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“With a sophisticated grasp of the ‘psy’ disciplines across global contexts,
Khan and Schwebach have curated an incisive and generative critique of
the psychiatrization of trauma and the construction of ‘mental health’ that
should be taken quite seriously. Collectively, the contributions have profound
implications both for how we understand the history of psychology and for
how we might imagine help, healing, and justice less rooted in structures and
epistemologies of violence.”
Patrick R. Grzanka, Professor of Psychology, The University
of Tennessee, Knoxville

“An exciting and very thoughtful volume, which elegantly rethinks the trauma
word, its meanings and practices on wide, global, American and intimate scales.
This book’s finely rendered cases will be taught and taught again.”
Nancy Rose Hunt, Ph.D., Professor of History, The University of
Florida, author of A Nervous State (2016) and A Colonial Lexicon (1999)
GLOBALIZATION, DISPLACEMENT,
AND PSYCHIATRY

This book explores diasporic identities and lived experiences that emerge in
global patterns of oppression and considers the consequences of treatment and
cure when patients experience mental illness due to war, displacement and
surveillance. Going beyond psychiatric institutions and conventional psychiatric
knowledge by focusing on informal networks, socially contingent value systems,
and cultural sites of healing, this book considers how communities utilize trauma
productively for healing. The chapters in this volume consider the detection of
mental illness and its treatment through claims to citizenship and belonging as
well as denials of social identity and psychic experiences by institutions of the
state. A multidisciplinary team of contributors and international range of case
studies explore topics such as colonial trauma, feminized trauma, reproductive
violence, military mental health and more.
This book is an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, political
scientists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as scholars and those involved
in policymaking and practice.

Sanaullah Khan is an incoming lecturer at Brandeis University where he will

teach medical anthropology after the completion of his PhD in anthropology at
Johns Hopkins University. He is currently also an adjunct professor in medical
anthropology at the University of Delaware.

Elliott Schwebach (PhD, political science, Johns Hopkins University) is

currently working as a DEI Consultant for Dr. Valaida Wise Consulting and
teaching at Central New Mexico Community College.
International Perspectives on Forensic Mental Health
Edited by Patricia Zapf
Palo Alto University

A Routledge Book Series

The goal of this series is to improve the quality of health care services in forensic
and correctional settings by providing a forum for discussing issues and dissemi-
nating resources related to policy, administration, clinical practice, and research.
The series addresses topics such as mental health law; the organization and admin-
istration of forensic and/or correctional services for persons with mental disor-
ders; the development, implementation and evaluation of treatment programs and
interventions for individuals in civil and criminal justice settings; the assessment
and management of violence risk, including risk for sexual violence and family
violence; and staff selection, training, and development in forensic and/or cor-
rectional systems.

Published Titles

Diversity and Marginalisation in Forensic Mental Health Care

Edited by Jack Tomlin and Birgit Vollm

Safeguarding the Quality of Forensic Assessment in Sentencing

A Review Across Western Nations
Edited by Michiel van der Wolf

Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry

Global Histories of Trauma
Edited by Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com

GLOBALIZATION,
DISPLACEMENT, AND
PSYCHIATRY
Global Histories of Trauma

Edited by Sanaullah Khan

and Elliott Schwebach
Designed cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Sanaullah Khan and Elliott
Schwebach; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-27557-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-27555-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31184-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003311843
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS

List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgmentsxiii

Introduction: Conceptualizing the Global 1

Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

PART 1
Trauma, Globality and Death 17

1 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge:

Decolonizing PTSD and Traumatic Memory
With Fanon 19
Roberto Beneduce

2 Obligatory Death in Wuhan: The Power to Decide

Who Died, and Therapies for Those Who Survived 42
Xiaowen Zhang and Jie Yang
viii Contents

PART 2
Global Surveillance and Trauma 61

3 American Exceptionalism and the Construction

of Trauma in the Global War on Terror 63
Neil Krishan Aggarwal

4 Militarism, Psychiatry and Social Impunity in Kashmir 78

Saiba Varma

PART 3
Culture, Displacement and Healing 97

5 Healing the Sickness of Fighting: Medicalization

and Warriordom in Postcolonial North America 99
Christopher M. Webb

6 Jinns and Trauma: Unbounded Spirits and the Ontology

of Mental Illness in Pakistan 117
Sanaullah Khan

PART 4
Global Bodies, Logics and Clinics 131

7 Feminized Trauma, Responsive Desire, and Social/Global

Logics of Control: A Dialogue 133
Alyson K. Spurgas and Elliott Schwebach

8 Reproductive Violence and Settler Statecraft 150

Elena Ruíz, Nora Berenstain and Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba

9 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI): Cases/

Experiences of Trauma and Healing 174
Crystal Han and Shinnyi Chou

Index193
CONTRIBUTORS

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is a cultural psychiatrist and social scientist at Columbia

University who specializes in the psychology of cross-cultural conflicts and nego-
tiation. After medical school, he completed a residency in psychiatry, a gradu-
ate degree in South Asian Studies, and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinically
applied medical anthropology. His areas of professional interest include cultural
psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology. His books include
Mental Health in the War on Terror (2015), The Taliban’s Virtual Emirate (2016),
Media Persuasion in the Islamic State (2019), Militant Leadership (2023), and a
forthcoming book on the psychology of war and peacemaking with the former
spychiefs of India and Pakistan’s foreign intelligence agencies.

Roberto Beneduce, PhD, MD, anthropologist and psychiatrist, is full professor of

Medical and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Turin, and founder
of the Frantz Fanon Center (Turin, 1996), a center devoted to research and clini-
cal intervention in the area of migration and asylum seekers. His research engages
various intellectual terrains and fields (history of ethnopsychiatry; anthropology of
memory and violence; racism and alienation; epistemic and environmental injus-
tice; religious imaginaries and changes in local healing knowledge (Cameroon,
Mali, Mozambique, and Senegal)). He has published in different international
journals (Politique africaine, Medical Anthropology, Transcultural Psychiatry,
Social Compass, Cahiers d’études africaines, Anthropos, etc.); among his works,
he authored the following books: Archeologie del trauma. Un’antropologia del sot-
tosuolo (Rome 2010), Un lugar en el mundo. Senderos de la migración entre violencia,
memoria y deseo (Ciudad de México 2015); L’histoire au corps. Mémoires indociles et
x Contributors

archives du désordre dans les cultes de possession en Afrique (Fribourg 2016) and, with
N. Gibson, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (New York 2017).

Nora Berenstain is Professor of Philosophy and core faculty in Women’s, G

­ ender,
and Sexuality Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research
spans topics in social & political philosophy, metaphysics of science, feminist epis-
temology and critical philosophy of race. Her current research explores non-
accidental patterns of relations among structures of oppression and how such
structures mediate knowledge production. Her work has appeared in Hypatia,
Synthese, Ergo, Mind, Contemporary Political Theory, and collections with Oxford
University Press. Dr. Berenstain co-directs the University of Tennessee’s Intersec-
tionality Community of Scholars, an interdisciplinary group of researchers ori-
ented toward transformative social change.

Shinnyi Chou is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist based in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, USA. In addition to clinical care of patients, she conducts basic
neuroscience research focused on understanding the intersection between can-
nabis and psychosis.

Crystal Han is currently a staff psychiatrist at the Harvard University Coun-

seling and Mental Health Services and at the Massachusetts General Hospital
Yawkey Center for Outpatient Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department. She
completed her BA at Cornell University and received her MD at the University
at Buffalo School of Medicine. She completed her adult psychiatry residency
and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Maryland/­
Sheppard Pratt program. Her academic interests include cultural psychiatry, the
Asian American transitional aged youth population and psychotherapy. She is
a recipient of the American Psychiatric Association SAMHSA Minority Fel-
lowship. She also completed the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Center’s
­Psychoanalytic Studies Program.

Sanaullah Khan is currently an adjunct professor of medical anthropology at the

University of Delaware. He has been a junior fellow at the American Institute
of Pakistan Studies and has received advanced training in global health, anthro-
pology and history of medicine from Johns Hopkins University. He is also an
incoming lecturer in medical anthropology at Brandeis University. In the past,
his research on militarization and psychiatric care has appeared in Critical Military
Studies, Asian Anthropology, Journal of South Asian Studies, Medical History, South
Asian Development and City & Society.

Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba is a Chicana mother (raised in Mexico and the United

States) and PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State
 Contributors xi

University. Her research investigates issues related to reproductive and infant health,
constellating across Indigenous Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Anthropology,
and Public Health while using mixed methods to interface the confluences of vary-
ing sociocultural factors that influence infant feeding practices, health and devel-
opment. Her academic training informs both the critical purview of her research
scope and the interdisciplinary approaches she uses as a community-engaged scholar
to tackle systemic issues and their underlying problems. Core to her academic prac-
tice is establishing crucial relationships that facilitate research and service while sup-
porting non-traditional, first-generation, and traditionally underserved populations.

Elena Ruíz is Associate Professor at Michigan State University. Her research

focuses on structural responses to gender-based violence and on structural justice
advocacy frameworks for survivors of sexual violence.

Elliott Schwebach received his PhD in Political Science (Political Theory) at

Johns Hopkins University, where he applied Freudian and Fanonian political psy-
chology to questions regarding the nature and ethics of private property. During
his doctoral work, he also attended the Washington Baltimore Center for Psy-
choanalysis as a student of their Psychoanalytic Studies Program. Elliott is cur-
rently teaching Political Science at Central New Mexico Community College, in
a city and state that he loves.

Alyson K. Spurgas is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the

Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut, United States. Spurgas researches, writes and teaches about sociologies
of trauma, politics of desire and technologies of care from an interdisciplinary and
intersectional feminist perspective. They are the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics
and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (The Ohio State University Press, 2020),
which won the 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize, and Decolonize
Self-Care (forthcoming on OR Book in 2023). Check out www.alysonkspurgas.
com for info about Alyson’s writing, teaching, speaking events and more.

Saiba Varma is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cali-

fornia, San Diego. As a medical and cultural anthropologist, her work examines
questions of violence, medicine, psychiatry, and politics as they pertain to Indian-
controlled Kashmir and South Asia more generally. Her first book, The Occupied
Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir, was published by Duke University Press in
2020. She has also written for public venues such as Salon, Economic and Political
Weekly, The Nation, and Al Jazeera.

Christopher M. Webb is a cultural anthropologist who studies violence, war,

trauma and healing. His work investigates how local social/cultural values mediate
xii Contributors

the holistic experience of violence. As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Webb focuses

on the social world of biomedical mental health categories, emphasizing the diag-
nosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Webb has conducted fieldwork with
Native American healers who conduct purification and healing rituals for war
veterans. Dr. Webb is a North Americanist with a deep scholarly interest in the
mythologies of North America. His diverse work considers contemporary veteran
culture, biomedicine, North American Indigenous diaspora, American Northern
Plains religion, warrior culture formations, healing rituals, U.S. ­military history
and Appalachia. Dr. Webb is a veteran of the United States Army and recipient
of the Purple Heart Medal.

Jie Yang is Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. She was trained
in linguistic anthropology. Her current research focuses on critical studies of men-
tal health and Indigenous and non-Indigenous psychology in China. She is editor
of the Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia (2014, Routledge) and
author of two monographs: Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic
Governance (2015, Cornell University Press; 2016 winner of Francis Hsu Book
Prize) and Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance
(2018, Polity Press). Currently, she is working on two projects: one delineates
troubling double binds and widespread distress among Chinese officials in the
context of anti-corruption campaigns (she is completing a new monograph on
the phenomenon of guan xinbing temporarily entitled Officials’ Heart Distress:
Bureaucracy, Inner Friction, and Psychopolitics in China); the other project delves
into Chinese classics of philosophy, literature and medicine to investigate psycho-
logical systems and classifications of mental distress and their associated modes of
treatment imbricated in these classic texts as well as their implications for contem-
porary psychological practice.

Xiaowen Zhang is a PhD student in anthropology at Simon Fraser University.

