Problematizing decolonization: Some Fanonian cautions. ‘A response to the papers on Fanon in this special edition’

Introduction

It was in the early 1980s that I escaped into a random bookshop to shelter from the rain. Unbeknownst to me, it turned out to be well known in ‘leftist’ circles: ‘Bookmarks’ in Finsbury Park, London. And there I stumbled across Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon, 1967). Intrigued by the title, I bought it. It is no exaggeration to say that it changed me and my life. It is no exaggeration to say that it revealed to me the world and my place in it.

My first writing ever, was entitled Black Burden, White Shadow — a homage to Fanon. It was my first (erroneous) attempt at trying to understand the sources and experiences of racism — a 40 year project that continues to this day. Fanon’s thinking went on to play a pivotal role in my later attempt at a more considered psycho-socio-historico-politico theorization of racism in Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization (Dalal, 2002). Along with Foulkes, the other pivotal figure in that book was Norbert Elias. In that work I built on a number of resonances between Fanon and Elias. Whilst Norbert Elias has increasingly found a place in the group analytic canon, Fanon has not. All of this is to say that Fanon was, and is, close to my heart. And so, I heartily welcome this Special Edition of Group Analysis, yet another attempt to foreground and incorporate the Fanonian world view into the group analytic canon.

The fact that the initiative to ‘decolonize the curriculum’ has been gathering momentum over the recent years, not only in our profession but academia more generally, makes this special edition a particularly timely one, as decolonization was the heart of Fanon’s life work. However, Fanon was also mindful of the large number of pitfalls that decolonization could easily fall into. To start with, I will set out my understanding of a specific thread from within his schema.

In Fanon’s account the process of liberation, that is decolonization, goes through three phases. It begins in unqualified assimilation, followed by a turn into the past. The third phase turns to the future where the real decolonization process begins.

In the first phase, the settler, the colonizer has it all their own way. They impose their world view on the colonized, which in the main the colonized are unable to resist. They accept their lower place in the Manichean world order as natural and reasonable. They accept the colonizer’s claim that there was no History before the colonizer stepped onto the land. This robs the colonized not only of any positive sense of ‘we’; the ‘we’ that they find themselves placed in is a stigmatized one (shades of Elias here). This creates a psychological situation wherein the colonized are dehumanized, made rootless, and vulnerable to absorbing the colonial order uncritically.

So the first step in the liberation process is to reclaim (and at times even invent) a history, a history to be proud of — to establish a ‘we’ with continuity. Fanon says that this turn to, and the celebration of the past, whilst necessary, is in fact a dead end because it has merely reversed the colonial order by celebrating the very qualities that the colonizer has denigrated: colonized good, colonizer bad. Fanon says

the poets of Negro-ism oppose the idea of an old Europe to a young Africa, tiresome reasoning to lyricism, oppressive logic to high-stepping nature, and on one side stiffness, ceremony, etiquette and scepticism, while on the other frankness, liveliness, liberty and — why not? — luxuriance: but also irresponsibility. (Fanon, 1983: 171)

However, it is a necessary dead end, because it builds a new psychological anchor, from which it is more possible to embark on the next phase, the actual struggle for liberation.

In the earlier phases, the colonized could not help but respond in the terms set out by the colonizer. The colonizer having decreed that there is no ‘Negro culture’ or ‘Arab culture’, the colonized counter assert: yes there is a Negro culture; yes Arab culture exists and has existed from times immemorial. Fanon says that

This historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley’ (Fanon, 1983: 172, italics added).

This turn to the past, has the unfortunate consequence of essentializing the notion of culture.

In the third phase, a shift takes place regarding ‘culture’ from content to process. Rather than looking backwards and deifying the past, which according to Fanon is trying to find succour in something dead, in this phase the colonized face the future; this results in culture coming alive and by being identified with revolutionary activities.

