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Writings for a Liberation Psychology
"In your country," Ignacio Martín-Baró remarked to a North American colleague, "it's publish or perish. In ours, it's publish and perish." In November 1989 a Salvadoran death squad extinguished his eloquent voice, raised so often and so passionately against oppression in his adopted country. A Spanish-born Jesuit priest trained in psychology at the University of Chicago, Martín-Baró devoted much of his career to making psychology speak to the community as well as to the individual. This collection of his writings, the first in English translation, clarifies Martín-Baró's importance in Latin American psychology and reveals a major force in the field of social theory.
Gathering essays from an array of professional journals, this volume introduces readers to the questions and concerns that shaped Martín-Baró's thinking over several decades: the psychological dimensions of political repression, the impact of violence and trauma on child development and mental health, the use of psychology for political ends, religion as a tool of ideology, and defining the "real" and the "normal" under conditions of state-sponsored violence and oppression, among others. Though grounded in the harsh realities of civil conflict in Central America, these essays have broad relevance in a world where political and social turmoil determines the conditions of daily life for so many. In them we encounter Martín-Baró's humane, impassioned voice, reaffirming the essential connections among mental health, human rights, and the struggle against injustice. His analysis of contemporary social problems, and of the failure of the social sciences to address those problems, permits us to understand not only the substance of his contribution to social thought but also his lifelong commitment to the campesinos of El Salvador.
Gathering essays from an array of professional journals, this volume introduces readers to the questions and concerns that shaped Martín-Baró's thinking over several decades: the psychological dimensions of political repression, the impact of violence and trauma on child development and mental health, the use of psychology for political ends, religion as a tool of ideology, and defining the "real" and the "normal" under conditions of state-sponsored violence and oppression, among others. Though grounded in the harsh realities of civil conflict in Central America, these essays have broad relevance in a world where political and social turmoil determines the conditions of daily life for so many. In them we encounter Martín-Baró's humane, impassioned voice, reaffirming the essential connections among mental health, human rights, and the struggle against injustice. His analysis of contemporary social problems, and of the failure of the social sciences to address those problems, permits us to understand not only the substance of his contribution to social thought but also his lifelong commitment to the campesinos of El Salvador.
256 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 28, 2019
Martín-Baró argued that psychology has created a fictionalized and ideologized image of what it means to be human based on its ahistoricism and bias toward individualism.
I had this book for a Latino(Raza) class in college. I’m keeping it. I LOVE HISTORY!!!
December 29, 2016
Easily one of my favorite pieces of psychological literature. Unlike many liberation-oriented psychologists, Ignatio's work is grounded in culturally salient therapies and modern methodology. Furthermore, Martin-Baro distances himself from psychology's proclivity to focus exclusively on the individual and assumes a community-based orientation towards healing.
A welcome break from Western psychology's egocentric cognitivism, devoid of cultural perspectives.
A welcome break from Western psychology's egocentric cognitivism, devoid of cultural perspectives.
October 25, 2023
I’m a PhD Counselor Educator and Licensed Therapist and I wish I would have read this in one of my classes. As a Latine counselor and researcher I think this is an essential read for anyone who is Latine or works with Latine clients.
July 21, 2025
THIS.
Martín-Baró is a psychologist and a humanist (as well as a Christian) and his vision for how mental health would come to be is implicitly similar to my definition of good politics (~ politics that at scale make friendship easier to build and to find – see esp pp.120-121).
The psychology he promotes has in common with AEDP (which I find most impactful in healing within the dyadic rx) and the hegemonic woo-woo understanding of healing/change that existed where I went to graduate school (CIIS) a vision of health (see p23) and “profound optimism” (p.172)but parts from AEDP in its rejection of individualism (see p22) even if AEDP grounds individualism in dyadic (but not social) relationship. Those traditions would benefit from wrestling with this work (as did I).
Vii […] how psychological theory and research might be transformed so as to realize their liberatory potential.
Ix. [Contrast with AEDP proposal of “Liberatory Affect” and client base] The deep gravity of his interest was reflected in the seriousness of his fundamental question, to which he always returned: What could he learn that would be helpful to his own task of creating and applying a “psychology” in the service of the Salvadoran people’s struggle for freedom and justice? This is not among the standard questions U.S. psychologists address to one another. [AEDP commitment to transformance of internal life thru rx but not explicitly about transformance of external conditions]
[…]. his view of the biases and limitations of standard models, grew out of his efforts to understand the subjective experience of the oppressed and traumatized people of El Salvador. […] His firm belief in a “liberatory psychology” pressed us to think about how we might transform our practices so that our work would be more relevant to that goal.
