Free your mind

Critical Psychology is an excellent introduction to critical psychological perspectives on South African society and South African psychology. I work as a clinical psychologist in the multicultural city of Bradford, England. I am also engaging in community development work in relation to mental health and wellbeing. I grew up in the era of apartheid South Africa and was involved in some of the protests and direct actions against this system of government that happened in England. I am very aware of race and cultural issues in this country and how they impact on identity and experiences of oppression. Therefore it was interesting to read about the role critical psychology is beginning to play in South Africa in a country that has both experienced positive transformation and continues to struggle with socio economic and health inequalities.

What is critical psychology? It is an attempt to apply psychology; the understanding of behaviour and experience, to a wider context than just the individual. Critical psychology looks at power relations and how they influence experience. The approach is particularly interested in oppressive uses of power and psychology’s own role in perpetuating these. This is useful as psychology (not just in a South African context) has posed as value-free, unbiased and therefore not political. Critical Psychology sees this scientific posturing as illusory; psychology, it contends, is always political. Traditional or conventional psychology tends to isolate the psyche from the social world around it. Social constructionist thought, however, argues that this is problematic considering that the individual is constituted through certain historically situated ideological discourses.

In contrast, traditional psychology tends to make generalisations about human nature based on studies largely carried out on white middleclass male Americans. In this way it produces a kind of psychological imperialism. This is illustrated in the South African context by its attempting to impose white European psychologies (for example the psychology of Karl Jung) and neglect traditional African understandings of mind body, spirit and society.

The individualistic emphasis in psychology means that it is rare to find research that seeks to do anything about making people’s lives more fair and just. In the introductory chapter Derek Hook observes that very little research has looked at ways of improving the lives of underprivileged communities (for example, how best to address poverty and illiteracy). While Hook acknowledges the value of community psychology approaches which the book covers, he also outlines the need for critical psychology to have a ‘bad attitude’: It needs to be able to not just come up with alternative ways of working such as community psychology but needs to actively question mainstream psychology which does not know what it is doing, Hook argues.

My experience of critical approaches in England is that they can adopt an aggressive and cynical tone, missing opportunities to be constructive. In a sense it is easier to say what is wrong with someone else’s approach rather than to come up with an alternative. At the risk of sounding aggressive myself, I would say that a critical psychology that kicks must be constructive as well as deconstructive, otherwise it just becomes wingeing psychology. This book however seems to get the balance right with both critical theory and accounts of community psychology. Hook argues critical psychology is neither characterised by nihilism nor idealism. Rather it aims to transform through an ongoing process of critical analysis.

In community psychology the emphasis is much more on empowering communities. There is more emphasis on education and community development, focussing on the strengths and ideas of the people you are working with, and helping groups to develop these. In fact, community psychology and community development seem very similar. One can question the need for psychology at all. From reading this book one becomes aware of the way psychology has been used to justify unfair ways of seeing ourselves that do not respect and value difference. However, while psychology is there as a discipline we should try and harness it to work for the greater good.

Western psychology takes the individual as the focal point for human analysis. For a black African this grates with the experience of being brought up in a culture where individuals are seen as inter-dependent; ‘a person becomes a human being through other human beings’. Psychology neglects this position. Indeed the founding philosophers of psychology such as Hegel and Hume did not see any value in African culture, writing it off as being worthless. I relate to this in mental health in England where if someone is suffering, psychology looks into their cognitive style of thinking to see what is going wrong. In Australian Aboriginal society if someone goes crazy everybody in the tribe gets together to discuss what they have done to drive that person crazy. In the west, as I have mentioned, we get together as 'psy' professionals(psychiatrists, psychologists etc) to say what is wrong with the individual. We do not realise that this individualising of the social problem in itself compounds the alienation process. Indeed the process of diagnosing the person who is suffering as schizophrenic or manic depressive is an old colonial technique, a method of dividing up communities and subduing them. It has similarities with the colour coding interviews that happened in South Africa.

Psychology is part of this process of atomisation, whether it intends to or not it adds to the process of generating new subjectivities that are more individualistic. This individualistic emphasis looks at concepts such as self esteem and puts the responsibility for change solely on the individual. This means that bigger contexts and issues are neglected, such as how globalisation is linked to increased poverty, illiteracy and alienation.

In the chapter 'Psychology: an African perspective', Nhlanhla Mkhize compares western and traditional worldviews. He contends that western societies tend to emphasise the future whereas traditional societies focus more on the past, relationship with ancestors and the present. While western cultures emphasise control over the environment, traditional culture emphasis living with it in harmony. This relates to a different way of valuing time, as western societies focus on what people do with their time. The harmonious relationship one has with ones ancestors and fellow human beings is seen as more important than the western mathematical division of time.

