Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon wrote as a Martinican psychiatrist trained in France and working in a colonial world. He sets clinical observation beside autobiography, literary reading, and psychoanalytic theory to describe how racism settles into the psyche of the colonised. He follows the black man who is made to see himself through the eyes and language of the coloniser, and traces how desire, the body, and speech carry that split. The account moves between Martinique, the metropole, and the analytic case.

Fanon draws on psychoanalysis and argues with it in the same movement. He holds that some complexes are socially manufactured rather than born inside the individual, and he reworks identification, narcissism, and the imago around colour. For a psychodynamic clinician the book supplies a language for the internalised other, for the way a patient is positioned by another's gaze before a session begins, and for holding race and identification in mind within the transference without collapsing either into private pathology.