Introduction

Undergraduate students in any Introduction to Psychology course are introduced to this oft-repeated story about the so-called birth of psychology as a modern scientific discipline in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt’s establishment of the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany—for one counter-narrative see, for instance, the contributions of Muslim scientists (e.g., al-Razi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd) to psychology between the 9^th and 13^th centuries CE (Haque, 2004).

This hegemonic story has a dual purpose: (1) confirming psychology as a science and, therefore, cutting its centuries-long connection with philosophy and (2) instituting psychology as a chiefly Euromodern discipline and, subsequently, deemphasizing non-European contributions from ancient times to the present day. The story of psychology, however, is complicated by a bifurcation within the history of the discipline itself: psychology as a natural science v. psychology as a human science (Walsh et al., 2014). The former camp attempts to align itself with the natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry) and with objectivity; consequently, it places emphasis on experimental research and quantification. The latter camp strives to reconnect psychology with its humanistic roots through philosophy, history, and theory; it seeks to honor subjectivity through qualitative research.

Critical psychologists clearly belong to the second camp, but, as human scientists, their critiques of naturalistic (Euromodern) psychology tend to be from the perspectives of critical modernism and postmodernism. In other words, their critiques, while valuable, remain Eurocentric. In this article, I will argue for an ecocentric transmodern praxis, which Burton and Osorio (2011) qualify as “analectical psychology” based on Enrique Dussel’s (1985) philosophy of liberation—another name for analectical psychology is “decolonial psychology” (Maldonado-Torres, 2017).

Lest I be misunderstood, this transmodern praxis is meant to extend—as opposed to cancel—the already established critiques within critical psychology. Before I unpack these terms and other ones, which may be unfamiliar to some readers, I shall first address both the coloniality of psychology as a modern scientific discipline and the silence of critical psychology, in the face of this coloniality. I will then end with an argument for the importance of centering radical work by Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern theorists before recommending three theoretico-practical resources that are neglected in (critical) psychology and which should be central in analectical psychology as a transmodern praxis. By radical, I mean specifically anticapitalist and antiracist; in other words, to be radical is to materially struggle for collective liberation and against colonial oppression.

Throughout this article, I frame the discipline of psychology as an ideological modern/colonial project that is situated within the structure of racial capitalism. Therefore, my historicization of modernity/coloniality is not meant to suggest that racial capitalism is an event; rather, my aim is to contextualize the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline in late 19^th century Europe and to document some of the ideological effects of this emergence: namely, psychologization and universalization. To neutralize these effects, I employ decoloniality and materiality as radical tools of psychosocial analysis.

The Coloniality of Psychology as a Modern Scientific Discipline

Coloniality, as opposed to colonialism as a material practice, is a relevant theoretical term for analectical psychology because it signifies an unconscious style of thought (e.g., not thinking that the US is a settler colonial society or that the territory of Puerto Rico is a franchise colony). To understand the significance of psychology’s emergence as a modernist science in the late 19^th century, one must first understand the invention of modernity in the 15^th century and how it was, and continues to be, dialectically linked with coloniality, for “while modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence, it also originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe” (Dussel, 1995, p. 9). In other words, Euromodernity is only intelligible in relation to its negated non-European alterity, for the rhetoric of modernity has always been, and continues to be, ideologically and materially sustained by a “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) structured around two fundamental axes: a “racial axis” (p. 533) and a labor axis (p. 539). However, this coloniality of power is usually occluded by what Dussel (1995) calls “the myth of modernity”, which he writes, “perpetrates a gigantic inversion: the innocent victim becomes culpable and the culpable victimizer becomes innocent” (p. 67, emphasis in original).

We must bear this relationship, between the culpable victimizer and the innocent victim, in mind when thinking about the modern psychologist vis-à-vis the psychologized-as-colonized, which is the ethical question of psychological harm (or torture ⁱ ) in experimental and applied research (e.g., the little Albert experiment, the Milgram experiments on obedience, and the Stanford prison experiment). Of course, none of these ‘experiments’ represent the minimum acceptable standards of ethical, or even scientific, research, yet the latter two in particular are often taught as “classic studies” in Social Psychology courses (Smith & Haslam, 2017). Tod Sloan (1996), drawing on Jürgen Habermas, qualified this precise relationship, between the objective psychologist and the psychologized subject, as the “colonization of the lifeworld” (for a definition see p. 62).

The coloniality of psychology becomes clear when one looks at how psychology furthers the two fundamental axes of race and labor. Psychology, or the psy-complex (Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1979) more generally, is in service to capital through at least two abstractions: (1) psychologization, which “has served, directly or indirectly, to strengthen the oppressive structures, by drawing attention away from them and toward individual and subjective factors” (Martín-Baró, 1994, p. 19) and (2) an idealist, and universalizing, emphasis on the primacy of consciousness, which is a function of commodity fetishism that “does not so much dispense with philosophical contemplation as it grants such contemplation a scientific status” (Arfken, 2017, p. 50).

