{"id":34458,"date":"2026-01-05T05:31:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/?p=34458"},"modified":"2026-01-05T05:31:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:31:18","slug":"politics-of-mainstream-psychology-v-liberation-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/politics-of-mainstream-psychology-v-liberation-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"Politics of Mainstream Psychology v Liberation Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Bruce E Levine<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When I first heard the term liberation theology (in opposition to a theol\u00adogy that fosters compliance with the status quo), I thought there should also be a liberation <\/a>psychology\u2014a psychology that doesn\u2019t equate a lack of adjustment with mental illness, but instead promotes constructive rebel\u00adlion against dehumanizing institutions, and which also provides strategies to build a genuinely democratic society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turned out that somebody else had thought of the same thing before I had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ignacio Martin-Bar\u00f3 (1942\u20131989) was both a priest and a psychologist, and it is he who should be given credit for popularizing the term liberation psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin-Bar\u00f3\u2019s liberation theology, liberation psychology, and activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. In the middle of the night on November 16, 1989, Martin-Bar\u00f3, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, were forced out to a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana Jos\u00e9 Sime\u00f3n Ca\u00f1as, where they were murdered by the US-trained troops of the Salvadoran government\u2019s elite Atlacatl Battalion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Jesuit priest, Martin-Bar\u00f3 embraced liberation theology in opposi\u00adtion to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a social psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppresses marginalized people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Politics of Mainstream Psychology<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin-Bar\u00f3 believed that the prevailing mainstream psychology had become infatuated with methods and measurements and thus was ignor\u00ading unquantifiable realities necessary for liberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such unquantifiable but powerful human dimensions include commitment, solidarity, hope, and courage.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He saw a mainstream psychology that either ignored or only paid lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, a compilation of Martin-Bar\u00f3\u2019s essays, editors Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne point out that libera\u00adtion psychology is about looking at the world from the point of view of the dominated instead of the dominators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin-Bar\u00f3 drew heavily on the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, who recognized a certain \u201cpsychology of oppres\u00adsion\u201d in which the downtrodden become fatalistic, believing they are powerless to alter their circumstances, thus becoming resigned to their situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prevailing organizational psychology that Martin-Bar\u00f3 criticizes is one that promotes an alienation of working people by serving the needs of industry. In his essay \u201cToward a Liberation Psychology,\u201d Martin-Bar\u00f3 points out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has happened to Latin American psychology is similar to North American psychology at the beginning of the twen\u00adtieth century, when it ran so fast after scientific recognition and social status that it stumbled . . . In order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prevailing psychological theories are not politically neutral. Martin-Bar\u00f3 astutely observed that many mainstream psychological schools of thought\u2014be they psychoanalytic, behavioral, or biochemical\u2014accept the maximization of pleasure as the motivating force for human behavior, the same maximization of pleasure that is assumed by neoclassical economic theorists. This ignores the human need for fairness, social justice, freedom, and autonomy<\/strong> as well as other motivations that would transform society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin-Bar\u00f3 pointed out that when knowledge is limited to verifi\u00adable facts and events, we \u201cbecome blind to the most important meanings of human existence.\u201d Great scientists recognize this, as a sign hanging in Albert Einstein\u2019s office at Princeton stated: \u201cNot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.\u201d<\/strong> Much of what makes us fully human and capable of overcom\u00ading injustices\u2014including our courage and solidarity\u2014cannot be reduced to simplistic, verifiable, objective variables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In American society, mental health treatment is a significant force that can work either for or against genuine democracy. There are approaching eight hundred thousand social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists working in the United States today (though not all provide mental health services), as well as many mental health counselors and paraprofession\u00adals. The US Surgeon General reported in 1999 that 15 percent of adults and 21 percent of children and adolescents in the United States utilize mental health services each year, and it is likely that these percentages have increased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether they realize it or not, mental health professionals who narrowly treat their clients in a way that encourages compliance with the status quo are acting politically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, validating a client\u2019s challenging of these undemocratic hierarchical modes is also a political act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe that mental health professionals have an obligation to recognize the broader issues that form a context for their clients\u2019 mental well-being, and to be honest with their clientele about which side of this issue they are on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Truths Do and Do Not Set People Free<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin-Bar\u00f3, tragically prescient, once quipped to a North American colleague, \u201cIn your country, it\u2019s publish or perish. In ours, it\u2019s publish and perish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast with Martin-Bar\u00f3, US intellectual activists have a considerable degree of free speech, and it requires no great