A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. . . . A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thoughts to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. (Fanon, 1983: 188, italics added)

It seems to me that at times Fanon himself succumbs to a number of Manichaeisms. In some places he tends to speak of cultures as though they were discrete homogenous monoliths, and as though there were only two cultures — the colonial and the indigenous. He also at times speaks of ‘authentic’ cultures, thus further essentializing them. But in other places he highlights that there can be no such thing as ‘Negro culture’ or ‘Arab culture’. My understanding of the reason for these contradictions has to do with the racialized pragmatics of the situation. He says ‘Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro’ (1983: 173). I take this to mean that in racialized contexts, heterogeneity is irrelevant. The only thing of relevance is the ‘race’ of the person. In other words, Fanon is forced to argue within the terms already set out by colonialism even whilst he works hard at trying to break free of them (which he progressively does, but takes traces of the Manichean legacy with him).

With this framework in mind, I now turn more directly to the articles in this journal.

Bobat et al. (Bobat et al., 2026) have introduced me to persons that I had never previously come across: Mda, Manganyi, Canham, Long, Mngxitama, Buccus, Gqola and Gaztambide and concepts such as ukwakumkanya, Dudula, female fear factory, listening with the third ear, and so on. I get a tantalizing glimpse of their thoughts, but they remain strangers; but now they are strangers that I am interested to get to know. This then is a positive step in the decolonizing direction. However, to simply familiarize oneself with these ‘exotic’ names, concepts and thoughts, interesting and useful as that might be, is not nearly enough. This would be akin to the multiculturalist idea that familiarization with the ways of Others is the antidote to processes of exclusion and marginalization. The project would then become reduced to that of the therapist developing ‘cultural competence’. Bobat et al. want us to go deeper, they want us join them, they require us to become participants in the process,

to listen beyond theory to rhythms, rituals, and relational wisdom in everyday life as foundational to an emancipatory group analytic practice. (Bobat et al., 2026)

Ubuntu ethics sits at the heart of Bobat et al.’s ‘emancipatory group analytic practice’. Fanon insists that this emancipatory practice is constituted by ‘mutual reciprocity’, and that practitioners should be ‘politically aware and socially committed’ (Bobat et al., 2026). These Fanonian values are at odds with contemporary values of psychotherapy, where the requirement is for the therapist to be somewhat removed from the client, and to be neutral rather than ‘politically aware and socially committed’. In contrast, Fanon urges the therapist to roll up their sleeves and participate in the therapeutic process, as was demonstrated by one of Bobat’s co-authors in Vignette 1.

Bobat et al.’s account shows how easy it is for well-intentioned decolonizing efforts to inadvertently generate new binaries that replace the old ones. For example in Vignette 1, a decolonizing initiative threw up a new binary for some participants: South African and non-South African; and this necessarily positioned some of the other participants as outsiders, as not one of the South African ‘us’.

The ever-present danger of the decolonial project replacing one binary with another, become more evident through Harte’s contribution (Harte, 2026). Harte asserts (quite rightly) that ‘group analysis cannot remain under the delusion of being neutral’. But this holds true of all discourses — even the indigenous discourses that sit at the margins. Harte highlights the fact that the language of group analysis is that of the colonizer (English), which ‘renders their own linguistic inheritance suspect or shameful’. She continues ‘speech needs to be reclaimed, not simply facilitated’.

Whilst broadly in agreement with the thrust of Harte’s contribution, I find myself faced with complexities that problematize the whole endeavour of ‘reclamation’ of the past. I will speak to this question through my experience of convening the group analytic training in India.

It is true that the English language came to India with the colonizer over 400 years ago. And it is true that the training is being delivered in English. Does this mean that the training provided by Group Analysis India and hosted by the Hank Nunn Institute is yet another colonial and colonizing project? For some there is no question that this is indeed the case. The charge being that we are ‘exporting’ European group analysis to previously colonized regions (Blackwell, 2025; Nayak, 2025). And even so, should the training be delivered in a local tongue? And if so which tongue? There are over 20,000 mother tongues on the Indian subcontinent — actual languages, not dialects. Many of the students on our programme, would not be understood by anyone else on the programme if they were to speak in their mother tongue because they would be the only one who could speak and understand it.

Moreover, it is the case that after 400 years, English is no longer a foreign tongue; it has been absorbed and changed, English has become Indish. This is something I came to learn in the following way. I noticed that students habitually ‘mispronounced’ certain words (to my ear); for example, in lieu of adolescence, they say ‘a doll essence’. It took me some while to realize that they were not in fact mispronouncing the words, because they were speaking Indish, not English. And so, I had to learn to accept their pronunciations as legitimate Indish, and not to impose my English pronunciations on them. Is this little moment a part of an ongoing decolonizing process? Is it significant in any meaningful sense?

