Action psychologique: French psychiatry in colonial North Africa, 1900--1962

After 1900, French psychiatrists honed their discipline's cutting edge in the Maghreb, not in Paris. When German psychiatric innovations overshadowed French accomplishments, French doctors saw the colonies as an experimental space for rejuvenating their profession. Unlike metropolitan practitioners, colonial psychiatrists embraced new strategies for managing insanity as they produced medical and social knowledge about North Africans. But these achievements reveal an ambivalent history, where doctors' contributions to colonial rule counterbalanced therapeutic progress. Modern facilities improved patients' conditions, but the institutional structures of colonial psychiatry facilitated the production of politically charged knowledge that undermined the benevolent image of colonial medicine.;This dissertation narrates the development of psychiatric theories, institutions, and practices in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Legal, ethnographic, literary, and medical documents expose the relationship between French psychiatry's renewal in the colonies and the dehumanization of North African Muslims. Psychiatric reformers mingled professional and humanitarian motives as they proposed the liberation of indigenous patients from what they considered barbaric medical traditions. With their mental hygiene and outpatient services, the new institutions that opened across North Africa in the 1930s departed drastically from the European asilary tradition and signaled French psychiatry's entrance into new domains. Innovation took a grisly turn, however, as chronic patients inundated the new hospitals. Radical somatic procedures offered risky but cost-effective means for easing caseloads, and the contrast between such methods and traditional practices reveals an implicit breach in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.;The most significant innovation that colonial institutions brought to the profession was the development of an ethnopsychiatric sub-discipline. Far from neutral, knowledge about North Africans' "primitive mentalities" encouraged educational, judicial, and professional discrimination against colonial subjects. Declassified military papers show that psychiatric research also provided the scientific background for the French army's psychological warfare campaigns during the 1950s. This knowledge met with intense resistance, however: the project concludes with an analysis of reactions against French ethnopsychiatry that places revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon in an anti-psychiatric tradition that spanned the twentieth-century Maghreb.