X. His intent was to build a psychology from the bottom up, one in which central place would be given to the needs, aims, and experiences of the oppressed. [sim to AEDP?]
[…]. Living among the Salvadoran people, sharing their risks, entering into their collective discourse of resistance – he realized that the traumas of war and violence could not be fully understood by a theory rooted in the individual psyche, such as the medical model of post-traumatic stress disorder.
[…]. The task for psychologists, he concludes, is to do more than treat “post-traumatic stress disorder” as an individual mental health problem. More adequate resolutions to problems of identify development require efforts directed to restoring stable and trusting social relations and the strengthening of the community’s capacity for collective action. [AEDP if we want lib. affect to ground]
Xi. […] their function must be understood in terms of how they serve the needs of people to survive as communities as they try to defend themselves and cope with situations of intolerable oppression. […] We must also examine how, at the same time, these ideological positions serve the political and economic interests of dominant classes.
Xii. He believed the development of a “liberatory psychology” was necessary if the field were to fulfill its promise of serving human needs, of providing tools with which people could transform their lives and rehumanize the world. <>
Xiv. What Martín-Baró finds in El Salvador (and we must watch for elsewhere) is a common sense that cannot be trusted because it has been infiltrated by ideology. Based on personal experience and therefore seemingly valid as a tool for interpreting the world, it is fact a cruel deception, leading us to misconstrue our own reality and to see ourselves through a distorted “ideologically correct” internal lens. When ideology has penetrated our thought structures, we can neither trust nor learn from our own experience. Thus, not until common sense has been de-ideologized can it be a beneficial guide for action. Absent a de-ideologizing process, we may be condemned to interpret the world through the eyes of the oppressor. <>
3-4 The proper role of psychology, Martín-Baró thought, was to assist people in understanding their own realities through a reflection of their own social experience.
5. Martín-Baró argued that psychology has created a fictionalized and ideologized image of what it means to be human, based on its own ahistoricism and bias toward individualism. […] structural problems are reduced to personal problems [….]. the final destination of psychology’s mission, a mission that set out with such good intentions toward self-discovery and a normal life, is a place where people are befuddled, belittled, homogenized, and left on their own to deal with their social oppression.
6. A praxis such as that could furnish psychology with a new way of thinking that conceives of truth […] as a task at hand: “not an account of what has been done, but of what needs to be done.”
8. He saw the transformative character of such actions and dared to immerse both himself and his chosen profession in the process of posibilitar, making possible. With every resource he could muster, he applied his energies to the task of liberation.
16. Toward the end of understanding human behavior and promoting humanizing institutions, we must try to understand ourselves and others in history, as social beings subject to social forces,
17. […] the schemata of psychology break down when we try to use them to respond to the needs of the people.
19. In our case, psychologizing has served, directly or indirectly, to strengthen the oppressive structures, by drawing attention away from them and toward individual and subjective factors.
27. […] psychology has for the most part not been very clear about the intimate relationship between an unalienated personal existence and unalienated social existence [….]. Moreover, psychology has often contributed to obscuring the relationship between personal estrangement and social oppression, presenting the pathology of persons as if it were somehow removed from history and society, and behavioral disorders as if they played themselves out entirely in the individual plane (see Chapter 6).
37. Psychology offers an alternative solution to social conflicts: it tries to change the individual while preserving the social order, or, in the best of cases, generating the illusion that, perhaps, as the individual changes, so will the social order [….]. <>
38. Our imperative is to examine not only what we [psychologists] are but also what we might have been and, above all, what we ought to be, given the needs of our peoples – whether or not we have pre-existing models.
39. […] we can assert that the fundamental horizon for psychology as a field of knowledge is concientización. To some, this assertion may seem escapist, while others may consider it too much of a commitment […]
41 In asserting that concientización ought to be the principal feature in psychology’s horizon, we are proposing that the task of the psychologist must be to achieve the de-alienation of groups and persons by helping them attain a critical understanding of themselves and their reality.
[…]. One cannot do psychology today in Central America without […] trying to make a contribution toward changing all those conditions that dehumanize the majority of the population, alienating their consciousness and blocking the development of their historical identity. But this must be done qua psychologist [….]