Put differently, psychologists often reduce, and depoliticize, complex psychosocial phenomena to the abstract level of the psyche qua behavior, the brain, and/or cognition; and they do so in a positivistic fashion, which entails ignoring the uncontrollable negativism (i.e., the materiality) of the social world outside the experimental laboratory (Martín-Baró, 1994, pp. 21-22). This psychologizing tendency, which undoubtedly aligns with the current ethos of neoliberal capitalism, is paradoxically accompanied by a universalizing tendency that can be demonstrated with a quick survey of psychological experiments since the beginning of the discipline, wherein the universal subject of psychology was supposed to be bourgeois, male, and of European descent.

This chauvinistic trend has changed over the last 50 years, particularly since the crisis in social psychology debates that took place in the 1970s (Moghaddam, 1987; Parker, 1989), which explored questions of ethics, methodology, and diversity. For example, the National Research Act was passed into law in 1974, one year after the ethico-methodological scandal known as the Stanford prison experiment. Critical psychology and qualitative research rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of this crisis, but critiques of the discipline’s naturalism (e.g., Politzer, 1929/1994) as well as human scientific approaches (e.g., Brentano, 1874/2015) can be traced back to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

While the reality of psychological studies today are quite different and reflect the diversity of the worlds in which they are situated, the colonial logics of the discipline continue to plague our research as a function of the myth of modernity. These psychologizing/universalizing tendencies, however, have been resisted by liberation psychologists, who do not confuse bias with objectivity (Martín-Baró, 1994, p. 29), and radical psychoanalysts, who privilege the sociability of the unconscious—after all, “psychoanalysis is the repressed other of psychology” (Burman, 2008, p. 176).

Being neutral in the face of oppression is neither objective nor ethical, which is why reflexivity and bias, on the part of the analectical psychologist, are important first steps toward psychosocial analyses that are grounded in decoloniality and materiality. For example, Parker (2011) argues that the current medical model—with its bonanza of so-called mental disorders that function as the basis for (mis-/over-) diagnosis and treatment in Euro-America—essentially pathologizes distress under capitalism through psychologization and universalization. Parker (2011) frames distress, from a psychoanalytic perspective, not as a neurocognitive substance but as a psychosocial process (p. 40).

Consequently, the globalization of psychology—with its management of distress through medicalization (i.e., reducing a psychosocial process causally to a biological substance)—mirrors the structure of global capitalism itself, which (re)produces distress via exploitation and alienation. Moving from the labor axis to the racial one, the reader is encouraged to check out the excellent text, ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (Richards, 1997), which provides an overview of the history of racism within the discipline of psychology itself (see p. 294 in particular).

Psychology’s so-called objective or neutral analyses of psyche occlude the material conditions, in capitalist societies, which position us as a certain social being within the division of labor (Arfken, 2017). Our social being is specifically determined by what Quijano (2000) calls “[c]oloniality of labor” (see p. 539), which sheds light on the primacy of “racial capitalism” (Burden-Stelly, 2020) in our decolonial analyses.

Modernity/coloniality, which is inspired by the work of Aníbal Quijano (2007), signifies the historical, and ongoing, colonial relationship between Europe and its alterity, which mirrors the psychoanalytic dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious, respectively. To put it another way, modernity is a conscious rhetoric, which is premised on an unconscious colonial logic (e.g., Afrika ⁱⁱ as the dark continent or Latin America as the US’s backyard). The colonial unconscious, which sustains the rhetoric of modernity, is none other than the metaphorical (i.e., ideological) repression of non-European epistemologies and ontologies through the literal (i.e., material) oppression of non-European cultures and peoples (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

Duran and Duran (1995) show, from a Native American postcolonial perspective, that the solution to psychology’s coloniality is not “cross-cultural psychology”—not to be confused with either “cultural psychology” (Adams, 2012) or “a cross-indigenous perspective” (Pe-Pua, 2006). For Duran and Duran (1995), “cross-cultural investigation…is performed through the inoculated gaze of a psychology whose discourse is founded on the premise of the universal subject—the subject of a historical project of emancipation via reason” (p. 5, emphasis added), which is, of course, mythic since it excludes “the reason of the Other” (Dussel, 1995, p. 26). The problem, however, is not reasoning in psychology per se, but “the irrationality of the violence of the modern myth” (Dussel, 1995, p. 26). This irrational violence is the unconscious colonial logic, which renders Euromodernity, as a form of reasoning, mythic.

