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In his opening address to a 1981 French-Latin American meeting on “the institutions and politics of present-day psychoanalysis,” Jacques Derrida began by examining the International Psychoanalytic Association's (IPA) division of the psychoanalytic world, in its 1977 constitution, into “America north of the United States-Mexican border; all America south of that border; and the rest of the world” (p. 199). Derrida notes that for the IPA the “rest of the world” was meant to designate Europe, which he calls the “old mother country of psychoanalysis, a body tattooed all over with psychoanalytic institutions and apparatuses” (p. 199). At the same time, for Derrida, the very idea of a “non-American rest-of-the-world” called up the presence of peripheral locations that “can neither be assimilated nor rejected” (p. 202); a global south “structurally defined in the profoundest sense by the colonial state” (p. 204), where psychoanalysis is either absent or figures as an emanation of the Euro-American metropolis.
Algeria was one of the latter places, a French settler colony where Derrida himself was born and lived until he was nineteen and where the Martinique-born theorist of Third World revolution Frantz Fanon practiced psychiatry and joined the struggle for national liberation in the 1950s. According to Derrida , before the war of independence in Algeria, “it was altogether exceptional and untypical for psychoanalysts to raise the question of their own practice in its political, ethnopsychoanalytical and socio-institutional dimensions” (p. 204). The work of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, rather, was an extension of colonial administration, dedicated to reinforcing the normative order of French colonialism by legitimizing, on one hand, the superiority and inevitable domination of the
European colonizer and, on the other, the inferiority of the colonized Arab population and the pathology of dissent and rebellion. The Algiers School of psychiatry provided a pseudo-scient