Zhang’s research interests lie in grief counseling, mental health and death rituals.
Her PhD project specifically focuses on death that occurred during the COVID-
19 pandemic in China, and how its aftermath in terms of survivors’ mental health
is being dealt with under the therapeutic ethos.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sanaullah Khan: This volume would not have been possible without the hard
work of my co-editor, Elliott Schwebach. Our shared passion to understand the
relations between political structures, globalization and psychiatric discourses kept
us motivated. As an anthropologist in training, I learned a great deal from Elliott’s
appreciation of political theory and deep commitment to de-colonial frameworks
and epistemology. Elliott’s deep appreciation of global logics of inequality seemed
to be too grand a scale at first, given my training in anthropology as well as the
discipline’s commitments to studying people’s mundane and everyday realities.
Yet the friendship and shared passion in global mental health that Elliott and
I discovered and nurtured through our stimulating conversations led me to con-
sider interesting ways to think about the macro and micro and the individual and
the structural as part of the same story. This book is a testament to our friendship
and collaboration, but more importantly, my own journey and training, thanks
to Elliott, in a vision of scholarship inspired by social justice and ethics of care,
kindness, empathy, transparency and responsibility.
Over the past few years, I have learned a great deal from the works of various
psychiatric and psychological anthropologists as well as historians – I have yet to
meet all of them in person, but their works have continued to shape my thinking.
I want to specifically thank two of these people: Mark S. Micale, whose writing
on the global history of trauma first inspired the idea of a project in which Elliott
and I could start the story of trauma, for once, from outside the “West” instead
of taking Western psychiatry, its histories of trauma and diagnostics as our bench-
mark for how people do or do not express distress. Second, I want to thank Tanya
Luhrmann, whose work and guidance opened my eyes to what culture does to
the workings of the psyche. My ideas of human subjectivity, disembodiment and
xiv Acknowledgments

agency in contexts of healing were shaped by the works of Rebecca Lester as well
as the generous feedback on my broader work by Kamran Asdar Ali on various
occasions, but most notably at the American Institute of Pakistan Studies Emerg-
ing Scholars symposium in 2022, which encouraged me to go beyond ideas of the
“self ” based on singularity and autonomy in my understanding of trauma, illness
and treatment.
Elliott Schwebach: Firstly, thank you to Sanaullah for reaching out to me with
this fantastic idea for a project, and for inviting me so graciously to participate as
an editor. A warm thank-you to Sarah Rae, Patricia Zapf, and Katya Porter at
Routledge for bringing this project to life. To the extent that this volume bears
the influence of my devout psychoanalytic commitments, I owe a great deal to the
Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and especially to my cherished
classmates and friends from my time there. Finally, I am proud to acknowledge
those in my life who helped sustain me, through care, support and counsel, as
this book was being written. A special thanks to Noreen Honeycutt for helping
me unpack my own losses and traumas, to the wittiness, warmth and wisdom of
Benjamin Tellie, Julie Liebenguth, José Durán, Mohammad Murtuza, Claude
Nganzeu, Chris Hewitt, Ian Schmid, Cliff Allington and Ryanne Fujita-Conrads,
and to the love of my parents.
INTRODUCTION
Conceptualizing the Global

Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

It is by now a truism bordering on cliché that we live within an increasingly glo-

balized world. Flows of people, capital and ideas follow both liberalization and
war, reproducing historical patterns of colonial power and generating staggering
levels of forced displacement, as communication technology becomes progres-
sively digitized, altogether embedding cultural exchange (and cultural conflict)
deeper within social relations worldwide. Global power dynamics emerge as
“threats” for authoritarian regimes opposing (neo)liberal growth, notwithstand-
ing the global cultural influences and communication networks shaping the lives
of many of their citizens; and conversely, yet under similar auspices of fear of
intrusion of unwanted global forces and forms, the apparatuses of state surveil-
lance and control stretch ever further into the social fabrics of liberal democra-
cies. The landscape of global inequality is expanding under conditions of flexible
labor regimes or the entry of workers into the gig economy. Medical systems are
becoming increasingly digitized, disrupting patient–physician relations, and the
possibility of environmental catastrophes, such as floods, heatwaves and disease
outbreaks, remains an ever-present global threat. And patterns of oppression con-
tingent to modern relations of power, such as racism, continue to make their mark
in social policies, knowledge regimes, worldviews and language, reaching far into
the unconscious to do so (see, e.g., Fanon, 1952/1994; Parker, 2019; Dennis,
2021), allowing long-standing psychic legacies of European colonial expansion to
suffuse and continually reconstruct lived experiences into the present.
Coinciding with these realities is the global enlargement of psychiat-
ric knowledge and praxis, developed and deployed across clinical, medical,
legal, nonstate and extralegal contexts. It would therefore stand to reason that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311843-1
2 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

psychiatry, alleging to describe the shape and nature of mental and behavioral
(un)health, would be generally self-reflexive about its capacity to trace the rela-
tionships of the production and treatment of traumas to the manifold, dynamic
global forces within which they are embedded. However, concerningly, this is
largely not the case. Invocations of the global within “psy-” fields, despite some
sincere but patchy attempts at institutionalizing self-reflexivity within training,
often remain universalistic and “fraught with implicit monolithic principles
from the Euro-centric intellectual traditions” (O’Byrne, n.d.; see also Mills,
2014), particularly insofar as they attempt to “multiculturally” expand an exist-
ing scientific edifice through a recognition of cultural differences superficially
associated with broad ethnic or racial categories. And ideas of Western “excep-
tionalism” continue to pervade the politics of mental health and shape regimes
of care and policing.
This collection represents an attempt to expose, chart and carefully unpack the
global as it manifests, in its various forms, across psychological domains and socio-
political subjectivities. More specifically, these chapters explore the production,
conceptual nature, management and lived experience of traumas as they relate
to what may be identified as global or globalizing logics of power within and across
particular historical contexts. Thus, this volume examines mental health concerns
as they become variously incorporated by modern disciplinary regimes, modes
of psychiatric knowledge as they interface with overlapping cultural and political
contingencies, and narratives of trauma, resistance and healing that emerge from
global patterns of governance, migration and oppression.
Importantly, this collection aims to interrogate such global or globalizing log-
ics as they emerge psychologically or psychiatrically at manifold scales as well as
locales and forms: including the scale of the clinic but also those of the fam-
ily, community, nation, state and international world. In addition, the volume
targets conflicts and challenges of psychiatric inquiry beyond those merely at a
methodological level. How does the global bear upon epistemologies of trauma
and traumatogenesis? Among different spheres of psychiatric interaction, what
do value differences and cultural conflicts reveal to us about epistemological or
ontological occlusion, incorporation, violation or transformation with respect to
diverse understandings of subjectivity and health? And how can an attunement
to the global help psychiatry revise long-standing onto-images of the conscious
and unconscious mind, and of the mind’s relationship to the body and the wider
social sphere, in a manner more befitting the complexities of psychic reality and
treatment?
As editors, from the position of our commitments in the fields of anthropol-
ogy and political theory, we have aimed to foster inquiry that might suggest rela-
tionships between the development of traumas and their broader global realities
 Introduction 3

to be multidirectional, multidimensional and causally nonreductive. Our own

work, which has combined an academic attention to power relations and societal
context with interdisciplinary engagements with psychiatric scholars and prac-
titioners, compels us to believe that trauma never appears in isolation from the
contingencies of the social environment. In the same vein, we know that traumas
(and how traumas are disciplined) further shape subjectivities and societal relations
across scales, from familial to international, conditioning the operation of power
and global political outcomes.
We therefore hope that the chapters that follow, as they register the societal
feedbacks, causal ambiguities, constructions and deconstructions of trauma within
particular, placed histories, can allow the reader a sense of the blurriness and
unpredictability that accompanies multidirectional, recursive and fluctuating lines
of influence. This is not to suggest that such lines are not causal or real; only that
they are non-static, convoluted, and when it comes to the relation of the global
to the local, often enigmatic. Through the semblance of global psychological
dynamics that can be glimpsed, in snapshot form, from the mosaic of these chap-
ters, we encourage readers to think psychiatrically as well as to dwell within the
complexities and challenges that an attention to the global can bring. We hope
that such an attitude, in fact, can further ambitions for a more mindful, honest
and healing psychiatry.
Above all, we remain heedful of the fact that the research within this collection
claims to reflect the traumatic histories of real people, and often of highly vul-
nerable populations. In addition, much of this knowledge has been constructed
through field research, interviews or other “on the ground” interactions with
psychiatric subjects and marginalized communities, or else through direct (e.g.,
clinical) cases between doctor and patient. We not only avow the paramount
ethical importance of bearing witness and responsibility to the people that we
represent in academic scholarship, but we believe that doing so well – particularly
within situations where, as a function of trauma, psychic ambiguities proliferate –
obliges a similar approach of humility and uncertainty in the face of complex
realities. It also requires an active acknowledgment and consistent reappraisal of
one’s positionality and value commitments, and an alignment of those commit-
ments toward ends that, to the best of one’s knowledge and ability, do not work
to deny or repress the agency of the oppressed.
We learn from the postcolonial psychology of Bonnie and Eduardo Duran, of
Opelousas/Coushatta and Apache/Tewa heritage, respectively, that psychologi-
cal research genuinely committed to global healing must keep as its foundation
“knowledge . . . derived from within the community itself, because who can
care more about the community and its survival than the members of the com-
munity?” (Duran and Duran, 1995, p. 208). And we agree with Eduardo Duran
4 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

when he writes, with reference to the context of Native American counseling but
drawing a conclusion with global significance, that both

treatment and a new narrative [can emerge] with non-Native providers. How-
ever, the non-Native providers also must be able to make a serious analysis of
their own history and take responsibility for that history. In this manner, the
providers are involved in a narrative therapy of their own, and in this honest
historical vessel the wounding itself can be healed.
(Duran, 2006, p. 28)

We believe that this holds equally true for academic scholars (not just providers)
working to better understand the traumas and treatment of oppressed subject
populations. We therefore direct the research and intended use of this volume
also to these ambitions.

Healing Global Mental Health

On a global scale, major western psychiatric institutes export biases, conceal
imperial violence under the garb of scientific knowledge, deploy stereotypical
assumptions about cultural values or identities and privilege only specific ways
of expressing distress. One question in front of us is about how we understand
trauma, on the one hand, and how it is expressed and concealed in people’s politi-
cal and social vocabularies, on the other. Another related question is about how
psychiatric discourses are internationalized, or how western diagnoses overlap
with or depart from local categories and symptomatology. This interaction begs
sociological, philosophical and anthropological questions about the constitution
of personhood and its variations between different cultures. These questions have
implications for whether the brain, the body or interpersonal relations are treated
as the cause of illness, and whether culturally specific interpretations of illness are
treated as a problem of superstition and ignorance or recognized for their role in
the provision of care. The internationalization of psychiatric discourses also com-
pels questions of foundational importance for social science, namely those of social
difference, the shape of global structural violence, and (through different forms of
expert knowledge) the separation of the medical from the social.
By interrogating global histories of trauma, including as they are insufficiently
attended to within psychiatric discourse, and as the violence underpinning them
is masked by false, uncomplicated, objectivizing and essentializing invocations of
global identities and interactions, this volume attends to the commanding ques-
tion of global futurities and healing. We follow China Mills who asks, with her
monograph Decolonizing Global Mental Health, “whether mental health can, or
should, be global” (Mills, 2014). In the context of this study, we are led to ask a
 Introduction 5

similar question: if the global is violent and traumatic, can these aspects of global
relationality as they manifest psychiatrically be rectified? And if an affirmative
answer can be found, can the decolonization of approaches toward mental health
treatment reciprocally enhance global efforts at sociopolitical liberation? By pos-
ing them here, we wish for these questions to echo throughout the chapters that
follow, even when they are not explicitly addressed or answered in great detail.
Regarding psychiatry’s capacities for unsnarling its complicities with global forms
of oppression, and potentially expanding and more radically positioning the roles
it can play for healing, the chapters in this collection present a diverse set of points
of reference and inference. Taken together, they may allow the reader to form
preliminary understandings that can guide further study and thought.
If global logics of power have not only traumatized and displaced but also
shaped and forged contemporary subjectivities at least partly in their fashion, it
seems sensible to pose at the outset the assumption that liberatory global futures,
however they might be encouraged and created, would entail neither a surgi-
cal excision of present-day global relations nor a simple reversal or return to
any imagined pre-colonial or pre-imperial past. It may be possible to resurrect
minoritarian global concepts and approaches from within dominant traditions
and employ them for decolonial ends: such as, for example, conceptualizations of
foreignness in Sophistic Greek thought which oppose the Platonic/Aristotelean
hierarchy separating Greek and non-Greek by measure of “civilization” (a hier-
archy that would, in later centuries, morph into Euro-centrism and underpin
patterns of colonial and neoliberal expansion). It is ever important to decenter the
aspects of dominant power regimes that marginalize, invisibilize and other, and
to correspondingly center the voices, values and knowledge thus affected. And
global liberatory praxis may be vitalized by political strategies of reparation and/
or repatriation, strategies which must nonetheless be met with a level of mindful-
ness commensurate to the incredible complexities and challenges presented by
intersecting and overlapping histories of genocide and injustice.1
However, insofar as traumas, unconscious defenses and attachments, and pre-
liberatory subjective identifications persist, the crucial strategies invoked earlier
will be insufficient in themselves. The psychiatric legacy of Frantz Fanon helps us
to bear in mind not only the necessities of healing for decolonial work, but also the
importance of globality, and the revolution of global relations at manifold scales,
for healing itself. Even Fanon’s anti-colonial militantism was infused with a glo-
bality that transcended the immediate objectives of sovereign self-determination
and statehood:

Frantz Fanon . . . being immersed in political struggle, observed and articu-

lated the scope and reach of collective political action that was pitched beyond
the nation-state and the continent. To put it another way, he understood and
6 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

articulated the dynamic tension between two logics of sovereignty – the trans-
cendent sovereignty of the imperial nation-states that is expansionist, divisive,
and repressive; and the immanent sovereignty of colonized peoples, which
destabilized and overthrew imperial structures of power.
(Bose, 2019, p. 673)

Or, in Fanon’s own language: “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a

political creature in the most global sense of the term” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 40).
This presents us with the provocative possibility that decolonization and other
efforts at redressing violent structures, including as these structures levy and per-
vade psychiatry and psychotherapeutic treatment, prompts not a de-globalization
or a “de-globification,” but rather a re-globalization or re-globification: a radical
reshaping of how we conceptualize, experience and imagine the global. The
“hows” of this question, and of psychiatry’s role within it, remain subjects for
careful deliberation and far exceed the confines of this book. Yet if psychiat-
ric reflexivity, violence reduction and ethical and effective treatment are desired
ambitions, it is imperative to heed Fanon’s counsel and to carefully reflect upon
the conceivable contours of liberatory global ideals.

