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Psychiatry was born in the wake of one of the greatest revolutionary movements of all time. It can only escape its operational reduction to a technique for the control of human beings by going back to its roots in political philosophy. This statement is obviously polemical, but I would like to substantiate it on the basis of two episodes: firstly, the advent of ethics committees, and secondly, the message of Frantz Fanon, as found in his recently published psychiatric writings. The ethics of care in psychiatry has changed from one model to another: first the model of access to citizenship for the mentally ill thanks to Pinel’s efforts at liberation, then the model of freedom promoted by the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s, and finally the current model of risk management. These ethical models contaminate clinical practice and care provision. Similarly, Frantz Fanon illustrates that it is from the phenomena revealed in daily clinical practice on the ground that the psychiatrist can bring to light the processes of alienation of the human being without becoming lost in cultural—or worse, racial—prejudices. The mechanisms of alienation today may be subtler than the brutality of colonization (individualism, acculturation, disaffiliation, etc.), yet it remains important that the clinician should base their therapeutic action on de-alienation as an ethics of freedom. And this is a political act. . .