Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (review)

For the past two decades, scholars have sought with dogged determination to demonstrate that the cultural traffic between the metropole and the colonies was a two-way street. In re-writing the history of French anthropology, medicine, sociology, and urban planning, Burke, Lorcin, Fogerty and Osborne, Pelis, Wright, Rabinow, and others have emphasized the experimental nature of what transpired in the French colonies and the contribution that practitioners in the periphery made to the development of modern professions back in L’Hexagone.¹ In this book, Keller turns his lens to psychiatry and its offshoot ethnopsychiatry. In North Africa, both disciplines intersected with biology, anthropology, and criminology, and each had far-reaching political and social consequences.

Frantz Fanon first brought to the attention of the public the pernicious racism of psychiatry as conceived and practiced in Algeria, as well as the dehumanization inherent in colonialism. Keller contextualizes Fanon’s analysis by recounting the disciplinary history of French colonial psychiatry. He also introduces some of its less well-known indigenous North African critics, and he provides a trenchant commentary on colonial psychiatry’s contemporary legacy.

During the Algerian War, psychiatrically informed notions of racial difference contributed to the arsenal of the Cinquième Bureau, the division responsible for psychological warfare. Yet, as Keller argues, this ignominious final chapter should not mask French colonial psychiatry’s original progressive intent. Imbued with the myth of Philippe Pinel—the French revolutionary said to have unchained the insane in Paris’s Bicêtre and Salpêtriere hospitals—early champions of psychiatry in North Africa saw themselves as liberators. By introducing such modern mental hospitals as Blida in Algeria, Manouba in Tunisia, and Berrechid in Morocco, French psychiatrists sought a humane substitute for the nightmarish, local maristan and its often lethal alternative—transportation to France. Later, in their zeal to exploit North Africa’s potential as a social laboratory, disciples of Antoine Porot and others associated with the “School of Algiers” became enthusiastic proponents of then cuttingedge techniques like electro-shock therapy, insulin treatments, and psychosurgery.

Colonial Madness is frequently engaging, but it is also occasionally uneven. Additional prosopography in identifying the School of Algiers would have been helpful in the early chapters, and country specialists may not agree with Keller paving over differences between Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco (for instance, Keller seems unfamiliar with Mohamed Boughali’s important Sociologie des maladies mentales au Maroc [Casablanca, 1988]). In his effort to locate the sources and ramifications of psychiatric racism, his discussions of biological difference, criminality, and primitivism tend to be repetitive.

These criticisms aside, the work has undeniable strengths. The case histories from the archives and the discussion of psychiatry in contemporary film and in the works of novelists like Kateb Yacine are thoroughly engaging. In his concluding chapters, Keller makes an excellent argument for continuity in the postcolonial world. In France today, psychiatrists still debate the role of cultural difference as the origin of pathology. Political wrangling over the integration of citizens with roots in France’s former colonial empire remains heavily tinged with racism. To his credit, Keller convincingly demonstrates why colonial-era debates over assimilation and association still resonate today.