From critical theory to critical therapy: Towards a permanent psycho-political revolution between subjective and objective disalienation

Journal article

Critical theory has historically assumed an undialectical either/or between reformist therapy and revolutionary politics. Frantz Fanon’s dialectical, psycho-social approach to recovery as disalienation offers us a way out. Lying at the intersection of critical theory, political strategy and the history of political thought, this article highlights a lesser-known French tradition of Freudo-Marxist psycho-politics contemporaneous with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, but which placed therapeutic imperatives front and centre of its psycho-political praxis. This article uses Fanonian institutional psychotherapy to contest the anti-psychiatric conceit that madness is liberating and that therapy obstructs freedom. Fanon’s critical therapy speaks to the recent care-ethical turn of the contemporary organized left, whilst maintaining a structural critique of the aetiology and treatment of mental illness. This article concludes that recovery involves a permanent psycho-political revolution between the subjective and objective, which requires a radical transformation of both mental healthcare and the pathogenic social world to and within which it responds.

Authors: Dyson, EM

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Journal: Philosophy and Social Criticism
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 655-687
• Article number: 01914537241284541
• Publication date: 2024-09-24
• DOI: 10.1177/01914537241284541
• EISSN: 1461-734X
• ISSN: 0191-4537
• Language: English
• Keywords: Frantz Fanon; institutional psychotherapy; mental health/care crisis; anti-psychiatry; deinstitutionalization