Psychologies of Co-Liberation

with Mary Watkins

In this sweeping conversation with Mary Watkins, she explores the ways that western psychologies decontextualize suffering from community (social determinants of health) and ecology. She invites us to ask what a psychology and a mental health would look like that understood our wellbeing is deeply embedded in our communities and their struggles, and in the place where we reside. She invites us to question what a more horizontal and reciprocal model of care would resemble, and how it would impact both wellness practitioners, and those they were accompanying.

Related Practices:

To more deeply examine the colonial inheritance of the European mind, see Getting out of the Box, which is part of the larger series Deprogramming the Colonial Mind. For inquiry into the historicity of constructs of conquest, see Building Peace. For deeper inquiry into the dynamics of race, see How Whiteness Operates and An Unfinished Conversation about Race. See Activism from the Heart of Nature. With regard to patterns of rupture and the nepantla, see the Tao of Apocalypse and Collapse. See Escaping the Prison of the Mind. See Interoception. See The Evolved Nest. See Triune Ethics Theory.

Who taught us this?

Mary Watkins is chair of the Depth Psychology Program, Co-Chair of the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco- Psychologies Specialization (CLIE), and Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research in CLIE at Pacific Graduate Institute. She was trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and was an early member of the archetypal/imaginal psychology movement. She has worked in a wide variety of clinical settings and with groups on issues of peace, diversity, social justice, reconciliation, immigration, and the envisioning of community and cultural transformation. She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace.

Teach me how

Mary references several bodies of work in this film. You can download Palo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She references the work of Frantz Fanon, including The Wretched of the Earth. She references Arthur Kleinman's 1991 book Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience.

Who taught us this?

Mary Watkins is chair of the Depth Psychology Program, Co-Chair of the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco- Psychologies Specialization (CLIE), and Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research in CLIE at Pacific Graduate Institute. She was trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and was an early member of the archetypal/imaginal psychology movement. She has worked in a wide variety of clinical settings and with groups on issues of peace, diversity, social justice, reconciliation, immigration, and the envisioning of community and cultural transformation. She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace.

Teach me how

Mary references several bodies of work in this film. You can download Palo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She references the work of Frantz Fanon, including The Wretched of the Earth. She references Arthur Kleinman's 1991 book Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience.

Video: | Photography: Adobe Stock | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.