heroism for US citizens to acquire their books or hear them speak and to discover truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truths do sometimes set people free, especially when people have a basis of strength to start with. And truths can be especially energizing when, as was the case with Martin-Bar\u00f3, proclaiming them takes courage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, Tom Paine\u2019s truths in Common Sense energized many colonials to take action against the British. Paine\u2019s readers had not lost their self-respect, community, and sense of power. Paine\u2019s audience also knew that Paine was risking his life to write and publish Common Sense. The power of truth to energize often lies in the risk that it takes to state it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generally in the United States, telling the truth about corporate-government tyranny and injustice requires little real risk, and so such truths provide little energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not that there is no value in exposing more truths about the corporatocracy. However, many professional activ\u00adists and educators have become lazy, pursing only easy, risk-free truths that are not energizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish my declaring the truth of people\u2019s personal abusive relation\u00adships or the truth of their systemic corporate-governmental abuse were enough to set them free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish that the people I know caught up in this state of helplessness could be spurred to action by lectures\u2014that would be an easy fix. But more often, lectures are a turnoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What these victims of abuse need is the strength to do something with the truth of their abuse\u2014strength that comes from support, morale, healing, and self-respect, as well as practical strategies and tactics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The oppression faced by the Salvadorans whom Martin-Bar\u00f3 worked with was different from the oppression we face in the United States today, yet oppression need not be physically brutalizing in order to damage the bonds of community and people\u2019s sense of self-worth.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would do well to reject a mainstream psychology that tacitly fosters compliance to the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, we need a liberation psychology that promotes constructive rebellion against dehumanizing institutions and, at the same time, aims at building a genuinely democratic society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the United States, liberation psychology needs to focus on the specific ways Americans have been pacified and demoralized. And it must focus on how we can be made whole again, so as to regain strength to fight for ourselves and our communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberation Psychology in Practice<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My form of practiced liberation psychology stems from my clinical expe\u00adrience. It is decidedly in opposition to resentment-producing coercions; it is about helping individuals and families build respectful relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have counseled hundreds of young people and adults who had been previously labeled with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, substance abuse, depression, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric diagnoses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What strikes me is how many of these people are essentially anti-authoritarians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major problem for these young anti-authoritarians is that most mental health professionals who had previ\u00adously diagnosed them have no familiarity with political ideologies that far better characterize these teenagers\u2019 thinking and behaviors than does any mental disorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word anarchism is routinely used by today\u2019s mass media synony\u00admously with chaos, but for philosophers and political scientists, anarchism means people organizing themselves without authoritarian hierarchies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Practical anarchism is not a dogmatic system and actually does not oppose all authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for example, practical anarchist parents will use their authority to grab their child who has begun to run out in traffic. However, practical anarchists strongly believe that all authorities have the burden of proof to justify control, and that most authorities in modern society cannot bear that burden and are thus illegitimate\u2014and should be elimi\u00adnated and replaced by noncoercive, freely participating relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A minority of the anti-authoritarian kids I have worked with are aware of anarchism and identify themselves as anarchists, perhaps having T-shirts with a circle drawn around an A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, even among those adolescents who know nothing of the political significance of the term anarchism, I cannot remember one who didn\u2019t become excited to discover that there is an actual political ideology that encompasses their point of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They immediately became more whole after they discovered that answering \u201cyes\u201d to the following questions does not mean that they suffer from a mental disorder but that they have a certain political philosophy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you hate coercion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you love freedom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Are you willing to risk punishments to gain freedom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you distrust large, impersonal, and distant authorities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you reject centralized authority and believe in participa\u00adtory democracy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you hate powerful bigness of any kind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Do you hate laws and rules that benefit the people at the top and make life miserable for people at the bottom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are different varieties of anarchism and there are different varieties of disruptive people, and these varieties are worth examining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One group of freedom lovers hates money, inequality, and exploitation of any kind. They reject a capitalist economy and aim for a society based on cooperative, mutually owned enterprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are essen\u00adtially