Mary Watkins

Helene Shulman

A presentation of the theoretical foundation and participatory methodoloies of psychologies of liberation that are emerging on every continent. The book proposes a radical interdisciplinary reorientation of psychology to aid in the creation of participatory and dialogical spaces for critical understanding and creative restoration.

Toward Psychologies of Liberation

Where are the forms of psychological, cultural, and social practice that would stand up to the forces of oppression and exploitation? Where are sustainable and creative modes of reflective living finding roots and thriving? Where are the psychological insights and practices that would accompany and sustain the social movements for peace, environmentally sustainable economies, and social justice?

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In general, however, the professions informed by psychology and other social sciences do very little in response to their awareness of massive social problems such as extreme poverty and genocidal violence. In part, this inaction is due to distance. Affluent societies that can afford to fund behavioral science faculties and extensive social services are usually far away from, or insulated from, the societies where millions live a hand-to-mouth existence or suffer daily violence.

But the limited response is also due to professional roles that are defined within individualist ideology. Problems are identified and located at the level of the individual. The system's contribution is obscured. Thus, understanding and helping one person or one family at a time is the predominant mode within the psy-complex (the industry surrounding the assessment and treatment of troubling emotions and deviant behaviors)

Although they aspire to improve the miserable living conditions of the most marginalized, part of their emerging vision is the need for creating solidarities and dialogues with more privileged people whose environments and psychological well-being are also undermined by the fragmentation of community, the widening of social divides, and the often insidious self-doubt that accompanies crises of personal and cultural meaning. Sandoval (2000) argues that now “the emotional ground tone of the once centered, modernist, first world citizen subject [is] shot through with intensities so that it resembles the emotional territory of subordinated peoples” (p. 33).

Institutional arrangements and ways of thinking that grow out of centuries of colonialism need to be questioned by those on both sides of the divides that have been created... The outcome of a history embedded in colonial thought has been a psychology of forgetting and denial in private and public spheres—a forgetting that has yielded a traumatic lack of witness of individual and community wounds caused by the larger social context (Shulman-Lorenz & Watkins, 2002b).

Imagination is a psychological phenomenon that occurs at the level of the local in individuals and communities. To create cultural alternatives, people have to break with taken for granted ways of thinking that prevent them psychologically from interrupting the status quo. They need to do work that “renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent in-between space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 7).

Because of its positivist scientific orientation, much of mainstream psychology has emerged as a search for universals, for norms of emotional life and behavior, and for modes of treatment for individuals who deviate from these norms. This orientation decontextualizes the individuals under its scrutiny. Obscuring the impact of collective trauma on mental health has led to treatments for single individuals while leaving intact the social environments that mitigate against psychological well-being. In order to address social issues, a critical psychological approach to symptoms is called for, an approach that is careful to understand the dynamic interrelation between psychological suffering and cultural and historical context (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2005).

Is it possible for more of psychology to align itself with and support these efforts to contribute to a peaceful and just society? Just how would it need to re-orient? How might those working psychologically with individuals and those working with groups and communities explore where the other’s work is crucial to their own, creating improvisations of healing at multiple sites in addition to and beyond psychotherapy on the one hand and social action groups on the other?

healing and regeneration should not be inherently individual, but also collective... to extend beyond the private to public setting, "where people can recognize that their suffering has common roots and is shared." 

We do not want to assume that the role of psychology is to help individuals and families adapt to the status quo when this present order contributes so massively to human misery, psychological and otherwise. Our psychology should not exist in a vacuum of disconnected theory where classrooms, research, and clinical encounters are considered apart from conflicts and suffering in society, where personal history is severed from the historical context and social institutions one has inherited.

These require a public settling of psychological accounts that far exceeds the capacities of the individual clinical encounter.

When rivers are dammed, whole areas are deprived of nourishment while others are flooded over. Biodiversity is diminished, and often a single invading species colonizes what was once a rich forest or wetlands environment where many species flourished. In psychology, the process of damming off examples of transformation from activist communities and questions from interdisciplinary and critical theory has led to a situation where universalist and Eurocentric ideas have crowded out the possibility of multiple indigenous psychologies that could be linked in enriching dialogues.

yet more important than any individual action is the process of psychological development through which participants grow stronger in their capacities for survival, critical analysis, emergence of new ideas, flexibility of action, community building, and the process of hopeful self-organization. One of the goals of such projects is not homogeneity of thought or agreement on all issues, but the psychological capacity to bear a dialogue with difference, to tolerate conflicting experiences and points of view, while still finding common ground and constructing a shared future

Cabrera believes that remembering should lead to dreaming social action projects for the future: “There is no point to look back if it does not help to dream a better future” (p. 3).

The vitality of these multiple streams of work demonstrates the successes of these ingenious and creative participatory projects that nourish communities that have been stunted, separated from one another, terrorized, controlled, and colonized. Psychology needs to learn important forms of knowledge that develop in the streets, in the arts, and in rural settings— often in the heat of struggle—from experiences in communities where people resist oppression by organizing in creative ways.

when we open up a field like psych towards the humanities, towards the political, there is so much hope and transformation that can occur.... that more than anything, psych can be an uplifting and empowering field to venture in 

He called for psychology to critically examine itself so that it could be a force for transformation rather than for conformity to status quo cultural arrangements that contribute to injustice, poverty, violence, and war.

Most psychological theories of the 1970s and 1980s were a historical and universalist, assuming that the fundamental realities of personality and psychopathology were the same across times and cultures. They had a homeostatic vision, which assumed the persistence of essential social structures rather than their transformation. Many psychological theories leaned toward a sterile scientism, focusing solely on quantifiable variables measurable in laboratory situations rather than an analysis of lived experience.

In part, the construction of a more just society is “a mental health problem,” requiring us to “work hard to find theoretical models and methods of intervention that allow us, as a community and as individuals, to break with the culture of vitiated social relations and put other, more humanizing relations in their place” (p. 120). His interdependent goals for liberation psychology were “healthy, free, and creative minds” in a “free, dynamic, and just social body,” where “people have sown enough seeds of life to be able to trust in the possibility of a tomorrow” (p. 121).

We want to create together situations that lead to a rebuilding of positive and joyful modes of interdependence, and the creation of new forms of attachment in which the humanity of each individual is acknowledged. Here is a program for an ongoing revolution, where the central goal is... a continuing practice of dialogue and restoration with the goal of building more humane communities.

The crucial question of liberation psychology, then, involves the transformation of fatalism into critical consciousness, an awakening of agency and the power to perform our roles differently, and a quickening of imaginations of desire.