Freud, Ferenczi, and Freire: Liberation psychology and the practice of psychoanalytic therapy

Psychoanalysis has not enjoyed sufficient attention in the theory and practice of Multicultural Psychology, and is often seen as either adversarial or apathetic to the interests of social justice and culturally competent clinical work with ethnic minority populations. This disconnect is partly the result of a lack of knowledge about the history of social progressivism in the early psychoanalytic movement, as well as the transformation of psychoanalysis into a tool of social conformity in the post-WWII United States. Also unacknowledged is the influence of psychoanalysis on Liberation Psychology, a social justice-oriented movement in Latin American psychology which served as an inspiration and theoretical foundation to Multicultural Psychology. In order to address this historical and theoretical impasse, this dissertation will initiate a conversation between psychoanalysis, Liberation Psychology, and Multicultural Psychology. By placing psychoanalysis in dialogue with two of the components of Liberation Psychology---Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire's Critical Pedagogy---it will be argued that there is an emancipatory ethic in analytic theory that mirrors, and in some cases directly informs, Liberation Psychology's social justice discourse. In turn, Liberation Psychology will be shown to have presaged many of the developments in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on intersubjectivity, mutual recognition, and enactments. Acknowledging the psychoanalytic structure of Liberation Psychology side by side with the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis yields a series of insights related to power, privilege, relationality, and culture, which can be used to develop a psychoanalytically informed Multicultural Psychology, and develop more nuanced conceptions of cultural competency. A case example will be used to illustrate a relational psychoanalytic model of cultural competency which emphasizes the role of cultural attunement, cultural negotiation, and the repair cross-cultural ruptures when attunement and negotiation is impaired. Having delineated this psychoanalytic approach to cultural competency, implications will be drawn for culturally competent practice, theory, and training.