Discipline and Psychiatry

Globally, an estimated 264 million people are affected by depression. We are cur-
rently living in an age where mental illness in some ways has become “normal-
ized” as new aspirations and disappointments are fueled by the global economy
(Chua, 2014). In some ways, everyone struggles with mental illness, either by
experiencing acute symptoms or through mild symptoms that are vernacularized
in different ways around the world (Estroff et al., 1991). In other words, mental
illness no longer evokes the same stigma as it used to in the context of European
mental asylums of the 20th century, where those with illness were separated from
broader society. Psychotherapy sessions are now available in schools and universi-
ties. Students and adults with exceptional needs or challenges are no longer the
only ones to receive psychotherapy. In today’s world, personal psychotherapists
are expected to help individuals navigate the stresses of life, even connecting with
their clients through online Zoom calls if they are separated by geographic dis-
tances and time zones.
While in recent years, mental health treatment has been made more accessible
in so-called developing countries, this is a moment to reflect on the place of psy-
chiatry in global humanitarianism, which authorizes social suffering with the help
of its claims to expert knowledge. Social conditions are now legitimated and made
increasingly visible with the help of psychiatric discourses, as Didier Fassin (2012)
writes in the context of France: “Suffering only became an efficacious notion in
the definition of public policy at the point when it was addressed by psychiatrists
 Introduction 7

and set in a legitimate institutional framework” (p. 33). In other words, social
problems, including urban poverty and turns to violence, are now increasingly
“psychiatrized.” One ramification of this move has been to overdiagnose popula-
tions without addressing deep-rooted social problems. In the case of France, the
use of psychiatric discourses was used, according to Fassin, to represent the weight
of social suffering. However, in many other cases, psychiatric care is marked by
a move to conceal the relationship between mental illness and social conditions
by health experts (Scheper-Hughes, 1993). Public health in many counties now
increasingly incorporates mental health, but often public health initiatives, due to
their emphasis on population health and disease eradication, continue to neglect
the psychological effects of disease outbreaks and attempts by states to maintain
“healthy” populations, even when this means separating loved ones and divorc-
ing the vulnerable from much-needed networks of care and emotional support.
When health systems do engage with mental health of the vulnerable, the rela-
tions between punishment and care often result in stigmatizing mental health, as is
demonstrated in the case studies of postcolonial India and Pakistan in this volume.
A fundamental problem of postcolonial psychiatry raised by Franz Fanon is that
maladies in social relations are treated as personal problems rather than as patholo-
gies caused by conditions of colonialism. These social forces are now operating at
global scales in the form of pandemics, conflicts and displacements. Thus, even
as mental health screening has been made increasingly accessible, the increase in
psychiatric disorders requires us to consider a parallel story: namely about the
globalizing forces of displacement. Conditions of scarcity create new pressures on
human sociality and result in new disorders. These disorders are social in nature,
structural mainly, but also interpersonal, as wider economic and social shifts are
experienced in intimate relations (as in, perhaps, a child’s disobedience and vio-
lence toward their parents, treated as a sign of illness rather than a demoralization
created by conditions of extreme poverty) (Das, 2006). These disorders range from
problems of addiction to mental illness and give voice to structural pathologies,
albeit in ways that do not respect the standard template of a medical complaint.
There are also many ways in which structural forces have the effect of numbing
the human mind, or “dissociation,” to borrow a psychoanalytic term: to distract
oneself from precarious job markets, retrenching welfare states and the ever-­
present threat of conflict and violence (Khan, 2017). The category of “accident”
(market crash, flood, etc.), as Virilio (2007) reminds us, is used by states to further
garner psychopolitical complicity. The overall numbing effect is a product of the
intensification of trauma and the experience of trauma as routine and repetitive,
with victims and perpetrators brought into the vortex of state violence: the for-
mer inflicting torture and creating conditions of death, and the latter shouldering
the unconscious burden of bearing witness to these horrors. Numbing as well as
anxiety-inducing, today’s globalizing forces also create new psychiatric subjects
and technologies of control. These new psychiatric subjects (ranging from the
8 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

migrant to the refugee seeker to the internally displaced) are exposed to new
forms of policing and carcerality that create the very conditions of madness or
irrationality that states paradoxically also arduously try to eradicate. Thus, the
psychiatric effects of state-led violence are continuously erased in torture cells and
prisons, just as force is used to correct pathologies and shape bodies.
While the problems are novel, the rich intellectual tradition of postcolonial psy-
chiatry offers some insights. Fanon shows how colonialism creates problems of iden-
tity which prompt the colonized to constantly ask, “In reality who am I?” In fact,
Fanon also wrote about the relevance of the social for clinical practice, especially
when he suggested that “in some circumstances the socius is more important than
the individual” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 105). At another point, he stated, “we are
driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in
the ‘soul’ of the individual but rather in that of the environment” (Ibid., p. 213). Just
as colonial authorities around the world pathologized resistance to power structures,
the figure of Fanon highlighted the potential for a different, more radical kind of
psychiatry: one that is attuned to mundane and everyday forms of suffering. In his
exploration of the effect of colonialism on conjugality, he argued that war “deepens
relations between husband and wife and cements their union. There is a simultane-
ous and effervescent emergence of the citizen, the patriot, and the modern spouse”
(1965, p. 114). At other points, he suggested that colonization leaves deep fractures
in social relations. The reason why postcolonial psychiatry requires a grounding in
Fanon is that Fanon helps us understand how psychiatric care can result both in
giving agency to patients to decide the terms of their treatment, by painstakingly
recovering the mundane pathologies that erupt in everyday experiences due to
conditions of social violence, but also in undoing state-led violence itself.
Despite the headway made by global psychiatric institutions in making psychi-
atric care accessible to populations, we are now experiencing ever-increasing risks
of what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) have detected in Freud’s fascination with
the Oedipus complex as a cause for neurosis. Deleuze and Guattari (1977) argue
that the “daddy-mommy-child” triad privileges and universalizes a specific fam-
ily structure, which is far more inflected with historical and cultural contingency
than Freud’s model acknowledges, and which fails to reflexively capture the pos-
sible tightening or social reproduction of the family unit by psychoanalysis itself.
Posing the figure of the schizophrenic against the oedipalized child, Deleuze and
Guattari (1977) write, “Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited con-
ception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so was his own tripartite
formula – the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me” (p. 23). Referring to
this as a type of analytic imperialism, they note,

the small child lives with his family around the clock; but within the bosom
of this family, and from the very first days of his life, he immediately begins
having an amazing nonfamilial experience that psychoanalysis has completely
failed to take into account.
 Introduction 9

Posing schizo-analysis as an alternative, they write that this approach “sets out to
explore a transcendental unconscious, rather than a metaphysical one; an uncon-
scious that is material rather than ideological; schizophrenia rather than Oedipal;
nonfigurative rather than imaginary; real rather than symbolic” (pp. 109–110).
Can we return to Deleuze and Guattari’s insight to guard against contemporary
psychiatric excesses? There are several contemporary iterations of similar critiques
about how humanitarian psychiatry views specific cultural relations as inherently
pathological, without explicating the multiplicity of relations in combination
with adverse political situations that are generative of mental illness. In creating
caricatures, states create new justifications to expand political violence. Thus,
in today’s world, in which psychiatric regimes are exported abroad (employing
normative assumptions as universals, increasing distrust toward psychiatry and
unintentionally stigmatizing various forms of mental illness), a schizo-framework
acquires a new salience. The question becomes: how we can recover the specific-
ity and uniqueness of psychiatric experiences?

Symptoms of Reality
According to the DSM-V and previous iterations, traumatic experiences and
responses involve intrusion and avoidance symptoms, where exposure to trau-
matic conditions creates stress and specific avoidance mechanisms. Avoidance
mechanisms entail avoiding experiences that recall traumatic events. The critique
that has been leveled onto the use of the DSMs to understand mental illness
globally has been its emphasis on specific symptoms which may or may not be
experienced universally, such as flashbacks (Jones et al., 2003). It is also worth
questioning whether trauma necessarily follows a temporality of initial trauma,
recurrence and avoidance (Khan, 2016, 2017). Meanwhile, symptoms of psy-
chosis are viewed as necessarily bearing a disconnect with reality and are often
treated with pharmaceuticals alone. Psychosis is often treated strictly as a neuro-
chemical problem instead of (at least partly) a social one, despite the prevalence of
experiences of psychosis being interpreted through or laden with particular cul-
tural values (Sadowsky, 2020). The question of whether they represent normal or
pathological experience continues to be debated, but how patients, their families
and physicians employ different social interpretations or explanatory models for
illness is still a relevant question (Farmer, 2010). When illness and symptoms of
psychosis continue to be treated from a strictly medical framework, the solution
too remains largely medical, and not sensitive to the social and political experi-
ences that surround the illness.
Foucault historicizes and complicates the philosophy of psychiatric treatment
in Psychiatric Power. For Foucault (2008), an earlier modality of psychiatric power
represented in the works of Pinel and Esquirol entails the psychiatrist playing up
to the imaginations of the patient, where treatment is based on maintaining the
patient’s as-if structures. The psychiatrist accepts the reality of the illness imposed
10 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

by the patient and in that way works toward its recovery. This began to change,
however, as psychiatrists, by the turn of the 20th century, began to impose their
own meanings of the real on the patient. In other words, the psychiatrists’ under-
standing of the real is final, and the patient’s recovery is dependent upon coming
to terms with this reality, which now means that the patient will go through a
range of infra-penalties every time their version of the “real” is suggested. One
question that we can ask, borrowing from Foucault, is: how do patients, physi-
cians and their families debate what constitutes the real? Is it only the psychiatrist
who can impose a definition of the real?
Instead of simply suggesting that psychiatrists alone create definitions of the
pathological, this volume considers the multiplicity of ways cultures and peo-
ple define pathologies, while reflecting on how pathologies are situated not just
within individuals but also their broader social structures. While patients may
refer to the cause of illness as resulting from precarious situations, we also know
from existing evidence (such as from studies of patients experiencing problems of
addiction) that structural causes of illness are often ignored in medical treatment,
placing the blame for illness disproportionately on the constitutions or subjectivi-
ties of patients (Bourgois, 2009).
While madness may represent a disjuncture from reality, does that mean that
its symptoms bear no relationship to the social or political context? We contend,
by contrast, that treating symptoms and delusions as bearing no relationship with
the real is itself a political act, one that is shaped by the impulse to discredit the
relationship between trauma and oppression. When a patient refers to the social
structure as the cause of illness, both their registering of a personal reality and
their expression of a political protest are likely to be disregarded. Altogether, this
forecloses the traumatic depths of specific political events.
In line with the complicated trajectory of Freudian thought, some psycho-
dynamic and adaptational postulations from psychiatrists such as Adolf Meyer,
Abram Kardiner and Henry Stack Sullivan in the US context and Vladimir
Myasishchev in the Soviet Union considered mental illness as a response to (or
conflict with) specific social milieus, shifting from earlier theories that relied
solely on hereditary factors. Yet in many contexts, the language patients used to
describe their mental illness continued to be either ignored or treated as strictly
medical, denying their symptoms socially etiological significance. ­Skultans
(1998), for example, observes how Latvian subjects described their symptoms
in terms of being “short of air” or having one’s heart “on strike” as forms of
political resistance, given a history of psychiatric discourses being used for sub-
jugation (where even small acts of disobedience could be met with a psychiatric
response). This example encourages us to think about the life of psychiatric
discourses, which can humanize but also brutalize the subjects of illness, some-
times both at once.
 Introduction 11

Psychiatric diagnoses also have a life as they move globally and acquire new
salience to make suffering legible or to conceal it. While, on the one hand, the
movement of psychiatric classification invokes the need to be receptive toward
culturally specific ways of expressing illness, these symptoms in most cases carry
with them signs of the broader social worlds, with symptoms, such as delusions
and psychoses, being buffered, magnified or channelized through specific cultural
experiences of senses and psyche, absorption and porosity (Luhrmann, 2012). Ill-
ness narratives offer a political critique as much as they illuminate personal injury.
While psychiatric institutions may become the voice of the state, a different,
more radical psychiatry may challenge the assumptions about what the symptoms
represent by siding with patients to turn symptoms into critique, even as the state
tries to depoliticize symptoms by enforcing a distinction between symptoms and
political reality.
Finally, a more radical psychiatry might interrogate assumptions about what
constitutes the subject of treatment. Mental illness can invite us to consider non-
human ontologies and temporalities that are ignored as part of the liberal subjec-
tivity in which agency is considered as firmly rooted within an individual (Asad,
2003). For instance, within Islamic contexts, patients refer to their afflictions and
seizures as examples of demonic possessions, where healing presents a site for
the recovery of not only the individual but the social relation causing the illness.
The psyche is thus difficult to disentangle from histories, spaces and relations.
However, for many reasons (including its complicities with Eurocentric, colonial
and racist assumption sets), we hesitate to look straight to the archetypal logic
that dominates Jungian psychiatry to acknowledge the psyche’s global relatedness.
For us, what globalizing logics prompt us to think about is how knotted experi-
ences present themselves as symptoms where neither a simple beginning can be
privileged, nor where there is a straightforward resolution through abreaction.
Modern experiences of trauma blur distinctions between the mind and the body,
the self and the other, and the human and the non-human. Thus, a question of
central importance is how the idea of the self or the causes of illness are contested
within clinical contexts. How are histories of trauma erased or subsumed in spe-
cific ways that privilege or make trauma “intelligible” to specific communities?

