Editorial

Christopher Chamberlin opens this general issue with a powerful analysis of the nature of psychosis in a colonial context. Focusing on a speculative reconstruction of one of the cases outlined by Fanon in the ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ chapter of Wretched of the Earth, Chamberlin attempts to integrate Fanon's clinical portrait of psychical subjectivity with his account of the politics of colonization. By reading Fanon alongside Lacan – paying particular attention to the way in which Fanon drew from Lacan's early psychiatric works on paranoid psychosis – Chamberlin fleshes out the clinical logic of a case that Fanon had left only implicit, or cursorily sketched in. The ultimate goal here is not only to elaborate on the ways in which Fanon himself might have developed a political and psychoanalytic reading of such a ‘reactionary psychosis’ in tandem, but also to lay the groundwork for a conception of ‘the unconscious dimension of colonization’, in which, according to Chamberlin, the subject is forcibly occupied by the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’.

Next, Christian R. Gelder in ‘“Health, Happiness, Efficiency, and Social Adaptation”: Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Work and the Critique of Adaptation’ examines the way in which a certain tradition of East Coast psychoanalysis in the US – including Sullivan, Marcuse, Fromm and Fromm-Reichmann – responded to the arguments of the mental hygiene movement and work of psychiatrist Adolf Meyer by developing a much more nuanced and critical stance on the meaning of healthy social adaptation than is normally associated with American ego psychology.

Thijs Leenaerts, in ‘Analysing the Psyche’, delves back into the much-debated relationship between the work of Sigmund Freud and that of Pierre Janet, and argues that by comparing and contextualizing their early writings on traumatic hysteria, subconscious ideas and the role of heredity, and by assessing their joint development of the legacy of Jean-Martin Charcot, one can alread