Upstream - Liberation Psychology with Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez & Harriet Fraad

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Mainstream psychology has been complicit — whether intentionally or not — in the establishment of colonial, white-supremacist, capitalist hierarchies of oppression around the world. Individualizing pain lets the systemic causes for our suffering off the hook and places the responsibility for healing and wellbeing on individual will.  In the 1970’s in El Salvador, confronted by these dangers of western psychology — during a civil war — psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró started to develop an alternative, constructing a psychology relevant to oppressed peoples, like many of the people of El Salvador who were undergoing social, political, and war-related trauma.  Martin-Baró was ultimately assassinated as a result of his work by a CIA-trained battalion of the Salvadoran army, but fellow therapists and theologians in Latin America carried his work on. His legacy, known as Liberation Psychology, is an attempt to bring the historical, political, and economic causes of our distresses and discontents into the therapy session. The aim is to bring about liberation through an understanding of the systemic causes of oppression, exploitation, and alienation and to offer pathways to more socialist, just, and regenerative models of relating that would bring about both human and planetary well-being. To learn more, we’ve brought on two guests with both a theoretical and experiential relationship to Liberation Psychology.  Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez, PsyD is a therapist and author of the book A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Daniel is the assistant director of clinical training in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the New School for Social Research, and the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology,  Harriet Fraad is a feminist activist, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and host of the Capitalism Hits Home podcast.  We begin the show with Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez, PsyD exploring Freud, Marx, and the origins of Liberation Psychology. In the second half of the show, we speak with Harriet Fraad exploring a Marxist-Feminist approach to Liberation Psychology. Thank you to Noname for the intermission music and to Neil Ballard for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. Related Conversations / Further listening: Stolen Focus with Johann Hari This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify to leave us a review there too. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And also, Upstream is a labor of love. It's really important for us to keep our bi-weekly conversation series and quarterly documentaries free of charge and accessible to anyone who's interested. But it all takes a lot of time and resources. If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so. And if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable,

please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. The kind of symptoms, problems, and difficulties that a client is bringing to, say, a psychotherapy session, are they things that result from something within the person? For sure. Does it go back to their family environment? Without question. Does it go back to an intergenerational transmission from one generation to the other within their family? Absolutely. But beyond that are social determinants. The higher the level of income inequality, the more likely you're going to have in a society

incidences of substance use, self-harm, anxiety, depression, etc. Such that very much questions of political economy have a way of trickling down, not in the form of wealth, but of misery, a kind of trickle-down misery. And when you look at clinical work per se, social workers, licensed professional counselors, clinical and counseling psychologists, etc., are sort of tasked with trying to put a band-aid on what are essentially the symptoms of a system. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn

everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Mainstream psychology has been complicit, whether intentionally or not, in the establishment of colonial, white supremacist, capitalist hierarchies of oppression around the world. Individualizing pain lets the systemic causes for our suffering off the hook and places the responsibility for healing and well-being on individual will. In the 1970s in El Salvador, confronted by these dangers of Western psychology, during a civil war especially, psychologist Ignacio Martín Barro started to develop an alternative, constructing a psychology relevant to oppressed peoples, like many of the peoples of El Salvador, who

were undergoing social, political, and war-related trauma. Martín Barro was ultimately assassinated as a result of his work by a CIA-trained battalion of the Salvadoran Army, but fellow therapists and theologians in Latin America carried on his work by a CIA-trained battalion of the Salvadoran Army, but fellow therapists and theologians in Latin America carried on his work. His legacy, known as liberation psychology, is an attempt to bring the historical, political, and economic causes of our distresses and discontents into the therapy session. The aim is to bring about liberation through an understanding of the systemic causes of oppression, exploitation, and alienation, and to offer pathways to more socialist, just, and regenerative models of relating that would bring about both human and planetary

well-being. To learn more, we've invited on two guests, both with a theoretical and experiential relationship to liberation psychology. Danielle Jose Hatambide Nunez is a therapist and author of the book A People's History of Psychoanalysis, From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Danielle is the Assistant Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the New School for Social Research and the Director of the Frantz Fanon Center for Intersectional Psychology. Harriet Fraad is a feminist activist, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and host of the Capitalism Hits Home podcast. We'll start the show with Danielle exploring Freud, Marx, and the origins of liberation psychology.

In the second half of the show, we'll speak with Harriet Fraad, exploring a Marxist feminist approach to liberation psychology. Here's Della in conversation with Danielle José Hatambide Nunez. Welcome. So good to meet you. We love to start by asking folks to introduce themselves. So how might you introduce yourself for our listeners? Oh, for sure. So my name is Daniel Jose Astambia Nunez, and I'm the Assistant Director of Clinical Training at the New School for Social Research and Director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology. Excellent. Thank you. And you are very well- versed in the field of psychology and a lot of interesting themes in your professional life. I'm wondering if you can share what is it that breaks your heart or concerns you about mainstream psychology? I'll start with the heartbreaking, the fun lowball questions. I guess it's two things. One is more clinical. The other is more at the intersection of research and public policy. On the clinical side,