The Globalization of Trauma: An Outline

Conventionally, trauma is represented in terms of traumatic experiences, their
re-experience and mechanisms of avoidance. With this volume, we seek to
­understand trauma not merely as the symptoms that come to represent it, but
also as a political concept: it is a marker of political violence, as it represents the
maddening impacts of wars, nationalism, local and global hierarchies, family dis-
orders, and ethnic provincialism (etc.) lived out in varied contexts and expressed
12 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

in myriad ways. To understand the healing of trauma caused by various levels and
intensities of oppression and subordination, we do not disregard the psychiatric
clinic (we find it rather crucially important), but we are also interested in investi-
gating the intersections between clinics and other spaces: such as nonclinical sites
of healing, domestic spaces, etc.
With this volume, we therefore hope to explore five important aspects about
trauma and the globalizing forces that shape it:

Temporality: What are the temporalities of traumatogenesis and the forces of

displacement as global conflicts become more routinized?
Expression: How do expressions of trauma vary cross-culturally, and how do
traumatic experiences find expression in sites outside of the clinic?
Ontology: How is the experience of trauma related to questions of personhood?
How might the experience of mental illness challenge Cartesian dualisms?
And how might patients and healers negotiate between multiple selves: both
human and non-human?
Intimacy: How might taking seriously the fluid, relational and intersectional
construction of identity help us better analyze the capacities and challenges of
psychotherapeutic intervention?
Psychosis: How might psychotic symptoms, if related to political oppression and
displacement, represent psychic attempts for relief from the maddening effects
of structural violence?

This volume does not provide the first account of the limits of western diag-
noses, nor of the differences between western or global and nonwestern or local
models of trauma. Nor is the volume unique in posing questions about the con-
fluences and intersections between psychological and physiological conditions,
of course, as this has been a persistent feature of Freud-inspired psychiatric study.
We hope to supplement existing approaches along these lines with a heightened
emphasis on globalization and global political structures, logics and scale, examin-
ing how they manifest within an array of local contexts and cases and bringing a
diversity of theoretical perspectives and voices to bear.
To do so, we order the volume into four parts. In Part 1, “Trauma, Globality
and Death,” Roberto Beneduce levies the psychiatric case studies of Frantz Fanon
to ask what contemporary patterns of migration, including migrant and immigrant
death, reveal about the hidden articulations and implications of trauma. Following
Roberto’s chapter, a chapter by Xiaowen Zhang and Jie Yang explores the intru-
sive uses of public health for political control, the production of death through
the medical triaging of patients, medical neglect toward non-COVID patients
to keep the health system intact, and the isolation of patients with COVID-19
from the wider society. These elements, according to the authors, served a than-
atopolitical function in the Chinese city of Wuhan during the outbreak of the
 Introduction 13

coronavirus-2019 pandemic. Zhang and Yang argue that long-standing traditions

focusing on the responsibility to the nation were mobilized to favor collective
over personal interests to an extent that conditions for death were produced to
“ensure stability of the social and medical order.”
In Part 2, “Global Surveillance and Trauma,” we situate a chapter by Neil
Krishan Aggarwal, which explains how manipulating thresholds or definitions of
torture allows the US state to erase or underplay the effects of its violence upon
Guantanamo detainees, where a discourse of American exceptionalism is used to
justify this violence, but is also, paradoxically, used by prisoners to make a case for
justice. We position this chapter alongside a study of psychiatric care and public
health in Kashmir by Saiba Varma, who advances the concept of “social impu-
nity” to give voice to patient experiences and resistances under state occupation
and sociomedical control.
In Part 3, “Culture, Displacement and Healing,” we present two chapters
that each unpack the complexities of non-clinical care and cross-cultural values.
Christopher M. Webb, a medical anthropologist and combat veteran, explores
Indigenous ritual treatments of combat trauma for both Native and non-Native
military veterans alongside a dominant discourse of “warriordom” as it reinforces
white settler violence. Then, in a study about the religious (Islamic) treatment
of mental illness in Pakistan, Sanaullah Khan demonstrates how effective care
in this context entails a cultivation of sensitivities to both spiritual ethics and
nonhuman agents.
There are three chapters in Part 4. In “Global Bodies, Logics and Clinics,”
interdisciplinary social theorists Alyson K. Spurgas and Elliott Schwebach begin
with a dialogue about psychological assumptions and psychotherapeutic prac-
tices as they become complicit with structural patterns of oppression, including
gender-based violence and sexual control. In the following chapter, Elena Ruíz,
Nora Berenstain and Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba bear witness to gender-based
forms of administrative violence and control, including reproductive violence
(such as reproductive rights rollbacks in the United States), as they emerge from
and support settler colonial statecraft. Finally, in a chapter that offers direct, prac-
tical takeaways for psychiatrists and psychotherapists, Crystal Han and Shinnyi
Chou demonstrate the centrality of colonial power relations for the development
and experience of trauma for AAPI populations (Asian Americans and Pacific
Islanders). Crystal and Shinnyi present a diverse array of case studies to show not
only how the global political dimension is reflected in traumatic symptomatology,
but also how it is often insufficiently accounted for in psychiatric treatment.
Altogether, we hope that this volume will help to explicate the patterns of
global power that permeate psychiatric knowledge and care, and to make global
psychiatry’s conventional ontological and cultural assumptions a little more
strange. We also hope to encourage the reader to continue evaluating the meth-
odological and epistemological frameworks that render trauma visible or invisible,
14 Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach

and in so doing, we hope to make suffering both more complex and more mean-
ingful. It is from this basis, we believe, that better care can follow.

Note
1 Within the burgeoning literature on these complexities and challenges, which is by now
too vast to comprehensively cite, we wish to draw attention to a remarkable ­literature
review by Olivia Klutse entitled “Repatriation and Reparations: Land-Based Indig-
enous and Black Futurity,” recognized for an undergraduate research award in 2018.

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PART 1

Trauma, Globality
and Death
1
WHERE PSYCHE, HISTORY AND
POLITICS MERGE
Decolonizing PTSD and Traumatic Memory
With Fanon

Roberto Beneduce
Translated from Italian into English by Richard Bates

Archives of Pain and New Necro-Geographies

To understand the hidden text in the narratives of so many asylum-seekers and
immigrants, to measure the violence their scars and tales recount, we need to
achieve a reading similar to that which Althusser defined as “symptomatic,”
remembering that it is not what we do not see that is the problem, but what
is imposed on our senses so clearly (pain, death, violence) to make us forget
what allows or feeds that pain, those deaths, those tragedies. It is the opacity of
the immediate, writes Althusser, taking up a formula of Spinoza, that needs to be
questioned.1 A historical and political opacity, certainly, but also epistemological,
which the images and news of recent years also reveal in the metaphors used by
the media and by governments.
What are the forgotten pages of this dark narrative? What is the origin of this
opacity, which, in the face of the new maps of dominion and our present-day
necro-geographies,2 leaves us grasping only a few fleeting images of despair and the
faded text of some clinical diagnoses? How do we grasp the meanings and the
borders of “trauma” within contemporary diasporic narratives? It may be useful
to look again at some of these images of death and indifference.
Thirty-nine bodies of Asian citizens,3 found in a lorry (cargo truck) not far
from London, horrified public opinion. On June 20, 2000, in Dover, England,
there was a similar episode: the lifeless bodies of 58 Chinese citizens were found
in a lorry, in which they had hidden to enter the UK, an uninterrupted series
of grim events, about which we have developed a singular form of “cultural
anesthesia” (Feldman, 1994).4 In June 2022, more than 50 bodies of Mexicans,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311843-3
20 Roberto Beneduce

Guatemalans and Hondurans were found without life in a lorry in the town of
San Antonio, in the US state of Texas.
Dying frozen, dehydrated or suffocated in an attempt to cross borders has
simply become another possible way of death in the contemporary world: a side
effect of modern teichopolitics – policies of border control through the proliferation
of walls, barbed wire, barriers of every kind and highly technological surveillance
systems whose aim is to prevent illegal immigration (Ballif and Rosière, 2009;
Rosière and Jones, 2012).
According to the authors who coined this neologism, teichopolitics (drawn from
a Greek word for a fortified wall) are a recent development of biopolitics for the
control of peoples and the subjection of bodies. In the age of late-capitalist and
neo-liberal brutalism (Mbembe, 2020), the value of human life seems to waver
furiously between that of a useful body, reduced to a mere work force, that of
disposable bodies/objects, and that of a humanitarian lament that questions the
hypocritical silence of governments and institutions.
The control of mobility (kinetocracy is a term suggested by Benedetta Rossi)
(2015, p. 152), initially effected under colonization, is not just about nation-state
making, national borders, airports or checkpoints: we find new expressions of it
within our cities, where new spaces of detention isolate illegal immigrants and
invisible confines separate rich from poor areas, and where any suspicious gesture
can legitimize the most brutal violence: as happened in March 2018 in Sacra-
mento in the US state of California, where Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black
man, was shot and killed by the police because his cell-phone was mistaken for
a pistol.
The centrality of the racial – and postcolonial – question in the episodes just
mentioned is expressed particularly clearly in the case of Yaguine Koita and Fodd
Tounkara, two adolescents from Conakry, Guinea, found frozen to death in the
undercarriage of a Sabena airplane in Brussels. With their story, the two young
Africans were to foster a serious debate and add another chapter to the painful
archive on migration, because Yaguibe and Fodd had a letter with them, written
with “grande confiance” to the European heads of state. I quote some passages from
it as it occupies a unique place in our present-day narratives of diaspora:

Your Excellencies, members, and officials of Europe,

It is a distinctive honor and privilege to write this letter to talk to you about
the aim of our trip and our suffering – we the children and the youth of Africa.
We put our trust in you.
First of all, we bring you our greetings – the sweetest, the most adorable
and respectful greetings of life. To this end, please be our support and help, we
the people of Africa. Otherwise whom shall we turn to for help?
We beseech you, come to our rescue. Think of your love for your beauti-
ful continent, your people, your family, above all the love of your children
 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge 21

that you love so dearly like life. Moreover, think of the love and kindness of
the creator, “God,” the Almighty, who has given you the good experiences,
wealth, and power to construct and organize your continent so well that it has
become the most beautiful and admirable of them all. . . .
Finally, we beseech you to forgive us for daring to write such a letter to you
important people whom we truly respect. Do not forget that it is to you that
we must plead [?] the weakness of our strength in Africa.5

In discussing the letter, De Boeck and Honwana (2005, p. 8) wonder: “Why

are these young Africans so powerfully attracted to the west? What is their vision
of a good life? What is their cultural politics, and in what geographies, ecologies,
and subjectivities is it located and imagined?” With a “symptomatic reading,”
however, a deeper truth emerges. It is the style in which this letter is written that gives
us pause. Alluding to Bhabha’s analysis of (post)colonial strategies of “mimicry,”
Ferguson (2002, p. 552) notes that, reading this text, it is impossible not to feel “a
specific sort of embarrassment, as well as a stark horror. . . . It is the embarrass-
ment of encountering Africans – in postcolonial era – who humbly beg Europe-
ans to come to their bluntly ask for help ‘to become like you.’”
The letter of Yaguibe and Fodd lays bare the hypocrisies of those who govern
us with a power of the dead and the oppressed. Their words are the writing of
another disaster (Blanchot, 1980/1995), the staging of the obscenity of so-called
“illegal” migration (De Genova, 2013). But another kind of obscenity should be
recognized: that of the categories that ever more often claim to define neutrally
the range of human experiences and crises, as in the case of post-traumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD.
As part of the transformation of disciplined societies into controlling socie-
ties (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 177–182), systems of governance now introduce a tragic
asymmetry that is once again developing along the line of color, to use the words
of du Bois, understood here broadly to consider the racial violence that is now
grafted onto migration policies or is unleashed as a homicidal symptom on city
streets. In Italy: the case of Moussa Balde, a citizen from Conakry in Guinea who
was savagely attacked by men in Ventimiglia in 2021, then taken to a detention
center in Turin, where he killed himself; the strangling of Alika Ogorchukwu, a
disabled Nigerian citizen, in Civitanova Marche in plain sight; the murder of a
homeless young Moroccan, Youns El Boussetaoui, by a League member of the
town council of Voghera. These episodes recall the expression of a violence that
we do not wish to recognize and an anguish that results, but for which there
seems to be no adequate diagnosis.6
In recent decades, the literature on the notion of “trauma” has developed
dizzyingly, and not only in clinical circles. Fed by literary studies, postcolonial
novels and studies that have sought to investigate the politics of memory or the
consequences of historical dramas, trauma has more and more frequently ended
22 Roberto Beneduce

up questioning the disciplines that had first defined it (i.e., psychoanalysis and war
psychiatry).7 The reflections that follow draw above all on such contributions for
its ideas, as a critical approach to trauma is able to recount what clinical sources
often ignore: the historical genealogy of our diagnostic categories, in the palimp-
sest of the symptom (Beneduce, 2016a; Kienzler, 2022; Mianji and Kirmayer,
2022).8
The perspective suggested here takes its cue from what Caruth wrote on the
success of PTSD. In her words,

the more we satisfactorily locate and classify the symptoms of PTSD, the more
we seem to have dislocated the boundaries of our modes of understanding. . . .
The phenomenon of trauma has seemed to become all-inclusive, but it has
done so precisely because it brings us to the limits of our understanding.
(Caruth, 1995, pp. 3–4)

This is undoubtedly true. Yet, I do not believe that the “limits of our understand-
ing” explored by psychoanalysis can be considered in the same way as ontological
limits of the human condition or intrinsic to traumatic experience. The limits
that Freud drew attention to do not just reveal the functioning of the uncon-
scious, but also derive from other processes: the politics of memory, the phe-
nomena of institutional concealment, the registers of verification and falsification
(Foucault, 2014). My aim in these notes is to uncover some of the areas of epis-
temic and political opacity that characterize the diagnosis of PTSD, which might
contribute to its decolonization. In doing this, I will be helped by the epistemic
break introduced by Fanon, and in particular by Chapter Five of his The Wretched
of the Earth, a chapter that may represent the high water mark of Fanon’s blending
of the political and the psychic (Beneduce, 2011, 2016b; Gibson and Beneduce,
2017; Jabr, 2019; Lazali, 2021; Sibertin-Blanc, 2014). Before summoning Fanon,
however, we need to examine another dossier.