42 It is not supposed that a simple consciousness of reality in itself can change that reality […] Concientización […] can go so far as to unleash, the change by breaking up the fatalistic thought processes that give ideological sustenance to the alienation of the popular majorities.
43. <> Is it possible to confront this most serious problem of the victims of war simply by extending the reach of clinical psychology as it is now practiced, to cover more people? Would this not merely represent an effort to reestablish the terms of a social reality that is at the very root of the conflict we are living through? […] This means that psychotherapy must aim directly at the social identity worked out through the prototypes of oppressor and oppressed, and at shaping a new identity for people as members of a human community, in charge of a history [….]
44. It does not entail giving up the technical role the psychologist now performs, but it does involve scrapping theoretical assumptions about adaptation and interventions made from a position of power. For this, what is needed is the elaboration of a different conceptual vision, and perhaps also new methods of diagnosis and intervention.
45. If the psychologist is not called upon to make peace for the forces and social interests at war, he or she is competent to help find paths for replacing violent habits with more rational ones [….]
46. […] it is a question of whether psychological knowledge will be placed in the service of constructing a society where the welfare of the few is not built on the wretchedness of the many, where the fulfillment of some does not require that others be deprived, where the interests of the minority do not demand the dehumanization of all.
77. Time and again, political revolutions have found upon taking power that one of their staunchest enemies is the cognitive-evaluative structure – the personal reference scheme internalized by large sectors of the population during their socialization under the “old regime” [….] Wilhelm Reich (1933) captured the essence of the problem when he held that a political system could survive only if it succeeded in molding the basic character of its citizens to fit its political agenda.
93. […] worth mentioning the model of locus of control […] to distinguish two classes of individuals […] In the first place, this dichotomy assumes that such consequences are always under the control of the person, a suggestion that is really quite insulting [….]
109. If the uniqueness of human beings consists less in their being endowed with life […] and more in the kind of life they construct historically, then mental health ceases to be a secondary problem and becomes a fundamental one.
114. The lie has come to permeate our existence to such an extent that we end up creating an imaginary world, whose only truth is precisely that it is a false world, and whose only pillar of support is the fear of reality, which is too “subversive” to be tolerated […] In this environment of lies, thrown off balance by social polarization, with no place for sanity and reason, violence dominates life to such an extent that […] people begin to believe that violence is the only solution to the problem of violence itself.
[…] common sense has been replaced by partisan sense, where unreason stifles the possibility of humanizing contact between different social sectors and prevents the development of daily normality?
115. But this [Salvadoran] love finds itself blocked by the personal and social lie […] by the violence that corrodes the foundation of respect and trust between people and groups.
Without doubt, of all the deleterious effects of the war on the mental health of the Salvadoran people, the undermining of social relations is the worst, for our social relations are the scaffolding we rely on to construct ourselves historically, both as individuals and as a human community.
117. […] the children, those who are constructing their identities and their life’s horizons in the fabric of our present social relations. They are truly the “children of war,” and we have the difficult task of ensuring that they do not structure their personalities by learning violence, irrationality, and the lie. [see GAZA]
119. What should we do as mental health professionals, given the situation now confronting our people? How do we begin to respond to the serious questions posed by the war, when perhaps we haven’t even been able to offer an adequate response in times of peace?
120. […] it forces us to cast off the veil of lies we move about in, and to look at the truth of our social existence without the ideological crutches of our routine work or of professional inertia.
In a conversation with Salvatore Maddi, a professor […] hearing him say that, ultimately, the healing power of any psychotherapeutic method depends on the dosage of its break with the dominant culture. The value of Freudian psychoanalysis, when it scandalized the European puritanism of the early twentieth century, would have been rooted in such a break. Another example is the best of Rogerian “nondirectional" therapy, in response to the one-dimensionality of the postwar North American therapeutic style. Perhaps this is what is lacking in present-day psychotherapeutic methods, including psychoanalysis and "client-centered" psychotherapy: a dosage of rupture with the dominant system. […] we must work hard to find theoretical models and methods of intervention that allow us, as a community and as individuals, to break with the culture of our vitiated social relations and put other, more humanizing, relationships in their place.
If the foundation for a people's mental health lies in the existence of humanizing relationships, of collective ties within which and through which the personal humanity of each individual is acknowledged and in which no one's reality is denied, then the building of a new society, or at least a better and more just society, is not only an economic and political problem; it is also essentially a mental health problem.
