A recent Substack article examines the growing influence of liberation and decolonial psychologies within contemporary psychotherapeutic practice. To understand the claims made in that piece, it is helpful to situate these movements within a broader intellectual trajectory of Western self-critique and its transformation in the twentieth century. The following commentary sketches that trajectory and explains why Critical Social Justice is a destructive departure from the West’s earlier tradition of corrective self-criticism.
The strength of the West has always been to critically reflect about reality, including itself, in order to improve the lives of the people living in its societies. From the earliest Greek and Roman philosophers, the incorporation of Judeo-Christianity into its moral ethos, and its adherence to scientific exploration, the West has sought to discover truth and to align itself with such truth. Not only is truth believed to be discoverable, but the pursuit of truth is believed to be good. Navigating through the complexities of human existence, this odyssey has not been without its flaws and tragedies. But commitment to corrective self-critique has been a characteristic feature of the Western world.
The 20th century posed significant challenges to the West, particularly to its philosophical and political foundations. In the first half of that century, and mimicking the practice of corrective critique, the Frankfurt School introduced the method of immanent critique. This critical method includes assessing a system’s own normative commitments, highlighting its internal contradiction, hypocrisy, or failure of realisation, and treating such contradiction as pathological. The Frankfurt School thinkers were all disillusioned Marxists who refused to accept the stabilisation of capitalism, mass culture, and the integration of the proletariat into liberal democracy. A strong motivating factor behind the practice of immanent critique has been the fomenting of dissatisfaction with Western culture. Thinkers like Adorno insisted that critique should remain negative, arguing that premature reconciliation should be deferred. Liberal democracy was seen as a system that masked deeper structures of oppression, and Marcuse made no secret of his full support for censorship and the destructive student movements of the 1960s.
The practice of immanent critique resulted in a different sentiment about the West than what historical self-criticism produced. Corrective critique turned into delegitimising critique, along a grievance escalation ladder:
- Tier 1: critique (a practice, institution, or belief fails to measure up to its stated ideal);
- Tier 2: from critique to grievance (personalising the contradiction between ideals and reality);
- Tier 3: from grievance to identity fixation (group or individual identity organised around moral injury);
- Tier 4: from identity fixation to retaliatory logic (punishment, humiliation, and displacement of the representatives of offence);
- Tier 5: from retaliatory logic to sacralised destruction (annihilation perversely moralised as a purifying necessity).
Following the contributions of the postmodern French intellectuals, Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories were produced that formulated destructive grievance around distinct identities. Most of these theories can therefore be placed at the third tier of the grievance escalation ladder, namely critique and grievance at the level of identity fixation. Queer theory, with its focus on targeted destabilisation and retaliatory logic, belongs to the fourth tier, while decolonial theory and liberation theology, with their explicitly violent and celebratory aims at the necessary destruction of the West, belong to the fifth tier.
The politicisation of psychotherapy includes the incorporation of decolonial theory into psychotherapeutic practice, using patients as political assets and harnessing their psychopathology for revolutionary ends. A recent Substack entry does a splendid job of elaborating on the so-called liberation and decolonial psychologies in practice today. “[M]ental health in decolonial psychology requires 1.) awakening to our true socialist nature that colonialism has estranged us from, and 2.) participating in the necessary violent revolution to overcome these colonial systems of oppression.” The first point is explicitly Marxian, while the second point is the reason decolonial theory belongs to the fifth tier on the grievance escalation ladder.
Likewise, as far as Latin American liberation theology goes, “it is deployed alongside decolonial psychology to facilitate this salvific revolutionary action… making it ultra-radical and teleologically oriented to violent class-based struggle as a necessary precedent for ‘true’ liberation.”
Decolonisation is truly a social doctrine of sacralised destruction, or transcendence through destruction, of everything the West holds sacred. It may be difficult for readers to appreciate the sheer gravity of this dangerous ideology, given the extent to which it has been popularised. But decolonisation is a terrorism doctrine in Western-majority countries and an ethnic cleansing doctrine in Western-minority countries:
“Throughout his work, [Fanon] argued the totalising project of colonialism includes a psychological system of dehumanisation that is maintained through both physical and psychological violence, ultimately leading to alienation, identity loss, and a fractured sense of self.
He also made it explicitly clear that violence and disorder are always a part of decolonisation, requiring a cathartic, initiatory, ritual rebirth ‘in the blood’ in order to negate and overcome the initial violence of colonisation.
As Fanon admits, decolonisation is “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another,” in a “total, complete, and absolute substitution” as society is turned upside down. A “program of complete disorder,” the “naked truth” of which evokes “searing bullets and bloodstained knives.””
Why is this relevant to psychology? The ideologically captured field of psychology has embraced both liberation and decolonial ideologies and incorporated these to form liberation and decolonial psychology. As if the alleged antisemitism in the American Psychological Association were not enough of a delegitimising indictment, its president, Dr. Thema Bryant, wrote an article in its flagship journal titled Lessons from Decolonial and Liberation Psychologies for the Field of Trauma Psychology. There is nothing corrective in an ideology that glorifies violent transcendence. Psychologists and psychotherapists who want to retain the healing ethos of the field need to be acutely aware of the rhetorical schemes ideologues employ to smuggle these concepts into psychological practice.
The Substack under discussion is a long but accessible read, and we encourage our readers to take the time to familiarise themselves with the origins and current forms of liberation and decolonial psychology.
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