leftist-anarchists\u2014\u201canarcho-socialists,\u201d \u201canarcho-syndicalists,\u201d or \u201canarcho-communitarians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If they discover what Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman have to say, they identify with them. They have a strong moral streak of egalitarianism and a desire for social and economic justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another group of freedom lovers also hates the coercion of parents, schools, and the state but, unlike these left-anarchists, they view capitalist markets as ideal for organizing virtually all aspects of society, and they lack an egalitarian moral streak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A political ideology that they can connect with is called \u201canarcho-capitalism,\u201d \u201clibertarian anarchy,\u201d or \u201cmarket anar\u00adchy,\u201d and some become fans of Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anti-authoritarians also can be distinguished by their views on violence as a way of achieving their goals. While many freedom lovers adhere to nonviolence, others consider violence an acceptable tool and will physi\u00adcally or psychologically victimize others to get what they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically, the question of violence has sharply divided anti-authoritarians in their battle to eliminate unjust and illegitimate authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If a nonviolent anarcho-communitarian is dragged by parents into my office for failing to take school seriously but is otherwise pleasant and industrious, I tell parents that I do not believe that there is anything essentially \u201cdisordered\u201d with their child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sometimes gets me fired, but not all that often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is my experience that most parents may think that believing a society can function without coercion is naive but they agree that it\u2019s not a mental illness, and they\u2019re open to suggestions that will create greater harmony and joy within their family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work hard with parents to have them understand that their attempt to coerce their anti-authoritarian child not only has failed\u2014that\u2019s why they\u2019re in my office\u2014but will likely continue to fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And increasingly, the pain of their failed coercion will be compounded by the pain of their child\u2019s resentment, which will destroy their relationship with their child and create even more family pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many parents acknowledge that this resentment has already begun to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ask them if they would try to coerce their homosexual child into being heterosexual or vice versa, and most say, \u201cOf course not!\u201d And so they begin to see that temperamen\u00adtally anti-authoritarian children cannot be similarly coerced without great resentment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work very differently with those anti-authoritarian kids who care only about freedom for themselves and have no problem victimizing others to get their way. These kids usually are initially receptive to me, especially when they hear my viewpoint on traditional schools. However, tension eventually enters our relationship when they hear my views on other matters, especially on the \u201csoul.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I may, for example, tell them that while I believe that they have not lost their soul, eventually people do lose their souls to the extent that they lie to others and to themselves, or to the extent that they act in ways to get the best deal for themselves without caring about the impact on others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often these kids will ask, \u201cWhat happens if we lose our souls?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tell them that in our current economy, it is quite possible to be financially successful without a soul; but they will never have a friend whom they really care about, and so eventually nobody will care about them because human beings eventually stop caring about those who don\u2019t care about them, and so they will have a friendless, loveless life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes this has an impact, sometimes not. Just like political activism, therapy may have an immediate effect, have a delayed one, or not work at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists and therapists need to have humility, especially with regard to their affection and respect\u2014or lack of thereof\u2014for those they are working with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If an activist or a therapist lacks such affection and respect, those whom they are working with will sense it and will likely be unre\u00adceptive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humility also means accepting that one is not capable of being helpful to everyone, and having faith that somebody else, perhaps at some other point of time, may well be helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberation psychology, in short, is about helping create self-respect, respectful relationships, and empowerment, and it is about helping people reject the role of either victim or victimizer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was an excerpt from Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011) by Bruce E. Levine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this book, Levine describes how American institutions and culture have created a passive and defeated populace. But he also outlines how Americans can recover dignity, unity, and the energy to do battle, and provides specific strategies and tactics to wrest power away from the \u201ccorporatocracy\u201d \u2014 the partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image credit: The mural was painted in 1984 by artists Miranda Bergman and O’Brien Thiele in San Francisco. A related book written by Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman use the mural as the book cover for \u201cToward Psychologies of Liberation.\u201d Link in comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, April 2011). His Web site is brucelevine[dot]net<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce E Levine When I first heard the term liberation theology (in opposition to a theol\u00adogy that fosters compliance with the status quo), I thought there should also be a liberation psychology\u2014a psychology that doesn\u2019t equate a lack of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34460,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34458\/revisions\/34460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}