Since there is no possibility of completely decolonizing modernity, or absolutely delinking it from coloniality, the decolonial (and pragmatic) answer to modernity then is neither critical modernity nor postmodernity, but rather transmodernity, which is the best of modernity and its alterity (Dussel, 1995). I must note that when I used the value-laden term ‘best’ I am thinking of Dussel’s (2013) ethics of liberation along with Johan Galtung’s (1969) conception of social justice as “positive peace” or as the “absence of structural violence” (p. 183). In deconstructing the myth of modernity, Dussel (1995) writes:

The birthdate of modernity is 1492, even though its gestation, like that of the fetus, required a period of intrauterine growth. Whereas modernity gestated in the free, creative medieval European cities, it came to birth in Europe’s confrontation with the Other. By controlling, conquering, and violating the Other, Europe defined itself as discoverer, conquistador, and colonizer of an alterity likewise constitutive of modernity. Europe never discovered (des-cubierto) this Other as Other but covered over (encubierto) the Other as part of the Same: i.e., Europe. Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European. (p. 12, emphasis in original)

Conversely, Sunil Bhatia (2018), who has pioneered a postcolonial line of research within critical psychology over the last two decades, is more optimistic about decolonizing psychology, which for him “entails examining both how Euro-American scientific psychology becomes the standard-bearer of psychology throughout the world and how specific local cultural flows and ideas play an important role in shaping identities across the world” (pp. xx-xxi).

The emergence of psychology as a modern scientific discipline in the late 19^th century coincides with the Scramble for Afrika. This co-occurrence did not go unnoticed by the new imperialists and psychology was put to use by colonial administrators as a management tool in the so-called civilizing mission (Mannoni, 1950/1990), for psychology was/is “yet another tool with which to mold minds” (Martín-Baró, 1994, p. 20). This was the case in Afrika when European imperialists colonized it; the situation was similar in India (Nandy, 1983), in Latin America (Martín-Baró, 1994), and among Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (Duran & Duran, 1995). Furthermore, psychology can be regarded as a secular ideology. For example, Slife et al. (2003), drawing on the work of Paul Meehl, write about psychotherapists as “crypto-missionaries” who “attempt to convert their clients to their own value system” (p. 56).

The coloniality of psychology—not mentioning “the laws of the psychology of colonization” (Fanon, 1959/1965, p. 47)—has been explored most lucidly by a certain Martiniquais revolutionary psychiatrist in the context of the Algerian war of independence (1954 – 1962). In A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon (1959/1965) writes, “The native [Algerian] doctor, because of the operation of the complex psychological laws that govern colonial society, frequently finds himself [sic] in a difficult position” (p. 132). For Fanon (1959/1965), non-European psychologists, particularly in franchise and settler colonial societies, are “colonized intellectuals” (p. 132) because of their “scientistic mimicry” (Martín-Baró, 1994, p. 20) and subsequent collusion with the colonial system (cf. Hoffman, 2015), which are effects of the psy-complex as a “technology of the colonizing power” (Gendzier & Fanon, 1976, p. 513).

The transmodern corrective to the coloniality of psychology entails embracing “both modernity and its alterity” (Dussel, 1995, p. 139). It would be irrational to both reject everything produced by Euromodern psychologists as colonial and accept all of the contributions of Euromodern psychology as inherently good or universally applicable. Similarly, I am not arguing that non-European psychologies are ipso facto morally superior, but simply that these subaltern psychologies—given their exteriority vis-à-vis modernity—shed light on Other (i.e., negated) epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies.

Transmodernity then means subsuming the emancipative aspects of psychology as a modern scientific discipline in a “world horizon” (Dussel, 1995, p. 139), which involves rejecting psychology’s “mythic-sacrificial behavior toward its Others” (p. 139, emphasis in original). Those negated Others are namely non-Europeans; therefore, centering Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern psychologies constitutes an important feature of our transmodern praxis.

What we call psychology—without qualifying it as Euro-American—was never, and can never be, universal. Even though it is a provincial psychology, since it is essentially of an Anglo-Saxon variety, it established itself as the hegemonic psychology as opposed to being one significant approach among many. The hegemony of Euro-American psychology is a function, therefore, of cultural/linguistic imperialism, ⁱⁱⁱ which was only possible due to the First World’s politico-economic hegemony. This post-WWII context sheds light on the materiality of (post)colonialism, which can also be paradoxically characterized as neo-colonialism without colonies (Nkrumah, 1965). Transmodernity rejects psychology’s false universality and advocates instead for pluriversality as multiple universalities, which is akin to cultural pluralism as opposed to multiculturalism.

