Kevin Duong - Psychiatry for Internal Colonialism: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic

This lecture surveys the experimental anti colonial politics and diagnostic techniques undertaken at Harlem's Lafargue Clinic from 1946-1958. Named after Karl Marx’s son-in-law and the author of Le Droit à la paresse, the clinic operated out of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and treated patients free of charge. Its mission was as radical as it was simple: psychoanalysis and psychiatric care should be available to anyone and everyone. Those damaged by the color line and those who were poor deserved, as much as anyone else, treatment for their neuroses. Internationally famous at the time, the clinic has yet to receive the attention it deserves from intellectual historians, even though its history is ripe with clues for understanding what it means to “decolonize the mind” in conditions of extraordinary economic duress and spatial segregation. What does psychic repair look like when the wound is as wide and deep as racism itself? What happens to the clinical encounter when neither clinic nor patient has any money? Can improving individual psyches do anything to mitigate collective structures of domination? These questions guided Lafargue Clinic’s psychotherapeutic techniques and compelled its theorist-clinicians, many involved with the aesthetic avant-garde and international communism, to theorize “self-rule” anew for the psyche and the social world.

Kevin Duong teaches modern intellectual history and political thought at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France as well as numerous articles on revolutionary theory and political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a book, Freud Against Empire: An Experimental History, which maps how an international cohort of midcentury radicals—Surrealist poets, painters, ethnographers, psychiatrists, and communists in France, Martinique, Cuba, and the United States—deployed psychoanalysis to undermine civilizational and global hierarchies.

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Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.

With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.

Host or Publisher The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis