You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a 2008 lecture, Peter McLaren, influenced, I believe, by the writings of Richard Kearney (1998), suggested that the Western tradition has become excessively enchanted with the spiritual-existential question, Who am I? This preoccupation tends to divert us from questions that are more pertinent from the standpoint of immediate political relevance: Where am I? Where are we? Such questions - instigating our reflection on, as well as interrogation and assessment of, our positioning within the nexus of interpersonal, cultural and economic relations - lead us more immediately toward considerations of praxis. How we think about our location within the hierarchies of power and social exploitation, as well as our connectedness with the values of our community, has inspired the emergence of liberation psychologies over recent decades; it is surely also central to any concern with the application of psychoanalytic insights to the mandate of progressive social change.
As is now well known, liberation psychology is the rallying cry of the late Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), who was murdered by the Salvadoran army in 1989 and who had vehemently advanced a new role for psychologists during the civil wars in Central America (see Hollander, 1997). His ideas drew from many sources, including the work of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Paolo Freire, and the Latin American freedom and justice movement in Catholic theology. Liberation psychology has definitions both narrow and broad. The narrow definition is that “psychology of liberation is the practice of psychology under the conditions of state repression” (Alschuler, 2006, p. 3). The broader vision is that psychologies of liberation are, as Watkins and Schulman point out, “compass points or orientations in the form of ideas, practices, and projects that nurture an imagination of alternative ways of thinking and acting together that can transform participation in social, economic, and ecological change and address psychological sufferings