His family was socio-economically middle-class. Two of them died young, including his sister Gabrielle, with whom Frantz was very close. Frantz was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of Afro-Martinican and white Alsatian descent, and worked as a shopkeeper. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves, and worked as a customs agent. Biography Early life įrantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French single territorial collectivity. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. Fanon has been described as 'the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time'. In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. Frantz Omar Fanon ( / ˈ f æ n ə n/, US: / f æ ˈ n ɒ̃/ French: 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a Franchophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department).

Fanon frantz the wretched of the earth