Globalizing Trauma or Decolonizing Memory? The Shadows

of a Disputed History
Why did the trauma clinic become the locus where so many of the essential
threads of our modernity ended up meeting almost naturally? What made the
diagnosis of PTSD so fundamental as to extensively saturate common language,
the social imaginary and even the dialogue of some cartoons?9 And why does
their amalgam of the political, the clinical and the historical now take on a special
importance? To answer these questions, we must describe some features of the
setting in which these themes took form.
In the late 19th century, no fewer than three contexts defined the social
and epistemological contours of the idea of trauma, all interlinked as in an
 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge 23

extraordinary diorama. The first was the various changes brought about by the
processes of production, with the increased number of mishaps caused by the
appearance of new means of transport (e.g., Erichsen’s disease or “railway spine”)
or by the rhythms of factory work. Gramsci would note in 1934 that the produc-
tion of “machine-like behavior” (“atteggiamenti macchinali”) in the human body
was an explicit aim of Taylorism (Gramsci, 1970, p. 2165). Bodies were trying to
resist the accelerated tempo of modernity by struggling to adapt or by letting new
ailments emerge.10
The second context consisted of the theories that were distinguishing between
various kinds of neurosis, which debated whether observed symptoms were
caused only by psychic reactions or if their appearance necessarily connoted a
neurological lesion too. Here the background was Freud’s theory of child seduc-
tion as a cause of hysteria, which would be followed, after 1897, by the idea that
the patients’ accounts of their symptoms were laden with fantasy, and that fantasy
always bore a primary connection to the Oedipus Complex. With the introduc-
tion of the idea of “belatedness” or “afterthought” (Nachträglichkeit), which Lacan
would claim to have extracted from Freud’s work, suggesting “après-coup” in
French, a new and decisive element entered the narrative of trauma: one of tempo-
rality. This allows us to understand how traumatic events in the past encounter a
significance only a posteriori (in Freud’s model, after the “latency period”). This
is an idea of which the epistemological, clinical and political potential may not
yet have been wholly explored, particularly insofar as the notion of latency can
be extended to historical traumas (genocides, mass atrocities, mass migrations,
slavery). We can ask the question: how long can the latency of a collective trauma
be before symptoms arise? And what form will these symptoms take?
The third context is that of the Great War, or First World War, with the hell of
the trenches and the grenades: it led Ferenczi to say in 1917 that only cinematic
images could adequately represent the singular and, until then, unknown symp-
toms observed in soldiers who had returned from the front (muscular spasms,
awkward bearing and gait, tics, language disturbances, etc.) (Ferenczi, 1994,
pp. 124–141). Here Ferenczi seems to suggest that ordinary clinical categories
and concepts encounter a limit in describing and understanding the reality of suf-
fering brought about by a new technology of death.
As Young (1997) has shown, the category of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) seems to forget the complex history that preceded its birth. Mixing
symptoms and diagnostic categories already present in previous classifications,
PTSD would reformulate trauma treatment and continue to expand in the years
following the context of the diagnosis’ emergence (the Vietnam War) to include
ailments caused by any kind of traumatic event (natural disasters, rapes, wars, loot-
ing, migration, etc.), irrespective of the sociocultural situation, place and role of
the subjects involved. The rapid tectonic movement of PTSD diagnoses shook
up psychiatry in the late 20th century, redefining its classificatory axes and the
24 Roberto Beneduce

very idea of trauma, but at the same time encouraging a new (mechanical) model
of memory (Young, 1997, pp. 270–279) and a singular ontologizing of human
experience itself.11
If clinicians make a serious mistake when they ignore the historical matrices
of their categories, the risks multiply when the socio-cultural maps in which they
take form and significance are ignored. The case of the Wolfman is perhaps one
of the best known.12 More recently, analyzing the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a
German judge who suffered from schizophrenia, Santner (1996) has highlighted
the hidden links between Schreber’s illness and the prevalent anxieties of his time
surrounding the role of the nation-state and the gradual assertion of antisemitism
in German society.
But there is also another context that should be evoked in the reconstruction
of the genealogy of trauma and, later, that of PTSD: that of the colonial space and
the racial apparatus, where the violence and seduction that were its plot and wrote
its “little secret” (Mbembe, 2006) were accompanied by a particular anxiety – that
of suspicion. It was this last context that offered perhaps the most decisive (and
still underexplored) conjunction between medico-psychological theories, strategies
of subjection, epistemic anxieties and the success of some diagnostic categories. If
the analogy between criminal, woman, neurotic and “primitive” was well known,
suspicion of the working class or lumpenproletariat, and then of the colonized,
would be the common denominator of the systems designed to inspect, con-
trol and classify these masses regarded as threatening, a logic that was arguably
extended from regimes of control over slaves (Genovese, 1972). This humanity of
uncertain and threatening appearance, and modes of suffering that would gener-
ate diagnostic doubt, were later accompanied by asylum seekers, whose tales and
experiences would be subjected to increasingly detailed examination and control
(Beneduce, 2015; Beneduce, 2018). The clinical gaze fostered this ideology of
suspicion, coining innumerable diagnoses (from that of “sinistrosis,” alleging a
propensity to overexaggerate the harms suffered by minor accidents, to the more
recent “factitious disorder” and “malingering,” referring to alleged tendencies to
feign or deliberately produce illness)13 that were directed mainly at the socially
marginalized groups: subordinates, the working class, members of ethnic and
racial minorities or immigrants.
During the First World War, suspicion did not spare soldiers who manifested
symptoms of the terror experienced in the trenches (shell shock syndrome).
What is striking, once again, is the relation between suspicion, the social class of
patients, and diagnosis: while officers and higher ranks usually received diagnoses
such as neurasthenia or depression, the lowers ranks would be accused of simulat-
ing their symptoms for their own advantage (to avoid returning to the front). The
military psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, a future Nobel Prize winner, for the
treatment of syphilis, entertained doubts as to patients’ suffering, and, to counter-
act what seemed to him simply chicanery or cowardice, prescribed electric shock
 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge 25

treatment for them. The tragic consequence was that some of them ended up
committing suicide, leading to polemics and a legal case in which Freud himself
testified.14
To understand how the diagnosis of PTSD met with such success, it is thus
important to set out a genealogy of suspicion with a critical genealogy of the idea of
trauma and the category of PTSD (Beneduce, 2010; Fassin and Rechtman, 2009;
Young, 1997). Doing so will show the colonial/racial setting as its place of origin
and its chosen image.
Colonial psychiatry had already launched a peculiar form of globalization of
the unconscious. Henry Aubin, a distinguished figure in French colonial psychia-
try and the psychiatric school directed by Antoine Porot in Algiers, and influ-
enced by psychoanalysis (particularly in its Jungian form), may be one of the most
eloquent examples of this desire. According to Bullard, by interpreting magic
thought or other religious practices as the expression of “denial” in the psycho-
analytic sense of the term, and perceiving the symptoms of Africans as similar to
those of European patients, Aubin contributed to the construction of a “global
unconscious.”15 And, unlike other psychiatrists of the period, he dismantled the
barrier of cultural difference that other psychiatrists had erected in approaching
Indigenous madness, as they described the role of superstitions and beliefs in the
ravings of Africans.16 This perspective, Bullard continues, canceled other differ-
ences too: ideas about magic or witchcraft, for example, had been “disarmed” of
their specific metaphysical and ontological value, and the global unconscious had
inexorably bent temporalities, experiences and autonomous narrative registers
within the hegemonic interpretive code of western psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
As Anderson et al. (2011) observe:

Cultural globalization assumes a universal and cosmopolitan subject as prereq-

uisite for its possibility. Globalization’s aqueous metaphors (flows of informa-
tion, the fluidity of capital exchange, floods of refugees) tap the same well as
Freud’s oceanic self, as does the republican universalism that overwhelms dif-
ference or anchors it within a civic teleology. Although these discourses allow
room for particularism, they do so only to the extent that such differences are
assimilable into a single model of the subject that conceals real difference in
favor of a uniform possibility of transformation and fluid exchange.
(p. 2)

Thirty years later, the category of PTSD would carry out a similar strategy,
massively and even more effectively universalizing the significance of traumatic
experience and its clinical effects, but also the temporality typical of traumatic
memory and its treatment. Through a complex epistemic and political torsion,
the trauma of American veterans in Vietnam perpetuated that secret impulse to
globalize the significance of symptoms, experiences and treatments that psychiatry
26 Roberto Beneduce

had already tried to achieve in the colonial period. To ensure its influence, how-
ever, the diagnosis of PTSD once again had to silence other conflicts and contra-
dictions, concealing in particular the racial nature of the violence and suffering
associated with the war in Vietnam. Contempt for an enemy, hated, derided,
racialized and animalized, was necessary to perpetrate violence and atrocities even
against civilians. The zoological language that Fanon had described in detail in
the colonial context once again took center-stage in the history of the US mili-
tary. And as often happens, it was often language that preserved, like splinters of
wood embedded in flesh, the (racial) meaning of abuse, atrocity and destruction.
Consider the case of the racial slur designating the Vietnamese, “g**k,” a term
already used by US soldiers against Asian people during other colonial wars (in
Korea, and still earlier in the Philippines) and employed also against Black Hai-
tians in the early 20th century.17 The history of the term is exemplary for the
function it played to dehumanize the enemy, and further to placate any sense
of guilt, moral crisis and anguish for American soldiers. A perverse competition
developed around the number of Vietnamese killed or Vietnamese women raped,
who, after all, were no longer men or women, but simply “g**ks.”18 The idea of
a g**k syndrome, a concept coined by Lifton (1969/1970), recalls one of the most
important pages in the history of PTSD:

The men who fought the long Vietnam ground war were drawn into what
I shall call the “g**k syndrome.” The scapegoated victims of American soldier-
survivors of the ground war in Vietnam were not the North Vietnamese or
the NLF guerrillas, or even South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers. Rather,
they were the “g**ks”. . . . So predominant was the g**k syndrome that try-
ing to avoid it made one “abnormal,” and even those who consciously fought
its dehumanization were inevitably drawn into it. . . . Despite everything,
however, more humane feelings toward Vietnamese did persist. Such feelings
could be kept alive by involvements with families or by various encounters
with the suffering of individual Vietnamese. Children could play a particularly
great part in resensitizing experiences. Veterans recalled their shock at seeing
American trucks barreling through villages and running over children in the
road. These are what I call images of ultimate transgression, of ultimate “mis-
match” –the helpless young, whom adults are supposed to nurture and protect,
cruelly destroyed by all-powerful but totally unfeeling American machines.
(pp. 70–71)

Combining the cultural genealogy of suspicion with the analysis of a diagnostic

category, relating the scene of racial violence examined by Fanon with colonial
psychiatry’s “denial” (Taïeb, Aubin, Mannoni, Carothers)19 and the moral and
political questions left in the background by the diagnosis of PTSD, I adopt a per-
spective not far removed from the approach of Laura Briggs (2002), Selma James
 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge 27

(1974/2012) and other feminist scholars who trace the connections between
colonialism, sex, race and social class to structurally analyze the dominant global
forms of exploitation. In my analysis, I work to distill a symptomatic understand-
ing of trauma from these premises.

