteri
its scholars' hostility to theories of the unconscious. From such mischaracterization
never know that Lacan's "family played its role in the fight against colonialism,"
daughter, Laurence Bataille, being imprisoned briefly for aiding the FLN (Front d
Nationale) after her visit to Algeria, or that Lacan himself was, in Jean-François d
opinion, "one of the only [intellectuals] to sound misgivings about the renewal of r
period following May 68. "64 For Lacan, as for Mannoni, the conflict between symb
orders is inescapably specific to language and history, yet irreducible to both phe
irreducibility frees up the psychopolitical deadlock that opposing critical models i
strengthen. Moreover, it is Heath and Gates who advance an oddly limited conception
which - bereft of psychic effects - can tolerate only empirical and practical consid
should add that throughout his career, Fanon never countenanced this idea of politics
when he seemed most distant from psychiatry.65
These arguments evidently have had profound political implications, especial
repercussions for postcolonial theory of Mannoni's shift in emphasis from inte
exchange - broadly, "the world of Others [le monde des Autres ]" - to the idea that w
language, culture, other people, and especially our own self- strangeness via an imper
[L'Autre].66 Although both phrases appear in Prospero and Caliban (pp. 108; 108), t
on a "world of Others" belongs properly to Sartre, Fanon, and Memmi, whereas th
Other figures in Lacan's and Mannoni's work alone.67 One of the first and most valua
of Mannoni's later argument is its pushing colonial relations beyond selfhood and i
63. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fanonism," Critical Inquiry XVII (1991), p. 463. Gates makes this claim
ing the sentence in Heath's article that I reproduced above. For a brilliant rejoinder to such claims, see Joan
My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994).
64. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, p. 295; Je
Sauverzac, "Présentation" to Mannoni, Le racisme revisité : "La recrudescence du racisme- que Lacan fut
pressentir dans les lendemains de mai 68- est l'un des motifs évidents de cette réédition " (p. 8).
65. See for instance Fanon's late essay "Colonial War and Mental Disorders," in The Wretched of the Earth
and McCulloch, who argues that "all of Fanon's works form part of a single theoretical construct. This cons
unified and essentially coherent even though the manner of Fanon's presentation of his theory is often fra
obscure" ( Black Soul, White Artifact, p. 3). The remark is an implicit rebuttal to Gendzier's statement that F
"condemn[ed] the system he studied because he believed it to be destructive of human life ... He abandoned
politics" (Franti Fanon, p. 64).
66. Here, my claim differs extensively from Apter's: "Mannoni's Prospero/Caliban paradigm carries
dialectic of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft- or more generally speaking, the problem of psychic servitud
torically into Marxist decolonization discourses" (p. 79). Although Mannoni's relationship to decoloniza
warrants reassessment, Apter's argument works largely in the context of Prospero and Caliban's openin
Lacanian implications of his thesis, emerging in later chapters of his book, complicates Mannoni's relati
and to Marxism. Stressing the Other's impersonal quality also distinguishes my argument from Julia Kriste
study of the foreigner and racism, Strangers to Ourselves , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (1988; Columbia Universi
which, despite its obvious debt to Mannoni's work, makes no reference to him.
67. See "The Decolonisation of Myself," p. 328. In Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Univers
Carolina Press, 1977), Paul Clay Sorum references Mannoni's article "The Decolonisation of Myself" (p. 3
his assertion that " Psychologie de la colonisation was written ... in collaboration with France's leading
theorist, Jacques Lacan" (p. 80). Although I have not been able to disprove this claim, "Decolonisation" says n
about authorial collaboration, and refers only in passing to Mannoni's analysis, without mentioning Lacan on
exchange - "beyond the imaginary level," as he puts it

