Critical Psychology: Chapter Five

Question 1

Define Psychopolitics

Answer 1

critical awareness of the role that political factors (relation of power) play within the domain of the psychological.

Question 2

What is the understanding of psychopolitics?

Answer 2

• how politics impact the psychological
• how personal psychology may be the level at which politics is internalised.

Question 3

fanon’s analysis of the psychic life of the colonial encounter. What is the objective of such psychological descriptions?

Answer 3

a) to subject forms of power to critique
b) to understand them better
c) to effectively challenge them

Question 4

Define Trans-historical.

Answer 4

across all historical settings

Question 5

Fanon tracks the implications of wanting to be white across what four domains

Answer 5

1. language: the taking on of the white language and culture.
2. Sexuality: the desire for a white spouse or sexual partner.
3. dreams: the dream of turning white
4. Behaviour: actions of skin whitening, hair-straightening etc.

Question 6

Define neurosis.

Answer 6

emotional disorder, manifest at the level of personality which stems from the conflict between a fundamental often instinctual impulse or wish and the need to repress this instinct.

Question 7

Define neurosis of blackness

Answer 7

“dream of turning white” which is the wish to attain the level of humanity accorded to white in racists/colonial contexts as it comes into conflict with ones being in a black body and in a racist society, which makes this wish impossible.

Question 8

Define Catharsis

Answer 8

psychological process where distressing or damaging emotional material is purged or gotten rid of via the means of some or other activity which externalises it

Question 9

Define collective catharsis

Answer 9

the process of catharsis as it happens on a mass social level

Question 10

Define scapegoating

Answer 10

projection of blame onto another person or object, who then becomes blameworthy or punishable for something “I” am in fact guilty for. a way of avoiding feelings of guilt and responsibility.

Question 11

Define Projection

Answer 11

process by which specific aspects of the self, or certain wishes or impulses are imagined to be located in something or someone else. it means that the individuals are able to avoid confronting certain truths about themselves and hence functions as avoiding guilt.

Question 12

Fanon develops two figurative terms to dramatize the strength of his two-way relationship between psyche and society. what are they?

Answer 12

1. Internalisation
   refers to the process by which external, sociohistorical reality is assimilated into internal and subjective reality.
2. epidermalization
   is used to underscore the profound transformation of economic inferiority to subjective inferiority.

Question 13

The two basic psychoanalytic notions are what?

Answer 13

1. phobic object
2. ambivalence

Question 14

Define phobic object

Answer 14

thing or person causing irrational feelings of dread, fear and hate. often includes a sense of paranoid anxiety and also acts as a source of unconscious attraction.

Question 15

Define ambivalence

Answer 15

phenomenon in which powerful emotional reaction appears to coexist with contrary affective impulses (even if these contrary impulses exist at a predominantly unconscious level)

Question 16

Define phobogenic

Answer 16

fear-causing person of object

Question 17

Define paranoid anxiety

Answer 17

irrational yet consistent belief that one is being systematically undermined, persecuted or attacked by a bad object, that is, a person, group of thing which intends to do me damage.

Question 18

Define collective unconsciousness

Answer 18

idea that all human beings share a supply of innate ideas or archetypes that are genetically supplied, that are universal and that can be seen spontaneously produced in the symbolism of different cultures and times.

Question 19

Define Archetypes

Answer 19

universal motifs or patterns that form a collective unconsciousness. archetypes make up the shared basic contents of religions, mythologies, legends etc. they also feature in individual dreams and fantasies.

Question 20

Define Negro myth

Answer 20

racist system of representations and values in which the figure of the black man or woman comes to stand as a repository, a figure in whim whites come to symbolise all their lower emotions and based inclinations. a dominant theme within what Fanon refers to as the European collective unconscious”

Question 21

Define European collective unconsciousness

Answer 21

Fanon adapts the Jungian notion of the collective unconsciousness such that it is no dependent on “cerebral health but is rather the result of the imposition of culture, is purely and simply the sum of the prejudice, myths and collective attitudes of a given group.

Question 22

Define Manichean thinking

Answer 22

approach to culture in which all values and concepts are split into binary opposites, one that is positive (which is white) and other that is negative (Black)

Question 23

Name the two ways in which the perceived sexuality of the black man or woman causes anxiety in the white colonial.

Answer 23

1. first, in colonial racism, blackness becomes the catch-all category for all negative values and/or instincts. so, in a very broad way, the black subject comes to represent all unadmitted and troubling sexual perversities. projection of anxiety or guilt onto the figure of black, that the Europeans avoid neurotic sense of their own sexuality.
2. secondly, they perceived sexual potency of the black man is enough to create a sense of inadequacy and insecurity in the white man, regarding his own sexual abilities. form of envy.