Colony: Another Kind of Trauma; or, When the Waves of the

Political Break on the Banks of the Psychic
The fifth and final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth can rightly be regarded as
the piece of thinking that fully asserts the project of a decolonial clinical practice that,
once any Eurocentric residue in the diagnosis has been dealt with and a socio-
genesis of mental disturbances has begun, can turn to consider the psychic scars
inflicted on the colonized, on the “wretched of the earth,” who (as Fanon’s life
work avows) embody a particular historical consciousness of the disaster and lived
experience (or Erlebnis) of domination. As in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon
shows in Chapter 5 of Wretched that sociogeny and alienation do not spare the
colonizers and French society, either. Reflecting the Manicheism of colonialism
famously discussed in the first chapter of Wretched, Chapter 5 demonstrates how
(though the costs and symptoms are radically different) alienation penetrates and
pervades both sides of the colonial world.
Fanon begins by wondering if a chapter on mental disturbances might not
seem “untimely” in “a book like this.” Its inclusion comes from the awareness that
the colonial period was a twisted one, where political and psychopathological
oppression were structurally knotted together: “The truth is that colonization, in
its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals” (emphasis
added). Returning to clinical material in the midst of an analysis of national cul-
ture or anti-colonial struggle is therefore necessary for Fanon. But Chapter 5 is a
complex chapter. The previous assertion is followed by others that sound almost
paradoxical: that anti-colonial resistance struggle, while necessary to uproot from
colonized minds the “seeds of rottenness” planted by oppression (Fanon, 1963,
p. 181)20 also generates mental disturbances; and that mental unhealth (including as
it is wrought by decolonial resistance) is impossible to treat within the colony.21
Like a mournful echo, mental disturbances accompany the various phases of
occupation, dominion and resistance. While they continue to inhabit the space of
psychopathology, we can still recognize their “infrapolitical” value (Scott, 1990,
pp. 183–201), which lends a more than metaphorical significance to the idea
of “defense mechanism.” There are few authors before Deleuze’s and Guatta-
ri’s method of “schizoanalysis” who have so effectively tied the symptom to the
political, the unconscious to history. What interests me here is how the work ena-
bled Fanon to imagine another narrative for these mental disturbances that had
arisen in the context of violence and colonial war. In his texts, and especially the
­climactic Chapter 5 of Wretched, Fanon succeeds in setting out an original theory
28 Roberto Beneduce

of trauma, whose structure is radically different from the one characterizing the
idea of PTSD.
His first step was to consider suffering both in the colonizers and in the colo-
nized. The cases in the first group of patients (“Series A – Five cases have been
collected here, all involving Algerians or Europeans who had clearly defined symp-
toms of severe reactive disorders”; Fanon, 1963, p. 185) document, for example,
the symptoms of two colonial police officers (cases 4 and 5). Later we read of a
French woman, the daughter of a civilian, responsible for violence against Alge-
rians and “obsessed” with hunting them down. Though Fanon acknowledges the
psychic wounds of French occupiers and even of those responsible for torture,
he does not neglect the differences between those who try to question their role
(case 4) and those who ask only to be able to continue to torture without suffer-
ing (case 5), nor does he neglect the differences between mental disturbances for
aggressors and for victims. If one of the police officers displays a state of depres-
sion and a panic attack after accidentally meeting someone he had subjected to
torture, the victim, who had also recognized his tormentor and feared he had
come after him even in hospital to continue his work, has a much more serious
reaction: he attempts suicide. The conclusion is that there is no natural way in which
trauma takes its course. The trauma’s position within the sociopolitical fabric will
impose different prognoses and fates upon its differently positioned subjects. This
is what I have previously called Fanon’s “political semiotics” (Beneduce, 2011;
Gibson and Beneduce, 2017).
There is a second step by which Fanon sets forth his original theory of trauma
that is closely connected to the first. The question with which Fanon had begun
his reflections on racial alienation 20 years earlier (“What does a man want? What
does the black man want?”; Fanon, 1986, p. 10) became – after bearing witness
to the accounts of the tortured, treating their wounds, listening to the silence of
the raped women – the terrible enigma of the colonized: “Who am I in reality?”
In the colony, dehumanization, humiliation and “thingification” generate radi-
cal demands on one’s own status. This question signifies a new page in Fanon’s
phenomenology, where he insists that the violence inflicted on colonial territories
and the occupation of colonized bodies is coextensive, where he sketches a politi-
cal and clinical ecology that lays out on the same canvas the “wounds inflicted on
the colonized during a single day under a colonial regime” and the pain of places,
expropriated lands and evacuated villages:

In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy
nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm
groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French
presence.
(Fanon, 1963, p. 182)
 Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge 29

Bodies, memories, lands, goods: the colony makes no distinctions in what it

appropriates, and everything will be forcibly alienated in the legal (as well as psy-
chological) sense of the term. This is another of the aspects forgotten by PTSD
as a diagnosis, which ignores the broader destruction of symbols and places that
is bound up within colonial suffering, and the territorial anguish that it generates.22
Fanon begins his reflections in Chapter 5 by declaring he wants to avoid “any
semiological, nosological, or therapeutic discussion.” However, the pages that fol-
low introduce new perspectives in these areas. This represents the third step in
Fanon’s establishment of an original theory of trauma. While psychiatry settled
for describing colonial symptoms as benign “psychotic reactions” (184), circum-
scribing and banalizing their causes, Fanon insisted on the fact that they emerge
from “a bloody, pitiless atmosphere” (183). This indicates that psychic suffering
is the inevitable response to a world that is collapsing, to an “atmospheric vio-
lence.”23 If colonialism takes on the characteristics of genocide, it is no wonder
that its symptoms appear differently than conventional approaches in psychiatry
might imagine: “Another well-established notion that deserves in our opinion to
be reevaluated is that these psychotic reactions are relatively benign . . . We believe
on the contrary that the pathological processes tend as a rule to be frequently malignant”
(Fanon, 1963, p. 183; my italics).
Fanon attempted to make use of psychoanalytic interpretive models to read the
symptom of those who became impotent on learning their wife had been raped
by the French (were these incestuous ghosts?),24 or the night-time ravings of a man
who felt persecuted during the night by the image of an old woman.25 In both
cases, the interpretations proved unsatisfactory, however. Unlike what Aubin has
suggested by drawing on the notion of denial, or Mannoni, who had interpreted
the nightmares of Madagascan children as reflecting castration fears (Mannoni,
1956), Fanon lifted another curtain: instead of trying to globalize the unconscious
of the colonized, or pathologize their reactions, he sought to recognize how far
the violence of war had colonized emotions, words and imaginaries. His insist-
ence on the “dislocated personality” of victims of torture, and his prognostic
pessimism (“In all evidence the future of these patients is compromised”), are the
clinical counterpoints of his political and anthropological thinking. In addition,
continuing a development he set forth in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon lifted
the veil that prevented psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of the time from naming
the experience of terror wrought by the voice of the colonist or the racial gaze,
or the drama of those who lived their lives as a daily apocalypse.
The violence Fanon witnessed in Algeria was the painful, infected suture
between colonial domination and racial alienation, the very one that the trauma
treatment emerging in the context of the Vietnam war would symptomatically
mask.26 But it is perhaps Fanon’s fourth step that is decisive in our critique of
PTSD.
30 Roberto Beneduce

In Chapter Five of Wretched, Fanon accommodates a recognition that colo-

nial violence evacuates, for its subjects, a sense of moral standing or orientation,
surrounding the colonial situation with a feeling of moral vertigo. For torture
survivors, for example, Fanon observes that a sense of justice is felt to be lost and
that there remains an “indifference to any moral argument,” an ethico-affective
position that others have gleaned from the stunned experience of some survivors
of Nazi concentration camps. Fanon therefore troubles the easy moral narrative
that may too easily be read into the traumas of victimhood: including by those
who would read Fanon himself as espousing a moral certitude within colonial
resistance. Simultaneously, Fanon avoids the pitfalls of failing to attend to moral
considerations at all, a tendency that is highly prevalent within PTSD diagnoses.
By probing morality for a myriad of actors, from subjects to participants,
within the colonial scene, Fanon also examines the moral orientation of two
young Algerians who were responsible for the murder of one of their compan-
ions: an adolescent like them, but who was French. “Are you sorry you killed
someone?” Fanon asks the first. “But that’s no reason for killing your friend,”
he replies to the second. In response: silence. This silence, the young Algerians’
seeming indifference, is eloquent. They reveal an abyss that colonial violence has
gouged out of experience. It is the colonial machine that Fanon wants us to rec-
ognize through the symptom of this silence, a symptom that covers the deeply felt
emptiness of moral exhaustion.
The historian Caroline Elkins (2005, 2022) has shown how the atrocities com-
mitted by the British Empire, not unlike those carried out in Indochina, Mada-
gascar or Algeria by France, were systematically silenced, concealed or justified
as exceptions due to alleged emergency conditions; only in 2021, 60 years later,
for example, did France admit to the torture and murder of the young mathema-
tician Maurice Audin. The case of the Migrated Files27 may be the most recent
example of the desire to conceal, at whatever cost, the sleepless traces of colonial
violence, silencing the untimely voice of colonial survivors, and even managing
to discredit the research of historians.28 The “pathogenic secret” of the bourgeois
family (Freud), from which the theory of trauma arose, has a no less dark chapter
in colonial history (and in the history of the nation-state). But the symptoms that
originated from colonial trauma would be equally stubborn, equally painful, as is
shown by the macabre violence of the civil war in the 1990s and the mysterious
disappearance of hundreds of minors in present-day Algeria (Lazali, 2021).

Untimeliness: Remembering the Past, Reclaiming the Future,

or Rethinking “True History” With The Wretched of the Earth
In 1957 in Kenya, as in other colonies, arrest and torture without trial was the
norm (see also Fanon, 1964, p. 66). Eric Griffith-Jones, attorney-general of the
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
thousand of such people in this city.” But then this is only a
conjecture. We have no means of knowing to an absolute certainty
the number of criminals in New York.
During the fall and winter, when there are great social gatherings
in the city, thousands of crooks invade Manhattan, and live at the
best hotels. When they leave, they usually take with them enough
money and valuables to last for years.
The curiosities of crime which may be seen in the museum of the
Rogues’ Gallery are worthy of careful inspection. These consist of
dark lanterns, jimmies galore, sectional jimmies, and ancient and
modern jimmies, knives, dirks, razors, pistols, guns, gold bricks,
burglary tools, skeleton keys and several hundred other things used
by criminals, all too numerous to mention. Many of these things are
kept in glass cases, and cannot be touched, but they show the
ingenuity of the criminal mind in trying to overcome the modern
barriers for protecting banks, counting houses, stores and Fifth
avenue homes.
 The Third Degree
After a crook has been arrested and brought to Police
Headquarters, and the authorities believe that he possesses
evidence that will convict himself, or that he belongs to a “gang” of
criminals that should be safely landed in prison without delay, he is
forthwith put through the “third degree.” The men of the Detective
Bureau make light of this star chamber inquisitorial proceeding for
the discovery of crime, and say that it does not mean anything, but
those who have passed through the experience have a different tale
to tell.
When crooks conspire to defeat the ends of justice, all they have
to do is simply to keep “mum.” If there are three persons in a
burglary or safe-breaking job, as is often the case, and one gets
caught, the other two pool their interests and secure him a lawyer.
As soon as the police have reason to believe that the man under
arrest is concealing valuable information, he is taken to Police
Headquarters on a short commitment. Perhaps they may put some
wise “guy,” or “stool pigeon” in the cell with him to get him to make
a damaging statement when he is off his guard. As near as can be
learned from various sources, the “third degree” is in the nature of a
rigid examination, perhaps like the torture which is still practised on
“suspects” in China, Russia and Turkey, to draw out a confession of
guilt, even where none exists. I asked several crooks to explain to
me the nature of the third degree, all of whom claimed to have gone
through the experience at different times. When I came to compare
notes, I found they all told almost the identical story.
A man who spent more than two years in the Tombs on a murder
charge was put through the “third degree” both in the Fifth Street
Station House and at Police Headquarters. It is not customary to put
a man through the third degree in the station house, but this man
claims to have been an exception. The crook in question spent
several nights in the cells in the Fifth Street House, and spoke from
experience. On the morning of the day when he was taken to 300
Mulberry street, he said two plain clothes men took him from a cell
in the basement, and forthwith boxed his ears and cuffed him
unmercifully over the face for five minutes, or until he became
greatly excited and almost insane! After this, he was taken upstairs
to a room, a veritable sweat-box, where he was “piled” with
questions, one after another, for an hour, for the purpose, if possible,
of making him contradict himself. All the answers he gave during this
star-chamber investigation were taken down, and he was then
compelled to sign, or else have his face and ears boxed a second
time. In reality the signing of this document made him the author of
a crime. In other words, the “third degree” is simply giving to a
crook a most unmerciful cuffing and abusing, till his eyes are all
discolored, and his face is covered with blood, and he is more silly
than sane. This is done that he may confess all the details of his
crime, and become an informer on those who were in the job with
him. This method is the torture of the Orient, the thumbscrews of
the Middle Ages, and is cruel and diabolical.
Central Office men have said that the third degree was one of
Inspector Byrnes’ “hobbies,” as he resorted to it on all occasions.
When it began to leak out in 1884 that Jake Sharp had bribed the
Board of Aldermen to transfer to his company the Broadway
franchise, it was found most difficult to secure any evidence to
connect the guilty ones with the crime. Inspector Byrnes, who was in
the Detective Department at the time, devised means whereby he
was able with the aid of some of his men, to entice one of the
“boodlers” to a Sixth avenue restaurant, where the flow of wine
unloosed his tongue, and where he admitted that he had sold his
vote to Jake Sharp for five thousand dollars. Inspector Byrnes, who
was on the premises behind a screen, hidden from view, had all the
admissions taken down, and they were used to convict the “boodler”
and send him to State Prison.
 After this “boodler’s” arrest, and he was taken to Headquarters,
Byrnes put him through the “third degree”; when he saw the
answers and admissions he had made in the Sixth avenue restaurant
in cold type, he broke down.
Whether the police are justified for the various uses to which they
put the “third degree” in ferreting out crime, I am not in a position
to state. When I asked a “cop” why they hit those fellows who
passed through the “third degree,” he replied: “You know crooks are
the worst kind of liars; unless the police gave them a moderate
cuffing, they would tell them a fake story which it would be a waste
of time to listen to.”
Some men do not blame the police for a moderate use of the
“third degree” in order to discover crime, but where to draw the line
is a most difficult thing. Judging from Professor Munsterburg’s
protest against the “third degree” in his book, “On the Witness
Stand,” Germany seems to have a more diabolical thumbscrew
system of the “third degree” than New York. Says the German
professor:
“There are no longer any thumbscrews, but the lower orders of
the police have still uncounted means to make the prisoner’s life
uncomfortable and perhaps intolerable, and to break down his
energy. A rat put secretly into a woman’s cell may exhaust her
nervous system and her inner strength till she is unable to stick to
her story. The dazzling light, and the cold-water hose, and the secret
blow still seem to serve, even if nine-tenths of the newspaper stories
of the ‘third degree’ are exaggrated. Worst of all are the brutal
shocks given with fiendish cruelty to the terrified imagination of the
suspect. Decent public opinion stands firmly again such barbarism;
and this opposition springs not only from sentimental horror and
from aesthetic disgust; stronger, perhaps, than either of these is the
instinctive conviction that the method is ineffective in bringing out
the real truth. At all times innocent men have been accused by the
tortured ones, crimes which were never committed have been
confessed, infamous lies have been invented, to satisfy the demands
of the torturers. Under pain and fear, a man may make any
admission which will relieve his suffering, and, still more misleading,
his mind may lose the power to discriminate between illusion and
real memory.”

