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Forum: I nspiring Psychoanalytic Writing

I gnacio Martn-Bars Writings for a Liberation
Psychology.

Barnaby B. Barratt


As many people now know, Professor Ignacio Martn-Bar was a
radical psychologist, prolific scholar and Jesuit priest, who was killed
by the Salvadoran army in 1989, a few days after his 47
th
birthday. It is
reported that a squad of an elite counter-insurgency unit, the Atlacatl
Battalion which had been trained by the United States Army, entered
the Professors home on the campus of Universidad Centroamericano in
the middle of the night. Martn-Bar was working on a manuscript
while five other resident members of faculty, as well as their
housekeeper and her daughter, all slept. The squad executed them all.
Previously, there had been about six politically motivated attempts on
Martn-Bars life a barbaric response to his scholarship and to his
humanitarianism in taking the political stand that the mandate of
liberation theology calls a preferential option for the poor (Anon,
1992; Aron and Corne, 1994; Hassett and Lacey, 1991). This is just one
chapter in the period of El Salvadoran history from 1980 to 1991,
during which, according to the Report of the U.N. Truth Commission on
El Salvador, nearly a hundred thousand dissenters disappeared or were
known to have been murdered, and millions were forced to leave the
country because of the conflict (IACHR, 1988; U.N., 1993).

Martn-Bar received his PhD in Social and Organizational Psychology
from the University of Chicago. Although his commitment to
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psychoanalysis as a clinical practice may have been slight, it is evident
that he had read Freuds work with interest, produced powerful writings
on the social and historical context of mental health and developed a
mandate for liberation psychology (Watkins and Shulman, 2008). My
Spanish is weak and I am no expert on Martn-Bars prodigious output
(eleven books and over a hundred articles), but I know well those
twelve essays that are the most readily available in translation
(Martn-Bar, 1974-1989; 1988). As I will suggest, these are inspiring
precisely because they challenge us to reconsider the sociocultural and
political impact of intellectual work, the specific question of mental
health or normal abnormality in the context of oppression, and the
potential of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as modalities that can
either perpetuate the ideologies of injustice or constitute a liberatory
praxis. I write this tribute for these reasons, outlining some of
Martn-Bars ideas and then offering some personal reflections on the
sociopolitical positioning and the cultural implications of
psychoanalytic labour.

Central to Martn-Bars visionary commitments is not only Aristotles
insight that the political is personal and the personal is inherently
politicized, but also that psychology has a potentially crucial role either
in endorsing oppression or in empowering the processes of liberation.
Much of his writing serves both as a critique of the mechanisms by
which this discipline becomes an ideological conveyance that sustains
the status quo, and concomitantly as a mission to redesign the venture
in terms that might be characterized either as free of such biases or as
implementing what he calls a preferential option for those who are
marginalized and oppressed by the dominant order. He argues that
psychology as developed in the past 150 years in an almost entirely
European and North American environment generates a fictionalized
image of what it means to be human. The fiction is that of a
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123
decontextualized or ahistorical individual, and it functions as an
ideological mechanism by which oppression is perpetuated.

Martn-Bars writings demonstrate how the production of this
falsifying image, which leads people to misinterpret their situation in
the world, depends on three ideological components that have
characterized the social sciences throughout the 20
th
century.

1) Scientistic mimicry is the error by which psychology typically
studies, analyzes and interprets the motives, behaviours and
personalities of people as if from a position of external neutrality
(and, of course, we might immediately ask ourselves how true this is
of our versions of clinical practice). He successfully shows how
such specious neutrality invariably reverts to an endorsement of
the status quo and how, from such a position, the voices of the
marginalized and oppressed are rarely listened to, and instead are
routinely objectified and often pathologized.