121. And this task consists not so much in teaching relaxation techniques or new ways of communicating, however important these objectives may be, as in training and socializing so that people's desires truly conform to their needs. This means that our subjective aspirations, both as groups and as individuals, must be oriented toward the satisfaction of our true needs; in other words, toward the requirements that lead us down the path of our humanization, and not those which tie us to compulsive consumption, to the detriment of many and the dehumanization of all. This would perhaps be the best psychotherapy for the effects of war and, surely, the best mental hygiene for building our future.
122. […] 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. Hence, we cannot limit our thinking to the question of what treatment is most effective for children who have suffered the trauma inherent in war; we cannot limit ourselves to addressing the post-traumatic stress. Our analysis has to extend itself to the roots of those traumas, and therefore to the war itself as a social psychopathogenic situation.
123. […] an analysis of trauma as the normal consequence of a social system’s way of functioning.
134. […] psychosocial trauma. This trauma arises because, as part of their development, the children are obliged to face some dilemmas whose terms are always unsatisfactory. [see 135 for El Salvador-specific plea]
149. Eliminating the ideological dimension – the relationship any social process has to the whole historical milieu in which it evolved – turns psychology into a blind enterprise with a scientific expertise that is led into the service of the established order.
150. But this failure mimics the dominant orientation in psychology, which is prone to disregard the historical reality in which we live, particularly if it means having to take a political stand.
172. […] he shows that the recovery of historical consciousness is possible even under the most extreme, most repressive of conditions, when reality is so thoroughly ideologized that the official discourse is the only voice that speaks. […] Martín-Baró saw in the theory and practice of psychology the potential for de-ideologizing artificial realities and for re-empowering the people to interpret and shape their own histories. In the end the question is, do psychologists dare to be empowered?
178. Because historically the people is called upon to be – to be itself – it must overcome its servitude, and must eliminate everything that stands in the way of its becoming itself.
180. The people is the depository of communitarian social values that cannot yet flower except as a plan or a repressed possibility. The people, therefore, is the bosom of a society’s identity, but not as present reality so much as an opening toward the collective future. The people is a denunciation of today’s lack of solidarity, and the annunciation of tomorrow’s community.
182 […] the concept of the people involves three complimentary aspects: […] history seeks freedom, solidarity is marshalled to shape a community, and exploitation makes claims for justice.
213. […] though fatalism is a personal syndrome, it correlates psychologically with particular social structures. […] psychosocial assertion that there is a correlation between objective and subjective structures, between the demands of social systems and the character traits of individuals.
215. Unable to get to the source of their condition, their consciousness takes refuge in a fatalistic attitude, transforming history into nature.
----
33. psych: observe human exp: phenomenological -socially, not just in therapy
104 child & trauma of institutionalized violence
105. bias (partisanship) allows still for objectivity
107 surveys -> psychology as dangerous tool
110-11. balancing ind & social causes of mental health; disorder: abnormal reaction to normal situation? normal reaction to abnormal situation?
116 most painful effect of war on members of privileged classes
124. limitations of individualistic view of psychic trauma
125. Normal abnormality especially effects children in their attempts to develop lives “within the network of these dehumanizing relations.”
127. family of calm limits psych impact of war on children; still, war teaches children violence works and is legitimate.
128. war child w/o childhood
140. CBCs open to acting to change world vs Evangelicals “leaving to God the task of transforming the “world of sin.””
142-3. political impact of religious conversion/evangelicals in ES; immanence/transcendence
152. Freud and naivete of imagining an “absolutely non-coercive political regime”
188 the Social Lie: bourgeois hegemony
218 how to end fatalism of masses
Martín-Baró is a psychologist and a humanist (as well as a Christian) and his vision for how mental health would come to be is implicitly similar to my definition of good politics (~ politics that at scale make friendship easier to build and to find – see esp pp.120-121).
The psychology he promotes has in common with AEDP (which I find most impactful in healing within the dyadic rx) and the hegemonic woo-woo understanding of healing/change that existed where I went to graduate school (CIIS) a vision of health (see p23) and “profound optimism” (p.172)but parts from AEDP in its rejection of individualism (see p22) even if AEDP grounds individualism in dyadic (but not social) relationship. Those traditions would benefit from wrestling with this work (as did I).
Vii […] how psychological theory and research might be transformed so as to realize their liberatory potential.