it sometimes kind of affects me, actually, when I think about the ways that we tend to practice, especially in community mental health settings, where it's predominantly low income, mental health settings where it's predominantly low income, immigrant populations, people of color, and coming in with this mindset that people are so fundamentally broken and so kind of burdened by different systems of oppression that you can't even imagine what different would look like or what change would look like for that person, for that client, in a way that leads to something I often call a kind of empathic abandonment, that, you know, it sounds a little something like, oh, well, the patient is so burdened by the different things in their life, they can't possibly come to their sessions or come on time, or they can't possibly, you know,

change their life circumstances in ways that sounds on the surface like empathy, but really winds up serving a purpose for the therapist's own comfort, meaning that they may not necessarily engage the client in the process of psychotherapy, but engage in something that we might call a form of psychotherapy, that if you just express sympathy to someone in their circumstances, that that somehow by itself is a form of treatment, as opposed to actually engaging the client in their lived experience in a process of change. That's something that I see far too often to sort of see the trauma and not see the

resilience with which people in our communities respond to their situations. So that's one form of heartbreak. The other being more around research and public policy. And that is that psychology broadly, despite the voluminous mountain of work that's been done on social inequality, that's been done on the psychological impact of social inequality, that's been done on the psychological impact of social inequality, our window of vision remains incredibly narrow. And by narrow, I mean specifically that instead of really thinking big about the kinds of policies that would make transformative change in our country, let alone our field, we get hankered down in a kind of McDonald-fication of psychology. So how do we turn whatever this body of research is into an app or into some five-minute thing you can do?

I had this fascinating experience after the first book came out, actually, where people in the kind of entrepreneurial space were reaching out to want to create a liberation psychology app, like do five minutes of mindfulness and you'll mindfulness the colonialism away, which is like an aberration, right, of what the work would actually point to, which is less about creating apps or specific tools for people than it is thinking about how do we make this research speak to the world and lead to transformative social change. So those are two things that break my heart on a regular ongoing basis. Thank you. And yeah, the show is called Upstream because it's about going

upstream from that which breaks our heart. So that's why we asked that. And I'm wondering if you are to go upstream, what would you say are the root causes of those heartbreaks that you feel in terms of psychology? I mean, I definitely think the causes of the causes, as it were, are related in both of those cases. I advocate for the perspective of seeing the kind of symptoms, problems, and difficulties that a client is bringing to, say, a psychotherapy session. Are they things that result from something within the person? For sure. Does it go back to their family environment? Without question. Does it go back to

an intergenerational transmission from one generation to the other within their family? generational transmission from one generation to the other within their family. Absolutely. But beyond that are social determinants, right? So we know, for example, that the higher the level of income inequality, the more likely you're going to have in a society the incidences of substance use, self-harm, anxiety, depression, etc., such that very much questions of political economy have a way of trickling down, not in the form of wealth, but of misery, a kind of trickle down misery. And when you look at clinical work per se, social workers, licensed professional counselors, clinical and counseling psychologists, etc. are sort of tasked with trying to put a bandaid on what are essentially the symptoms of a system. And without question, right, like I engage in a lot of psychotherapy, and I certainly

do psychotherapy training for my students. And there's many things I could say about how psychotherapy is, of course, useful and very transformative for a lot of people. But it's a little bit like the parable of the starfish. The story goes along the lines of, you know, a man is walking down a beach. And off in the distance, they see just a strew of starfish who are beached on the beach. And there's a child, a little girl, who keeps grabbing each individual starfish and throwing them back out into the ocean. The man comes up to the little girl and says, you know, why are you doing this? Like, no matter how many starfish you throw back out into the ocean, all these many will remain, as if to say, like, all your efforts are in vain.

And that's where the little girl says, well, maybe, but it mattered to that one, right, to each individual starfish she threw out. And, you know, the heart of the parable is that even change at an individual level can be meaningful. And I have nothing against that concept. But I would sort of imagine, well, what if that little girl grows up and she becomes a marine biologist? And she asked the question,

why did all those starfish wind up on the beach that day? And she engages in science, scientific research, and discovers, hmm, that has a little something to do with global warming. That seems to be a reason for why starfish may be winding up on the beach, because the water's heating up. Well, why is global warming such a thing right now? And she digs in further and realizes, oh, gee, giant major corporations are doing everything imaginable to make voluminous amounts of money, even as they're destroying our environment. And let's say she goes even deeper. Well, what facilitates major corporations and interests being able to do this? She might realize, aha, well, in the United States context, racial fear and demagoguery

is a major powerful force in getting right-wing politicians into office to then enact said policies. Well, all of a sudden, a story that starts with the individual starfish can lead to a systemic appraisal of what it is that leads to these problems to begin with. So as a therapist, I'm like, of course, we should try to do our best clinically for every client that's in front of us. But let's not also forget that the forces that brought that client to sit in front of us are much larger than familial dynamics and intrigues. Absolutely. And this is exactly why we reached out to speak with you. And it may seem strange to have this conversation on a podcast about economics. But for me, when I heard about liberation psychology, what I imagined in a therapy session, and I'm not a therapist, it was just my imagination was that in through liberation psychology, a therapist could identify where one's anxiety or depression or pain is more individually caused either through perhaps chemical imbalance or the loss of a loved one

or heartbreak, those types of things. Or they could also distinguish when there were systemic causes or systemic conditions that led to the patient's sense of precariousness or depression or anxiety for what's happening in the world. And I just, I felt the sense of liberation that would come from that therapist working with that client in helping them understand the systemic causes of what's going on for them. So yes, that's, I love the metaphor that you share and a little bit more about what's breaking your heart and what you see when you go upstream. So maybe could you share about your personal journey with liberation psychology? So what inspired you on this path?