by inverting and distorting it. Mannoni stated in 1950
only is inseparable from, but also may by caused by,
that Europeans project onto the colonized. What conce
gache" was the specious disinterestedness that the Fre
tion for their brutal violence.
The "minute particulars" of historically-specific hatred and trauma that Mannoni and Lacan
in different ways outline are thus a prophylaxis against the "empire of the selfsame" - the kind
of imperialist politics that, as Freud put it sardonically, stem from "His Majesty the Ego."69
Moreover, because of his growing interest in what escapes the imaginary order in psychopolitical
terms, Mannoni's argument shifted over time, emphasizing less an individual unconscious, for-
mulated according to specific drives, than an impersonal structure - contingent on language and
history - that is tied to collective forces. As he remarks in "The Decolonisation of Myself," "racial
differences have absolutely no meaning in the natural order. . . . [They] become the significants
(to borrow a linguistic term) which allow us at last to formulate, whether clearly or obscurely, the
terms of the deepest problems concerning human relationships" (p. 333).
The basis of this argument also appears in his earlier work. For instance, in one response to
Lacan's 1954-55 seminar on "The Ego in Freud's Theory," Mannoni modifies Lacan's perspec-
tive on intersubjectivity by pointing to a form of repetition that "may not be detectable in the
thing that's repeated" (Lacan responded: "I like what you're saying" [pp. 188-89]). What recurs
in colonial structures, we might say, has political and non-social implications for all parties
involved - Mannoni's way of highlighting, before interpreting, the lapsus that emerges between
subjects and their symbolic structures. As he observes, "in interpersonal relations, something
factitious is always brought in, namely the projection of others on to ourselves" (qtd. in Lacan,
Seminar /, p. 147). This emphasis modifies Prosperò 's thesis in crucial ways, for the "factitious"
element demonstrates tragicomically why colonial relationships in particular are so transferential,
and thus aggressively volatile, in character.70
In "Decolonisation" Mannoni uses this understanding of transference and otherness to signal
what impedes crossracial understanding. "It is," he remarked, "as though the meeting between
black and white, far from being an encounter between two 'undifferentiated men,' were a distil-
lation of the difference between them - a difference devoid of any intrinsic meaning - which
becomes the symbol, at once obvious and absurd, of what goes wrong in human relations , and
68. Mannoni, qtd. in Lacan, Seminar II, p. 78. Significantly, there are also grounds for reading Prospero's masque in Act
IV, scene i of The Tempest (1623), as a way of "de-imaginarizing" colonial relations. Shakespeare is of course an important
precursor to Mannoni's claims. And although Prospero and Caliban does not invoke the masque, several critics have noted
that this scene holds up an image of paradise the better to reconcile Prospero and others to a world they cannot inhabit;
they grow accustomed to, and learn to love, what is "marr'd" (4.1.127). For elaboration, see Peter Lindenbaum, "Prospero's
Anger," Massachusetts Review XXV (1984), esp. pp. 164-65, and Joseph H. Summers, "The Anger of Prospero," Michi-
gan Quarterly Review XII (1973), esp. pp. 128-29. For a brilliant, even more radical understanding of colonial failure and
enmity, see Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864), Robert Browning: The Poems , ed. John Pettigrew with Thomas J.
Collins, 2 vols. (Yale University Press, 1981), 1: pp. 805-12, a poem whose implications for postcolonial theory would take
another full-length essay to assess.
69. Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908 [1907]), Standard Edition 9: p. 150. The phrase "empire of the
selfsame [l'Empire du propre ]" is Hélène Cixous's, from "Sorties," in Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born
Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (1975; University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 78.
70. The comment is reported because it apparently occurred during the evening of 6 April 1954.
also, so far as we ourselves are concerned, of what goes wrong in the white world" (p
antiessentialist claim indicates not only how fantasy enables and corrupts race relatio
and just as important, why the races are not locked in predetermined roles - that co
white and black are not as self is to Other (Black Skin , p. 21 5). 71
Because in Mannoni's formulation whites and blacks draw on a "difference dev
intrinsic meaning" (p. 333), his understanding of the Other as an impersonal categ
the Hegelian deadlock that Sartre described and reproduced in Orphée noir (1948)
Memmi and Fanon, in turn, solidified. Mannoni's insights into history and def
also pushed colonial critique beyond accounts of scapegoating and mimetic racis
and Bhabha (who echoes him, perhaps unconsciously) called "grotesque mimicry"
p. 23)73 - and toward an analysis capable of engaging with impossibility, trauma,
Bersani has termed "inaccurate self-replications."74 This is arguably one way of rid
of egoic imperialism. As Mannoni explains, "Nous sommes là dans le monde de l'hist
entrons à reculons ," a phrase losing much of its allusiveness when translated: "We are
of a historical process; we are entering upon it blindfold [literally: backwards, ret
(p. 161, p. 167).
In short, while Sartre's, Fanon's, and Memmi's accounts of prejudice remain ego-bound, Man-
noni uncovered powerful connections among racial violence, unconscious imagos, and elements
of psychic life that belie meaning and conventional temporality. Addressing different forms of
socialization and impersonal relations, he came closest among these thinkers to offering an anties-
sentialist perspective on psychic and cultural aggression in its colonial, postcolonial, and neoco-
lonial forms. Not surprisingly, then, his work also differs widely from Meyer Fortes's 1959 study,
Oedipus and Job in West African Religion, first delivered as a lecture in 1957, and Marie-Cécile
and Edmond Ortigues' co-authored 1966 study, Œdipe africain, which together stress the collec-
tive dimensions of the Oedipus complex and base palliatives for individual conflict on a person's
symbolic reintegration into his or her culture.75 In response to the view of such psychiatrists that
paternalism is an appropriate corrective to African psychosis, Mannoni - representing paternal-
ism as a symptom of European aggression - broke conclusively with their racist precepts.
* * * *
71. When disputing the Adlerian formulation "Ego greater than the Other," Fan
White
Ego different from the Other (p. 215)

