Alice Cherki

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Alice Cherki (born 1936 in Algiers, Algeria) is an Algerian psychoanalyst living in Paris. She has written books, including Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, based on her memories of working with Fanon in Algeria and Tunisia.

She was born into a Jewish family in Algiers; her father sold cereals. Being excluded from the French school during World War II because she was Jewish started her political awakening. While studying medicine, she campaigned for Algeria’s independence. After hearing Fanon give a lecture, she joined his team as a junior doctor at the Blida-Joinville hospital during the war.

At age 20 she married Charles Géronimi, a friend of Fanon; they later divorced. In 1957 she began studying psychiatry in Paris, then fled to Tunis. She worked as a junior doctor in a Manouba clinic and later received a grant from the temporary government of the Algerian Republic to finish her studies in East Germany. She returned to Algeria just before independence in 1962.

In 1964 she moved to Paris to finish her psychiatric training and begin psychoanalysis, while continuing to visit Algeria. She has published many papers and books on topics like otherness, immigration, and how trauma is passed down. In 2007 she won the Œdipe prize for La Frontière invisible, violences de l’immigration, a work that links her psychoanalytic practice with her political experience. Her biography of Frantz Fanon has been published in several languages and highlights his ideas about the psychological effects of colonization on both the colonizers and the colonized.