2) The next falsifying component is a collection of five features that
Martn-Bar dubs inadequate epistemology, although, by the logic
of his own arguments, inadequate is too mildly pejorative.
Positivism treats reality as if it is merely a given, even where it is
indubitably a social construction (e.g. economic and political
structures). Individualism reduces social problems to matters of
personal characteristics, competing interests and aspirations.
Hedonism depicts humans as ultimately motivated by seeking
pleasure and avoiding unpleasure, whereas Martn-Bar is deeply
impressed by the self-sacrificial and altruistic aspects of our
behaviour. Homeostatic vision is in my view an aspect of the
preceding features and refers to what Martn-Bar sees as the social
sciences inherent distrust of change. Then there is ahistoricism,
which Martn-Bar considers the most seriously flawed assumption
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of the prevailing psychology. Depicting human nature in terms of its
allegedly universal qualities, it leads to a belief that, as he illustrates
it, there are no fundamental differences between, say, a student at
MIT and a Nicaraguan campesino, between John Smith from Peoria,
Illinois, and Leonor Gonzales from Cuisnahuat, El Salvador
(Martn-Bar, 1974-1989, p. 23). Thus, the discipline lauds as
universally applicable the drivel of Maslows Needs Hierarchy or
the hegemony of the Stanford-Binet concept of intelligence.

3) Martn-Bar calls the final component of social scientific ideology
provincial dogmatism. This refers to the way in which the
discipline of psychology has a history of preoccupation with fatuous
debates of little relevance to the actual lives that are touched
beneficially or not by its labours. Among other issues, I found
myself reminded of the somewhat absurd discussions over the
scientificity of psychoanalysis, which occupied so much of the
literature in the mid and late twentieth century, and which thus
distracted so many of us from the more salient question: what sort of
a science, and what sort of healing, is involved in psychoanalysis?

In considering the possible redesign of the discipline his prescriptions
for a liberation psychology Martin-Bar is most provocative and
original. He vividly articulates what we, as clinicians, should surely
know: in addition to nutrition, safe and sanitary shelter, healthcare and
meaningful work, every human needs vision, dignity, the opportunity to
know compassion and to learn to love. In relation to this, Martn-Bar
specifies three urgent tasks for psychology in El Salvador.

1) A principal task is to help with the recovery of historical meaning
or memory, for he clearly understands how the personal or private
internalization of the public structures of oppression results in a
legacy of shame and guilt that attenuates the possibilities of
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125
liberation. He writes, the predominantly negative image that the
average Latin American has of himself or herself when compared
with other people indicates the internalization of oppression, its
incorporation into the spirit itself fertile soil for conformist
fatalism, and so very convenient for the established order (1974-
1989, p. 30).

2) Another urgent task for psychology is the de-ideologizing of
consciousness. Here Martn-Bar leans on the ideas of Paulo Freire
(e.g. 1971) on concientizacin as the development of critical
consciousness. His discussion of the way in which commonsense is
inevitably infiltrated with ideology to the extent that we can neither
trust nor learn from our own experience is powerfully
thought-provoking (even though presented in a manner very
different from the way in which similar ideas have been advanced
by more psychoanalytically-oriented commentators). As a social
psychologist by training, Martn-Bar was understandably focused
on the way in which mass media are manipulated both to keep the
Latin American population unaware of its own oppression, and to
convey the cultural aspirations of the dominant culture (e.g.
Hollywood sitcoms being rerun in remote El Salvadoran villages).
This manipulation serves to deflect the potentials of critical
consciousness in relation to the here-and-now of poverty,
exploitation and oppression. In this context, Martn-Bar also
refocuses the problems inherent in the clinical criteria of disorder,
mental health and abnormality. He persuasively argues how
readily such concepts are accommodated to endorse the prevailing
reality and the dominant order; indirectly, he asks us to explain how
we define the individuals abnormal psychology in an
environment that is structurally dehumanizing, exploitive and
violent.