According to Fuss, Fanon views whiteness as "a self-identical, self-reproducing term, [which] draws its ideological power
from its proclaimed transparency, from its self-elevation over the very category of 'race'" ( Identification Papers , p. 144).
Neither Fanon nor Fuss would dispute that this model of whiteness is precarious and fallacious- that it requires violence to
sustain the illusion of self-consistency. The question that remains, however, is whether Fanon's conceptual understanding
of race solidified this fantasy or signaled why it fails and can therefore be surpassed.
72. See Léopold Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, précédée de Orphée
noir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
73. Bhabha, "The Other Question- the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," Screen XXIV (1983), p. 27. In this article,
Bhabha refers to "a grotesque mimicry or 'doubling' that threatens to split the soul and whole, undifferentiated skin of the
ego" (p. 27). Given the enormous influence of Bhabha's postcolonial essays, it is ironic (to say the least) that critics advanc-
ing the same concept while attacking Mannoni are in fact adopting Mannoni's own phrase.
74. Leo Bersani, "Against Monogamy," Oxford Literary Review XX (1998), spec, issue: "Beyond Redemption: The Work
of Leo Bersani," p. 20.
75. Meyer Fortes, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1957; Cambridge University Press, 1959), esp. pp. 78-79;
Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, Œdipe africain (1966; Paris: L'Harmattan, 1984), pp. 111-15.
146 Journal of Modera Literature
"To credit a black African with an internal world

explicit racism but also of medical science," writes J
to Wulf Sachs's Black Hamlet (1937, reprinted 1996).
sembling counterintuitive aspects of Mannoni's ethn
wisdom of colonial psychiatrists, many of whom wro
ing any of the symptoms that they blithely diagnosed
this experience in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, b
generalizations about a continent that dwarfs Engla
latter group H. L. Gordon, author of several essays o
in Kenya; B. J. F. Laubscher, author of Sex, Custom , a
Pagan Natives (1937); and Colin Carothers, author of n
The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in
of Mau Mau (1954).78
Six decades before Richard Herrnstein and Charles M
publishing The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Str
conducting elaborate experiments on supposed "racia
cranial size, as though late-Victorian critiques of phre
to Britain's colonial realm. James H. Sequeira could
Medical Journal , that "Dr. Gordon has found that a l
[in East Africans], constituting what in a European c
Carothers - overall, the most liberal of the above p
by writing on "Mental Derangement in Africans"
African" (1951).80 In The African Mind , he summed
"European conceptions of the African [that] . . . repres
The African . . . has been described as conventional; h

