Building a Counseling Psychology of Liberation: The Path Behind Us, Under Us, and Before Us

In this 2020 SCP Presidential Address amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and global uprisings against anti-Black racism, Anneliese Singh reflects on the potentialities of liberation for all counseling psychologists in every setting in which they labor. In doing so, she invites the embodiment and practices of liberation as a key value of counseling psychology.

The presence of a Latin American psychological line in the Anglo-Saxon academic context: the Psychology of Liberation in Scopus (2002-2015)

Liberation psychology is a theory born in Latin America. This article studies the psychology of liberation in the Scopus database, with the aim of deepening historically on the subject and identify their visibility among Anglos-Saxons scientists. The study is a temporal analysis (2002-2015), in order to know their history, the key players in its creation, authors' greater impact on publications and major scientific journals. Also, it conducted an analysis of production according to the authorities, publications, terminologies, and citations. This study uses as tools data analysis Programs (Createpajek) and display of information (Netdraw). The main results in a universe of 55 papers were: 9 main authors; 3 elite journals that publish more than 41% of the articles; a universe 7 keywords that control the law of the least effort, and the replication of the most cited journals.

How/Can Psychology Support Low-Income LGBTGNC Liberation?

Findings from a participatory action research project conducted by the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (WWRC) are used to explore the questions of whether and what kind of psychology can support racially and ethnically diverse, low-income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (LGBTGNC) liberation. Such issues cannot be understood through lenses of gender and sexuality alone and mainstream psychology—as well as the larger LGBT movement—has tended to ignore the formative ways oppressions are made to work together. Intersectionality and homonationalism are necessary concepts in a psychology of low-income, racially and ethnically diverse LGBTGNC liberation as well as an understanding of “resistance” that broadens to include building community among individuals as well as solidarity and coalition with sister social movements. Freedom of movement and the right to housing are explored as human rights relevant for a low-income LGBTGNC psychology of liberation.

A Psychology of Liberation for Central America: The Unfinished Work of Ignacio Martín-Baró (1942–1989)

On November 16, 1989 the world was shocked by the news of the assassination of six Jesuits at the campus of the Universidad Centro Americana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Among those murdered by government soldiers was Ignacio Martín-Baró, a PhD in social psychology from the University of Chicago who at that time was the Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Vice-President of the Interamerican Society of Psychology (SIP). Drawing on Martín-Baró’s published writings and non-published academic papers and correspondence, this article traces the evolution of the Spanish-born Jesuit who became a leading authority among Latin American social psychologists. In particular, it analyzes his project of becoming a clinical psychologist under the influence of psychoanalysis, his critical social psychology aimed to “de-ideologize” the oppressed social classes of El Salvador, and his ultimate project of a psychology of liberation for Latin America. Martín-Baró’s work came to a tragic end just when it began to bear fruit, but it stands as a testimony to a lifetime committed to the human values of democracy, social justice and service to society’s poorest and most neglected.