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3) The final urgent task for psychology, Martn-Bar sees as utilizing
the virtues of the people. Here too, his training as a social
psychologist comes to the fore as he demonstrates how research
using conventional survey instruments and opinion polls can be
used to raise critical consciousness and then turned against the
dominant order. It is this aspect of his labours that perhaps most
immediately brought him to his untimely death at the hands of a
tyrannically cruel regime. At times, Martn-Bar seems to go into a
near reverie as he writes rhapsodically about the people. To me,
this is reminiscent of the discourse of some overly optimistic
Marxists who, prior to the writings of Antonio Gramsci
(1926-1934) and others, were inclined to believe that miraculous
social changes would occur as soon as power is reclaimed by the
masses. It is in relation to this dimension of Martn-Bars writing
that I find myself painfully aware that I am inescapably a son of the
first world, whose vision and wisdom is thus distorted, perhaps
myopically and perhaps pessimistically. In short, there is much in
his writings that prompts me to an acute awareness of my own
limitations which is surely the proper definition of writing that is
inspiring.

So what of psychoanalytic psychology? Does psychoanalytic theory
and practice not also need to be redesigned, just as much as Martn-
Bar demands the redesign of the entire discipline of psychology? I
came away from this study of his writings with three areas of concern
in relation to our field of specialization: the issue of scientistic mimicry
and faulty epistemology; questions about the aims of psychotherapy
and psychoanalysis; and the potential of psychoanalytic praxis as a
critique of ideology. I will briefly discuss each of these in turn.

There is no doubt in my mind that psychoanalysis is a science but not,
in Thomas Kuhns terms, an ordinary or normal science (Kuhn,
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1962). Rather, it is an enigmatic and extraordinary science (Barratt,
1984; 1993; 2012). Yet it is evident that its progress (and the possibility
of its liberatory praxis) has been arrested by its scientistic mimicry, its
efforts to be the sort of science that it is not. Freud himself stumbled
around this issue. For example, in a 1933 passage that has a discernibly
neo-Kantian flavor, he declared that there are two sciences,
psychology and natural science, (p. 194) but then, five years later, he
announced that psychoanalysis is a natural science like any other
(1938, p. 80). Specifically in the context of clinical practice, when we
talk as if our labours with patients are value free or objective, our
claim to be scientific is a masquerade (as I have extensively argued
elsewhere). Such scientistic mimicry is always tied, overtly or covertly,
to the values of the dominant sociocultural order, and thus colludes
with the ideological systems of alienation and oppression. Against this,
psychoanalysis has the inherent value of freeing the patient from the
suffering caused by repetition-compulsivity, which is what Enrique
Dussell (1977) and others would call a praxis of liberation.

One of the most conspicuous examples of scientistic mimicry in the
fields of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the
excessive influence of developmental models. Many of these models
are quasi-biological, being presented as an objectively verifiable series
of psychological phases or behavioural stages that are allegedly
universally applicable and that constitute a linear sequence along which
the individual may variously progress, regress or become fixated. There
are at least five problems hidden within the assumptions involved in
such models. First, such models entirely ignore Freuds discovery of
what Andr Green (2002) called the shattered time (temps clat) of
the mind, the pluritemporality of our psychic realities that Freud tried to
describe by announcing that the unconscious is timeless (zeitlos) and
by his complex notion of Nachtrglichkeit, wherein the determinative
or even traumatic significance of an event can be caused by something
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that occurs subsequently (Barratt, 2012). If we lose the discovery that
the time of the mind weaves forward and backwards in non-unitary
and nonlinear twists and turns, then we actually erase the
distinctiveness of psychoanalytic inquiry. Second, this sort of
developmentalism renders a depiction of ontogeny in which every
phenomenon must be explained by earlier phenomena (thus reverting to
mother-infant bonding, to birth trauma or even to in utero occurrences);
this effectively denies Freuds discovery of the Oedipus Complex as an
epistemological rupturing that reorganizes all that has preceded it.
Third, at the same time, such developmental thinking implicitly installs
a pseudoscientific teleology, in which each phase comes to be defined
as a deficient or immature version of the next and thus can only be
understood by a preconceived developmental endpoint, rather than in
terms of its own meaningfulness and interior dynamics. Thus, fourth,
this type of thinking exemplifies many of the issues raised by
Martn-Bars general critique in that it is a depiction of the human
condition that is positivist, decontextualized and ahistorical, laying a
spurious claim to universality on the basis of its quasi-biological
appearance. Fifth, developmentalist models endorse the status quo by
providing an objectifying account of the individuals life journey in
which the endpoint of adaptation is conformity to realities that are
taken as given, and in which maturation is similarly pre-decided in
terms of accommodation to prevailing sociocultural arrangements. This
effectively erases the liberatory potential of clinical discourse in its
capacity to listen creatively to the existential particularities of that
which appears maladapted or immature.