Putting a Crook through the Third Degree at Police Headquarters.

 CHAPTER XXII

THE CITY GANGS

For over sixty years the people of New York have been afflicted
with mercenary bands of lawless thieves and hoodlums who are
known to the authorities as “Gangs.” The only justification for their
existence is robbery, murder and revenge. They fight their
murderous battles on the streets of the city, and during the melee
assault and rob the people, after which they flee with the plunder.
Whenever they get into trouble, the alderman, district captain or
some other ward “heeler” comes to their rescue, and they in turn do
good service for him on election day as repeaters, stuffing ballot
boxes, and assaulting voters. Each gang is supposed to belong to
some political party, who are able to wield considerable “pull” in time
of trouble.
More than once they were responsible for a reign of terror in
many parts of the city. They were known to the police as “gangs,”
perhaps on account of their clannishness, for whenever they
participated in any local fight or riot, they usually stuck together and
fought like tigers for what they called their own rights. It is more
than likely that some of the gangs were bound together by an oath
which placed each member under pains and penalties not to reveal
their secrets. Whatever these oaths were, we are unable to say, but
we hardly think they were as rigid as the oaths of the Molly Maguires
or the Mafia?
 The police records of the old New York gangs of fifty years ago,
show them to be mercenary, corrupt and dissipated, and often
revelling in riot and bloodshed; and when they desired to carry out
their evil purposes, they did not scruple at robbery or murder. For
years they have had full sway in the city on account of politics, but
when their conduct became unbearable, and oppressive, and all
irenic measures failed to break them up, the police were appealed
to, came upon them unexpectedly, clubbed the leaders, and sent
many of them to prison for long and short terms.
The most notorious of these predatory bands was known as the
Whyo Gang. They usually “hung out” in the vicinity of the Five
Points, Baxter, Leonard and Centre streets. This part of the city was
then known in police parlance as “The Bloody Sixth Precinct.” For
nearly a hundred years, crimes of every description, including a large
number of robberies, burglaries and holdups had been committed
here. For nearly three-quarters of a century, the Sixth Precinct was
known as the hotbed of crime, and the Whyo Gang found it a
profitable field for their labors.
The Whyo Gang was made up of young pickpockets and thieves of
the worst character, and many of them, if not all, spent years in jail.
Two leaders of the Whyo Gang, Dannie Lyons and Dannie Driscoll,
were convicted of the crime of murder, and hanged in the yard of
the Tombs Prison. Lyons was executed August 21st, 1886, and
Driscoll January 23d, 1888. The gang had robbed and murdered
scores of inoffensive people on the streets of the city, whose
untimely end will always remain a mystery.
“The Bloody Sixth” no longer carries the same reputation it did
forty years ago. No doubt much that was said and written of it was
not all true; nevertheless, it furnished more murders than any other
five city wards. It ought to be remembered that the “Sixth” contains
the Five Points, Mulberry Bend, the Criminal Courts Building, and the
Tombs Prison, where so many “tough” characters are harbored? The
population at the present time consists largely of Italians, Jews,
Polaks and Chinese. It has a great many squalid tenements, low
dives, groggeries, gin mills and several opium dens.
The Slaughter House Gang held forth in the Fourth Ward, and had
its headquarters over a squalid gin mill at the corner of Water street
and James Slip. It was run by a band of desperate characters, who
terrorized the neighboring water fronts. Captain Allaire took
energetic means to break it up, and succeeded only when he landed
the piratical ring leaders in prison.
The Cochran Roost Gang held forth at the corner of East Thirty-
sixth street and First avenue. It is said that this gang had pledged
themselves to kill policemen on sight. They laid wait for young and
inexperienced policemen on dark nights with bricks and stones in
their pockets. They usually hid themselves in alleyways and flat
roofs, and many sanguinary battles took place between them and
the police, in which they were usually worsted. Their headquarters
were reached by climbing a broken down staircase or ladder, which
they could hoist up with a rope, which led to an old shanty on the
corner of First avenue and Thirty-sixth street; hence the name,
Cochran’s Roost.
Handsome Harry Carlton, the last man who had the “honor” of
being hanged in the yard of the Tombs Prison, December 5th, 1889,
prior to the installation of the Electric Chair in Sing Sing Prison, was
known as one of the brilliant lights of the Cochran’s Roost Gang.
The gang known as “The Forty Thieves” held forth at Forty-second
street and Eleventh avenue. They had a local notoriety.
The Hell’s Kitchen Gang had their headquarters on Thirty-ninth
street and Eleventh avenue. They usually fought negroes with guns,
while the negroes in turn fought them with razors. The negroes and
whites are far from being friendly in this neighborhood, and many
battles have taken place in recent years.
The Gas House Gang was on Eighteenth street, near First avenue.
The Poverty Hollow Gang and the Dead Rabbit Gang were both on
the East Side, in the neighborhood of Thirty-fourth street and
Avenue A.
The two murderous associations of recent times are the Paul Kelly
and Monk Eastman Gangs. The former held out on Cherry Hill, while
the latter had their clubhouse on Stanton street, near the Bowery. A
noted police official of experience, in speaking of the many efforts to
break up the Monk Eastman and Paul Kelly Gangs, said that when
these murderous ruffians were arrested by the police and taken
before certain magistrates, the “pull” they exercised was so great
that nothing could be done to them. As long as these gangs existed,
it was impossible to have an honest election in New York. In later
years they belonged to powerful political organizations, and were
used for the purpose of controlling the city and State elections.
A few years ago Monk Eastman and some of his “pals” were sent
to Sing Sing for a term of years for assault and robbery. The
organization is still in existence, but is quiet.
The other leader, Paul Kelly, died some time ago of wounds
received in a street battle. On his death bed he refused to say who
shot him, but he left it with the members of the gang, when they
come out of prison, to avenge his death.
The most recent criminal band that has sprung into prominence
the past few years, is known as the Five Points Gang. During the hot
summer spell they start out at night, robbing and assaulting East
Side storekeepers, and people who are asleep around their doors. In
one night they were able to get away with more than two thousand
dollars. Several of the gang are now in prison, while many of the
leaders are still at large.
Party politics is the one thing that fosters the Gang System in New
York. As soon as the police arrest any of the gang leaders, they are
aided in court by District Captains and leaders who have a solid pull
with the Magistrate or Judge. After their discharge, they repeat the
same lawlessness, until some person gets killed, when they are sent
to prison.
 CHAPTER XXIII

CRIMINAL TRIALS AND THE GLORIOUS

UNCERTAINTY OF THE LAW
Celebrated Cases—Speedy Trials for Homicides—Lax
Conditions of Our Courts—Greasing the Machinery
of the Law—Crooks at the Bar—A Noted
Criminal Lawyer—Strange Sentences

Almost every year, New York witnesses a noted criminal trial,

which frequently becomes a sensation in the community. For weeks
beforehand the newspapers give an excruciating account of all the
horrors of the case—involving the past history of the defendant; nor
do they fail to drag in his father, mother, uncles and aunts, besides
his business relations. When the day of trial comes, if the defendant
happens to be at the bar for murder or some other noted crime, all
the sickening details are re-hashed in the evening and morning
papers. Sometimes the trial lasts from one week to three months,
dragging itself slowly along, till everybody in the city becomes
disgusted. All this, of course, is distinctively American, and as the
people call for it, they are sure to get it. The New York editors are
great literary caterers, and seem to know how to satisfy such
depraved tastes. It has come to be an admitted fact that a criminal
trial in New York is a most exciting experience, and for a time stirs
the community, making it the main topic of interest at meals, clubs
and society gatherings.
 Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court on Centre Street, where the
great murder trials of the past decade took place.

