Introduction

Abstract

This book traces the historical postcolonial journey of four generations of Jamaican psychiatrists challenging the European colonial ‘civilizing mission’ of psychiatric care and demonstrates that psychological decolonization requires a seminal understanding of the complex mental inter-relationship between slaves and slaveowners. The novel collective psychoanalytic model of psychohistoriography emerged from a large group worker participation program in the Lunatic Asylum in the era of democratic socialism in Jamaica, analyzing the antipodal dialectic history of descendants of Africans enslaved in the New World by brutish British Imperialists suffering from the European psychosis of White Supremacy. The sociopoem Madnificent Irations and the novel psychotherapeutic blueprint of psychohistoriographic cultural therapy created through cultural poesis and socio-dramatization demanded that enslaved and enslavers emerge psychologically step-by-step from Rastafarian ‘Babylon’—the ailing present world order—into a new Zion, where protagonists can live in a Brand-New World of productivity, sharing, and peaceful coexistence.

The four generations of Jamaican psychiatrists rising out of the ghettos of British Canefield plantations following emancipation from slavery in 1834 have carefully forged a decolonizing pathway for psychiatry and the treatment of mental disorders, breaking the mental chains of the horrors of African people enslaved by Europeans in the New World.