It is often the case that the only common language between a woman from Kerela and a man from Bengal, is going to be Indish. And therefore, Indish will be the mother tongue — the first language — of any children born to this couple, as is very often the case in metropolitan India.

The thing is that there is no way back to some ideal time before the colonizer entered the story — because it never existed. There are further complexities: those living in South India have an experience of being colonized by the North — specifically by the imposition of Hindi as the new (allegedly non-colonial local) national language. But Hindi is the local language of the capital Delhi and environs. The languages of the south are Dravidian, whilst those of the North are very different, rooted in Indo-European Sanskrit. (One of the students on the Indian programme, a highly educated professional from South India, says that she is made to feel ashamed for not being fluent in Hindi)

The Sudra scholar from the South India, Kancha Ilaiah, a Telegu speaker, describes being colonized twice — once by the British, and once by the Brahmin Hindu North. He does not wish to go back to the past because he was born into the lowest of the four castes, the Sudras; who until very recently, were forbidden from learning to read and write — forbidden on pain of death. Ilaiah’s book, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (2019), is a powerful account of how his culture has been appropriated, colonized and demeaned by Brahminic Hinduism. Moreover, he encourages the Dalits and Bahujans (previously known as the Untouchables) to read, write and speak in English rather than Hindi or Telegu for two reasons. First, he thinks Brahminic colonization is more heinous than British colonization. Second, he wants their thoughts and experiences to join with, and be a part of, international exchanges with the rest of the world. For Ilaiah, Gandhi’s attempt to push for the 4000+ castes (and he along with it) into the four occupation related categories of the Chaturvarna, the four castes, is to be resisted because it is in itself the Brahminic colonization process called Hinduisation.

Ironically, the current Indian government has appropriated and weaponized decolonization and post-modernist ideologies to delegitimate all criticism of their ethno-centric fascistic policies, dismissing the critiques as Eurocentric and colonialist.

I agree with Harte when she says:

To work in English is to privilege a particular conceptual vocabulary, to translate local idioms into terms recognizable at the centre, and to risk alienating participants from their own cultural rhythms of speech and thought. Too often the analytic group assumes English as a neutral medium. It is not as it carries the weight of imperial history. (Harte, 2026)

However, the alternative is not to jettison English, rather it is to continuously interrogate and question the assumptions and beliefs that have been structured into it.

There are similarities here with the Algerian situation. Gibson (Gibson, 2026) informs us, that through the struggle for liberation and over a period of time there came about a radical shift in the attitude of the Algerian towards French, the language of the colonialist.

[French] which had [previously] been considered the language of order and threat, of the police and the law courts [changed over time] . . . These changing attitudes ‘stripped the Arabic language of its sacred character, and the French language of its negative connotations’ (Fanon, 1965:92) . . . [so that] ‘the new language of the nation could then make itself known’ (Fanon, 1965: 92). (Gibson, 2026, italics added)

The new language is the language of the future which critically absorbs and transforms the languages of the past. For me this passage helps problematize the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’. The notions assumes that cultures ‘own’ languages, practices and beliefs, and that they are their property; property which they have owned since the beginnings of time itself. I agree that when the pharmaceutical company Grace patented Indian indigenous knowledge of the Neem tree’s healing capacities, this was not so much cultural appropriation, as outright robbery. I agree that some of the ways that Yoga or Buddhist Mindfulness have been stripped of their spiritual connotations and commodified and instrumentalized as self-improvement skills are problematic. But is this the case also with food and music? The danger is that the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’ can be used to deepen divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’, resulting in the reinforcement of the division made by the colonizer. This is the danger that Fanon was flagging up regarding the second phase of the liberation process.

