What would a practical psychology look like if it put aside scientific detachment in the interests of best serving non–dominant members of out community? We don’t need to speculate. A branch of the profession called liberation psychology in Latin American did just that.

There are many roots to the blossoming of liberation psychology—as an alternative approach to traditional North American psychology came to be called in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. It grew out of an application of Roman Catholic theology and leftist political theory in response to the terrible wealth disparity to be found in Latin America.

One formative event was the publication of the book A Theology of Liberation in 1973 by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez. Other actors were attempting to a more psychological approach informed by Marxist thought to the pressing problem of poverty. One thing all the responses to inequality had in common was a hostile reaction to the movement by those in power: whether it was the Vatican or the right wing, authoritarian governments that held sway in much of Latin America.

Paolo Fiere and the Construct of Conscientization

As good a place to start as any in exploring the birth pains of a liberation psychology is the writing of the Brazilian professor, philosopher and educator, Paolo Friere (1921-1997). Friere’s early involvement in trying to empower the poor in his country was to advocate for wider educational opportunities. In the 1940s, literacy was a condition for voting in his country—a way in which more educated elites could insure their holding onto power. Friere’s efforts in Brazil were ended when a right wing coup there in 1965 led to his brief imprisonment and far longer exile.

Drawing on these and other experiences, Friere wrote a highly influential book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed first published in 1968, though it would not be until 1974 that the work saw print in Brazil.

In his book, Friere detailed the steps he saw necessary for an individual to achieve conscientization, sometimes defined as a critical consciousness. It is  a process in which an individual overcomes an identity shaped by oppressive and disparaging ideologies. The individual must first change their internal sense of reality. In so doing they gradually recognize the mechanisms of cultural oppression and dehumanization that led to their earlier negative sense of themselves. Finally, they must reshape a new understanding of who they are and their social identity in the midst of an oppressive cultural milieu (Martin-Baro, p. 40).

Friere was writing about the need for consciousness raising among the lower socioeconomic classes in Brazil, but his concepts also applied to women, blacks and homosexuals. Friere was an important part of multiple movements empowering non-dominant groups and buttressing each other in the process.

Psychology, efforts at education, and advocacy for the oppressed were inseparable in this conceptualization.

“Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly,” Friere wrote, describing the process as a kind of rebirth. “Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence, they can no longer remain as they were.” (from friere.org, “Concepts used by Paolo Friere”)

Ignacio Martin-Baro and his Liberation Psychology

Building on the ideas of Friere, social psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martin-Baro (1942-1989) built on the ideas of Paolo Friere, ultimately integrating them into a perspective that he helped popularize as psicologia de la liberacio’n or liberation psychology in the 1980s. But many of these ideas were crystalizing in his writings in the decade before.

Born in Spain, but spending most of his adult life in El Salvador, Martin-Baro argued that in a liberation psychology, as in a liberation theology, positive, pragmatic impact on people in need should always trump scientific orthodoxy and trying to stick to a particular theory. As such, Martin-Baro argued that psychology should always exercise “a preferential option for the poor” when attempting to empower these often oppressed majorities.

Martin-Baro’s Critique of Mainstream Psychology

Martin-Baro decried the reality that so little energy in the field of psychology was put into understanding cultural/political factors and facilitating a deconstruction of false notions of personal identities among individuals belonging to non-dominant groups. He felt this was very problematic, “especially when compared to the time and energy devoted to contributions as trivial as some of the so-called learning theories or some of the cognitive models so much in fashion today” (p. 18). He argued that the “the concern of the social scientist should not be so much to explain the world as to transform it” (p. 19).

The irrelevance of psychology in Latin America, Martin-Baro argued, was the result of three primary factors. The first was its scientific mimicry of North American psychology in general. Martin-Baro noted how Latin American psychology had moved in lock step with developments in the United States, going from being primarily psychoanalytic to behavioral to cognitive in its focus. This, he argued, not in response to compelling arguments relevant to the region but rather because of what was in favor in American academia at any given time.

The second problem, Martin-Baro argued, was a lack of an adequate epistemology, or productive way of knowing and understanding psychological phenomena. Latin American psychology, and more broadly psychology itself, suffered from too great a focus on asking how instead of why, on the individual rather than the collective, and on validating the pursuit of personal pleasure and satisfaction over more selfless values. Equally concerning was how psychologists saw stability as more trustworthy as a framework of understanding rather than the broader reality of change or disequilibrium. In Martin-Baro’s view, this led to false notions of seeing human nature as primarily essential over time rather than a social construction of particular times and cultures.

