Representing the colonized: The contribution of psychiatry—a “Muslim psychiatry”

Tocqueville’s thinking clearly illustrates the complexity of the tradition of political liberalism and its inherent relativism—a relativism predicated on the centrality of the Western world forged out of Europe.

Within this frame of thinking, the colonized were represented as the negative of the anthropological image of the West, with a view to legitimizing colonial domination. To this end it was necessary to press the sciences into service, and so a “scientific” paradigm was created that would provide the arguments to be deployed in support of the image in the negative.

So, in this endeavour to represent “the other” as inferior—as lagging behind in the march that led to the achievements of Western civilization—science increasingly came to play a supporting role, providing a basis on which to justify the European domination over an “inferior” humanity. And one of the “sciences” enlisted in this effort was psychiatry.

This started 1912, when the Congrès des Aliénistes et Neurologistes de France was held in Tunis, marking the beginning of a colonial psychiatry intended to serve as a basis on which to train colonial, civil, and military psychiatrists in the service of colonial power (“Le regard colonial” 2005). Proposing to advance the study of the so-called indigenous mentality, Antoine Porot founded the Algiers School, which trained an entire generation of psychiatrists.

That mentality forms the subject of a 1918 article tellingly titled “Notes de psychiatrie musulmane,” in which Porot underscores its constitutive separateness from the Western mentality. Porot offers a portrait of the affective life of a Muslim, describing it as governed by an automatism inscribed in nature—a mentality constrained by “basic instincts, necessary to life and its preservation, and satisfied by this regulative automatism that nature has devised as the basis of their satisfaction” (Porot 1918, 378; my translation). The conception he puts forward is thus deterministic, and it paints a picture of a human nature that is different from that of the West, for it is destined to wallow in an irremediably backward condition.

This mindset from which Porot was working necessarily led him to construct a constellation of stereotypes revolving around the Western representation of Muslim humanity, which was accordingly distilled down to its being passive,^[1] given to stasis, gullible, and superstitious.

Finally, by combining these stereotypes he set the foundation for the “discovery” of a human nature that was different from the Western one, and on this basis he set out a theory of primitivism that depicted Muslims as “primitive spirits” or “primitive men” irremediably marked by a “mental childishness.” Their mentality was devoid of “scientific craving” and “general ideas.” In fact, as seen through the lens of Muslim psychiatry, this mentality was only good for formulating “simple syllogisms, occasionally stupid in their conclusions” (ibid., 383). In short, “these primitives, deeply ignorant and prone to credulity,” lived “worlds apart from our mentality,” and they had never even fleetingly been touched by “the minutest of our moral qualms” (ibid., 377).

This interpretive scheme even formed the basis for diagnosing diseases. The Muslims brought in to the Centre Neuro-Psychiatrique d’Alger were observed to suffer from a mental frailty (débilité mentale) that manifested itself in “violent and brutal hysteric spells, deaf-muteness, and forms of astasia-abasia” (ibid., 380).

In a subsequent development, this colonial psychiatry would go so far as to identify the purportedly scientific foundations on which to rest the representation of the whole native population of North Africa. Indeed, Porot and his school even claimed that the behaviour patterns of Maghrébins were to be explained by pointing to the stunted evolution of their cerebral cortex and to the predominant role played by the activity of their diencephalon (Porot and Sutter 1939; cf. “Le regard colonial” 2005). Finally, once all these elements were bundled together, they translated into the assertion that there existed a distinctly North African mentality entirely unlike the European mentality.

This paradigm rounded out the historiographical reconstructions of the colonial period by providing the scientific support needed for a definitive legitimation of the colonial enterprise (see, c.g., Mercier 1875).

• [1] In this Muslim humanity, “passivity is the manifestation of a temperament that is often atonic, lacking in vitality” (ibid.). 2 In the Muslim man “the static personality smothers the dynamic personality” (ibid., 380). 3 “The spirit of the indigene predisposes him to credulity and makes him suggestible in the extreme” (ibid., 381). 4 He is “shaped by submission and is given to religious docility, and falls prey to all manner of superstitions” (ibid., 381).