What then are the aims of the clinical discourses that we know as
psychotherapy and psychoanalysis? By clinical, I am now referring
only to modalities of conversation with an individual client or patient
(as contrasted with the labours of community psychology). Elsewhere I
have argued that a distinction must be made between clinical practices
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that overtly or covertly articulate goals of adaptation and maturation
toward which they intend to direct the individuals functioning, versus
what I take to be the unique character of the psychoanalytic method in
freeing the individuals functioning from the grip of
repetition-compulsivity. In actuality, each particular treatment may be a
mixed case, but nevertheless this distinction is polemically heuristic, for
it compels us to examine the hidden assumptions behind whatever we
consider to be a successful treatment assumptions about healing and
health. Some would slide past such an examination by claiming that the
aim of treatment is the individuals happiness, but this is hardly a
decontexualized characteristic. Alternatively, some would invoke
Freuds formula that the aim of clinical practice should be to enable the
individual to love and to work (sadly, as we all know, he omitted play
from what should have been a triad). However, as clinicians we know
that a multitude of attachments pass under the rubric of love,
including those that are quite inflected with sadism and hostility. And
the capacity to work might imply either the individuals
accommodation to the drudgery of alienated labour, or alternatively it
might be defined as Martn-Bar defines it as our power to
transform the realities in which we live. Against these approaches, can
we not articulate the aims of clinical practice in terms of the
individuals freedom? But then, as we shall see, we have to address the
embedding of the individual in relation to the collective constraints on
freedom.

This brings us to the potential of psychoanalysis as ideology critique.
Perhaps Martn-Bars central challenge to us as psychoanalytic
practitioners is to understand the problems incurred whenever suffering
is analyzed solely on the level of the individual psyche, without being
also understood as a pervasively collective experience. In this respect,
his challenge returns us to Freuds admonition in 1921 that individual
psychology must also be understood as social psychology.
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Consciousness is a psychosocial reality, a privatized production of a
collective history. If psychoanalysis attends to consciousness (its
functioning as suppressive and repressive along the horizontal axis, or
as splitting and projective along the vertical axis), then surely what
should emerge from its praxis is not just the individuals
comprehension of self as if autochthonous and unique, but a critical
comprehension of the collective forces that have produced his or her
private interiority?

Clinical practice typically devolves toward ideological assumptions
when it equates social adaptation and an ideal of maturity with healing
and health. Having practiced psychoanalysis in the United States for
over three decades, I have had to face the fact that, as often as not, I
was helping people enjoy a normal life in a world which is far from
normal and, indeed, in a world where the normality of American life
is obliviously dependent on its global domination, economically and
culturally. I frequently observed among my fellow practitioners implicit
and explicit assumptions as to what should eventuate from a successful
treatment. For example, it is normal to commit to a single love
relationship for the duration of ones adulthood (despite the fact that
research shows such exclusivity is achieved only by a statistical
minority, and usually not happily at that). It is normal to hurt ones
body and to treat it as if it were a machine merely a market
commodity. It is normal to hate ones job, normal to want to feel
superior to ones neighbour, normal to aspire to great wealth (and to
pay ones employees as little as possible), normal to believe that the
United States can indeed genuinely claim to be the land of the free,
and so forth. What goes unexamined in such assumptions is the hard
fact that so much of the lifestyle accomplished by the middle and upper
classes in the United States is the result of a systematic exploitation of
the proletariat and the peasantry of the tricontinental world (the
third-world), as well as domination over minorities within its own
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borders. In the pursuit of happiness that passes for wellbeing,
forgotten are the genocides on which the country was founded, and
overlooked are the genocides in multiple foreign lands by means of
which the economic, cultural and political successes of the USA have
subsequently been attained. I became acutely conscious of all this, even
while struggling to avoid lapsing into some of the ideological
assumptions that pervade our clinical practices.