How did you come to this field of liberation psychology? Well, I guess my journey, we must really go back to my mother, honestly. And I say that only half jokingly, because I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My mom had like, you know, maybe, you know, an eighth grade education, but she read a lot, like she was a voracious reader. and a big influence for us was our church community, which was very psychologically minded. So our pastors were exposed to Freud, at least one of them is getting a doctorate in clinical psychology, so there's exposure to mainstream psychological research and clinical theory. And my mom, who was their secretary, would read all these books and read them for them, read them for herself, and she'd bring them home. And so very early on, the idea that psychology was a tool of communal help and communal liberation and transformation was sort of obvious to me growing up. Like I, you know, most kids want to,

you know, be firemen and astronauts and whatever when they're five or six, and I wanted to be a psychologist. And so it was just kind of hand to glove for me. And it was only later when I came stateside to go to school that I realized, well, not all psychology is like that. Psychology can be very deterministic, it can be very individualistic and kind of psychologistic, so to speak, in the way it looks at social problems. So I went to school, right, I went to undergrad at Rutgers. And I feel like I would have gotten a lot more of that experience had somebody made the connection between, say, academic, mainstream, laboratory psychology, and the kind of things I care about, right? That there are ways in which the science of psychology is kind of uniquely positioned to speak to these issues

as they manifest downstream, so to speak. I went through a period of just trying to figure it out because I couldn't quite find a place where my voice fit. And through a very circuitous turn of events, I found myself, of all things and of all places, getting a master's degree at Union Theological Seminary. That was just the thought that some of my mentors at Rutgers had, like, oh, we really think you should apply to Union. And I was just like, well, I'm a heathen, so I don't know why you want me to go to seminary, but I'll apply. And I just happened to get a full ride and a domicile. Like they would give you housing and give you support to do your schooling.

So I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to seminary then. And the thing about Union is that because it had this psychoanalytically oriented master's program, and it was also one of the hotbeds of liberation theology in North America. It gave me a very unique space to explore the intersection of these ideas. And it was actually a guest lecturer, Claude Barbara, from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, who came to our school and gave a lecture on liberation psychology. And that was sort of a lightning moment for me, like, oh, you could bring these different things together. The kind of preferential option for the poor and the oppressed within liberation theology and psychoanalytic thought into this kind of social justice oriented approach to psychological research and clinical practice. And for those who may not know what liberation theology and liberation psychology are, how

might you introduce them to someone who is unfamiliar and also the bridge or the journey? Because I know they're very intimately connected and I love how that's embodied through your own personal experience. So what is liberation theology? What is liberation psychology? And what's the connection there? for Sunday school or whatnot. Liberation theology is all those moments where the Jewish prophets say, you know, you crush the poor beneath your feet and live the widow and the orphan go hungry. And the idea that God has a special place in their heart for those who are downtrodden. Or every moment that in the Christian gospels, Jesus says, I come to give good news to the widow, the poor, the orphan, to the oppressed and the enslaved. I come to bring liberation, right? So it's all

those moments where there's this idea, not just of a spiritual liberation, but of a real societal transformation and liberation from oppression. The reason I start there is because, like, I grew up in a Pentecostal evangelical church, and I, you know, read the Bible a lot, because that's just kind of what you do. But that aspect of the message of the Hebrew prophets, the message of the Christian gospels, never really popped until I started reading things through this lens. So you can think of at least two kind of origin points for liberation theology. One of them is Latin American liberation theology and the work of Gustavo Gutierrez, basically representing a number of Catholic priests who were just noticing the absolutely brutal, egregious levels of inequality in their home countries, the level of colonial exploitation

by the United States and other European powers that were leading to so much misery in their communities. And so they're trying to understand how do you make sense of the gospel or how do you make sense of the Bible? How do you make sense of faith in a world that's so broken? And in order to answer that, many of them did work in their communities, right, with communities and peoples that were highly disenfranchised and poor. And they also engage Marxist thought. And even though Marxism has a history of, you know, secularism and atheism, there are very interesting veins in Marx that kind of tread on the idea of the Exodus, right, as this the story of liberation from oppression in the Hebrew scriptures. So

people sort of started making connections between this idea that in order to understand reality, you have to start from the bottom. You have to start from the perspective of the downtrodden in order to see things, so to speak, as they really are. Then you had this kind of North American analog that you find in the work of James Cone in the form of Black Theology or Black Liberation Theology, which is, again, how do you make meaning of the cross, of the message of salvation and liberation in a world where the humanity of Black people is verboten, right? Is literally outlawed by legal, economic, and social structures. of the Americas trying to see an image of God that comes from below, that comes from those who are suffering, and that their suffering is a source of meaning. It's an epistemology. It's a way of seeing the world. And lo and behold, Ignacio Martín Baró, the founder of liberation psychology, was a Jesuit priest who was very much exposed and around these kind of liberation theology circles.

