Psychoanalytic Artifacts: Frantz Fanon and the Thematic Apperception Test in Algeria

This paper takes up the panel’s concern with the materiality of medical artifacts by examining the transnational itineraries of one psychiatric object: the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). First developed by Harvard psychoanalysts in the 1930s, the TAT prompted test-takers to provide open-ended narratives in response to ambiguous images. As a material artifact, the TAT is deceptively simple, comprising a series of images on cards and manuals for the test administrator, who could select salient images from the standard pool. By the 1950s, the TAT had become a popular tool among psychiatrists, who saw its portability and its reliance on pictures as particularly suitable to cross-cultural research and diagnosis. In this paper, I bridge histories of colonial medicine and psychiatry through a case study of the adoption of the TAT in colonial North Africa. In 1956, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—now best known as an anti-colonial theorist—adopted the TAT to evaluate Algerian Muslim women in a psychiatric clinic. Fanon, however, found the TAT to be a failure: he deemed the women’s answers to the images to be incoherent, inconsistent, and indeterminate. Despite claims that the TAT’s materiality—as a paper-based and visual object—made it portable and adaptable, Fanon’s results instead demonstrated the cultural assumptions about the psyche embedded in psychiatric tests. Instead, it was his experiences as a psychiatrist in Algeria that influenced Fanon’s fervent critique of medicine as a tool of colonial violence, while also leading him to foreground the psychic impact of colonialism. By focusing on the failures of the TAT, this paper thus illuminates the histories and politics embedded in material artifacts.