emotional stimulation; lacking in spontaneity, foresigh
ity; inapt for sound abstraction and for logic; given to
general, as unstable, impulsive, unreliable, irresponsibl
out reflection or ambition, or regard for the rights of p
76. Rose, "Introduction: Part Two," Black Hamlet, p. 39. See also
South Africa," pp. 413-33.
77. When referring to African tribeswomen in At Home with the
erg remarks: "They fall in and out of love with the facility of film-
78. H.L. Gordon, "(1) A Case of Striatal Syndrome; (2) Sexual Per
VI (1929-30), pp. 122-30; Gordon, "Psychiatry in Kenya Colony,"
167-70; B.J.F. Laubscher, Sex, Custom, and Psychotherapy: A Stu
Routledge, 1937); [John] Colin Carothers, The African Mind in H
Geneva: World Health Organization, 1954) and The Psychology of
79. James H. Sequeira, "The Brain of the East African Native," B
a summary and partial critique of this argument, see H. J. Simon
Journal of Mental Science CIV (1958), pp. 377-88.
80. Carothers, "A Study of Mental Derangement in Africans, an
cially in Relation to the African Attitude to Life," Journal of Me
Function and the African," Journal of Mental Science XCVII (195
81. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease, p. 87.
One waits in vain for Carothers to dismiss these offensive claims; he corroborates th
irony, as sound judgments.
Although some of these arguments recurred in contemporaneous psychology, the
generally came to different conclusions about the etiology of these characteristics, vie
cultural rather than innate. While Gordon was working on East African cranial size, f
Sachs published his unorthodox analysis of John Chavafambira, a nganga (healer-d
Manikaland, now in eastern Zimbabwe but formerly part of Southern Rhodesia. Bl
his account of the analysis / friendship, is an often self-reflexive statement about his
in Chavafambira's well-being. Similarly, although J. F. Ritchie - "a convinced Fre
showed little theoretical interest in his or other Europeans' countertransference,
African as Suckling and as Adult (1943) by stipulating that he could "find no essentia
between the African mind and the European."82 Ritchie's study is far from being a r
ment, but it asserts at the outset a profound conceptual break with psychiatry's racial
instead addressing - and frequently validating - warped assessments of cultural d
Although it would be easy to dismiss this shift as bogus, given its residual biases, it
onstrate the mutability of prejudices by underscoring many of their cultural roots, in tu
Mannoni's profound contribution a decade later.
Ritchie's text flounders on the epistemological gap between nature and culture
began theorizing in the late 1890s and that Lacan highlighted in the 1940s before era
remaining vestiges of biologism in Freud's work. One reason for this obstacle is R
others') inability to control assigned parameters for projection; in their model, transf
remain the sole province of the indigenous. The repercussions of this argument becom
we see the liberties that Mannoni took with Ritchie's model, which argues that prolo
is responsible for Africans' immaturity. Owing to a "long indulgence at the breast"
Ritchie, the African regards himself as faultless and perceives the outer world as res
his misfortune, an obvious way of thwarting - indeed, ridiculing - sociopolitical
introjects all good from without," adds Ritchie, in a thesis Carothers would later e
projects all bad from within."83
When introducing Sachs's Black Hamlet , Rose adds an important historical dimens
lamentable material. She offers a genealogy of the word projection , tracing its co
clinical use from Freud's 1915 essay on "The Unconscious" to Ernest Jones's 1924
Bronislaw Malinowski about the universality of the Oedipus Complex. From there,
the concept to Klein's account of projective identification in 1928; Géza Róheim's 19
"Psycho-Analysis and Anthropology"; Sachs's and Ritchie's respective uses of the term
in 1937 and 1943; and, finally, Mannoni's 1950 study, Prospero and Caliban}4 "Look
82. J. F. Ritchie, The African as Suckling and as Adult: A Psychological Study (Livingstone, Nort
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1943), pp. 4, 5. Subsequent references give pagination in main text. See a
fand's The Sick African: A Clinical Study, 3rd. Edition (1943; Cape Town: Juta, 1957), published the same ye
study, which states: "The causes of mental diseases [among Africans] are, as far as we know, the same as in
but . . . differences in psychiatric pattern to that of the European are due to some extent to differences in
tural background" (p. 533). Gelfand's opening chapter also states, "Africans may be divided roughly into
sophisticated and the unsophisticated" (p. 14). For additional material, see Megan Vaughan, Curing Th
Power and African Illness (Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. p. 114.
83. Ritchie, p. 32, also qtd. in African Mind, p. 87.
84. Rose, "Introduction: Part Two," Black Hamlet, pp. 51-52. Specific references are: Freud, "The Unco
Standard Edition XIV: pp. 159-209; Ernest Jones, "Mother-Right and the Sexual Ignorance of Savages"
theory of the infantile projections of the primitive,

starts to turn back on itself. ... On what is the belief i
if not on a moment of projection?"85
Rose's point applies moreover to psychological-
between "inferiority" and "projection." For the latte
is the imputation to the outer world of all badness an

Internally-determined danger and pain are repudiated
impulses and activities are attributed to the outside w
at a distance his sense of badness or inferiority - and
of consciousness most of the time ... He projects his
impulses and thus persuades himself that he is good
In this formulation, the African is the sole source of

aggression, acting as a neutral interpreter of African
political intervention becomes clear when we watc
substituting the term European for African. Imagin
hearing the equivalent of "The European tries to kee
ority - and he does succeed in keeping it out of co
very distant from Mannoni's actual claims. In Pros
later, Mannoni insisted that Europeans alone exhibit
"inferiority" to colonizers, deeming this a cause, rat
and discrimination. After bringing Europe into the p
ment wanting, agreeing to reprint Prospero unalt
might shed light on a situation that "is now perhaps
Decolonisation of Myself," he revised this claim on
edly write a very different book now." He also antic
a study of the psychology of decolonisation" - "a dif
interest" (p. 327) - an undertaking, moreover, that L
by its stress on individuals' complex relationship to t
* * * *
Still, Mannoni was not willing to discredit Prospero entirely. In

that his retention of earlier claims stemmed not from intellectu
that the phenomena described in his book had disappeared neith
ously colonized countries. While acknowledging profound weak
in Applied Psycho-Analysis II (1951; International University Press, 1964),

Psychology of Sex and the Foundations of Kinship in Primitive Societies" an
Psyche IV (1923-24), pp. 98-128 and 293-332; Melanie Klein, "Early Stages of
and Reparation, and Other Works 1921-1945, introd. Hannah Segal (1975; Lon
Róheim, "Psychoanalysis and Anthropology" (1931), Psychoanalysis Today, ed.
versity Press, 1944), pp. 381-95.
85. Rose, "Introduction: Part Two," Black Hamlet, p. 53.
86. See Ngûgï wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language i
and Vergés, "To Cure and to Free: The Fanonian Project of 'Decolonized Psychi
R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Blackwell, 1996)
including his "mixing so unconcernedly theories taken from rival schools of thou
allusion to Adler's conceptual incompatibility with Freud and Lacan), Mannoni add
had shown "how the ghost of the former colonial subject haunts (without their being
relationships among whites who have never left Europe . . (pp. 328, 330). After st
profound hermeneutic importance of "many other points of view ... I even listed the
ical, economic, political, etc.," he argued that materialist and crassly psychologisti
to racism just don't go far enough: "surely we should be deluding ourselves to ima
rooting out of every racist feeling (even if such a thing were possible in fact as well
theory) would of itself bring with it the just and humane solution to racial problems?
in his early essays, Mannoni focuses here on psychic elements that, resisting meanin
transformation, nonetheless perpetuate racial violence. One wishes that Fanon had rea
more carefully and that postcolonial theorists would revisit this aspect of Mannon
and, alas, still timely argument.
Instead of "deluding" himself with the fantasy of society's and his own complete
tion, then, Mannoni returned to claims made more rigidly in Prospero , including hi
that an irrevocable self-strangeness determines our relationship - colonial or ot
other people. While continuing to advance theories of racism "beyond the imag
(qtd. in Lacan, Seminar II , p. 78), he also used the principle of "dislocation" to high
of identification and fantasy that escape Sartre's crude "Manichean allegory" of sel
This accent on impersonal otherness is crucial to understanding racial enmity, for it n
colonial critique of all remaining vestiges of essentialism but also compels us to redef
take to be postcolonial reciprocity and relationality, which - inadvertently or perhap
erately - may replicate colonial hierarchies and fantasies. While refusing to equate
with otherness, in other words, Mannoni's later arguments shatter the notion that E
locked in the category of sameness and the colonized in a position of otherness. Yet by
poststructuralist and new historicist fallacy that the psychic is largely an effect of cul
forces, he exposes aspects of the colonial scene to which we are all unconsciously atta
tionally, Mannoni strengthens the need for - and the difficulty of attaining - a fulle
of emancipation, as underscored by his epigraphic comment, "Dislocation can do the j
sis [Le dépaysement fait office d'analyse ]."87 "Dislocation" makes clear, that is, w
and psychic structures prove unsustainable; it helps us "decathect" these attachments a
how we might live without them.
The Martinican philosopher-poet René Ménil summed up the complexity of this tr
his recent fragment "Psychanalyse de l'histoire" when claiming eloquently that "the
our impossible history lies not in the absurdity of the past but in the incoherence and
of our current social conscience."88 If our current beliefs are bound to an "impossible
the sense that it is traumatic and unrecoverable, then ignoring these beliefs almost gu
past atrocities will be repeated. We recall Mannoni's similar point about our failure to
the past and each other, "as though the meeting between black and white . . . were a d
the difference between them - a difference devoid of any intrinsic meaning - which
87. Mannoni, qtd. in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., p. 234.

