Colonial psychiatry and "the African mind"

In this first history of the practice and the theoretical underpinnings of colonial psychiatry in Africa, Jock McCulloch describes the clinical approaches of well-known European psychiatrists who worked with indigenous Africans, among them Frantz Fanon, J. C. Carothers and Wulf Sachs. They were a disparate group, operating independently of one another, and mostly in intellectual isolation. But despite their differences, they shared a coherent set of ideas about 'the African mind', premissed on the colonial notion of African inferiority. In exploring the close association between the ideologies of settler societies and psychiatric research this intriguing study is one of the few attempts to explore colonial science as a system of knowledge and power.

First sentence: In August 1938 a young British psychiatrist named Cobb was dismissed, following a scandal, from his position as senior medical officer in charge of Mathari Mental Hospital, Nairobi.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

1

Pages

195

ISBN

9780521034807

Data source: Wikidata