In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon expanded upon Freud's concepts of ontogeny and phylogeny, alongside which Fanon placed sociogeny.[4] Freud employed ontogeny, a term borrowed from the field of biology, to describe the natural development of the individual subject; phylogeny, Freud proposed, could be used to understand the development of groups of subjects, such as families or societies.[5] Building upon Freud's work, Fanon developed the concept of sociogeny, which he employed to articulate how socially produced phenomena, such as poverty or crime, are linked to certain population groups as if those groups were biologically, or ontogenetically, predisposed towards those phenomena. The conflation of sociogeny and ontogeny - i.e., the conflation of a sociogenetic phenomena with an ontogenetic or "natural" predilection - plays an important role in the social construction of race, according to Fanon