But this is not the place for an apologia pro vita meae, but rather for a
confrontation with the radical challenges that Martn-Bar offers us.
The articulation the voicing of suffering, whether individual or
collective, opens us to what is other and otherwise in a manner that is
authentically liberatory. Psychoanalysis continues to provide us with
one of the most powerful ways of understanding some of the critical
issues that face humanity. Its method offers us the possibility of a
journey of ideology-critique that Martn-Bar calls the
de-ideologizing of consciousness. To realize this potential, it is
imperative that, as practitioners, we hold in mind that the individual and
the society that is inhabited by the individual are not in and of
themselves real. Rather, they are mutually co-created. Perhaps, in
recognition of this truth, we need to ask ourselves daily whether our
clinical discipline enables us to engage in an authentic rethinking of the
priorities by which we conduct our lives or whether it accommodates us
to the default thinking of the status quo. Ignacio Martn-Bars life and
death prompt me to re-engage in a struggle with this question, as his
ideas challenge practitioners of psychoanalysis to ask what this praxis
portends in a complexly challenging economic, political and
sociocultural environment. In a paper written five years before his
assassination, he quotes Salvatore Maddi as saying that the authentic
power of any method of psychological healing depends on the dosage
of its break with the dominant culture (Martn-Bar, 1974-1989, p.
120) these are surely both inspiring and profoundly challenging
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words for those of us who practice psychoanalysis and its derivative
psychoanalytic psychotherapies.


References

Anon. (1992). Biografa Ignacio Martn-Bar. San Salvado:
Universidad Centroamericano, Jos SimenCaas.
Aron, A. and Corne, S. (1994). Introduction. In A. Aron and S. Corne
(Ed.). Writings for a Liberation Psychology, pp. 1-11.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barratt, B. B. (1984). Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing.
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Barratt, B.B. (1993). Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse:
Knowing and Being since Freuds Psychology. Baltimore, MD:
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Barratt, B.B. (2012). What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freuds
Secret Committee. London: Routledge.
Dussell, E. (1977). Philosophy of Liberation. Trans. A. Martinez and C.
Morkovsky. Pasadena: Wipf and Stock, 2003.
Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. M. B. Ramos.
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Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J.
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Freud, S. (1938). An outline of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed.).
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Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII, pp. 139-208. London: The
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Gramsci, A. (1926-1934). Prison Notebooks. Trans. J. A. Buttigieg.
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Green, A. (2002). Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory
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Hassett, J. and Lacey, H. (1991). Towards a Society that Serves its
People: The Intellectual Contributions of El Salvadors
Murdered Jesuits. Washington, DC: Georgetown University
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IACHR (1988). Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights 1987-1988: El Salvador. Washington, DC:
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3
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Edition). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Martn-Bar, I. (1974-1989). Writings for a Liberation Psychology (Ed.
A. Aron and S. Corne). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994.
Martn-Bar, I. (1988). From dirty war to psychological war: The case
of El Salvador. In A. Aron (Ed.). Flight, Exile, and Return:
Mental Health and the Refugee, pp. 2-22. San Francisco, CA:
Committee for Health Rights in Central America.
U.N. (1993). Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador.
Washington, DC: United Nations.
Watkins, M. and Shulman, H. (2008). Toward Psychologies of
Liberation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.



Barnaby B. Barratt, PhD, DHS practices psychoanalysis in
Johannesburg, where he is a Training Analyst with the South
African Psychoanalytic Association; he is a member of the
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International Psychoanalytic Association. His most recent book
is What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freuds Secret
Committee (Routledge, 2012).


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