Fanon's Police Inspector

Frantz Fanon practiced psychiatry in a colonized Algeria during its struggle for independence. In his 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon described cases from his treatment of Algerian nationalists and French colonists. I present one of Fanon's cases as an ethical inquiry into posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A French police inspector, who is employed in torture, visits Fanon with symptoms of PTSD after escalating domestic violence. The patient asks Fanon "to help him torture … with a total peace of mind." Is it possible to treat the inspector in a meaningful way? More broadly, how might researchers and clinicians balance collective responsibilities to individual symptoms and social conditions? The answer depends on how trauma is framed: as disorder of meaning-making or circuit dysfunction, as individual illness or social rupture, as potentially gendered and racialized. These framings can reveal different views on the allocation of responsibility for the causation, expression and management of PTSD. I do not propose that it is inherently immoral to modify traumatic memories; nor do I question the efficacy of individual interventions. Rather, I ask whether PTSD has a social meaning that transcends individual comfort in decision making about erasure. What do individual interventions accomplish in the absence of concurrent political and social transformations? I argue that a holistic understanding of PTSD entails a set of social obligations: to address at its root political, gendered, and racialized violence, to repudiate occupations centered on exploitative manipulation of individuals and cultures, and to social change that prioritizes these commitments.