Ix. [Contrast with AEDP proposal of “Liberatory Affect” and client base] The deep gravity of his interest was reflected in the seriousness of his fundamental question, to which he always returned: What could he learn that would be helpful to his own task of creating and applying a “psychology” in the service of the Salvadoran people’s struggle for freedom and justice? This is not among the standard questions U.S. psychologists address to one another. [AEDP commitment to transformance of internal life thru rx but not explicitly about transformance of external conditions]
[…]. his view of the biases and limitations of standard models, grew out of his efforts to understand the subjective experience of the oppressed and traumatized people of El Salvador. […] His firm belief in a “liberatory psychology” pressed us to think about how we might transform our practices so that our work would be more relevant to that goal.
X. His intent was to build a psychology from the bottom up, one in which central place would be given to the needs, aims, and experiences of the oppressed. [sim to AEDP?]
[…]. Living among the Salvadoran people, sharing their risks, entering into their collective discourse of resistance – he realized that the traumas of war and violence could not be fully understood by a theory rooted in the individual psyche, such as the medical model of post-traumatic stress disorder.
[…]. The task for psychologists, he concludes, is to do more than treat “post-traumatic stress disorder” as an individual mental health problem. More adequate resolutions to problems of identify development require efforts directed to restoring stable and trusting social relations and the strengthening of the community’s capacity for collective action. [AEDP if we want lib. affect to ground]
Xi. […] their function must be understood in terms of how they serve the needs of people to survive as communities as they try to defend themselves and cope with situations of intolerable oppression. […] We must also examine how, at the same time, these ideological positions serve the political and economic interests of dominant classes.
Xii. He believed the development of a “liberatory psychology” was necessary if the field were to fulfill its promise of serving human needs, of providing tools with which people could transform their lives and rehumanize the world. <>
Xiv. What Martín-Baró finds in El Salvador (and we must watch for elsewhere) is a common sense that cannot be trusted because it has been infiltrated by ideology. Based on personal experience and therefore seemingly valid as a tool for interpreting the world, it is fact a cruel deception, leading us to misconstrue our own reality and to see ourselves through a distorted “ideologically correct” internal lens. When ideology has penetrated our thought structures, we can neither trust nor learn from our own experience. Thus, not until common sense has been de-ideologized can it be a beneficial guide for action. Absent a de-ideologizing process, we may be condemned to interpret the world through the eyes of the oppressor. <>
3-4 The proper role of psychology, Martín-Baró thought, was to assist people in understanding their own realities through a reflection of their own social experience.
5. Martín-Baró argued that psychology has created a fictionalized and ideologized image of what it means to be human, based on its own ahistoricism and bias toward individualism. […] structural problems are reduced to personal problems [….]. the final destination of psychology’s mission, a mission that set out with such good intentions toward self-discovery and a normal life, is a place where people are befuddled, belittled, homogenized, and left on their own to deal with their social oppression.
6. A praxis such as that could furnish psychology with a new way of thinking that conceives of truth […] as a task at hand: “not an account of what has been done, but of what needs to be done.”
8. He saw the transformative character of such actions and dared to immerse both himself and his chosen profession in the process of posibilitar, making possible. With every resource he could muster, he applied his energies to the task of liberation.
16. Toward the end of understanding human behavior and promoting humanizing institutions, we must try to understand ourselves and others in history, as social beings subject to social forces,
17. […] the schemata of psychology break down when we try to use them to respond to the needs of the people.
19. In our case, psychologizing has served, directly or indirectly, to strengthen the oppressive structures, by drawing attention away from them and toward individual and subjective factors.
27. […] psychology has for the most part not been very clear about the intimate relationship between an unalienated personal existence and unalienated social existence [….]. Moreover, psychology has often contributed to obscuring the relationship between personal estrangement and social oppression, presenting the pathology of persons as if it were somehow removed from history and society, and behavioral disorders as if they played themselves out entirely in the individual plane (see Chapter 6).
37. Psychology offers an alternative solution to social conflicts: it tries to change the individual while preserving the social order, or, in the best of cases, generating the illusion that, perhaps, as the individual changes, so will the social order [….]. <>
38. Our imperative is to examine not only what we [psychologists] are but also what we might have been and, above all, what we ought to be, given the needs of our peoples – whether or not we have pre-existing models.