I think that there are similar complexities with the notion of ‘bi-culturalism’ (Harte, 2026) which is valorised in New Zealand as a good working exemplar of ‘live and let live’. Bi-culturalism was an agreement between the British Crown and Māori chieftains, instated in law by the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Bi-culturalism is surely a move in the right direction, an attempt to recognize and give equal status to Māori culture with ‘western’ culture. However, not only does bi-culturalism lend itself to cultural essentialism, it excludes a number of other identities. For example, the ‘Islanders’ from Pacifica (Tonga, Samoa, etc.) who are perhaps the most disadvantaged group in New Zealand society; it also excludes the growing numbers of people from the Indian subcontinent and the far East.

Bi-culturalism has tendency to position the two cultures as discrete homogeneities — each a kind of ‘pure’ culture. However, over the last 400 years the Māori have been progressively (and by now almost entirely) Christianized. Each Marae has been Christianized into a specific denomination — Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Mormon, and so on. There is no purity, no absolute beginning; things are mixed up and have always been mixed up.

What happens to the colonized once they are decolonized? What is it that they become? Their pristine original authentic selves? Surely not. If it is true as Bruno Latour asserted that ‘we have never been modern’, then it is also true that ‘we have never been ancient’, and more, ‘we have never been pure’.

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I am in full sympathy with the thrust of Reem Abu Hweij’s (Abu Hweij, 2026) powerful rendition of psychotherapy within the ‘agonizingly violent and suffocating reality’ that is Palestine. The horrors being inflicted by the Israeli State on innocents in Gaza in the 2020s, echo the cruelties inflicted on Algerians by the French in the 1950s. Abu Hweij calls on Fanonian notions of action wherein ‘healing is not and adjustment to the world but a transformation of it’. She draws on Frankl who showed that those who could hold onto some form of meaning, some belief, even in the darkest hours of the death camps, were more likely to survive the horrors. But I find myself hesitating when Abu Hweij says

The therapeutic challenge, then, is not to impose meaning, but to reconnect individuals to their already existing cultural, historical, and spiritual sources of meaning. (Abu Hweij, 2026)

I hesitate because of the phrases ‘reconnecting’ and ‘already existing’. In my view, cultural, historical and spiritual sources of meaning are not fixed, but fluid and emergent, continually being transformed by social conditions. One can speculate that in 18th or 19th-century Palestine, the identities Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Palestinian would not have the same valencies and significances that they have in today’s world, and so in this sense they were not ‘already existing’ in the form that they do today. This was also the case for the identity Muslim in Yugoslavian Bosnia. By all accounts, prior to the attempted eradication of Muslims by Serbian forces in the 1990s, the people in that part of the world viewed themselves as primarily Yugoslavian not Muslim. It was the attempted genocide of Muslims by Serbian forces that that made Muslim identity a ‘source of meaning’. Fanon was not so focussed on ‘identity’. Rather, as Gibson (Gibson, 2026) tells us, Fanon concurred with Abane’s emphasis on the ‘primacy of citizenship over identities’ (Abane, 2011: 39).

My concern is that the decolonizing project does not attend sufficiently to the contradictions and problematics in so called ‘indigenous’, ‘pre-colonial’ cultures. They tend to be given a free pass and romanticized. As I have been already arguing, it is also the case that the ‘already existing’ indigenous cultures are not unproblematic in themselves. Cultures are always and necessarily politicized entities — they consist of sedimented power relations which privilege and legitimate one kind of human over another kind (for example men over women). This is as true of ‘our’ culture as it is of ‘theirs’.

And so, at times decolonization itself can turn out to be another form of colonization, another imposition. For example, when the ‘West’, having previously colonized the ‘East’, now telling and requiring the ‘East’ to decolonize itself, seems to me to be yet another Eurocentric imposition: that they ought to do away with the English language for example. This is the ‘West’ continuing to tell the ‘East’ what to do, because the ‘West’ knows what is good for them. Sometimes, it sounds to me that it is another version of ‘go back where you came from’. Fanon invites us to look forward not backward. In my view, much of what passes for decolonization can remain stuck in the second phase of Fanon’s account: the valorisation and privileging of (unproblematic) indigenous cultures over (problematic) colonial cultures.

