Psychiatry for Internal Colonialism: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic, 1946-1958
This talk studies the experimental politics of anticolonial psychoanalysis undertaken
at the
Lafargue Clinic in Harlem from 1946-1958. Named after Karl Marx’s son-in-law and the
author of Le
Droit à la paresse, the clinic operated out of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and treated
patients free
of charge. Its mission was as radical as it was simple: psychoanalysis and psychiatric
care should be
available to anyone and everyone. Those damaged by the color line and those who were
poor
deserved, as much as anyone else, treatment for their neuroses. Internationally famous
at the
time, the clinic has yet to receive the attention it deserves from political theorists
and intellectual
historians, even though its history is ripe with clues for understanding what it means
to “decolonize
the mind” in conditions of extraordinary financial duress and spatial segregation.
What does
psychic repair look like when the wound is as wide and deep as racism itself? What
happens to the
psychoanalytic encounter when neither clinic nor patient has any money? Can improving
individual
psyches do anything to mitigate collective structures of domination? These questions
guided
Lafargue Clinic’s psychotherapeutic techniques and compelled its analysts, many involved
with
international communism and the aesthetic avant-garde, to theorize anew “self-rule”
for the
psyche and the social world.
connect with us