The Aesthetics of Decoloniality in Psychotherapy: Institutional Psychotherapy and Fanon's Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

This article will examine how colonialism and racism stratifies space, with particular focus on aesthetic production and the way in which an individual’s freedom is dependent on the “ambience” of the space they occupy. The analysis will be grounded in Algerian colonial psychiatry and anti/de-colonial psychotherapy. Through an examination of Frantz Fanon’s application of Institutional Psychotherapy in Blida-Joinville Hospital, this article will argue that Fanon’s decolonial politics and his commitment to dis-alienation were reliant on the (re)construction of space within the hospital so as to increase what Félix Guattari would later refer to as the “coefficient of transversally”. By implication, this article’s argument intends to use Fanon’s spatial approach to psychotherapy in order to elicit a reading of Institutional Psychotherapy en masse as having, at its heart, a focus on spatial and aesthetic production.