The heteronormative nuclear family model that prevails in the ‘West’ is surely problematic for all kinds of reasons, including requiring the woman to be a kind of superwoman — a mother, carer, cook and cleaner in addition to having a career. The heteronormative extended family and marriage structures that prevail in the ‘East’ are equally problematic for all kinds of other reasons, including the requirement for the woman to leave her parental home and customs, move into husband’s home, adopt his parents as her new parents as well adopting their customs. In effect from first being her father’s property, she is now the property of her husband’s family. Her function becomes that of serving the new family. In the West it is independence that is celebrated, in the East it is deferential obedience. (It goes without saying that these are generalizations; not everyone lives in accordance with these customs, and many find ways to resist the cultural expectations, wherever they live).

It is helpful to recall Bertrand Russel’s caution having to do with the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed (Russel, 1937). The fallacy being the assumption that the suffering of the oppressed has necessarily ennobled all of them. Not always; contrast Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe. One can add to this ‘the fallacy of the superior virtue of the colonized’.

As the prior discussion about Ilaiah shows, there are, and have always been, multiple ongoing overlapping colonization process. What will ‘western’ progressives make of the Indian intellectual, law maker and formerly ‘untouchable’, Bhimrao Ambedkar’s powerful lecture that he wrote in 1936 India, The Annihilation of Caste (2016)? Having previously been invited to give a lecture on caste, he was rapidly disinvited because he was going to state in a public forum that the only way one could do away with the horrors and cruelties of caste, was to do away with Hinduism itself, because caste is integral to Hinduism. Where will the progressive western decolonialist stand? With Ambedkar? In which case against indigenous Hindu culture. With the old Hindu culture? In which case reinforcing and legitimating Ambedkar’s oppression as an untouchable. Ambedkar’s presence starts to deconstruct simplistic conceptions of colonization and decolonization.

Incidentally, and in passing: there are strong resonances between Elias and Ambedkar. For example, Ambedkar’s notion of ‘infection by imitation’ is akin to Elias’ thesis explicated in The Civilizing Process; they both speak to the ways that the less powerful imitate the ways of the more powerful, and in doing so come to feel somewhat better about themselves. It seems to me that the group analytic canon would be considerably enriched by the incorporation of Ambedkar’s writings as well as Fanon’s.

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The group analytic canon (what gets taught on our trainings in the UK) is mostly limited to luminaries from the ‘West’, and even more parochially, from the psychoanalytic milieu in the UK. For example, the ones most often named as the progenitors of therapeutic communities tend to be Maxwell Jones, Wilfred Bion, John Rickman and on occasion S.H. Foulkes. Fanon does not feature in this standardized list, despite the fact that much of his work and ideas has prefigured and informed theirs.

Gibson, Siegel and Masó’s contributions in this journal are important for this very reason, because they reveal the existence of a number of entirely different trajectories that contributed to the genesis of therapeutic communities as well as group analysis, variously called ‘social therapy’, ‘institutional therapy’ and ‘collective therapy’. Interestingly, each of them parses these trajectories slightly differently, and so each reveals something that the others do not speak to, and so each adds more complexity to the picture.

For example, Gibson says ‘The founder of institutional psychotherapy was François Tosquelles’ (Gibson, 2026), whilst Masó informs us that it was in fact Agnes Masson (more on this in a moment). Meanwhile Gibson highlights the fact that Tosquelles arrival in Saint Alban was not voluntary, as it appears to be the case in Masó’s account; rather he was ‘Interned in France as an “undesirable”, he was recruited to be a nurse at Saint Alban after most of the staff had left for military service’ (Gibson, 2026). A very different picture.

Mostly it is the psychiatrist François Tosquelles who gets given the credit for initiating the social therapies, and he is indeed a significant figure. Tosquelles developed his ideas first in Catalonia during the Nazi occupation, and then in the early 1950s in Saint-Alban Hospital in Lozère, France. We see through Siegel, Gibson and Masó’s accounts that much of Tosquelle’s work not only prefigures, but also goes beyond contemporary group analysis into territories one might call radical. Tosquelles devolved power and responsibility from the hospital administrators and doctors, to patient groups who organized events and clubs — activities that were therapeutic. He ‘decentred one-to-one talk therapy’ (Siegel, 2026), introduced the idea of ‘collective psychotherapy’ and the ‘transferential constellation’ in order to give the patient ‘as many vectors of chance as possible to be drawn out into the shared world, into linguistic communication, shared work and activity, artistic presentation, and symbolic circulation’ (Siegel, 2026). Foulkes’ notions of ‘the location of the disturbance’ and ‘dynamic administration’ were anticipated by Tosquelles as well as by Fanon. We learn that Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis came to play a crucial role in the formation of Tosquelles’ thought and forms of practice, resulting in the creation of ‘cooperatives run by asylum patients themselves’ (Masó, 2026). Fanon interned at Saint-Alban Hospital where he met and was mentored by Tosquelles. It was shortly after that Fanon went on to implement and expand on what he had previously learnt at ‘at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria that same year and, later in 1957, at the day hospital in Tunis’.

But the real focus of Masó’s paper is neither Fanon nor Tosquelles, but a forgotten figure who preceded Tosquelles, the psychiatrist Agnes Masson. She worked at Saint-Alban from 1933 to 1936 prior to Tosquelles arrival there. Surely it is no surprise that it is a woman has been written out of the official history. Masó tells us that ‘Masson’s largely overlooked work influenced subsequent experiments, whether with Tosquelles or Fanon’ (Masó, 2026 ). Tosquelles himself acknowledged his indebtedness to Masson and was clear that in many ways he was following in her footsteps. We learn from Masó that before Tosquelles or Fanon, it was Masson who was the first to construe psychotherapy as being a political project as much as a psychological one. All three of them set about dismantling institutional hierarchies and instated cultures that were informal. But all was not smooth sailing. Many authorities thought that the rearrangements were ‘too social to be truly therapeutic’. The collective practices introduced by Masson were resisted because they were too closely associated with notions of ‘care’ which is ‘women’s work’. In more recent years, Gilligan’s Ethic of Care has suffered a similar fate. I was particularly taken by Tosquelles’ notion of ‘therapeutic mothering’ which is resonant with the more recent conception of the ‘corrective emotional experience’, both denigrated and dismissed in some circles as anti-therapeutic sentimentality, unlike the virtues of manly ‘analysis’.

Masó’s paper reinstates Masson at the beginnings of the history of therapeutic communities as well as group analysis. Masó goes on to point out that ‘women [everywhere in the 20th-century] were systematically excluded from the manifestos and founding texts of new disciplines [including psychology]’.

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Meanwhile, Gibson’s account reveals Fanon to be fully committed to live out his philosophy in the world, in ways not dissimilar to that of the philosopher-activist Simone Weil. Both ‘walked their talk’; both put their lives on the line for their beliefs; and in different ways, both willingly paid the ultimate cost.

On the one hand, I think that contemporary group analysts are likely to feel at home in the group ethos that was being established by Masson, Tosquelles and Fanon almost a century ago.

for many years now, our colleagues at the Institute . . . have been meeting every week to talk among themselves about various anecdotes from their professional practice, but without any express desire to identify anything specific or definitive. [. . .] In the course of such an unusual collective and polyphonic discourse, it also becomes evident that the cracks and links between the words that are ‘versified’ as a whole follow, so to speak, the paths of the poetic function of language. (Tosquelles, 1985: 183–184, cited in Masó, 2026)

On the other hand, despite the many resonances between Radical Foulkes and Fanon, I think that one of the reasons as to why Fanon has not yet entered the group analytic canon has to do with his insistence that psychiatry and psychotherapy are intrinsically political endeavors and not just ‘psychological’. A principle that many colleagues find difficult to swallow. All this is symbolized by the absence of the term ‘power’ in Foulkes’ cogitations.

For me, Gibson’s rendition of Fanon’s distinction between an ‘official referee’ and the ‘nurse referee’ helpfully points to the authoritarianism that still prevails in sections of our training institutions having to do with staff student relations. In my view we have much to learn from Fanon when he says

Orderlies, . . . [Fanon] argues, ‘may adopt the habit of ordering the boarder around, and all of us, we have all heard orderlies say, for example: “Who gives the orders around here?” Behaving “like a parent”, the orderly tends to infantilize the boarder and scold and punish them: “You will not go to the cinema tomorrow” . . . [I]f care is not taken, the hospital establishment, which is above all a curative establishment, a therapeutic establishment, is gradually transformed into a barracks in which children-boarders tremble before parent-orderlies’. (Fanon, 2018: 346 cited in Gibson, 2026)

Whilst much of the conversation in our institution (IGA, London) tends to focus on group analytic discourse as residing on the colonizer side of the equation (quite correctly), I want briefly to highlight the ways in which group analysis itself has been colonized by particular ideologies and ways of thinking. For example, and most recently, group analysis has been colonized by managerialism and the philosophy of New Public Management. It is also being colonized and taken over by positivism.