39. […] we can assert that the fundamental horizon for psychology as a field of knowledge is concientización. To some, this assertion may seem escapist, while others may consider it too much of a commitment […]
41 In asserting that concientización ought to be the principal feature in psychology’s horizon, we are proposing that the task of the psychologist must be to achieve the de-alienation of groups and persons by helping them attain a critical understanding of themselves and their reality.
[…]. One cannot do psychology today in Central America without […] trying to make a contribution toward changing all those conditions that dehumanize the majority of the population, alienating their consciousness and blocking the development of their historical identity. But this must be done qua psychologist [….]
42 It is not supposed that a simple consciousness of reality in itself can change that reality […] Concientización […] can go so far as to unleash, the change by breaking up the fatalistic thought processes that give ideological sustenance to the alienation of the popular majorities.
43. <> Is it possible to confront this most serious problem of the victims of war simply by extending the reach of clinical psychology as it is now practiced, to cover more people? Would this not merely represent an effort to reestablish the terms of a social reality that is at the very root of the conflict we are living through? […] This means that psychotherapy must aim directly at the social identity worked out through the prototypes of oppressor and oppressed, and at shaping a new identity for people as members of a human community, in charge of a history [….]
44. It does not entail giving up the technical role the psychologist now performs, but it does involve scrapping theoretical assumptions about adaptation and interventions made from a position of power. For this, what is needed is the elaboration of a different conceptual vision, and perhaps also new methods of diagnosis and intervention.
45. If the psychologist is not called upon to make peace for the forces and social interests at war, he or she is competent to help find paths for replacing violent habits with more rational ones [….]
46. […] it is a question of whether psychological knowledge will be placed in the service of constructing a society where the welfare of the few is not built on the wretchedness of the many, where the fulfillment of some does not require that others be deprived, where the interests of the minority do not demand the dehumanization of all.
77. Time and again, political revolutions have found upon taking power that one of their staunchest enemies is the cognitive-evaluative structure – the personal reference scheme internalized by large sectors of the population during their socialization under the “old regime” [….] Wilhelm Reich (1933) captured the essence of the problem when he held that a political system could survive only if it succeeded in molding the basic character of its citizens to fit its political agenda.
93. […] worth mentioning the model of locus of control […] to distinguish two classes of individuals […] In the first place, this dichotomy assumes that such consequences are always under the control of the person, a suggestion that is really quite insulting [….]
109. If the uniqueness of human beings consists less in their being endowed with life […] and more in the kind of life they construct historically, then mental health ceases to be a secondary problem and becomes a fundamental one.
114. The lie has come to permeate our existence to such an extent that we end up creating an imaginary world, whose only truth is precisely that it is a false world, and whose only pillar of support is the fear of reality, which is too “subversive” to be tolerated […] In this environment of lies, thrown off balance by social polarization, with no place for sanity and reason, violence dominates life to such an extent that […] people begin to believe that violence is the only solution to the problem of violence itself.
[…] common sense has been replaced by partisan sense, where unreason stifles the possibility of humanizing contact between different social sectors and prevents the development of daily normality?
115. But this [Salvadoran] love finds itself blocked by the personal and social lie […] by the violence that corrodes the foundation of respect and trust between people and groups.
Without doubt, of all the deleterious effects of the war on the mental health of the Salvadoran people, the undermining of social relations is the worst, for our social relations are the scaffolding we rely on to construct ourselves historically, both as individuals and as a human community.
117. […] the children, those who are constructing their identities and their life’s horizons in the fabric of our present social relations. They are truly the “children of war,” and we have the difficult task of ensuring that they do not structure their personalities by learning violence, irrationality, and the lie. [see GAZA]
119. What should we do as mental health professionals, given the situation now confronting our people? How do we begin to respond to the serious questions posed by the war, when perhaps we haven’t even been able to offer an adequate response in times of peace?
120. […] it forces us to cast off the veil of lies we move about in, and to look at the truth of our social existence without the ideological crutches of our routine work or of professional inertia.
In a conversation with Salvatore Maddi, a professor […] hearing him say that, ultimately, the healing power of any psychotherapeutic method depends on the dosage of its break with the dominant culture. The value of Freudian psychoanalysis, when it scandalized the European puritanism of the early twentieth century, would have been rooted in such a break. Another example is the best of Rogerian “nondirectional" therapy, in response to the one-dimensionality of the postwar North American therapeutic style. Perhaps this is what is lacking in present-day psychotherapeutic methods, including psychoanalysis and "client-centered" psychotherapy: a dosage of rupture with the dominant system. […] we must work hard to find theoretical models and methods of intervention that allow us, as a community and as individuals, to break with the culture of our vitiated social relations and put other, more humanizing, relationships in their place.