The following case study shows how important it is for counsellors to be aware of different worldviews. Bheki has been referred because he experiences drowsiness when he tries to study, which he explains as being due to family problems; ‘Bheki’s father, Mr Nkosi passed away in 1994. He was born in a polygamous family. There was always tension within the family. Mr Nkosi decided to get married and stay away from his original family. He moved away from Nkandla, in northern KwaZulu Natal, to the city to escape bewitchment by members of his extended family. Unfortunately he died before he could make peace with them. Bheki believes that someone interfered with the transition of his father’s soul from the world of the living to the spiritual world. He maintained that his father’s soul was being held captive by umthakathi (a sorcerer), who had turned his father into a zombie. He was worried that his father’s soul was wandering aimlessly, without finding peace. He was also worried that as the eldest son, the same fate would befall him if he happened to die before rectifying the situation.’ If indigenous world views were included in the training of psychologists they may be more able to help in situations like Bheki’s.

Mkhize highlights the relevance of a collectivist and interdependent view of self in black South African culture. There is a dynamism between individual parts and the whole; ‘I am because we are, and since we are therefore I am’ (Mbiti). A person’s identity cannot be described in isolation; belonging to a community in a ‘dance of harmony (where) everyone who belongs is continuously moving, adjusting to the rhythm of life within the community’. We are introduced to concepts such as Ubuntu which refers to responsibilities in relation to others. This can include helping in the building of a neighbour’s house or loaning them cows to till their fields. Whilst selfhood is rooted in community, at the same time individual creative expression is not denied and can lead to the positive development of the community as a whole.

Mkhize suggests that social constructionist psychology has much in common with African understandings of selfhood. According to the psychology of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, self-understanding is arrived at through social interaction. Hence the individual internalises voices from his environment. Within the individual there always is a dialogue between different voices as opposed to one centralised thinker. From the African perspective one is never alone; one is in a continuous dialogue with the environment. There is a constant osmotic exchange between the environment and the person; the African is always listening to the pulse of the world.

An excellent chapter looks at the contributions of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko to critical psychology. According to Biko ‘the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’. This process of internalisation of oppressive ideas and power relations is important to understand and again is something traditional psychology is guilty of neglecting. Fanon asserted that we need to understand the political patterns of violence, power and subordination in order to understand the individual. This is a big challenge to mainstream psychology which in Britain is concerned with the cognitions and not wider political and historical contexts.

In this chapter Hook argues that the writings of Fanon are very relevant today, as we are now in a state of neo-colonialism. Colonialism is defined as the practice of forcibly appropriating and controlling non-western territories. Edward Said in his book Orientalism observed that colonialism ‘makes native people foreigners in their own countries, marginalising the experiences of norms of their culture to the imposed standards and values of the invading culture’. We see this effect around the world. One example that comes to mind is in the Irish population who suffered very high levels of mental health problems after experiencing British colonialism which promoted the idea of the Irish as inferior and forced the adoption of the English languageand outlawed the use of the Irish language.

Similar to the dehumanisation of the Irish, Fanon documented how the African mind was colonised with racist stereotypes. He thus outlines a racially driven alienation process that leaves a deep-rooted identity conflict between the cultural norms of the coloniser and the colonised amounting to intrapsychic violence. Fanon described how he felt black people are ‘sealed into a crushing objecthood’ by the white gaze. This chapter is challenging stuff that gets us to think about the tensions in our identity formation between who we want to be and who others see us to be. There are also good chapters on the critical value of psychoanalysis, Foucauldian thinking and Marxism for thinking about South African psychological issues.

The second section of the book looks at the political and social contexts in South Africa. This includes feminist thinking, community psychology perspectives, the role of collective action in the prevention of HIV/Aids, the influence of Black psychology. The third section looks at practical applications of critical psychology. Chapters include 'Participatory action research', 'Emotional processes in political subjects' and 'Liberation psychology'. The writing includes honest counter-criticisms and is a stimulating and informative read.

I found this book very relevant to my own work working with people (from different cultures) often in relation to the psychiatric system. Western psychiatry, I find, has much in common with colonial techniques of appropriating identity (through diagnosis and clinical language) and silencing subjective and spiritual worldviews and thereby distorting lived experience. I also found it useful to think about how I aim to empower disenfranchised groups and communities and the dilemmas one comes up against. Throughout the book there are cartoons and helpful summary boxes making the writing both accessible and comprehensive. For anyone interested in the emancipatory uses of psychology in a post-colonial context this is an essential book.