In the 1990s whilst I was briefly the Chair of the London Courses Committee, I suggested that the curriculum should be widened to include insights from sister disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, philosophy, social anthropology, politics, literary theory, and so on. The curriculum committee at that time strongly disagreed and determined that the curriculum should stay with its psychoanalytic foundations. They were concerned that the introduction of these ‘extraneous’ discourses would undermine and dilute group analysis. In this way, the group analytic canon could be said to be colonized by, and in thrall to, individualistic and internalist psychoanalytic accounts of the human condition.

This ideology has consequences for the practice of contemporary group analysis; it determines relations between teacher and student, as well as therapist and patient/client. In my view, it is this that also results in rigid hierarchical structures and boundaries between the internal psychological world and the external socio-political world, between the ones-who-know and the ones-who-need-to-be-told-what-they-need-to-know (recall the official and nurse orderlies). These kinds of attitudes and boundaries are the very ones that Fanon, Freire, Tosquelles, Masson and others worked hard to overturn as they believed that the socio-political was integral to the psychological.

There are many group analysts today who continue to resist this idea; they maintain that psychotherapy needs to be neutral and free from politics. I myself have been arguing over the years that the psyche is in itself a politicized entity, politicized by the fact that the ‘I’ is constituted out of the mix of ‘we-s’ one is born into.

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Before concluding this response, I want to speak briefly to two recent articles on decoloniality in this journal: Dick Blackwell’s Decolonizing Group Analysis: What does it mean? (2025), and Suriya Nayak’s Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis (2025). I do this because it seems to me that Blackwell asks the question and Nayak has tried to answer it.

I find myself in complete agreement with Blackwell when he highlights the dangers of fetishizing the decolonial project in ways that it becomes incorporated into the very colonial system that it sets out to question and dismantle. I also agree that the decolonial project does not have an end point, a point of arrival. Blackwell rightly

calls into question all established theories and discourses of group analysis and of Western psychotherapy generally, embedded as they are in Western philosophical traditions and forms of ‘knowledge’. (Blackwell, 2025: 3)

However, it seems to me that Blackwell does not bring the same critical perspective to bear on the voice of the subaltern. He limits the decolonization process to one which

supports the empowerment of subaltern voices addressing the unity of patriarchy, racism and class exploitation wherever they occur. (Blackwell, 2025: 3)

Support without critical questioning and reflection is collusion. What of the instances when it is the subaltern who is the source of patriarchy, racism and class exploitation — as the writings of Ilaiah and Ambedkar attest?

Blackwell also raises a question having to do with his positionality. Is he, a White person, allowed to speak about racism? He also asks (and is asked) whether he is the right person to write about decolonizing the curriculum, and whether he is entitled to write it (Blackwell, 2025: 8). My answer is absolutely yes. Of course he should speak. I have learnt a lot from him, and continue to learn from him, even if at times I disagree. It does not require Blackwell and others to silence themselves in order to allow the subaltern to speak. Not to speak would leave the subaltern speaking alone in a void. The subaltern’s voice is not ‘sacred’ to use Fanon’s term. To follow this course would be to simply reverse the colonial world order in which ‘one ‘culture must disappear for the benefit of the other’ (Fanon, 2018: 362 cited in Gibson, 2026).

For me, decolonization is but one aspect of the profound critical questioning attitude that was advocated by Kant in the early days of the Enlightenment. Question the colonialist world view — yes certainly. But also question the world view of the subaltern. As Blackwell rightly says ‘everything needs to be subjected to questioning and critique’ (Blackwell, 2025: 14). The key term for me is ‘everything’, the West and the East, the Euro-centric and the Indo-centric as well as all the other centrics. All claims are ‘centric’, because all speakers have to stand somewhere and speak from somewhere. None are innocent. All have agendas. ‘We all have dirty hands,’ says Fanon (Gibson, 2026).

