In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Colonial Madness. Psychiatry in French North Africa
  • Eric T. Jennings
Colonial Madness. Psychiatry in French North Africa. By Richard C. Keller. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

This important book tackles a topic that historians of medicine and science alike have hitherto largely neglected: the role of psychiatry in the French colonies. Keller's compelling study is striking at a basic level, for the vivid examples it provides. These include a 1938 case of folie à quatre (95) that cast new light on the role of heredity in psychological ills, the case of an Algerian father imploring the authorities to intern his son in 1952, which speaks to patient and family agency and advocacy (109), and perhaps most notably, a young Moroccan man who attempted to take his life in 1937 because he felt he could never become completely French, a case that caused one colonial doctor to conclude that "civilizing" need be undertaken slowly (122).

Keller proves sensitive to the context and power relations of French colonial North Africa. He charts some wide-ranging colonial stereotypes of criminal, violent, and mad Muslims. Yet he shows that settlers as well were the subject of similar clichés, with some psychiatrists deeming them inherently demented, or even mad for having departed the metropole. In the realm of practices, Keller's book convincingly shows the remarkable intertwining of empire and psychiatry, from the links and ruptures between metropolitan and North African psychologists in the 1930s, to the psychological training of Sections Administrative Spécialisées – military units charged as of 1955 with winning hearts and minds during the Algerian War of independence.

Along the way, Keller engages with, indeed revises Frantz Fanon's famous conclusions about French colonial psychiatry. Although undeniably linked to the colonial administration, Keller shows how psychiatry was far more than a straight-forward instrument of coercive colonial rule. Indeed, Keller contends, French psychiatrists in North Africa enjoyed greater freedom than in the metropole. Furthermore, when they and the colonial administration did work together, they tended to conceive of psychiatry as an essential cog of a vaster colonial welfare state, still in its infancy in the 1930s. Lastly, colonial psychiatrists were anything but a homogenous corps, despite the existence of an "Algiers school." One detects, for instance, ongoing tensions between criminalizing and romanticizing impulses towards North African Muslims.

Insofar as the so-called Algiers school did share a set of beliefs, racial thinking was one of its defining characteristics. Yet Keller also goes well beyond race, taking seriously French colonial psychiatrists' ameliorative, progressive discourses, which, he reminds us, did not translate into progress. Keller proves chronologically sensitive, noting for instance how associationist or indirect-rule inspired policies colored psychiatric care in the Maghreb. He also traces shifting practices, from early nineteenth century transportation of psychiatric patients from North Africa to the metropole, to the development in the twentieth century of massive institutions on location, like the Blida psychiatric hospital.

Keller proves especially adept at recovering patient agency and "defiance" to French classification and etiology (85). He underscores the "tensions between local healing practices and European ideas about psychopathology" in particular (95). Through a set of rich case histories, he is able to recover patient voices and hence experiences of confinement.

The French revolutionary allegory of Philippe Pinel's eighteenth century emancipation of the insane proves recurrent and potent throughout this study. It was used by colonial psychiatrists to evoke the "liberation" of North Africans from their "shameful penal colony" (28) – in other words, from the shackles of pre, or early colonial care. After decolonization, the Pinel image was, interestingly, appropriated by postcolonial Algerian psychiatrists who continued to press for a progressive, interventionist form of psychiatry that had already lost favor in the former metropole. In the process, they reinvented Pinel into Fanon, or Fanon into Pinel.

Finally, Keller adroitly links colonial-era psychiatry to the Algerian War. In particular, he sheds light on the complicity of French colonial psychiatrists with the French military's counter-insurgency efforts, as they helped the army and police forces to better "know the adversary's soul" (155).

I will permit myself a handful of quibbles and questions that in no way detract...

Share