What Is Decolonial Psychology? A University Center Advances Field Practice

Traditional Western psychology has been widely criticized for using insidious methods that can manipulate people into accommodating the ideas and beliefs of a dominant culture stemming from racism and White supremacy. In turn, mental wellness frequently becomes largely a matter of coping with an often unjust world.

Decolonial psychology, by contrast, names the dominant culture as a primary cause of mental health challenges. Rooted in giving space to communities that are historically oppressed and impoverished, decolonial psychology invites patients to reimagine a world in which their existence isn’t subordinate to the dominant culture.

Last fall, the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology opened at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. The new center—named after the famed mid-20th-century French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and political philosopher—is implementing a decolonial psychoanalytic approach in its studies. Fanon has long been considered a highly influential decolonial psychology thinker.

Decolonial psychology…names the dominant culture as a primary cause of mental health challenges.

The lab, led by Daniel José “Dr. G” Gaztambide, is applying the study of what is called sociogeny, a concept Fanon expanded and popularized in his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks. As opposed to ontogeny, which focuses on the development of the individual, sociogeny looks at the person’s development through a broader sociocultural context and how this context has its own developmental history that affects the individual.

Who Was Frantz Fanon?

Fanon was not only a psychiatrist and political philosopher but also a Pan-Africanist and anti-colonialist. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique, which was under French colonial rule at the time. Since 1946, the Caribbean island has had the status of French department or state—with voting representatives in the national legislature.

Experiencing and witnessing colonial oppression primed Fanon to its atrocities, but his military service with the Free French forces during World War II—where he faced racism and observed Allied hypocrisy—radicalized him. After the war, he returned to Martinique where he began his journey into medicine and then went on to study in Lyon, France.

“Frantz Fanon trained in France under other figures of the leftist psychiatric scene like François Tosquelles [in 1951]. He very much was trying to understand how different social forces, including colonialism, take root in people’s psyches—not just as a problem somehow existing in their heads, but as something that’s a result of broader social structures, political economies, systems of inequality, and so forth,” says Gaztambide.

In 1953, Fanon became the director of a psychiatric ward at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (owned by the French government) in Algeria. Here, he did some of his most important work, in part because this was where he began to apply the practice of sociogeny or so-called socio-therapy—an approach that integrated his patients’ cultural backgrounds into analysis, as opposed to focusing solely on addressing family history.

“Psychologists tend to think about racism as a matter of belief…as opposed to a system, a structure that is political and economic in nature.”

The following year, the Algerian Revolution broke out, and Fanon became responsible for treating both Algerian torture victims and the French soldiers and officers who conducted the torture. Between 1953 and his exile in 1957, he radically transformed the hospital, which, among many changes, included ordering all patients to be physically unchained.

Although he passed away at 36, Fanon created a profound body of work that continues to influence and inspire those in the psychiatric field six decades later, including Gaztambide and his student researchers at the Queens College lab.

Applying Decolonial Psychology Today

The lab has conducted two qualitative studies using the sociogenic method. One, called the “Colonial Mentality Study in New York,” focuses on the Puerto Rican diaspora. The second study, titled “Same-Gender Loving & Gay Black Men’s Resilience” was developed in partnership with DBGM (which originally stood for Depressed Black Gay Men and is a grassroots LGBTQ+ and BIPOC-led organization that supports Black gay men who are struggling with depression).

“[We’re] doing a lot of interviews to get people’s experiences of different types of struggles, phenomena, and problems, and using those interviews to create a narrative that we can then use not just to write articles and publish research, but also to make an argument advocating for the needs of that community, and using that to inform programming, using that to inform what kinds of policies we should advocate for,” says Gaztambide.

While the lab engages in external collaborations with community partners, they also do inward-facing work, presenting these findings in conferences of professional psychologists.

“There have been a number of publications and community events that we’ve done in the past few years. The biggest one, most recently, would be a major paper that we published in American Psychologist, where we challenged the ways in which psychologists tend to think about racism as a matter of belief, like it’s bad thoughts you have in your head, as opposed to a system, a structure that is political and economic in nature,” says Gaztambide.

Future Work

Aside from qualitative studies, the lab would like to focus more on clinical psychotherapy. “We’re increasingly moving in a more clinical direction and trying to understand how these ideas [that Fanon wrote about] translate to the meat-and-potatoes work of basic psychotherapy,” Gaztambide says.

“When people think about Fanon, they tend to think of a revolutionary engaging in struggle against colonialism,” Gaztambide continues. “People don’t often recognize that day in and day out, he was a psychotherapist seeing patients. We have access to a lot of written work that he and his colleagues did.”

Learning from Fanon’s practice and his own experience, Gaztambide understands that psychotherapy is not just about the relationship between the therapist and the patient but also about how both parties negotiate misunderstandings that arise during sessions.

“When you’re able to negotiate those conflicts, it leads not just to a stronger therapeutic alliance, but it’s reliably associated with therapeutic outcomes,” Gaztambide points out. “Lo and behold, in a series of papers between 1940 and 1955, [Fanon] wrote about exactly that.”

Fanon and Tosquelles called this theory “disalienation,” which is the practice of two people coming together without any preconceived notions of the other. In a therapeutic context, this would “flatten” the hierarchy between doctor and patient and theoretically minimize ruptures in the relationship.

“Not only do we have ruptures based on our interpersonal patterns of behavior, we also have ruptures related to dynamics of power and identity,” Gaztambide explains.

Gatzambide adds that this is “not just the inherent power inequality between patient and therapist, but also how that’s manifested along axes of identity. Being in my case, a White Puerto Rican male therapist, working with, say, a queer Afro-Puerto Rican patient negotiating identity, it’s sort of inevitable that there’s going to be moments of tension and conflict.”

However, if the person in the “higher” position can be open to the other person, a lot can be accomplished. Ultimately, this is what Fanon worked toward, and psychologists like Gaztambide seek to expand upon—a psychotherapeutic approach that doesn’t reinforce the dominant culture but rather seeks to deconstruct it.

“We’re doing the research, we’re doing the academic stuff, but we’re really interested in bringing this to the community in ways that’ll generate dialogue,” Gaztambide says. “My secret hope is that it’ll generate more budding psychologists from our communities who want to train and do this work.”