At this juncture, Bassam Tibi’s (2013) controversial notion of Leitkultur (guiding culture) comes to mind since the assumption within multiculturalism is that subaltern cultures must assimilate to the hegemonic (i.e., guiding) culture, which is supposedly civil. While Tibi's (2013) argument regarding the need for a consensually accepted value system is compelling, equating such a system with a specifically European value framework raises significant concerns regarding ethnocentrism. I think it is crucial—for the survival of all forms of life on this planet—that we seriously think and act in terms of an ecocentric value system. In my view, Dussel (2013) provides a theoretically significant framework (among others) for such an ecocentric value system in his magnum opus, Ethics of Liberation.”

In sum, mainstream (Euro-American) psychology, that is, psychology as a modern scientific discipline, or as a natural science, “is the dominant paradigm, which pretends to universality but actually generalises from a particular situation at the heart of the state-capital-colonial nexus, hence experimental psychology, psychometrics, therapy and management of the individual as the dominant approaches” (Burton & Osorio, 2011, p. 30, emphasis added).

The Silence of Critical Psychology vis-à-vis the Coloniality of Psychology

To begin, I theoretically and practically position myself as a critical psychologist, who is not attempting to save or improve the discipline of psychology. I critique psychology because I am interested in actualizing a transmodern praxis grounded in decoloniality and materiality. In other words, I am trying to not only de-naturalize psychology by reclaiming its human scientific roots (Adams et al., 2015), but also to un-discipline psychology through radical “epistemologies of the South” (de Sousa Santos, 2014), which I will address towards the end of the article when discussing three theoretico-practical resources from the underside of modernity.

This section examines critical psychology's silence regarding the coloniality of psychology. It builds on Parker's (2009) argument while extending it through a decolonial lens. Parker (2009) is writing from a revolutionary Marxist perspective, and he views psychology as an Ideological State Apparatus within capitalism, which is ultimately in the service of the Repressive State Apparatus (Althusser, 1970/2014). In other words, psychology’s primary function, as an Ideological State Apparatus, is to interpellate us (concrete individuals), through psychologization, into concrete subjects of the oppressive and violent state-capital-colonial nexus (Althusser, 1970/2014). For this reason, like Parker (2009), I do not see critical psychology as an ideological sub-discipline of psychology (p. 78), but instead as a material form of ideology critique (or praxis) vis-à-vis psychology qua ideology. I extend Parker’s (2009) Marxist critique from a decolonial perspective in order to emphasize the primacy of both the racial and labor axes in the coloniality of power.

Building on Edward Said’s engagement with critical theory, Bruce Baum (2015) writes, “the Frankfurt School failed to engage adequately colonial racism and anti-colonial resistance. The critical theorists’ account of racism was Eurocentric and too narrowly focused on anti-Semitism” (pp. 420-21). I see a similar problem in critical psychology, namely its critiques of psychology as a modern science are valid but they tend to be Eurocentric (i.e., citing mostly, if not only, European theorists) and they fail to engage adequately the coloniality of psychology, let alone the question of decolonial liberation. Following Nichols (2020), dispossession may be reconstructed as a category of critical psychology, “one that may serve to mediate between critiques of capitalism and colonialism, with a particular focus on the late modern and contemporary Anglo settler world” (p. 4)? Dispossession, according to Nichols (2020), is “a broad macrohistorical process related to the specific territorial acquisition logic of settler colonization” (p. 5).

Critical psychology is deeply indebted to the early Euromodern tradition of theorizing and practicing psychology as a human science, which can be traced back to the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Sigmund Freud among others (Walsh et al., 2014). These works are also the theoretical roots of current qualitative research approaches (Wertz et al., 2011). In addition to hermeneutics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School’s critical theoretical approach, which was mostly Freudo-Marxist, is another key influence on critical psychology (Stewart, 2007). Not mentioning the legacy of Marxist psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky and Henri Wallon) and other radicals: European philosophers (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, etc.), psychoanalysts (e.g., Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Félix Guattari, etc.), and anti-psychiatrists (e.g., Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, etc.).

The previous discussion illustrates the predominantly Eurocentric intellectual genealogy of critical psychology, which neglects through its history and ongoing citational practices non-European points of reference. Now, of course, there are exceptions to this rule, which I will address in the next section. For instance, the Annual Review of Critical Psychology has included two special issues (2006, 2013) on critical psychologies from around the world (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Afrika, India, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Colombia, China, Cuba, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka). However, it is not a question of tokenism; these critical psychological interventions, particularly the ones from the Global South, should be normalized in critical psychology (Adams et al., 2015). In other words, they are not simply a peripheral element to be included merely to demonstrate the diversity of our critics, especially when their key points of reference remain Eurocentric. Further, our critiques of psychology need not be situated within the European intellectual tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph. We can begin our decolonial critiques from intellectual traditions located outside the dominant European canon (e.g., Dussel, Fanon, Said, Martín-Baró, etc.), be in critical dialogue with the European tradition, while grounding our transmodern praxis in the ongoing material reality of colonial dispossession. This is how we remain focused on the fact that our ideology critiques of psychology are simultaneously material critiques of racial capitalism.

