Frantz Fanon. David Macey

organo-genesis and psycho-genesis or, in other words, the relative roles played in the triggering of mental illness by organic-somatic and purely mental factors.

      There is a significant indication of just how rapidly Fanon wrote his thesis. The section dealing with Lacan refers to the latter’s thesis of 1932, and to his 1938 article on the family, but primarily to a text that he claims is entitled La Causalité essentielle de la folie. There is no such text by Lacan: the title given by Fanon is the subtitle of the second part of the paper ‘Propos sur la causalité psychique’;¹⁰¹ to make matters worse, Fanon gives no page references, and most of his quotations prove to be from the third section, which is subtitled ‘Les effets psychiques du monde imaginaire’. These are easy mistakes to make when working at speed and under pressure, but the fact that Fanon’s examiners apparently failed to pick them up during the two-hour viva voce examination he took up says little for the academic standards in force at Lyon’s Faculté mixte de médicine et de pharmacie in 1951. More significantly, it may indicate just how unknown a quantity Lacan was for Fanon’s examiners.