Fanon, photography, and the limits of social marketing campaigns
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Flick Grey (2016) interrogates the mental health discourse around anti-stigma, recovery, consumer participation, and co-production in relation to a larger discursive context around othering and seeks to question how much they challenge existing power relations. Grey approaches this question through an analysis of a billboard campaign that was mounted in 2008 by Mind in Australia, and asks us to look beyond the apparently positive representations of mental health service users and modes of involving them and to situate such strategies within a discourse of ‘benevolent othering.’ Rather than challenge or change established modes of representation and involvement, these ostensibly positive images and modes of participation and involvement further entrench and subordinate mental health service users both at the level of discursive representation and political practice.
Although the concept of benevolent othering is a useful device for exploring practices such as co-production and anti-stigma campaigns, this commentary explores its limitations in relation to the analysis of how othering works within the internal psyche, photographic representations in social marketing campaigns and in the dual poles of ‘stigmaphobic’ and ‘stigmaphilic.’
Othering and Fanon
To make specific links between othering and a radical psychodynamic discourse, I would suggest we begin with Frantz Fanon rather than with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edward Said. Fanon wrote about how the “human worth and reality” of the Black subject depend on being “recognised by the [white] other” (2008, pp. 168–169) and developed his concept of the other as the theoretical underpinning for the Manichean dialectics invoked in Black Skin White Masks in the context of the intensely experiential philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology. This provided a framework for his understanding of alienation, difference and the beginnings of postcolonial criticism which I believe is highly relevant to Grey’s analysis of othering in mental health discourse. Spivak and Said built on this foundation rather than originated it. Engaging with the postcolonial origins of the theory of othering, and Fanon’s contribution to it in particular, reveals how the other is not only an external object, at the level of social relations or representations in discourse. Fanon the revolutionary psychiatrist was also aware of othering as an internal phenomenon in which the superiority of the other is embedded within the psyche of oppressed individuals and produces alienation, estrangement, and depersonalization. [End Page 257] Fanon calls this “the internalization–or, better, the epidermalization of … inferiority” (2008, p. 4): The psychologically destructive process of othering attacks the ego of the Black subject and diminishes how she or he engages with the external world.
One of the intriguing questions raised by Grey’s concept of the benevolent other is where it might be located. Is the benevolent other always located in the external world, or can it be a psychic object that is internal to the subject? Looking at the billboard photograph again, it is clear that the patronizing benevolent other is the same person as the crumpled up victim of ‘mental illness.’ Fanon acknowledged the loss of identity that results from the internalization of inferiority, the dissolution of the self and the struggle to reassemble it when he wrote about “fragments … put together again by another self” (2008, p. 82).
In her discussion of Fanon’s concept of othering, Lazali (2011) asks whether “it might be possible to invent a benevolent Other within the self” (p. 152). Therefore, one might question whether an internalized benevolent other should be viewed within the same frame as Grey’s conceptualization of what seems to be an always externalized and negative (or at least patronizing) benevolent other.
Between the dual extremes of the hostile and benevolent others as external objects, there seems to be a need to name the positive voice or process that is needed within the subject to counteract the attacks on the ego by the external other. This would imply a third space that is neither hostile nor patronizingly benevolent, one that is truly empowering and that does not serve to subordinate further the subject within discourses of abjection.
Photography, Othering, and Difference
Billboard campaigns, such as the Mind...