While psychology as a human science may sound emancipatory to the ears of most critical psychologists, the Eurocentric conceptions of the human—the subject of psychological science—are highly problematic in the eyes of non-Europeans. Sylvia Wynter (2003) shows, for example, the genealogy of the human from “the theocentric conception of the human, Christian” to “the new humanist and ratiocentric conception of the human, Man (i.e., as homo politicus, or the political subject of the state)” (p. 269). This modern/colonial category of “the human” never included those ‘primitives’ and ‘barbarians’ who were regarded by the European bourgeoisie as subhuman. As Wynter (2003) shows, the coloniality of being was “enacted by the dynamics of the relation between man—overrepresented as the generic, ostensibly supracultural human—and its subjugated Human Others (i.e., Indians and Negroes)” (pp. 287-88). In other words, the universal subject of psychology is none other than this Man, or overrepresented human. This, however, does not mean that the category of the human ought to be abandoned in the name of anti- or post-humanism. On the contrary, the category must be radicalized, via Fanon’s (1961/2004) “new humanism” (p. 178), to specifically include, and be overrepresented by, non-Christians, women, and non-Europeans since affirming “the reason of the Other” is “a step toward a transmodern worldhood” (Dussel, 1995, p. 26, emphasis in original).

Following Enrique Dussel, Burton and Osorio (2011) renounce the two dominant European paradigms for critiquing psychology as a modern science, namely: critical modernism and postmodernism. The former “recognizes some of the problems inherent in the modernist paradigm but retains a commitment to the emancipatory elements of rational (enlightenment) methods” (p. 30), and the latter not only throws out “the erroneous universalism of the modernist-colonial model it also rejects the advances in reason produced through the development of that system” (p. 31). Transmodernity, on the other hand, “moves beyond the alternatives of critical modernity and postmodernity, promising to overcome the shortcomings of each, constructing a more adequate and super-ordinate orientation invigorated by the critical perspective of the oppressed other” (Burton & Osorio, 2011, p. 23).

Analectical Psychology as a Transmodern Praxis

According to Dussel (1995), critical modernity and postmodernity, which are the two dominant paradigms in critical psychology, are Eurocentric critiques of modernity from within. Transmodernity, conversely, surpasses this Eurocentrism while upholding “negated alterity, the dignity and identity of other cultures, and the cover-over (en-cubierto) Other” (p. 66, emphasis in original). In other words, transmodernity is a decolonial critique from the underside of modernity, which “might in effect be the ana-dialectical solution to psychology’s paradigm wars – transcending them with this positive dialectic extended from the underside (the analectic), and underpinning the method of psychology not just epistemologically and ontologically but in the first place ethically” (Burton & Osorio, 2011, p. 34). Here is what Dussel (1985) means by ana-dialectic or analectic:

Dialectic in its positive sense or “ana-dialectic” permits us to open ourselves to methods that not only are not scientific but are not even theoretical (because analectic is a method whose point of departure is an ethical choice and a concrete historical praxis). This is of great importance because without it one would not be able to describe the epistemological level of the human sciences (which retain analogies with the factual sciences but are distinct because natural beings are not human beings—beings with history, culture, and freedom). (p. 160, emphasis added).

Analectical psychology then, as Burton and Osorio (2011) show, is ecocentric, pluriversal, critical realist, liberatory, human scientific, and ana-dialectical with its foundational point of reference being liberation praxis (e.g., Fanon, Freire, Martín-Baró, and Montero). Analectical psychology can also be qualified as “a really social psychology” (Burton & Kagan, 2009), a “decolonial psychology” (Adams et al., 2015; Kessi, 2019; Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Pickren, 2020), a “transmodern psychology” (Burton & Osorio, 2011), a “pluriversal psychology” (Beshara, 2019), or a “border psychology” (Beshara, 2021b).

According to Mignolo (2000), pluriversality, or pluriversal epistemology, is a form of ecocentric critical thinking, which can also be characterized—following Gloria Anzaldúa—as border thinking. Analectical psychology entails transdisciplinary border thinking, which is directed “toward ‘using’ the disciplines [e.g., psychology] beyond the disciplines themselves, aiming and building a world without modernity/coloniality. Border thinking is actional” (Mignolo, 2000, p. xviii); hence, the centrality of praxis. Pluriversal epistemology “emerges from diverse local experiences through time and around the world, between local Western histories and non-Western local histories” and “interconnects the plurality and diversity of decolonial projects” (Mignolo, 2000, p. xxii).

