Fanon And Freud: The Relationship Between The Individual And Society

This paper will draw attention to the relationship between the individual and society with respect to Fanon and Freud, paying special attention to the inferiority complex of blacks in relation to the perceived superiority of whites and discerning the root cause of such differences. Furthermore, it will discuss the possibility of overcoming such differences and trying to achieve social change. Fanon focuses on two related desires that constitute the pathology of the colonial situation: “The Black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (p. xiii). As an unconscious desire, this can result in a series of irrational behaviors and beliefs, such as the Antillean speaking French, the desire for a white

Fanon continues that “The civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed incest…. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves as if the black man actually had them” (Fanon 142-143). This frustration with blacks’ perceived sexual ability to exercise more sexual and primitive freedom results in general unhappiness for the white man, who consequently directly channels hostility towards the apparent source of the problem, the blacks, which only works to escalate racism. This can be related to Freud’s idea that the super-ego is an aggressor against the ego, where the super-ego is an internally accepted social restraint on the aggressive ego (Freud 123). Therefore, the super-ego is civilization and with the establishment of the super-ego comes a sense of bad conscience. Because it is internalized, the super-ego omnisciently regulates both our thoughts and deeds. The black man is hence for white culture the “the burden of original sin” (Fanon 168). Racism in this way is essentially a kind of defense reaction, which, in a way, explains why racism so powerfully enforces and reaffirms relations of separation and distance – the white man wants as much distance

Fanon cites Hegel in saying that one’s sense of self worth and even reality comes from others, particularly from how they react to one’s actions (Fanon 191). This racism even gets instilled among blacks themselves because of an inferiority complex derived from blacks living in a world where their human worth is questioned; since blacks are not in a position to put down white people, they prove their worth by putting down each other. Ultimately, blacks perceive whites to be better since they would not want to be white if they didn’t believe that this would alleviate their