The third problem of contemporary psychology was in how it bought into false dichotomies: for example, science vs. faith or one theory over another. Martin-Baro suggested that it would better to value whatever perspective has practical impact on helping people within a given culture to progress. As such, Martin-Baro wrote: “It shouldn’t be theories that define the problems of our situation, but rather the problems that demand, and so to speak, select, their own theorization” (Burton, p. 9). He called this orientation “realismo-critico” as opposed to the more mainstream strategy of “idealismo-metodologico.” 

Martin-Baro’s Principles of Liberation Psychology

Martin-Baro argued that in a liberation psychology, as in liberation theology that “true practice has primacy over true theory” (Martin-Baro, p. 26). Specifically, he argued psychologists needed to stop worrying about their social and professional status and refocus on the pressing needs of people it should be serving.

“It is the real problems of our own people that ought to constitute the fundamental object of our work,” Martin-Baro argued, “their situation of oppressive misery, their condition of marginalized dependency that is forcing upon them an inhuman existence and snatching away their ability to define their own lives. (pp. 26-27)

As such, Martin-Baro argued that psychology should always exercise “a preferential option for the poor,” and in oppressed majorities.

Referencing the work of Paulo Freire, Martin-Baro wrote this would entail “breaking the chains of personal oppression as much as the chains of social oppression” (p. 27). The psychologist must be willing to address how to challenge and uproot the existential fatalism or learned helplessness of so many Latin American poor. He embraced Freire’s call for a pedagogy of the oppressed rather than on behalf of the oppressed.

Such a notion would require a radical repositioning of the traditional frame of conventional psychology. In practical terms it would mean that educational psychologists would address the needs of families in the community rather than the school, and industrial psychologists would be driven by the needs of workers and their unions, not that of mangers and business owners.

Martin-Baro identified three primary tasks for a psychology of liberation. The first is the recovery of historical memory, by which he means “rescuing those aspects of identity which served yesterday, and will serve today, for liberation” (p. 30).

The second is de-ideologizing everyday experience, by which he means undoing  the social construction of an oppressive system that foster “a fictional common sense that nurtures the structures of exploitation and conformist attitudes (and) retrieve the original experience of groups and persons and return it to them as objective data” (p. 31).

The final task is utilizing the people’s virtues, which Martin-Baro felt resided in popular traditions, religious practices and long-standing social structures.

Martin-Baro insisted that his vision for psychology didn’t throw out behavioral analysis: “It does insist, however, that behavior be seen in light of its personal and social meaning; that it be analyzed in terms of the knowledge it makes manifest and the sense it acquires from a historical perspective” (p. 39).

The Latin American psychologist dare not divorce him or herself from addressing political factors. All individuals in any society, he argued, undergo political socialization, which he defined as “the individual construction of reality and a personal identity that are or are not consistent with a particular political system” (p. 75).

Research on Misinformation and Public Opinion

Martin-Baro established the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP). Part of its mission statement was “so that the citizens see themselves as themselves, and generate the changes that are still necessary in a society divided by poverty and violence.” (p. 16)

In doing so, Martin-Baro noted a primary problem for people under repressive regimes was that they lacked a “social mirror” through which they could look at themselves “in the reality they know” rather than the one the dominant elements of their society would have them believe (p. 187). Critical consciousness could not be created simply through information. Similarly, an effective social mirror was more than what was seen on television. Public opinion polling was offered as one such method.

It is telling that in the United States we are seeing more fully than ever the power that political powers can wield in misinformation campaigns.

The practical consequences of Martin-Baro’s liberation psychology were not lost on his political opponents. In 1989, he was one of six Jesuits murdered by the army of El Salvador. But the movement did not die with him.

Elizabeth Lira’s Work with the Trauma of Torture

Psychologists across Latin America were confronted with how to respond to the victims of repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes, tactics that ranged from intimidation to imprisonment and torture. Their responses were consistent with the values of liberation psychology thought not all framed their actions with those words.

Elizabeth Lira (1944-  ) grew up in a middle class family living in Chile. In the 1970s, following a coup there, she often found herself advising clients how to find financial help, help loved ones out of jail or even how to leave the country. Lira began working for the Catholic Foundation for Social Aid. Impressed by the work of Marie Langer (hopefully the subject of a subsequent article), the two women published a two volume work in 1983 on the impact and treatment of torture. For their own safety, the women found it necessary to use pseudonyms. Five years later, Lira was instrumental in the formation of the Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights. (Hollander, 135-136)

By 2000, Lira had identified nine objectives in a therapeutic model to treating victims of political trauma. As summarized by historian and social advocate Mark Burton, four of them included “linking of the traumatic experience to existential meanings in the life of the person, regaining of role as a social being, restructuring of the (person’s) existential project: continuity between past, present and future, (and) regaining of collective ties” (p. 14). The psychologist is also encouraged to work as a resource to those attempting to prosecute those responsible for such abuses.

