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Imperial Networks and Postcolonial Independence: The Transition from Colonial to Transcultural Psychiatry

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Psychiatry and Empire

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

This essay seeks out continuities and discontinuities in the transition from colonial to post-colonial psychiatry. It seems important, if somewhat obvious, to point out that in the transition from colonial to post-colonial both Senegal and France were transformed. To be sure, Senegal’s independence figured more weightily in Senegal than in France, but then Senegal was only one many colonies that France lost in those years, so it is not an exaggeration to speak of parallel if not identical transformations. Colonial psychiatry transformed into a diverse range of practices, ranging from collaborations with traditional healing to biomedical, pharmaceutical-based psychiatry. Transcultural psychiatry occupies a mid-range in this spectrum; committed wholly neither to Western nor to Senegalese culture, it reaches out, seeking to bridge differences in beliefs and practices related to spirit, psyche, healing and wellness. Transcultural psychiatry here is distinguished from ‘ethnopsychiatry,’ understood as the project launched by Georges Devereux of recuperating entire healing systems from non-Western cultures.1 Transcultural psychiatry is a practice which involves and interests Senegal and France (as well, to be sure, as other countries). Its emergence demonstrates how, in the psychiatric arena during the transition to post-colonialism, neither Senegal nor France emerged as less caught up in an inter-connecting set of relations.

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Notes

  1. Georges Devereux, Mohave Ethnopsychiatry and Suicide; The Psychiatric Knowledge and the Psychic Disturbances of an Indian Tribe (Washington, D.C Government Printing Office: 1961). For comparable work on Senegal see, Andras Zempleni, L’interprétation et la thérapie traditionnelles du désordre mental chez les Wolof et les Lebou (Sénégal), Thèse de 3ème cycle, 1968.

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  1. Alice Bullard
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Sloan Mahone (University Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Deputy Director) (University Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Deputy Director)

  2. Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford, UK

    Sloan Mahone (University Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Deputy Director) (University Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Deputy Director)

  3. Cambridge University, UK

    Megan Vaughan (Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History) (Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History)

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© 2007 Alice Bullard

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Bullard, A. (2007). Imperial Networks and Postcolonial Independence: The Transition from Colonial to Transcultural Psychiatry. In: Mahone, S., Vaughan, M. (eds) Psychiatry and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_9

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52413-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59324-4

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