Further, de Sousa Santos (2014) addresses pluriversality in terms of epistemologies of the South, which he defines as “ways of knowing born in the struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (p. 238). Connell (2007) explores the same topic using the phrase Southern Theory, which for her “calls attention to periphery-centre relations in the realm of knowledge” (p. viii). Yet another important nomenclature is Global Social Theory, which refers to concepts, topics, and “thinkers from around the world” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p. 2).

Transmodernity is an ethics-based praxis, which “re-founds the project of human emancipation that had been conceived within the totality of the dominant world system as one of liberation from exploitation that can only be finally achieved by reaching, on equal terms, to those beyond that system” (Burton & Osorio, 2011, p. 23, emphasis added). This section is titled analectical psychology as a transmodern praxis because the aim of our decolonial and material critiques is to reflect on (critical) psychology in order to act upon the capitalist-colonial world. For this reason, Dussel (1995) qualifies transmodernity as “a practico-political program…characterized by ecological civilization, popular democracy, and economic justice” (p. 117). In sum, analectical psychology does not cancel (critical) psychology, rather it materially grounds our decolonial critiques in a transmodern praxis (see Beshara, 2021a).

Three Theoretico-Practical Resources from the Underside of Modernity

According to Freire (1970), liberation is a revolutionary process, which must be led by the oppressed for the humanization of all (i.e., the oppressed and oppressors). For this reason, it is relevant for analectical psychologists to not only cite but also center radical work by Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern theorists in their transmodern praxis. I would further emphasize being in dialogue in our research with living scholars-activists-practitioners, who are actively engaged in projects of collective liberation and social transformation. This ethos is inspired by initiatives, such as Cite Black Women (citeblackwomencollective.org), and scholars like Ahmed (2017), who is reflexive about her “citational practice” (p. 148), for citation as a praxis is inherently a political act.

Ahmed (2017) writes that citations “are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (p. 16); therefore, in closing I will recommend three theoretico-practical resources from the underside of modernity that can facilitate our dwelling becoming “a transmodern worldhood” (Dussel, 1995, p. 26, emphasis in original). This final section is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather my effort is to provide selective examples as sources of inspiration for analectical psychologists who dream of living in a transmodern world.

Indigenous Praxis

Indigenous praxis refers to radical Indigenous theories and practices developed by Native folks both before and after the colonization of the Americas in 1492. As far as psychology is concerned, Indigenous works typically emphasize the centrality of historical trauma and attempt to ground their accounts in an Indigenous perspective, which is inherently pluriversal given the heterogeneity of First Nations. An excellent example here is the overlooked text, Native American Postcolonial Psychology (Duran & Duran, 1995).

As we continue to experience modernity-induced environmental disasters, Indigenous ecopsychology (e.g., Estes, 2019; Gray, 1995; Parry, 2016), as both a tradition and a way of life, offers a particularly relevant framework for addressing contemporary environmental crises, particularly through its emphasis on the interdependence between humans and the non-human world. In this regard, it resonates with what Nick Estes (2019) aptly calls “history as the future.” Indigenous praxis also provides valuable resources for decolonizing Euromodern histories (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014) and methodologies (Smith, 2012).

Adams et al. (2015), for instance, write about Indigenization as “a strategy whereby locally grounded researchers and practitioners re-claim local or Indigenous wisdom to produce forms of knowledge that resonate with local realities and better serve local communities” (p. 223). For them, it is one of “three approaches to decolonizing psychological science” (p. 221), the other two being: accompaniment and denaturalization.

Finally, Indigenization also has an international dimension, which Salaita (2016) highlights when he writes about the revolutionary links between the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the struggles of Indigenous folks on Turtle Island and elsewhere. Additionally, Estes (2019) grounds the radical notion of solidarity in the Indigenous praxis of “kinship relations”, which links humans with non-human animals and with the land. The Red Nation, a coalition co-founded by Estes, indexes the signifier ‘red’ to link Indigeneity with socialism in an order to reframe solidarity as kinship.

Black Praxis

Black praxis refers to radical theories and practices developed by members of the Afrikan Diaspora, particularly descendants of slaves. Robinson’s (1983/2000) term for this praxis is the “Black Radical Tradition”—that is, “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” (p. 171)—and his examples of Black radicals include: Du Bois, James, and Wright. But the list obviously includes other Black men (e.g., Williams, Cox, Rodney, etc.) and many Black women (e.g., Jones, Davis, Wynter, etc.). Robinson (1983/2000) adds, “Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilization, but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation” (p. 73). Here Robinson is arguing that Black radicalism is a different (perhaps, more anarchist) program for revolutionary change, adjacent to but distinguishable from Marxism. He writes:

The record of resistance for four centuries or more, from Nueva España to Nyasaland, leaves in no doubt the specifically African character of those struggles. Resistances were formed through the meanings that Africans brought to the New World as their cultural possession; meanings sufficiently distinct from the foundations of Western ideas as to be remarked upon over and over by the European witnesses of their manifestations; meanings enduring and powerful enough to survive slavery to become the basis of an opposition to it. With Western society as a condition, that tradition almost naturally assumed a theoretical aspect as well. (Robinson, 1983/2000, p. 5)

In other words, Black radicalism must be understood on its own terms (i.e., not through a Eurocentric lens) as a distinct praxis without reducing it to slavery—that “critical foundation for capitalism” (Robinson, 1983/2000, p. 116). Robinson’s (1983/2000) most important theoretical innovation in Black Marxism is perhaps that of “racial capitalism” (p. 2). Here is his account: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism” (p. 2).

To clarify, racial capitalism is not a sub-type of capitalism. Robinson’s point—also echoed by Quijano—is that capitalism has always been, and continues to be, racial. In other words, there is a direct link between the colonization of the non-European world—along with the enslavement of non-European peoples—and the accumulation of wealth in Europe, which then provided the necessary fertile ground for a modern discipline like psychology to emerge as a science in late 19^th century Germany.

Additional contributions can be found in the literature on Black Psychology (e.g., Azibo, 1996; Bynum, 1999/2012) and the Association of Black Psychologists, which publishes the Journal of Black Psychology. For instance, whenever I teach Social Psychology, I find myself returning to Clark and Clark’s (1947) Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children, which is informally known as the ‘doll study’. The influential study was cited as evidence in the United States Supreme Court’s (1954) Brown v. Board of Education decision, since it indisputably showed the harmful effects of segregated schools on racialized children who identified with the “colored doll” that they were shown by the researchers and yet perceived said doll as uglier than the “white doll” (Clark & Clark, 1947). Clark and Clark (1947) empirically demonstrated that this (mis)perception can be explained in terms of the racialized children’s internalization of racism, which is a radical psychosocial insight that analectical psychologists must pay attention to.

Critical Race Theory (CRT), which recently some conservative governments (e.g., the US and the UK) in the Global North identified as a threat to whiteness, rose out of Critical Legal Studies. Derrick Bell is the originator of the movement, which currently includes many figures, such as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2012) as well as Tommy J. Curry (2009) to name a few.

The basic tenets of CRT include: (1) “racism is ordinary, not aberrational”; (2) “our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group”; (3) “the ‘social construction’ thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations”; (4) “the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market”; (5) “Closely related to differential racialization—the idea that each race has its own origins and ever-evolving history—is the notion of intersectionality and antiessentialism”; (6) “the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, [B]lack, American Indian, Asian, and Latino writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, pp. 7-10). In closing, it is important to mention that an significant project has been outlined over the last ten years on the basis of CRT: Critical Race Psychology (Adams & Salter, 2010; Salter & Adams, 2013).

Global Southern Praxis

The phrase the Global South has a history that can be traced back to the Haitian Revolution (1791 – 1804) and the League Against Imperialism (1928), but its official beginning is in 1955 with the Bandung Conference (in Indonesia), an Afro-Asian conference in which twenty-nine countries participated—representing more than half of the world’s population at the time. This conference took place in the context of the decolonization of Afrika and Asia (1945 – 1960) and eventually led to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)—a forum of one hundred and twenty countries that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc—in 1961 at the Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries in Serbia, Yugoslavia. Prashad (2012) writes:

The central concept for the new nations was the Third World. The Third World was not a place; it was a project. Galvanized by the mass movements and by the failures of capitalist mal-development, the leaderships in the darker nations looked to each other for another agenda. Politically they wanted more planetary democracy. No more the serfs of their colonial masters, they wanted to have a voice and power on the world stage. (pp. 20-21)

Similarly, the Global South is not a place; it is a project of South-South cooperation that refers to a “concatenation of protests against the theft of the commons, against the theft of human dignity and rights, against the undermining of democratic institutions and the promises of modernity” (Prashad, 2012, p. 64). Prashad (2012) adds, “The global South is this: a world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity” (pp. 64-65).

To put it in Dusselian terms, the Global South is modernity’s alterity, which is not only geographically exterior to the Global North as is the case with the Tricontinent (Afrika, Latin America, and Asia), but also culturally exterior, even when geographically interior, as is the case with Indigenous, Black, and non-European immigrant cultures in the Global North. To be clear, the point is not cultural supremacy, but transmodernity, which is the best of modernity and its alterity; however, this transmodernity, as Freire (1970) argues, can only be realized through the revolutionary leadership of the oppressed given the historical and ongoing violence caused by modernity/coloniality since 1492. Recent efforts in this direction include the edited volume, Critical Psychology Praxis: Psychosocial Non-Alignment to Modernity/Coloniality (Beshara, 2021a), and the forum: Afro-Asian Critical Psychology. ^iv

Afrika

Here I am referring to radical theories and practices developed by continental Afrikans. South Afrikans are leaders in this context given the recent conference that was organized in 2019 at the University of Western Cape in Cape Town, which was titled, Toward a Decolonial Psychology: Theories from the Global South. Keynote speakers at the conference included Maldonado-Torres, Kessi, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, as reported by Adams (2019). Analectical psychologists can also benefit from reading Afrikana philosophy (Gordon, 2008; Hord & Lee, 2016) and engaging with writings by pan-Afrikan revolutionaries, such as Sankara, Cabral, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Biko, etc.