And he kind of creates this fusion between the ethics of liberation theology with his reading and learning as a social psychologist with a psychoanalytic background. Yes. And in your book, A People's History of Psychoanalysis, Karl Marx's name came up a couple of times and I was surprised to see it. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Can you speak a little bit more about that connection between Marxism and liberation psychology? What did you discover through writing the book? And also just what connections are there? Well, you know, it's funny, like, Freud and Marx are those two people that you're told to stay away from in undergraduate and graduate schooling.

The story goes they're both white men, European Enlightenment projects. They have nothing to say to the global South. They have nothing to say to people of color, let alone the poor and oppressed. I was doing, I guess that to take a step back there, I very much, you know, saw things through that lens until I discovered the work of Sander Gilman and Elizabeth Danto. Elizabeth Danto's book, Freud's Free Clinics, Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918 and 1938, was a game changer for me because it showed a different picture of psychoanalysis that was intimately bound up with questions of social justice. When I start reading more into this, you know, I'm just kind of shocked that the overwhelming majority of the first generation of psychoanalysts were all Marxists, socialists, communists, and social democrats, with Freud being the conservative

one, and he's a social democrat. So I was really struck by that, that there were all these questions around LGBT rights, feminism, and Marxism already kind of there in that movement, and that Marx was such an inspiration for psychoanalysis, for liberation theology, and then later on for liberation psychology as well. So I was kind of weirdly introduced to Marx by rediscovering Freud, if that makes sense. Freud's a funny case because, you know, I don't know any evidence that Freud actually read Marx, but there are so many little parallelisms in how Freud thinks about society that sometimes mirrors one-to-one something that Marx said. So for example, there's this place in The Future of an Illusion where Freud is talking about, oh gee, you know, it really does seem like society is the product of a powerful

few having control of all the wealth and depriving the many. Well, how do the few maintain such control over the overwhelming number of people who make their wealth possible through their labor? And Freud says, well, if you can provide a kind of substitute of satisfaction, particularly in the form of being able to displace the hatred and hostility that you might feel towards the elite, and you redirect it towards an other, especially a racial other, then it's kind of like an ancient Rome, where you might be an exploited plebe under the Roman Empire. And yet, because you're a Roman citizen, you can participate in the wealth of the Roman Empire by conquering and exploiting other nations and other people, right? And this is Freud's sort of metaphor for how racism works,

where lo and behold, that's the exact same metaphor that Marx used when looking at the kind of North American scene during the Civil War, and when looking at the ways that British elites exploited anti-Irish sentiment to break up unions. And Marx said exactly the same thing. Under Rome, I may be exploited, but as a Roman citizen, I get to exploit other people. And that kind of keeps the system stable. Yes, I found that a lot of your book was an invitation to unlearn. And the greatest unlearning for me through your book was about Freud and psychoanalysis in general. And I know you obviously write, you do research, and I know you work with clients. And so how do you bring in this work, these understandings, these theories into a conversation

with someone? Like what questions would you ask? What would a session look like with you? When we speak, and certainly when we speak in a session with a therapist, it's not just us talking. It's also certainly our intimate others, right? So things that we heard growing up. So think about a moment where you're having some difficulty with a task. Maybe you decide to put it to the side, and then this automatic thought comes through that says, oh, why are you being so lazy? Maybe not remembering that when you were growing up, you heard a parent say that to you, like, oh, why are you being so lazy? So when you're talking, you're often repeating different things that you heard in your environment one way or the other. Well, the same thing happens societally as well, that when we're speaking, we're not just speaking out of our interpersonal

experience. We're also communicating something about our society, about the way in which we see ourselves in that society and perceive others to see us. So what might that look like concretely? and perceive others to see us. So what might that look like concretely? Well, suppose I'm working with a client and they're talking about work and all of a sudden they're saying, you know, I just feel like I'm not where I should be. I feel like I haven't really climbed to where, you know, maybe my potential could take me, but I don't know, maybe I'm just not good enough. Maybe I'm just talking nonsense. Well, you can listen to that on a number of different levels. You can listen to it in terms of, hmm, what messages did they hear from their family that told them maybe they're not good enough? What messages, you know, what desires maybe from their parents are coming through

in this interaction? And that's a perfectly valid way of hearing that. You could also hear that statement less in what I would call a horizontal interpersonal way. You could also hear it in a very vertical way. Somebody who says, you can even imagine it, I am not where I should be. It's kind of imagining that they're in a certain social plane and that they either deserve to or perhaps should reach for a higher social position. And in this context, we're talking about work. And work is not exactly a neutral subject, right? It's always bound up with questions of power and positionality, who produces and who derives wealth from that production. So I might very simply reflect to this hypothetical patient, not where you should be. And they might suddenly start expanding like, yeah, you know, I did all the things I was

