Spirit of the Place: Fanon, The terrors of the FLQ and Decolonizing Therapy

I grew up in 1960s Montreal on a street filled with kids. We didn’t know any better but this was a tumultuous time; the Front de libération du Québec, (FLQ) a Quebec separatist terrorist group was wreaking havoc in our city. Their violent pledge to establish an independent Quebec included robberies, bombings, kidnappings and murder.

The FLQ saw violence as a necessary tool for political change. They were inspired by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist, social critic and revolutionary.

Decolonizing Therapy founder, Jennifer Mullan, who is similarly smitten with Fanon has written:

“Frantz Fanon taught us that oppression lodges itself not only in the body politic, but in the literal bodies of the colonized—manifesting as psychic pain, disconnection, and rage. Decolonizing therapy must honor that rage as sacred and recognize that healing is inherently political.”1

A Decolonizing Therapy post on instagram references the origins of psychotherapy: “Therapy co-opted global indigenous healing then resells it to people bleeding out from the trauma it created.”

Decolonizing Therapy is on brand with today’s progressive antisemitism. Instead of accepting Jews (who are almost all Zionists) it purports that Zionism is a mental illness. This rhetoric further contends that Jews and Zionists are not one and the same. Anti-Zionist Jews (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) help spread this disinformation.

Zionism is in fact, the return of an Indigenous people to their homeland after centuries of forced displacement. Our language, our calendar, our prayers, our very sense of time and place are tied to the land of Israel. Despite being exiled, massacred, and scattered, our people’s deep connection to our country prevails.

Decolonizing Therapy highlights ideology over evidence as there is no solid data showing it works. It also disavows a historically oppressed minority population. An important question to ask is, ‘how could a Jewish client receive any kind of ethical care from a decolonizing therapist?’

I’ve heard from a few Jewish colleagues who have reached out to Jennifer Mullan with impassioned pleas for her to consider Jews in her approach. They never received a response.

Now, back to my early days growing up in Montreal. During the time of terror inflicted by the FLQ and for some years after, many Jewish families left my hometown for the U.S. or English-speaking Toronto. It just didn’t feel safe to stay.

This is the diaspora we’ve been living in. Homes abandoned or destroyed by malintent, the feeling of loss so familiar; a muscle memory. When we say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ at the Passover seder this is no longer an abstract notion to me.

As Jonathan Rosen wrote recently, check your own privilege. And as Kenneth L. Marcus also wrote earlier last month, Decolonizing Therapy must be defunded.

Your grandfather traveled to Canada on a boat all by himself when he was just 10 years old.

Your great grandmother kept teaspoons on her windowsill; so she could hear their trill as the cossacks rode up on their horses.

At the very last minute, your great great grandfather decided not to come to Canada so his wife boarded the ship with their nine children and they never saw him again.

Your great uncle and his family were hanged in their town; betrayed by their neighbors.

We have relatives in Argentina somewhere.