Latin America

The key reference here is, of course, not only liberation psychology (Martín-Baró, 1994), but also liberation philosophy (Dussel, 1985). A recent book titled, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (Gaztambide, 2019) provides an excellent account of the links between radical psychoanalysis and liberation psychology.

Furthermore, I highly recommend the modernity/coloniality research program, as developed by Dussel, Quijano, and Mignolo, for it has had the most influence on my stretching of critical psychology over the last four years. Escobar (2007) summarizes the modernity/coloniality research program as follows:

The conceptualization of modernity/coloniality is grounded in a series of operations that distinguish it from established theories of modernity. Succinctly put, these include the following: (1) an emphasis on locating the origins of modernity with the Conquest of America and the control of the Atlantic after 1492, rather than in the most commonly accepted landmarks such as the Enlightenment or the end of the eighteenth century; (2) a persistent attention to colonialism and the making of the capitalist world system as constitutive of modernity; this includes a determination not to overlook the economy and its concomitant forms of exploitation; (3) consequently, the adoption of a world perspective in the explanation of modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon; (4) the identification of the domination of others outside the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity, with the concomitant subalternization of the knowledge and cultures of these other groups; (5) a conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of modernity/coloniality – a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself, and that relies on ‘a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center’. (p. 184)

Asia

Finally, in terms of radical theories and practices developed by continental Asians, I have particularly drawn on Engaged Buddhism, as developed by Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and I have related this radical approach to critical psychology (e.g., Beshara, 2016, 2017). Hạnh (1998) is most known perhaps for his notion of “interbeing”, which signifies a relational ontology that is similar to the previously mentioned Indigenous praxis of kinship (Estes, 2019).

Buddhist psychology (or abhidharma) is thought-provoking because it can be framed as a “contemplative science” (Wallace, 2007)—distinct from both natural science and human science—that dates back thousands of years, and which is grounded in empiricism—therefore, not to be confused with introspection—since meditation is a rigorous qualitative method of sorts. Buddhist psychology is also critical psychological because of how it decenters the ego, and, of course, this decentering began millennia before Freud’s invention of the unconscious in the European context.

I will conclude this discussion of analectical psychology as a transmodern praxis with another theoretically significant contribution from Asia, namely Wai’s (2013) Critical Psychology is not Psychology. In this witty piece, Fu Wai (2013) draws on a paradox by ancient Chinese philosopher Gongsun Long, which reads, “white horse is not horse”. Analectical psychology—which indexes Confucius’s Analects—in a sense is what Wai (2013) terms a “non-psychology” (p. 278), for it is not a “reformist counterpart” or sub-discipline, but a transmodern praxis, that is, a revolutionary negation of the negation. In other words, the transmodern praxis of analectical psychology constitutes a radical (antiracist and anticapitalist) negation of a modern/colonial discipline that has historically negated the humanity of non-Europeans. Said differently, our ana-dialectical negation (cf. Samir Amin’s delinking), which is a decolonial act, materially affirms the ethico-political significance of our transmodern subjectivities along with their epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies.

References

Notes

¹ This article was conducted with the author's own funding.

i cf. the American Psychological Association’s collusion with the US government to torture, via “enhanced interrogation techniques” that include waterboarding, “enemy combatants” who are not protected as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions (Hoffman, 2015).

ⁱⁱ For reasons as to why Afrika should be spelled with a K (see Madhubuti, 1973, p. 13).

ⁱⁱⁱ I write this article in English, for example, when my native tongue is Arabic because English is the dominant language of science, particularly as a function of US hegemony post-WWII.

^iv https://afroasiancriticalpsychology.wordpress.com/

Author notes

2 Assistant Professor of Psychology (Humanities & Social Sciences). PhD in Consciousness and Society (Psychology) Education.

Additional information

Para citar este artículo / To cite this article / Para citar este artigo: Beshara, R. (2026). Analectical Psychology as a Transmodern Praxis: Three Theoretico-Practical Resources from the Underside of Modernity. Pensamiento Psicológico, 24, 1-37. doi:10.11144/Javerianacali.PPSI24.aptp

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