supposed to. I went to school. I got the degree. I worked very hard. I should be sipping mojitos on some balcony somewhere. And instead I'm working 50 hours a week and feeling exhausted. Well, now suddenly there's a lot there in that imagery. The idea that if you just work hard, if you study hard, then you'll win. You know, I'll put it very crudely. You'll win at capitalism, right? But of course, that's not how our society works. But of course, that's not how our society works. So in the act of just reflecting do all these things that you're supposed to,

the world will be your oyster. Similarly, you know, of course, that's in talking about class, but the same thing applies when we think about gender, race, and sexuality, right? That there are certainly messages that we learn about our world interpersonally, and it is in many ways interpersonally mediated, but there's also a lot of things that we learn about the world and our position in it from the broader social sphere. So my argument basically is that if we attend to the subtleties in people's speech, we don't have to go looking for the social. We don't have to pretend that we have to bring the social into the room as if the psychotherapy office is in outer space somewhere and not in the society in which we live. So my call to a lot of clinicians would be, don't go looking for the social. See how it's already

there. Yeah, thank you so much for that concrete example. And it is something that, again, I've assumed about liberation psychology, that there might be more space for education around the social. So I'm wondering, you know, you joked about winning at the game of capitalism, but do you ever go from asking these questions, which I hear could be very helpful for digging deeper, as you said, but do you ever get into like an educational moment? Like this is what alienation is, or, you know, like, this is what alienation is, or, you know, like, yeah, or this is that this is capitalism, and capitalism is X, Y, and Z. Like, what is the space for raising class consciousness or things around economic theory? What is the space for that type of education in sessions with patients? It's a fascinating question that brings up a lot of tensions in the work of, say, somebody like Paulo Freire.

I'll say for starters that I think therapists have the fantasy like, oh, and the moment will come and I'll give them bell hooks or the moment will come and I'll, you know, assign das capitales, homework or something very pedagogical. I think in reality, in actual practice, it more often than not becomes very counterproductive. It becomes counterproductive, and I'll illustrate it in the following way. So when Paulo Freire was first developing his theory of pedagogy, at first he's like, yeah, I'm going to go into these indigenous, low-income Afro-Brazilian communities, and I'm going to teach them, right? I'm going to educate them about racism and capitalism and all these things. And he found in very short order that nobody cared. Nobody was interested in having these conversations. But people sure were interested in learning how to read and developing that as a skill. So he goes back, and he goes back to

a drawing board and realizes, gee, it's almost like the more I try to impose my worldview on them, the more they push back and resist or don't want to talk about it. Let me take a different tact. And here is where his engagement with psychoanalysis becomes quite relevant. Because in reading people like Eric Fromm or reading Frantz Fanon, he realizes that, you know, maybe he has this wrong. Maybe I have to take a different tact. So he goes back to these communities, and rather than trying to, quote unquote, educate them from above, he tries to engage them in the act of reading, but in what he calls reading the word to read the world. It started out something very simple, like just introducing somebody to the letter F. And the letter F leads to the word field. And he might ask them to expand,

well, gee, well, what comes to mind when you think of a field? And then suddenly people are like, oh, well, I think about toiling all day. I think about toiling all day and working very hard, and then coming home and not having space and time to be with my children. So all of a sudden, it's by trusting and evoking the participants' own experience that there started to be an opening to talk about these issues quite organically. He realized in very short order that he didn't need to teach people about capitalism. They sort of intuitively had a sense of what it meant to be exploited, of what it meant to feel that you're not integrated in your community, of what it means to not be able to connect with other people, even your loved ones, because there's this sense of competitiveness

that's always flying around. And that experience is what led him to make this distinction between what he calls a banking system of education and a problem-posing method of education. The banking system is quite literally, I take this information from my brain and I deposit it in you as a passive receptacle, which is presumably empty. This is, you know, thoroughly, a thoroughly psychoanalytic idea that if you treat the patient like they're somehow an empty vessel for your own subjectivity, well, it makes sense that either A, they're going to behave in a very submissive fashion, or B, they're going to resist because they're trying to maintain their own autonomy.

I mean, everybody else has already taken away their autonomy at their job, in their community, being regularly harassed by the police. Why should they add you to the list? In that sense, we could think of psychoanalytic practice as a problem posing enterprise that when you're really beginning from someone's experience and helping them articulate all of those things that they feel every day in their body, but that they don't have words for, I can say quite pragmatically, I don't need to break out black skin, white masks, or Das Kapital. People seem to have an intuitive sense of what it means to be screwed over by the world. And when they're given permission to put that experience into words,

everything else kind of flows very organically, I want to say. People make their own decisions to become involved in activism or collaborate with other workers or to have conversations about what's really going on in the community. And I don't really have to tell them that.

If anything, I could certainly say in my own experience that whenever I've tried to be like educational, tends not to go very well. And if you look at the research, that's pretty well established that if you start from, here's what I'm going to bring to you, people tend to shut down, they're not open to it. But if you start from them as an equivalent, if not more important source of knowledge, that actually opens people up. And there, perhaps there could be education, but perhaps you may not need to. patient or a woman of color patient about what it means to be a woman of color in the society. I don't need to educate them about that. It sort of starts to come through because they're being given this very unique permission to say everything that comes to mind. And that means literally everything, not just about mommy and daddy, but about your experience in the world. Thank you. Yeah, I'm hearing the power of questions, the power of listening.

