Why Fanon for group analysis now?

This article introduces Frantz Fanon as a vital contributor to a socially-grounded, anti-racist and social justice-oriented group analytic practice now. Fanon eloquently described how, even as they are structural and historical, racist and colonial dynamics are subjectively experienced, within the body, within the muscles, as a ‘nervous condition’ (Fanon, 1970: 8), albeit being externally caused by processes of objectification and dehumanization, or what (in the context of racialization) he called ‘epidermalization’. He wrote, vividly, of subjective states of zombification and petrification highlighting the mental debilitation, as well as sense of excision from the body, produced by racism. Hence Fanon recognized how distress was caused by oppression and, while his primary concern was with racialized oppression, his analysis can be extended, especially when read intersectionally, to engage class, gender, sexuality (for example) as engaging with race and racialization in mutually constitutive ways (Nayak, 2021; Paré, 2025). Increasingly recognized for his phenomenological contributions, Fanon was both a vehement critic of mainstream (colonial) psychiatry and an advocate for reforming and transforming mental health practice. He understood madness as alienation; that is, a neurotic or traumatic response to oppression and dehumanization, such that the key task was not only restoring social bonds but collective socio-political transformation for individual liberation. Three key examples from Fanon’s clinical papers are discussed to highlight what group analysts can learn from his analysis of the intersectionally gendered and racialized dynamics of assessment; how colonialism is played out within the doctor-patient relationship, and, third, how the colonial contract structures institutional settings, so setting up impossible double binds for the colonized or racialized subject who can only emerge as deficient, inferiorized or silenced. As well as highlighting compatibility with the best of group analytic and democratic therapeutic community models, some alignments with feminist and other self-advocacy mental health movements are noted.