From Blida to East Berlin: Alice Cherki and the Transnational Formation of Postcolonial Psychiatry
This project examines the transnational trajectories and afterlives of radical psychiatry, specifically institutional psychotherapy, and their role in the formation of post-colonial psychiatry and psychoanalysis across Europe, North Africa, and GDR. It does so by tracing the intellectual and clinical corpus of French-Algerian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Alice Cherki alongside the educational trajectories of Algerian medical students, including Cherki, who pursued medical training in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of an exchange program established with the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), linking psychiatric education to the broader anti-colonial and socialist internationalist networks of the period. In centering Alice Cherki’s formative experience with Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric reforms at Blida-Joinville in Algeria and Razi Hospital in Tunisia, the project reconstructs the transnational history of institutional psychotherapy by tracing its continuities, transformations, and ruptures from its emergence in Vichy France as an anti-fascist and socialist psychiatric movement to its postcolonial reconfiguration through the anti-colonial and social internationalist struggles during the global Cold War. At stake in the transnational encounter between these histories—Nazism, colonial warfare, socialist reconstruction, and liberation struggles—is elucidating how they crystallized a dense conceptual terrain in which questions of annihilatory violence, memory, migration, trauma, and subjectivity acquired renewed urgency. Situated at the intersection of the history of psychiatry, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and Cold War history, From Blida to East Berlin thus reconceptualizes postcolonial psychiatry not simply as a clinical practice, but as a broader project of disalienation shaped by multiple political currents and struggles in the long twentieth century.