And then also in my experience, what I feel is like listening for a question. Education is most useful when somebody comes to me with like, hey, I have a question. It's like, oh, okay, well, let's explore that together. But if there's no question, educating someone in my experience can feel very proselytizing or trying to put upon someone and can absolutely be met with resistance. I'm wondering, when I heard about liberation psychology, I was so enthusiastic. And I even looked up different educational programs. And I found there weren't very many. I know that Pacifica Graduate Institute has a liberation psychology degree.

But I'm wondering if you can talk about, you know, you went over the historical, but what is the state of liberation psychology today? How popular is it? And I know you did say that part of it has kind of morphed into community psychology and multicultural psychology or on your website, intersectional psychology as well. But has it just gone into other forms? Or how popular is it today? And how might we also uplift liberation psychology more? Like, again, for me, the enthusiasm is so strong for me, particularly right now. So what's the state

of the popularity of liberation psychology today? I mean, it really does depend on geography. So like in Latin America, like liberation psychology is very much a robust research program, and a very robust mode of intervention that's very much still practiced by that name. In North America, at least in the United States, it's more of an inspiration. So people will read and engage Martín Baró's work and then adapt it to community psychology or to clinical psychology, social psychology, and so forth. And there's certainly a variety of disciplines who are informed not just by Martín Baró, but especially Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire. Fanon in particular, his influence can be felt throughout the whole of everything. I mean everything from

decolonial studies, black studies, intersectionality, black male studies, afro-pessimism, really like everything and anything and anyone who has something to say about colonialism, racism, and racial capitalism must have engaged Fanon at some level and in some capacity. So it's really less of like a concrete brand, like the Department of, say, Liberation Psychology, and more of a series of tributaries whose influence continues to be felt across many disciplines today. And yet, what about within mainstream therapy or mainstream psychology? Would they absolutely have been exposed to these thinkers and liberation psychology as a practice? Or would it have been an elective class that they may have gotten to

take if they chose? What is the popularity in terms of how mainstream would this be in the field of psychology in general? I mean, I think today it's a little bit better, psychology in general? I mean, I think today, it's like a little bit better, but you still have the tendency of like, you know, here's your course on psychotherapy, and then go take your course on cultural competence, social issues over there. And there's certainly still a divide between people who will say, we're doing the real, you know, psychology research, you're doing applied psychology over there. So there's very much a split in the field that still continues where liberation psychology might be seen as off the beaten path. But more and more, you do see people making an effort to include more voices from the

global South as part of the general psychology curriculum, both in clinical psychology and counseling psychology, certainly, as well as in other sub-disciplines within psychology as a whole. Well, I am happy to hear that. And our last question for you is just what might you say to an economist, right? Because this show is about economics and we've been talking more to the people studying psychology or psychoanalysis. But what might you say to an economist or a student who wants to study economics like what might you say is by way of liberation psychology or to get folks thinking about things from your lens the first thing i would say is that from a psychoanalytic perspective what is for example patriarchy but the installation of particularly cis het men's fears, anxieties,

and desires into law? What is white supremacy, if not the installation of white people's fears, anxieties, and desires into law? What is neoliberalism, if not the institution of the ruling and particularly the wealthy elites' desires into political economy? That, you know, without in any way taking an anti-materialist stance, there's a way in which the desires, fantasies, and wishes of a very select group of people, their dreams, become the nightmare of everybody else that there's a way in which political economy works that winds up structuring the way we look at the world there's been research done for example that if you look longitudinally at the application of different types of neoliberal policies that has a way of trickling down into people's psychologies and how they see the world. So you can actually trace from the 80s to the current time, the more that people come to accept the idea, well, you know, you just didn't work hard enough. You just didn't do what you're

supposed to do. Some people are going to work their way down to the bottom, and the right kind of people are going to work their way up to the top. And not everybody necessarily believed that prior to the advent of neoliberalism. So there's some interesting relationship between literal material structure and the ways that those structures come to confine our imagination and our ability to dream a different way of being in the world. So to any extent that economists could, you know, just throw psychology a bone, the psychosocial sciences, to put together how these very concrete material things both come from, to an extent, from a psychological place, but have an indelible impact on how people live their lives on the ground. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Daniel José Hatambide Nunez. We'll be right back for the

second half of the show with psychotherapist and hypnotherapist Harriet Fraud. How you get close to the love How you eliminate all your sadness when you're opening up How you make excuses for billionaires you broke on a bus I need niggas around me rolling up and smoking me up Because, because, my rainforest cries Everybody dies a little And I just wanna dance tonight And I just wanna dance tonight And I just wanna dance tonight

Ah, yeah Hear my lil' baby Medusa Tipping the juice up I go back and forth in a Uber Travel for two months I'm the emptiest, hallelujah Open my chest up It's a rabbit inside my hat

Angel all dressed up Looking to bless up With the milk and the honey Guess I make money for money's sake I've been right in a hundred days Took the wretched out the earth And called it baby phenom I know my shoulder blades are shattered wings That carry me home

I said baby come on You know this flesh is only temporary Brittle is bone Why don't you empty out your love for me Then chisel the stone These are ten black commandments A property loan Cause every blade of grass or earth We don't actually own I am the I am says Sam Am I The universe bleeds infinity, you got one life How you get close to love? How you eliminate all your sadness when you opening up?