If the foundation for a people's mental health lies in the existence of humanizing relationships, of collective ties within which and through which the personal humanity of each individual is acknowledged and in which no one's reality is denied, then the building of a new society, or at least a better and more just society, is not only an economic and political problem; it is also essentially a mental health problem.
121. And this task consists not so much in teaching relaxation techniques or new ways of communicating, however important these objectives may be, as in training and socializing so that people's desires truly conform to their needs. This means that our subjective aspirations, both as groups and as individuals, must be oriented toward the satisfaction of our true needs; in other words, toward the requirements that lead us down the path of our humanization, and not those which tie us to compulsive consumption, to the detriment of many and the dehumanization of all. This would perhaps be the best psychotherapy for the effects of war and, surely, the best mental hygiene for building our future.
122. […] 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. Hence, we cannot limit our thinking to the question of what treatment is most effective for children who have suffered the trauma inherent in war; we cannot limit ourselves to addressing the post-traumatic stress. Our analysis has to extend itself to the roots of those traumas, and therefore to the war itself as a social psychopathogenic situation.
123. […] an analysis of trauma as the normal consequence of a social system’s way of functioning.
134. […] psychosocial trauma. This trauma arises because, as part of their development, the children are obliged to face some dilemmas whose terms are always unsatisfactory. [see 135 for El Salvador-specific plea]
149. Eliminating the ideological dimension – the relationship any social process has to the whole historical milieu in which it evolved – turns psychology into a blind enterprise with a scientific expertise that is led into the service of the established order.
150. But this failure mimics the dominant orientation in psychology, which is prone to disregard the historical reality in which we live, particularly if it means having to take a political stand.
172. […] he shows that the recovery of historical consciousness is possible even under the most extreme, most repressive of conditions, when reality is so thoroughly ideologized that the official discourse is the only voice that speaks. […] Martín-Baró saw in the theory and practice of psychology the potential for de-ideologizing artificial realities and for re-empowering the people to interpret and shape their own histories. In the end the question is, do psychologists dare to be empowered?
178. Because historically the people is called upon to be – to be itself – it must overcome its servitude, and must eliminate everything that stands in the way of its becoming itself.
180. The people is the depository of communitarian social values that cannot yet flower except as a plan or a repressed possibility. The people, therefore, is the bosom of a society’s identity, but not as present reality so much as an opening toward the collective future. The people is a denunciation of today’s lack of solidarity, and the annunciation of tomorrow’s community.
182 […] the concept of the people involves three complimentary aspects: […] history seeks freedom, solidarity is marshalled to shape a community, and exploitation makes claims for justice.
213. […] though fatalism is a personal syndrome, it correlates psychologically with particular social structures. […] psychosocial assertion that there is a correlation between objective and subjective structures, between the demands of social systems and the character traits of individuals.
215. Unable to get to the source of their condition, their consciousness takes refuge in a fatalistic attitude, transforming history into nature.
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33. psych: observe human exp: phenomenological -socially, not just in therapy
104 child & trauma of institutionalized violence
105. bias (partisanship) allows still for objectivity
107 surveys -> psychology as dangerous tool
110-11. balancing ind & social causes of mental health; disorder: abnormal reaction to normal situation? normal reaction to abnormal situation?
116 most painful effect of war on members of privileged classes
124. limitations of individualistic view of psychic trauma
125. Normal abnormality especially effects children in their attempts to develop lives “within the network of these dehumanizing relations.”
127. family of calm limits psych impact of war on children; still, war teaches children violence works and is legitimate.
128. war child w/o childhood
140. CBCs open to acting to change world vs Evangelicals “leaving to God the task of transforming the “world of sin.””
142-3. political impact of religious conversion/evangelicals in ES; immanence/transcendence
152. Freud and naivete of imagining an “absolutely non-coercive political regime”
188 the Social Lie: bourgeois hegemony
218 how to end fatalism of masses
September 16, 2024
What is Psychology and whose interests does it serve? Many times I have sat with myself after a session of therapy, considering that so many people I see face the same societal ills: racism, sexual abuse, misogyny, and so on. As a psychologist, I wait for them in my clinic until their difficulties manifest into mental health difficulties and treat them so that they may perhaps regain their functioning and wellbeing.