This post-modernist analysis of the relation between knowledge and power can get highjacked and end up in a number of absurdities in which all truth claims are said to be valid; absurdities that allow Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway to unashamedly reframe brazen lies as ‘alternative facts’.

But there are those who would not heed Kant and dismiss and cancel him for the crime of being Eurocentric. Indeed, there was an occasion when a student refused to read Winnicott because according to her, he was just another ‘dead white man’, and so could have nothing useful to say.

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In her 2025 paper Suriya Nayak mentions the proposal put forward by a student on the Indian programme to the International Courses Committee (London), for the ‘creative expansion of the qualifying process’. Nayak concludes that ‘To date, the GAI QC 3 cohort are required to follow the traditional IGA assessment mode of writing an essay’ (Nayak, 2025: 561). In my opinion, this is not quite true. The essays written on the India training have little resemblance to the ‘traditional’. Students are invited and encouraged from the first to write critically, in the first-person subjective voice. The topic is left entirely open — the only condition being that it should have something to do with their experience on the group analytic programme. The result has been an extraordinary and diverse set of heartfelt (dare I say poetic) set of writings. Further, the writings are not being ‘marked’ by anonymous markers — as they are in other parts of the IGA. Our guidelines say ‘We do not think of our reading process as a “marking process” resulting in a pass/fail conclusion. Rather, we will be looking for interest . . . coherence . . . clarity . . . and most importantly . . . for meaningfulness’. In lieu of ‘marking’ the readers are asked to respond very directly and personally to the writers, in letter form, starting with ‘Dear X’, rather than as anonymous markers responding in a depersonalized third person voice: ‘the candidate . . .’. On many an occasion the student writer has responded to the reader’s letter, and an ongoing dialogue has ensued between them. In regards to the final two papers at the conclusion of the training, the theory paper is presented to the student body, and it is they who then make a judgement about it. The final ‘qualifying paper’ is not marked either. Two readers meet with the candidate to have a conversation about the work which hopefully leads to both the readers and writers gaining a deeper understanding of the material. These are our attempts at trying to make the whole learning process more ‘relational’, and less hierarchical and bureaucratic. Will any of this count as decolonizing the curriculum? Of course, if one thinks that being asked to write itself is the problem, because it is a colonial imposition, then none of this will count. It will all be condemned and dismissed as yet another colonizing endeavour.

The reading on the Indian programme has included subaltern voices from the Indian terroir, as well as philosophy and politics. No doubt we could have done much more. Moved and prompted by student contributions, some of us have introduced the idea of supervisees bringing their accounts of the therapy process in the form of a poem or prose poem, written in the first person to the group or individual rather than about them. All this in lieu of the more usual ‘objective’ third person accounts — ‘he said, she said’ — that are the norm. Will any of this count as ‘decolonization’? I personally did not think of any of these innovations (if innovations they be) as decolonial activities. Rather, my intention has been to try to make the learning process relational and less hierarchical, to encourage and welcome critical questioning of the canon from the first. We have tried to be ‘Freirean’ — teacher/students and student/teachers. There are differing views about how well we have managed this, and whether we have gone far enough. There is both appreciation as well as discontent in the student body as well as the staff body.

If it is true as Blackwell says, that decolonizing is an infinitely long, never ending process, then however much one does, there is always more to do. And so, the little steps of progress can always be dismissed as not good enough and condemned for not going far enough. Voltaire was mindful of this danger when he cautioned against making ‘the perfect’ the enemy of ‘the good’. On the other hand, there is also the opposite danger, of complacently congratulating oneself for small shifts in the right direction and imagining that one has arrived in decolonial heaven.

I give the last word to students on the Indian programme, who say this in the abstract they submitted for consideration by 2026 Athens Symposium Scientific Committee.

We propose that institutions, like individuals, come into being through processes of identification, differentiation and separation. New trainings must first encounter the founding traditions which draw on Western models of group analysis. Over time they begin to differentiate adapting theory and practice to local cultural, social and political realities. In doing so, they must also decide what to retain, what to modify, and what to leave behind.