How you make excuses for billionaires you broke on a bus? Sunny niggas around me rolling up and smoking me up Because, because when rainbows pass Everybody dies in love And I just wanna dance tonight And I just wanna dance tonight And I just wanna dance tonight If you think you love me, then bury me when the sun up Faded with the homie, he prilling another blunt up

Talking to Muhammad like niggas don't really trust us Down on stolen land for a dollar like that ain't fucked up, it's fucked they money I'ma say it every song, into the revolution coming, all the feds start running. Fuck a goodwill hunting. This is brand new murder. Revolutionary suicide. The clothes are curt and you ain't seen death. I can hear the blood on the moon.

These niggas put a flag up on it. All they do is consume. Only animal to ravage everything in its path. They turned a natural resource into a bundle of cash. Made the world anti-black, then divided the class. Not a rich niggas, it's rich nblack then divided the class now the rich niggas is rich niggas with show bread

really bitch niggas with big figures some coke heads these bitches is coke heads motherfucker billionaire how you get close to love how you eliminate all your sadness

when you open it up how you make excuses for billionaires you broke on a bus sunny niggas around me rolling up and smoking me up because because when rain falls

everybody dies of love I just want to dance tonight. I just want to dance tonight. That was Rainforest by No Name. Now, here's our conversation with psychotherapist and hypnotherapist Harriet Fraud. Can you briefly introduce yourself for our audience? Sure. My name is Harriet Fraad. I'm a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in New York City. I've been in practice for 43 years, although not always in New York City. And I also write about the cross between personal life

and political and economic life, how they influence one another. And I was a radical activist in my life, really, ever since I was in high school. So I had a lot of experience and a founding mother of what was then a class-conscious women's liberation movement. And so you mentioned that you're a mental health practitioner. Well, I'm a mental health counselor, technically. So how did you come to do that work? What was your interest in that?

Well, I think I was trained from my early childhood from being really of that bent and living with different families from my own and having to figure out how to please these people, what the rules are, how do you please them, how do you get to be the favorite, how do you get to stay, and how to get past my bullying older sister and ingratiate myself to people. And so I, you know, I really developed a keen interest in that. All right. So the next question then is about the connection between the work that you do as a therapist and hypnotherapist and the writing work, the radio work,

and your public speaking work. So what's the connection there? Well, the connection is that there are different discourses of liberation. Psychology is one discourse of personal liberation, and then there are discourses of economic and political liberation. And unfortunately, they don't cross-fertilize one another. But people exist in a social context as personal beings. And left ignores personal life by and large. And the psychology community ignores political life. So very sophisticated therapists that are in a highly trained group with me of advanced hypnotherapists from around the world, most of them have nothing to do with the politics of their countries

because they concentrate only on inner liberation and not on the social context in which people live, which has an enormous psychological impact. For example, if you're struggling to make ends meet and see yourself as an embattled struggler, you're not going to have the same perspective as you might have if you have a lot of time to relax and assess things, if you can go away on trips, if you have time to process things. Your whole personal life and marriage are very different if you can afford a vacation. And America has less vacation days than anyone in the Western industrialized world. And so that if you're a working class person or poor,

working at a $25,000 or less job, chances are you have no vacation days, except maybe if the place is closed on Christmas or New Year's. Whereas if you're in the upper echelons, you have paid vacations. It's a very different thing. That's why marriage has fallen apart down in the working class and lower, struggling poor, whereas it's much more stable for the rich and for the professional group, because people have time. Very different reality to have time. And so that their problems in their marriages are not all the psychological hangups they bring, but the lack of time and space to process anything. That's huge. It's just one example. So when you're with someone in a session, and they bring up some of these issues, some of their feelings of stress or loneliness or difficulty making ends meet, how do you bring in what you call,

you know, the political is personal, you know, a play off of the personal is political. How do you bring that into the sessions? Is there an educational component? Is there kind of a coaching component? Yeah, there is a component. I remember this one woman who had been married when she was about 15 in the South, and I explained to her the theory of the feudal household where the labor of the woman is not interchangeable. One can't find another master easily, but the male provides the household and the tools, and the woman provides sexual,

domestic, and all the child-rearing and emotional services. And she burst into tears. She'd never seen it that way, that she was a serf. And it resonated with her. It really resonated because of its emotional meaning. That was a very dramatic incidence. But also I have a client who's a very brilliant man who's a plasterer for the city. He goes into the projects and plasters big holes and holds you know, holds back the rats and the roaches and whatever else. And part of his struggle is his wife is unemployed and he is the provider and he feels enormous pressure in his life. And part of what we talk about is the pressure being the sole provider,

