"liberation psychology"

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From depth psychology to liberation psychology

Psychologist Phillip Cushman (1995) saw psychology that developed within the capitalistic framework of the American society struggle to break free from its dominant economical forces. He observed how psychology as a discipline conformed to predominant market ideologies. He noted how this is manifested in the discipline’s “strong tendency to avoid the political and ethical in favor of the technological, to avoid the humanistic in favor of the scientific, to avoid the humanitarian in favor of the expedient, to avoid the needs of labor in favor of the interests of capital” (p. 163)

He recognized the influential position that psychology has attained within this sociopolitical arrangement, noting that:

if psychology is one of the guilds most responsible for determining the proper way of being human, then psychology wields a significant amount of power, especially in our current era, in which the moral authority of most religious and philosophical institutions has been called into question. (Cushman, 1995, p. 336)

Cushman noted how the model of self put forward by psychology has the effect of perpetuating dominant cultural values. He pointed out its role in shaping political structures and policies. He described psychology’s need to adapt itself to the dominant political force of capitalism has influenced the shaping of theories concerning the configuration of self, definitions of normality, and the general understanding of what constitutes mental health and illness.

Cushman (1995) deconstructed the dominant configuration of self in this era and defining it as the “empty self,” characterizing this prevalent modern condition as “a pervasive sense of personal emptiness” that produces “values of self-liberation through consumption” (p. 6). He articulated how this psychological condition was a perfect fit to meet the needs of twentieth century capitalism and pointed out how by treating this notion of self as natural, instead of truly addressing symptoms and causes that relate to this condition of self, psychologists end up serving capitalistic demands and further encouraging an increasingly decadent consumer culture.

Cushman (1995) emphasized the importance of psychologists understanding the cultural and historical context behind the theories they practice.

Our current arrangement of power and privilege create many victims in the course of everyday life. But if our ways of understanding these attacks rob us of our ability to conceive of ourselves as persons who can join together into groups that can work to stop the emptiness, violence, and abuses of our era, then our theories are unhelpful. No, then our theories add to the oppression. (p. 352)

Without understanding the historical context through which their theories emerge, researchers at times blindly exercise psychological imperialism. They enforce predominant cultural values through normalizing the conception of self that was formed by and perpetuates the framework of power and privilege.

A radical departure is now called for from depth psychology as it is situated in the current era. This requires a move out into the world beyond the margins of Western perspectives of the soul and self, into the Global South and Middle East that have been generally pushed beyond the horizon.

Psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) in Writings for a Liberation Psychology observed how psychology in Latin America is following the same trend as psychology in Europe and North America, with the goal of gaining a social status similar to what North American psychology had attained. Martín-Baró criticized the way psychology holds to the methodology of natural science to legitimatize its field of study, developing a fictionalized and abstracted image of what it means to be human based on ahistoricism and an emphasis on individualism. He argued how this image of man is false, as it presents the individual as cut off from history, community and the social and cultural context through which one emerges.

Martín-Baró (1994) called out modern psychology’s blindness and unconscious compliance with the status quo:

Psychology has for the most part not been very clear about the intimate relationship between an unalienated personal experience and unalienated social existence, between individual control and collective power, between the liberation of each person and the liberation of a whole people. (p. 27)

Martín-Baró further pointed out psychology’s role in creating oppression, showing how it often fails to see individual suffering and illness in the context of history and society and instead places responsibility solely on the individual. This led him to recognize the need for a liberation psychology; one created not from top down, but from the bottom up. He insisted that psychology must truly become a force for liberation, yet to do this it first must liberate itself.

It was this attempt to look critically at the dominant ideas and values that liberation psychology was conceived. In Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Watkins and Shulman (2008) describe how “liberation” is “a holistic term that urges us to consider the links between economic, political, sociocultural, spiritual, and psychological transformation” (p. 46). Liberation psychology is a discipline that emerged in the intersection between socio-political fields and depth psychology. It provides a space where one can “break open one’s normalized assumptions, allowing one to see the interconnections between the psychological, the historical, the socioeconomic, and the spiritual” (p. 62).

Liberation psychology places individuals in a cultural and social context. It allows researchers to critically examine dominant views and biases in American psychology, with notions of progress and individualism, and the psychological consequences of neoliberalism, an ideology that promotes Euro-American economic and cultural hegemony.

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