To watch the selection of the jury, and see panel after panel of
intelligent men excused on the flimsiest grounds, is enough to make
the Goddess of Justice open her eyes and weep.
During the past twelve years we have witnessed some of the most
tragic murder trials in the history of the New York Bar, in which
money and brains were used on both sides. When Roland B.
Molineux, Dr. Kennedy, Albert T. Patrick and Harry K. Thaw were
placed on trial, the courts were thronged daily with gaping crowds of
men and women, breaking their necks to get a look at the
defendants, and using all sorts of “pulls” to secure a seat in the
court.
And as the jury is called and examined one by one, to read their
real character as depicted on their faces when they take their seats
to decide the fate of some weakling, a good judge of human nature
can readily discern the result of the trial long before it is finished.
Then, listen to the testimony that is presented; hear the lawyers
wrangle for and against the prisoner, and, finally, watch the judge as
he charges the jury, and then see the prisoner as he stands at the
bar for sentence or acquittal. All this becomes a fearfully interesting
piece of realism.
 But the glorious uncertainty of the law leaves so many loopholes
for the real criminal to escape punishment, and the innocent to get a
term of imprisonment, that some of the rulings made in our courts
are tragic enough to make angels weep.
Some time ago, a rich murderer was tried in this city. His defence
was one that no Court in the land recognizes, viz.: the unwritten law.
During the trial, one medical expert said that the defendant suffered
from “brain storms.” In a more recent murder trial, the only defence
offered was “Confusional Insanity,” all of which is simply a foolish
way of trying to “beat” the case.
We could name a dozen of well known characters whose crimes
have been heralded all over the land, who were sent to the death
house, but after a couple of years, when the Court of Appeals
decided that they should have another trial on a mere technicality,
returned to the Tombs, and after a few abortive efforts to convict
them a second time, were liberated, as the important witnesses
were dead, or could not be found. It is difficult to say wherein lies
the trouble. But with our present elective system, we are apt to get
some very poor material as Judges. They lack educational and
experimental qualifications. Nor can we abolish the right of appeal
because some judges make foolish rulings. With such judicial
material on the bench, the right of appeal is our only safety valve,
and must be retained.
There is a widespread feeling in our day that many trials are only
a huge farce, and the “unwritten law,” “benefit of the doubt,” and
“long-drawn-out hypothetical questions” in a large number of cases
are allowed to defeat the ends of justice.
In regard to homicides, nothing would appeal to the good sense of
the community after an atrocious murder has been committed more
than to give the murderer a speedy trial and summary justice. It is
all “humbug” to keep a murderer shut up in the Tombs from six
months to a year before trying him. When he goes forth to trial, if
the witnesses are not all dead, they have forgotten nearly all of what
was once fresh in their memory. Let there be speedy trials and quick
punishment for all kinds of crime. This will deter others from
following the footsteps of evil doers. In murder cases it would be
well also if capital punishment were abolished, and life imprisonment
substituted.
In nearly all the advanced countries of Europe, in criminal trials,
swift justice is the order of the day.
In Great Britain there are no long-drawn-out trials. Nor will the
judges allow delays on mere technicalities. Each case is decided on
its own merits.
As a rule, the presiding judge exercises full control over the case,
and as a result everything is done with quickness and dispatch, and
the higher courts uphold such rulings.
In speaking of the lax conditions of our courts, a recent writer
says: “The machinery of our courts seems to be passing slowly and
inevitably into disrepute. Processes wrought out by wise and noble-
minded men for the protection of life and property and the
dispensation of justice, have been seized upon again and again by
unscrupulous pettifoggers, and every technicality of the entire legal
procedure has been converted into a loophole through which some
scalawag has escaped. The country swarms with unhung murderers,
and with thieves who walk the streets at noon unmanacled, who
ought to be wearing striped suits inside of prison walls. When
murder trials drag their weary lengths through the disgusting weeks
and months of the year, only to end at last in a new trial, or in a
pardon issued by some sentimental fool who has reached the
Governor’s chair, is it to be wondered at that hot-headed men lose
respect for statutes and judges and begin to talk of taking the law
into their own hands? It is high time that our judges and lawyers
were awake, and took measures to reform the present processes of
criminal jurisprudence so as to make the punishment of crime both
swift and certain.”
It is a great mistake to shield rich criminals from their just
desserts, as is sometimes done. Punishment should be meted out to
all alike at all hazards, else it will have no terrors for the wrongdoer.
Criminals must be impressed with the dignity and majesty of the law
—no matter what is their social or commercial standing.
A few years ago, Roland B. Molineux had a hard battle for his
liberty. He was always brave and optimistic, and believed all alone
that in the end he would be vindicated. He must have spent about
twenty months in the Tombs, and the same length of time in the
death house awaiting the decision of the Court of Appeals. As I had
always taken a deep interest in the young man, I called to see him
in the death house. Here he manifested the same hopeful spirit he
had shown all along. During his long confinement it looked
sometimes as if fate was conspiring against him, but thanks to his
gritty father, who stuck so nobly by him, and the matchless
eloquence of Governor Black, the undisputed Demosthenes of the
New York Bar, he was finally acquitted. In this trial, which was fairly
conducted, Governor Black was master of the situation, and
conquered. From this time, either in civil or criminal trials, the
Governor was the peer of any lawyer in the land. It must also be
said that there was another gentleman, who filled no inconspicuous
part in the vindication of Molineux, and that was Judge Olcott, who
was a peacemaker and diplomat of the highest order.
 Greasing the Machinery of the Law
Frequently the prosecutor in a criminal court, under the cloak of
having a duty to perform, proceeds to do it with the vengeance of a
fiend, and the bias and prejudice of a persecutor, and perhaps with
murder in his heart.
Nor are we without numerous instances where the prosecutor or
some of his assistants have been known to “gear” the machinery of
the law so as to convict some unfortunate of a crime of which there
was absolutely no evidence, except what was manufactured for the
occasion. In doing such work, the police can always be relied upon
for a certain amount of help, which they never fail to give. Then
there is in every community certain degenerates, including emotional
and hysterical men and women, ready to swear to anything asked of
them, and who spring into fame during a sensational trial, not to
mention the professional juror who draws two dollars a day for
sitting around the court house, who is largely dependent on the
public prosecutor for his sinecure.
There are thousands of people who all their lives have been the
victims of cruelty, oppression and malicious persecution, but real
justice they have not known. There are innocent men in nearly all of
our penal institutions, who have suffered because of false swearers.
They may appeal to an Executive, even a righteous one, who has so
many intolerable conscientious scruples on the question of pardoning
crooks that the poor, friendless prisoner is allowed to rot in prison,
so that the righteous Governor may make no mistake.
But the innocent have this consolation, that their case has been
sent up to Heaven’s Court of Appeals, where in God’s good time a
just verdict will be rendered in their favor.
But what a crime it is to send an unfortunate to the Electric Chair,
or State Prison for life, or even a limited term in jail, on
manufactured evidence or opinions of an alienist, or a handwriting
expert, who are given large fees for their testimony! Handwriting
experts have made so many mistakes in the past that it is absolutely
impossible to believe them. They may think themselves famous as
interpreters of dots, curves, right angles and horizontal lines, but
they cannot positively tell whether John Doe or John Jones wrote
the document, and human opinions are not evidence. It is certainly a
miscarriage of justice to convict any man or woman on such absurd
testimony. If you have plenty of money, you can prove anything you
please by the use of such expert testimony, or disprove it. But
without the most absolute corroboration, expert testimony is
worthless.
 Crooks at the Bar of Justice
The day of judgment for New York criminals usually falls on Friday.
It not only brings many surprises, but hidden things long forgotten
are brought to light. Between the day of a man’s conviction and the
day when sentence is passed, the officers of the law have an
opportunity to look up his record, and report him in the true light to
the judge. When he comes to the bar for sentence, the court has his
life mapped out on paper. As soon as the judge begins to question
the prisoner, his character for truthfulness is put to the test. Crooks
who are as a rule notorious liars have poor memories. No matter
how cumulative their guilt is, they are always innocent!
It is interesting to watch the proceedings when some scamp has
come up for sentence. A good deal of stage work is done in Court
for the effect it has on those present. The female relatives are on
hand, weeping like steam engines, while the prisoner at the bar, who
has made many promises, is as hard as a stone. Some of the men
up for sentence are salesmen, confidential clerks and secretaries,
who, when they lose at the races, steal big sums from their
employers, and then have their friends “pull social and political
wires” to get them out of their troubles; while the poor mechanic or
day laborer who steals eight or ten dollars to keep the wolf from the
door, has not a friend in the world, and usually gets a “soaking”
when he comes to the bar. Perhaps his wife or mother has been to
see the judge at his home, where she has created a “scene,” but it
has done no good; he has got to go to prison. Not long since, Judge
Cowing, one of the best of the General Session judges (now retired),
said to a young man who had been before him on two former
occasions: “You have been in Elmira and Sing Sing, and here you are
again. Where are you going to end up? Your mother came to my
house last night. Poor woman, I felt
Hon. JOHN F. McINTYRE.
A noted criminal lawyer
Copyright. I. & M. Stienberg. N. Y.
Justice J. A. Blanchard
 Justice J. W. Goff

sorry for her; but you show no feeling whatever. What’s the matter
with you? If I should grant the requests of friends for everyone who
has a good mother, the people would soon ask me to retire from the
bench altogether.” This is true. The judge must send the young
prodigal to prison to deter others.
Here is what another judge said of a young man who stole
$15,000 from an employer. The firm had only charged him with
stealing a much smaller sum, but when they examined their books,
they found it a small fortune. It was spent mostly on the races. His
wife and three small children were in court, asking for clemency: “I
have been on the bench,” said His Honor, “many years, and have
had many a sad case, but there is none sadder than the one I am
now called upon to dispose of. The great trouble in such cases is
that you are compelled to inflict punishment upon people who do
not deserve it—I mean the wives and children of men charged with
crime.”
 Noted Criminal Lawyers
One of the most noted criminal lawyers of the New York bar for
thirty or forty years was the late William F. Howe, better known as
“Bill” Howe. I have often heard him plead eloquently at the bar, and
with great success. Howe was a typical advocate, and put his soul
into his client’s defence. He was humorous, pathetic and magnetic
before a jury. When he understood the case thoroughly he became a
powerful pleader. It is said that he frequently was moved to tears by
his own eloquence, and was always able to draw tears from the
most unsympathetic jury. He was called by a certain District Attorney
“The Weeping Bill Howe.”
A story is told of Howe’s tears in connection with a case in which
he appeared for the defendant, before Recorder-Hackett. Mr. Howe
had just succeeded by his eloquence, aided by his tears, in obtaining
in rapid succession the acquittal of several men charged with
homicide. The Recorder was somewhat disgruntled. Howe entered
upon the defence of a woman charged with homicide. She was
seated with her child on her knees. While Howe was pleading for her
acquittal, he was seen to scowl at his client. She gazed at him in
blank amazement. Howe moved up closer to her and the baby.
Suddenly the baby began to cry. Howe wept as the baby’s screams
suddenly ceased. Recorder Hackett looked up with a smile and
remarked: “Mr. Howe, you had better give the baby another jab with
a pin.”
Stories are told around the Criminal Courts Building of lawyers
who received retainers from well known crooks in the shape of
stolen jewelry. A lawyer who used to be a frequent visitor at the
Tombs defended a crook in return for a diamond pin which he had
received for his services. After he had convinced the jury that his
client was innocent, he wore the stolen pin in his necktie.
 John F. McIntyre is one of the best of our criminal lawyers. He
always puts up a strong fight for his client. This is the one thing that
appeals to a jury. An intelligent juror can easily tell if a lawyer is
simply a “hired attorney” or a real advocate. Moore, who defended
“Doc” Kennedy, is another of that kind. When a lawyer appeals to a
jury as if he meant it, good results are sure to follow. Among a score
of noted New York criminal lawyers might be mentioned Abraham
Levy and James W. Osborne.
 Strange Sentences
During many years of careful observation, I have seen some
strange sentences. If you are poor and have a mean enemy, with
the aid of the police, he can inflict great injury on you!
I knew the case of a young man, who found some worthless junk
wire outside a factory, and was sent away for a year. In the next cell
was a crook with a “record” who was aided by a cop, and a crooked
lawyer. He stole a thousand dollars. His “bit” was only six months.
Another fellow who swindled several dry goods stores out of
$17,000, was allowed to plead to petty larceny. He got off cheap—
only six months.
Such travesties of justice have often been witnessed in New York.
Indeed, men and women have been known to conspire with lawyers
and others to send innocent persons to prison, and they have
succeeded!
I knew well the case of John H. While he was in prison, his wife
suddenly became the friend of a certain police official. After he had
secured his liberty he was informed that he must keep away from his
old home. Soon after he was arrested, charged with a crime of
which he was entirely innocent. When he went to Part I, General
Sessions, to plead, a legal pettifogger who was sent there by this
man’s wife stepped up and informed him that he would take his
case. He did so, and without consulting him entered a plea of guilty.
He was then sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He found out
afterwards that it was a conspiracy to get him out of the way. It was
a success.
I recall the case of an Italian who was charged with the murder of
his wife. He was caught “red-handed,” and two of his children told
the coroner that they saw him do the deed. John F. McIntyre ably
represented the people, and Judge Fursman presided in the Criminal
Branch of the Supreme Court. When the case came to trial, the
Italian children had evidently been tipped off to forget all about it.
As they had manifested entire ignorance and forgetfulness of the
crime, and could not remember a word of what they told the police
and the coroner, the murderer was allowed to go scot free!
We knew a man who stole $40,000, and yet received a suspended
sentence. But this should be said, that the money was taken to save
another man, and not himself, and the deficiency was made good.
Perhaps it was only fair that the sentence be suspended. We know
two young men who were in the Boys’ Prison at the same time. One
stole $10,000, the other just one dollar. The lad that stole the ten
thousand dollars had his friends make restitution, then the
complainant recommended extreme leniency. In view of his former
good character, the court gave him a suspended sentence. The boy
who stole one dollar had been in prison and was out on parole. For
this new crime he was sent to the House of Refuge.
There is the case of a young man named Sullivan, who stole a tray
of valuable jewelry from a Columbus avenue house. A morning
paper commented freely on the “pull” that gave the prisoner a
suspended sentence. The owner of the store did not relish the thief
getting off so easy. In speaking of the affair he said: “The next time
a thief visits my place, I will make no effort to bring him to justice.
What is the use, if he is let go after his guilt has been clearly
established? The robbery was carefully planned, and was well
carried out. The Court should have given the thief a medal. Why
not?”
While chaplain, I was sent for by an unfortunate girl, an inmate of
the Women’s Prison. She had the usual tale of disappointment and
misplaced confidence to tell, which was full of sadness. Most girls,
strangers in New York, and far from home, have usually a hard road
to travel. After I heard her story, I remembered that there was a
prominent lawyer in the city that came from the same place of which
she was a native. The gentleman was an ex-Assistant District
Attorney. I felt if I could only get him interested in the case, she
would have a better chance of securing her liberty. I made a
personal call on the gentleman. He had spacious offices in the
vicinity of Wall Street. As soon as I had mentioned this young
woman’s name, he at once recognized it. Indeed, he had been
intimate with the family for years, and was willing to do anything for
her. All of which was very encouraging. I then asked him to make a
note of the date when she came up for sentence. At my suggestion
he called one of the stenographers to make a memorandum. “Mary
Ann,” said my legal friend, “make a note of this,” and looking very
pious, he said, “I do this for the love of God; yes, I do this for the
love of God.” By this time the clerks and typewriters began to snicker
and laugh. Just as I had expected, all this pious talk did not amount
to anything. The poor girl was finally sent away to one of our
institutions.
 CHAPTER XXIV

CRIMINAL BRANCH OF THE SUPREME

COURT

When on January 1st, 1896, the present Constitution of the State

of New York took effect, there went out of existence the Court of
Oyer and Terminer—a court whose quaint name accorded well with
its interesting history and associations.
It was an exclusively criminal court, closely allied to the Supreme
Court, and although unlike the “Circuit Court” not strictly a part of it,
its judges were Supreme Court Justices assigned to hold it and
interlocutory proceedings in actions pending therein were taken in
the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is now the highest court in this State having
original jurisdiction—that is, having the power to hear the evidence
in and determine actions commenced therein or removed thereto
from an inferior court, as distinguished from the right to review on
appeal. It may take cognizance of all manner of civil and criminal
actions and proceedings triable in a State Court, except the
impeachment of public officials, of which a quasi-criminal court—the
Court for the Trial of Impeachments—alone has jurisdiction.
In New York County, one part of the Supreme Court is usually
devoted to the trial of criminal actions, and that part ordinarily sits
each month in the year, except July, August and September.
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