88. René Ménil, "Psychanalyse de l'histoire," Antilles déjà jadis, précédé de Tracées (Paris: Jean Mich
p. 47, my translation. I thank Ranji Khanna for this reference.
symbol, at once obvious and absurd, of what goes wro

wrong in the white world" ("Decolonisation," p. 333).
We hear the echo of Fanon here - "workfing] on
the 'failures' [des ' ratés'Y {Black Skin , pp. 23; 20) -
reparative triumph, the optimistic dream of "a white m
Unlike Fanon's conception, "de-imaginarizing" colon
relinquishing their hidden (although hardly secret) att
analysis gives colonial critique is neither certainty nor
a politics built on the collapse of European and Ame
politically astute, this argument surely puts to rest the f
of social relations and that Lacanians begin from the p
never explain."89
Resolute about the difficulties facing Europe and A
of any well-meaning sermonising" ("Decolonisation
psychic elements that stymie progression, decolonizati
failing to keep up with the times and in straying radi
to make painfully clear how, in many parts of the wo
in the new" (p. 327).
89. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," p. 463.

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Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Redux: Why Mannoni's "Prospero Complex" Still Haunts Us

Author(s): Christopher Lane

Dislocation can do the job of analysis [Le dépaysement fait office

intellectual history with Jacques Lacan.4 Although

4. Homi K. Bhabha, "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and t

11. Apter p. 77.

imagos. By stressing the influence of fantasies bea

Fanon's famous attack on Mannoni . . . exemplifies m

In Apter 's study, however, Mannoni is too embarr

15. Apter, p. 79.

Fanon's belief that psychoanalysis is politically reparative, as it helps build a future in

In the spring of 1947, Mannoni was busy recording his drea

21. Fanon, p. 222.

During these years, Mannoni recorded his dream

replicate personal and political conflicts while distorting externally verifiable

life as they imagined it to be; this explains why Hartl

As Mannoni's knowledge of psychoanalysis deepened in later y ears - Psychologie

argument that he would repeat in Prospero , Mannoni

Mannoni's thesis about inferiority and dependence in Prospero

non-civilized" ( Prospero , p. 19), he ended up formulating two accounts of dependency. We could

manifest as personae. But Mannoni uses this last term t

44. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, p. 1

Two years after Mannoni's book appeared in France, the Ma

the process by which enmity becomes actual, a quali

Taking the dependency complex as Mannoni's so

Despite Fanon's debt to Lacan, whom he acknowledged for helpin

Seven years later, in Portrait du colonisé précédé du portra

conceptual understatement seems inevitable, given

exchange - "beyond the imaginary level," as he puts it

Ego different from the Other (p. 215)

"To credit a black African with an internal world

The African . . . has been described as conventional; h

theory of the infantile projections of the primitive,

is the imputation to the outer world of all badness an

In this formulation, the African is the sole source of

Still, Mannoni was not willing to discredit Prospero entirely. In

in Applied Psycho-Analysis II (1951; International University Press, 1964),

87. Mannoni, qtd. in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., p. 234.

symbol, at once obvious and absurd, of what goes wro

89. Gates, "Critical Fanonism," p. 463.

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