Trauma and Liberation Psychology
It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the most influential figures in the development of postcolonial theory, and anticolonial struggle, was a trained medical psychiatrist whose political awakening occurred during the Algerian uprising against French colonial rule.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon provides a psychoanalysis of colonialism. Part of this analysis includes a critique of psychiatry as a tool for colonial domination. Psychiatric hospitals, Fanon (2004 [1963], p. 181) writes, proliferated during colonization with the intent of “‘curing’ a colonized subject correctly.” Under colonialism, resistance to colonial domination was considered a form of madness in need of curing. That is, if the colonial subject could ever truly be cured. As Fanon (2004 [1963], p. 222) notes, colonial “magistrates, policemen and doctors” in Algeria “held serious dissertations on the relationship between Muslims and blood.” Today we hear similar proclamations about Arab and Muslim bloodlust and the supposed Palestinian “culture of death.” That psychiatry was used to advance and justify the colonial project required the development of a counter-psychiatry developed from the perspective of the oppressed. While Fanon believed that violent, anticolonial struggle was the only path to psychological and social liberation, one of his many theoretical proteges, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, believed that liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressor could be achieved through critical self-examination and consciousness raising, or concientizacion.This notion of critical consciousness raising is at the heart of both Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, as well as an allied social and epistemological project in Latin America - that of liberation psychology. Liberation psychology has close ties to indigenous psychology (Allwood and Berry 2006), postcolonial psychology (Duran and Duran 1995), feminist psychology (Moane 2011), and other critical psychologies, which as a whole aim to “transform psychology into an emancipatory, radical, social-justice seeking, or status-quo-resisting approach that understands psychological issues as taking place in specific political-economic or cultural-historical contexts” (Teo 2012).
Critical psychologies respond to the indiscriminate importation of dominant Western psychological models, and seek to advance their own understanding and ways of addressing the traumas of war. Such perspectives critique the following assumptions: (1) the causes and effects of political violence are purely medical, (2) the effects of mass trauma can be measured individually; those who are not “diagnosed” or “diagnosable” are not affected, and (3) solutions are primarily found in individual, psychological treatment, not in the realms of community or society (see Summerfield 1999, 2000).Drawing inspiration from liberation theology, Ignacio Martin-Bard, a Jesuit Priest and psychologist living in El Salvador during the 1980s, called for no less than the creation of a new horizon for psychology to counter these presuppositions. This requires, he argued, a new epistemology and a new praxis to service the needs of the majority of the population, by which he meant the poor and oppressed (Martin-Barti 1996, p. 26). In line with the work of Freire’s notions of Conscientization, or the dialogical process of reflection and action that helps develop critical awareness and a sense of agency, liberation psychology, as described by Martin-BarrS, requires three related projects: (1) people must be engaged in transforming their reality - a process that is accomplished through dialogue and relationship; (2) people must come to understand the “mechanisms of oppression and dehumanization” (Martin-Barb 1996, p. 40), thus building critical consciousness and fostering the potential for alternative ways of understanding the world; and (3) the new understandings that are built through these processes result in a renewed sense of self and agency. Practices of liberation psychology therefore require honoring and attempting to draw out people's understandings of the political and historical contexts of suffering.
Adopting such a position may require practitioners to take sides in a conflict, going against a central tenant in Western humanitarian aid.
However, taking sides against the oppressor or oppressors (whoever they may be) is only asking practitioners to make ethical choices, not to abandon objectivity. As Martin-Barri (1996, p. 122) contends:The curative work of the psychologist is necessary, but if psychology’s work is limited to curing, it can become simply a palliative that contributes to prolonging a situation which generates and multiplies the very ills it strives to remedy.
What is needed, instead, are analyses of the root causes of violence, along with political means to address them. Trauma, in the form of an accident or sudden loss, is harsh, unexpected, and individual in nature. However, the trauma of political violence is often “perfectly foreseeable and, unfortunately, perhaps even foreseen and planned” (Martin-BarrS 1996, p. 123). Indeed, it is this malicious intent that makes the effects of collective trauma so profoundly disturbing. According to Martin-Barro, examining the effects of trauma is insufficient. Rather, attention should be directed at the conditions that allow trauma to persist. These are what Martin-Barro calls “traumatogenic structures or social conditions,” such as exploitation and oppression, which come to exist as a “normal abnormality” (Martin-Baro 1996, p. 125). Thus, the urgent task of psychologists working towards emancipation is to examine these dehumanizing relations and to play a role in the collective political project of changing them.
Addressing dehumanizing relations requires challenging the notion of an individual victim who possesses no agency in the face of trauma and humiliation. Described by Kleinman (1997, p. 10), the pathologizing and individualizing of trauma often takes on a sequential character as the “trauma victim” goes from being seen as the one who “suffers political terror to one who is a victim of political violence to one who is sick, who has a disease.” Transforming the dehumanizing effects of both trauma and trauma treatment requires “de-privatizing” and resocializing the notions of suffering (Kleinman 1997).
As the introduction to this chapter illustrates, political violence involves entire communities and societies as targets of trauma. As a collective experience, the effects of political violence necessitate attention to the social and political context in which the suffering occurs (Summerfield 2000). Accordingly, the fractured narrative of a community must be restored through a collective and democratic process of recollecting the collective memories of a polity, along with a reclamation of the individual’s place in the collective, including children, and the recovery of social roles (Burton and Kagan 2005, pp. 14-15). A liberation psychology approach would emphasize the democratic nature of such collectivizing of memory, a process which may play a role in reconciliation. This democratic impulse involves attending to the needs of all members of the community, including men, who too suffer trauma, humiliation, and dehumanization (Lindorfer 2009). In its practice, liberation psychology rests on aiding in the collective, political processes through which people create meaning out of overwhelming suffering (Hernandez 2002; see, for instance, Lykes et al. 2007). The following section will provide a narrative of different forms of collective, political processes through which Palestinians have recovered from and resisted collective violence over the last 60 years of displacement and occupation. The purpose of this narrative is both to understand the collective forms of survival and struggle that have emerged in response to political violence, and young people’s role therein, as well as to understand the current context of donor-funded trauma relief projects carried out by Palestinian NGOs today.3