But what of the societal ills themselves? That is what this book seeks to discuss. Written from a Latin American, specifically a Salvadorean perspective, the book argues that in order to help society, a psychologist must see things from the perspective of the downtrodden and advocate for societal and political changes, not just individual ones which we have become very comfortable with. This resonated greatly with me as someone who had become cynical sitting in clinic. Cyclical watching other professionals treat trauma while casting a blind eye on happenings from Grenfell to Sudan to Palestine to Congo.
There is a lot more to this book, and it was enough to get it's author murdered by the regime. It is very academic and is based on the authors on research in areas as wide as religion, state violence, mental health, research and so on.
Highly recommended for an alternate view to the very western, individualised, 'apolitical' stuff we are taught at university.
But what of the societal ills themselves? That is what this book seeks to discuss. Written from a Latin American, specifically a Salvadorean perspective, the book argues that in order to help society, a psychologist must see things from the perspective of the downtrodden and advocate for societal and political changes, not just individual ones which we have become very comfortable with. This resonated greatly with me as someone who had become cynical sitting in clinic. Cyclical watching other professionals treat trauma while casting a blind eye on happenings from Grenfell to Sudan to Palestine to Congo.
There is a lot more to this book, and it was enough to get it's author murdered by the regime. It is very academic and is based on the authors on research in areas as wide as religion, state violence, mental health, research and so on.
Highly recommended for an alternate view to the very western, individualised, 'apolitical' stuff we are taught at university.
January 5, 2026
Writings for a Liberation Psychology is gospel for those wanting to learn about alternative, anti-oppressive approaches to mental health. Ignacio Martin-Baro uses in-depth analyses of societal inequities, particularly those present in El Salvador during and before the Salvadoran Civil War, to inform strategies for enhancing emotional and mental health from a macro perspective. I found his perspectives on fatalism in marginalized communities insightful and noticed similarities between his examples and the population I work with as a psychotherapist.
I initially found myself disappointed by Martin-Baro's dull and overly theoretical analysis, which was similar to my reading experience of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I was discouraged and began to question my reading comprehension skills as it relates to social sciences and psychology. However, I chose to change my approach midway and concentrate on reading more conceptually instead of depending on my usual "cruise-control" method. This greatly enhanced my experience, enabling me to gain a deep understanding of the analyses.
Similar to Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," I will reference "Writings for a Liberation Psychology" throughout my career to enhance my practice and praxis as a liberation-focused therapist.
I initially found myself disappointed by Martin-Baro's dull and overly theoretical analysis, which was similar to my reading experience of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I was discouraged and began to question my reading comprehension skills as it relates to social sciences and psychology. However, I chose to change my approach midway and concentrate on reading more conceptually instead of depending on my usual "cruise-control" method. This greatly enhanced my experience, enabling me to gain a deep understanding of the analyses.
Similar to Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," I will reference "Writings for a Liberation Psychology" throughout my career to enhance my practice and praxis as a liberation-focused therapist.
August 7, 2025
"Recovery of memory. The first element for putting fatalism aside is overcoming the exclusive focus on the present, not only by opening people's minds to the future, but also by recovering the memory of their personal and collective past. Only insofar as people and groups become aware of their historical roots, especially those events and conditions which have shaped their situation, can they gain the perspective they need to take the measure of their own identity. Knowing who you are means knowing where you come from and on whom you depend. There is no true self-knowledge that is not an acknowledgement of one's origins, one's community identity, and one's own history." - Fr. Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology
August 25, 2025
One of the most important books a person can read if you are interested in Community Psychology, Participatory Action Research, Liberation Psychology, or Liberation Theology. This book provides a window into the process of engaging communities in conscientization - uncovering the "big lie" and how all of this affects communities. Notably, Martin-Baro was martyred for his work raising the concerns of community members by the government of El Salvador, demonstrating that ideas are dangerous, and liberation is tenuous.
January 23, 2019
At times the writing is meandering or possibly poorly translated. Valuable ideas and interesting concepts are presented but not in the most clearly understood language unfortunately. For such a small book it was a slog getting through it but the most engaging ideas I took away were around "de-ideologizing reality" and the need people's public opinion research. So if you want to skim the book, I recommend the articles chapters that focus on those.
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