To accomplish these goals, Lira  found behavioristic models of therapy to be useless in treating the victims of torture and that only a psychoanalytic approach allowed for the conceptual nuance necessary to working with such individuals. At the same time, a sole focus on transference also could interfere with the establishment of a therapeutic relationship that was emotionally supportive and which offered practical information and advice (Hollander, 136-137).

Maritza Montero’s Community Psychology

Maritza Montero (1939-  ) is a social psychologist from Venezuela and is one of several important figures who has carried on the values of Liberation Psychology as espoused by Ignacio Martin-Baro and one its most common applications, community psychology. Montero’s books include Latin American Political Psychology (1987) and co-editor of Psychology of Liberation: Theory and Application (2009).

Beginning in the 1970s, Montero worked to establish the best ways of addressing the suffering of the people in her country by actually going into their communities and trying to understand their “group dynamics.” Unaware of the full range of work of others in this area until an Inter-American Congress of Psychology in 1979, Montero recalled how “we discovered that what we were doing was called community psychology and there was a lot more in it.” (Montero, p. 16)

Montero was aware of criticisms of the emerging approach—namely an over focus on repeating the ideology behind it and an under focus on application. Its roots in European theories of post-structuralism and social constructionism fueled a tendency towards overly abstract language that could often become hard to follow by those not already convinced (Burton, p. 17).

In addition, while supporting non-dominant groups finding strength in their cultural traditions, those traditions can also endorse sexist or homophobic beliefs.

Grounding her approach in the tradition of social psychology rather than clinical, Montero suggested in 1991 that community psychology provided a methodology and empirical basis for a psychology of liberation whose rich theoretical foundation calls for  a reframing of traditional psychology (Burton, p. 12).

By 2003, community social psychology was either taught or practiced in ten different Latin American countries, including “Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina” (Burton, p. 12)

But Montero identified that community psychology was practiced differently in different places, falling into two patterns. Montero identified the first as a traditional hierarchical ‘Up-Down approach driven by “expert” opinion, external planning, and a perceived need to “educate” the public. The second, which she endorsed, was a transformational Down-Up model driven by community participants, local control, and the fostering of increased consciousness of problems and their social and political causes (Montero 2008, p. 667).

In the maturation of a community psychology as a discipline, Montero identified an increased focus in the field on the importance of community participation, an exploration of power dynamics, and relatedly a “critique of empowerment and ways to achieve it” (Montero 2008, p. 668).

The possible focus of community psychology’s efforts in Latin America can vary widely, including “health promotion, economic development and anti-poverty programmes, housing, (and) community development, as well as the development of community intervention and support in the fields of disability, mental health and drug use” (Burton, p. 12)

Reflecting on the current situation in Latin America in 2012, Montero sounded a cautionary note. In some Latin American countries, she noted that community psychology approaches never took hold. In addition, “in (some) countries where community psychology is known and where there have been academic programmes as far back as the mid-seventies (i.e., Colombia or Mexico), those pioneering initiatives have not survived.” In other countries, the approach remained vital but not dominant. (Montero 2012, p.15).

That said, there have been at least thirteen international congresses on liberation psychology since 1998. These have been held in nine different Latin American countries–with five having been hosted by Mexico.

As an earlier article on this website on the history of psychology in communist China demonstrates, any time psychology takes an ethical stance that seriously challenges the powers that be, it places itself at risk. Even if that risk is limited to a reduction in funding. But as professionals in a privileged position, our role as advocates calls for such action.

With that, I return to what Paolo Friere wrote nearly half a century ago. If we embrace the cause of the people, of non-dominant groups in whatever community we live in, we cannot help but be transformed in a way that requires our advocacy and action.

Mark Carlson-Ghost

References

Burton, Mark (2003). Liberation Psychology: Learning from Latin America. Retrieved from www.liberationtheology.org on 9/15/2019.

Hollander, Nancy Caro (1997). Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ.

Martin-Baro, Ignacio (1994). Writings for a Liberation Psychology, A. Aron      and S. Corne, eds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Montero, Maritza (2008). An insider’s look at the development and current state of community psychology in Latin America. Journal of Community Psychology, 36(5), 661-674.

Montero, Maritza (2012). Invisibility and informality in Latin American psychology. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 3(2), 15-16.