Recovered history: Liberation psychology

Bruce Levine -  On November 16, 1989 in El Salvador, liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, were forced into a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were then murdered by the Salvadoran government’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, a “counter-insurgency unit” created at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in 1980. The massacre is detailed in the Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador.

This year, 25 years after Martin-Baró’s assassination, the Liberation Psychology Network, the Latin American journal Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología, and peace and justice activists around the world will commemorate Martin-Baró, whose integrity, courage, and activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. Embarrassingly, the vast majority of U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists know nothing about Martin-Baró and liberation psychology. Outside of Pacifica Graduate Institute, I’m not aware of any U.S. graduate program with an announced focus on liberation psychology.

Noam Chomsky, longtime critic of both the U.S. government and U.S. psychology, has tried to inform the world about the life and work of Martin-Baró. Chomsky, in praising a collection of his essays (Writings for a Liberation Psychology), said that Martin-Baró had a “rare combination of intelligence and heroism to the challenge his work sets forth ‘to construct a new person in a new society.’ His life and achievement are a true inspiration.”

Why would the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and other mainstream mental health institutions keep U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists and the general public ignorant of the life and work of Martin-Baró?

As a Jesuit priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a social psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed the majority of people. Martin-Baró concluded that mainstream psychology either ignored or paid only lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people’s lives.

Ruling elites and power structures—from monarchies to military dictatorships to the U.S. corporatocracy —have routinely used “professionals” to control the population from rebelling against injustices so as to maintain the status quo. While power structures routinely rely on police and armies to subdue populations, they have also used clergy—thus, the need for liberation theology. And today, the U.S. corporatocracy uses mental health professionals to manipulate and medicate people to adjust and thereby maintain the status quo—thus, the need for liberation psychology.

The U.S. corporatocracy, in order to control other nations—be they in Latin America, Native America, or elsewhere—has provided power and prestige for both individuals and institutions which meet the needs of the corporatocracy. Martin-Baró observed the following about North American psychology: “In order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.”