both the pride that he can support his wife and daughter and the constant pressure to take overtime even though he's exhausted, and the ramifications in the marriage of that exhaustion and that responsibility, and also the ramifications for his daughter, who hardly ever sees him because he's always sleeping. And because he's not American, he sees the social context more easily than if he were American because the foreign clients I have, whether Pakistanis or Irish people or whatever, are all more aware of the impact of the political environment than Americans are. And so in these conversations,, you know, you share something like you've said and people have kind of a moment of realization or resonance, does that personal

liberation then, do you see it as leading people to then want to do more political activism or more work to change their current situation, not just for themselves, but for others? Sometimes and sometimes not. I mean, sometimes people, it just fuels their rage at the level of responsibility and exploitation that they suffer. And it was that client who explained to me early on what Trump did for him. He said, he's an idiot, but he shows our anger. And I love to watch him. He's giving them all the finger. And that's what we want to do, just like they did in England with Brexit. So I learned from him a political thing that related to his rage at being an exploited laborer and having his wife's job exported to a different country and her being unemployed and

unable to get a job because her whole industry has been exploited, I mean, exported as well as super exploited. And so someone who used to have a job of $100,000 or more is now unemployed so long she doesn't get unemployment insurance. And he said, I'm not sending my wife into McDonald's. And so I have to take this all on. And he's enraged. And I do help him deal with his rage as politically justified rage so he won't try to drink himself into oblivion or take drugs and encourage his wife not to either because the way out is often to change your consciousness of what's going on rather than change what's going on and acknowledge it. And drugs are always available for that as well as drinking. And the United States now is going through a colossal opioid epidemic where we consume 80% of the world's opiates,

even though we're, what is it, I think 6% of the world's population. It's staggering. And that's a way out that has afflicted many of the people that he knows, including his family. conflicted many of the people that he knows, including his family. And so that you can, what it can do is it can show you that it isn't you. And you can know that you're oppressed and exploited and that your anger is justified. It's not an aberrational development. That's that's a relief and it can also make him much more determined to be available for his family and to find other creative outlets so there's this quote that i've heard about you shouldn't break someone's worldview without offering them another one or a new one because it can be very disorienting and difficult for someone to kind of really wake up to the realization of a broken system or a system that's destructive or not life-sustaining.

And so do you also give guidance into other systems or other ways of being, you know, socialism, Marxism, that kind of thing as well? you know socialism marxism that kind of thing as well i don't directly proselytize but what i do is talk about that there are alternatives and also that whoever is suffering it's not their fault the big thing is self-blame and the system in the United States has these expressions of, you're so smart, why aren't you rich? And that anybody who doesn't make money is a loser. And also to show people that they're not suckers and defective because they believe the ideology and work a hard day's work and yet never make ends meet. because that's the way it's designed in order to the Siamese twins of poverty and wealth that can't be separated from one another.

And it's a comfort. The different worldview is I am not in charge of everything. And it's not all my fault, but I'm part of a system. And then some people go on to want to make changes. A young woman who's decided she's got to do something because she doesn't like what's happening in her life and she knows that it's a problem that's shared. And I've helped her know it's a problem that's shared. And if people want an analysis, I'll give them an analysis without saying this is socialist, this is Marxist, this is whatever. But looking at that they are in a social matrix in which class is the most repressed discourse in the United States, but it doesn't mean it hasn't an enormous impact on their lives

and that that is a problem. It's just bringing up the social context so people don't feel at fault, which is something other therapists rarely do. It's not just their problem and they shouldn't be taking psych drugs. That's a real crime in the United States that we're 6% of the population and consume 66% of the psych drugs because people, if they go to a clinic, the easiest, cheapest, fastest thing

is to just get them hooked on something that makes them comfortably numb and doesn't address the problem. And part of the problem is they have a right to be angry and to direct their anger into some kind of political avenue. And that's something that I can help with, even though I don't tell them what to join or what to do. Because it's not a directive practice. It's up to them to find it, but I can help them understand the context in which they live.

And that is a big relief for people in the United States. It probably would be different elsewhere, where there's less personal responsibility. You can't really forget that American exceptionalism was based on the idea that between 1820 and the 1970s, if you were white and either male or associated with a white male, every generation did better than the last. And so when that stopped, people felt it was their fault. This is, you know, what's the matter with me? Americans didn't raise themselves with a mass working class movement on the level that others

did. They did in terms of the labor movement in the 1930s. But generally, there aren't these powerful working class movements because we were the exception and we're not anymore. The working class will either rise together or it won't rise. Can you talk a little bit about the history, particularly of working men in the last 40 years? Yes, because working men have had a real gender jolt because white working men were able to support dependent wives who worked full-time for them in the household and dependent children. And their sense of manhood and self-worth was based on their net worth,

that they were able to support a family, that they were in charge, and you are in charge a lot more if you're the breadwinner. It was kind of a feudal construction where the woman works in a household paid for by a man and produces emotional, sexual, domestic, child care services. And now men don't make enough to support wives and children. Their women have to work and may not want to come home exhausted from work and take care of a man's needs and commands, and don't necessarily have to marry somebody like that either. So the marriage rate, particularly for working class men, has plummeted.

The two moorings in life have been cut from the mass of American working class men, and that's work and love. And when marriages and relationships don't hold up, women manage much better because women were and are the maintainers of emotional connection. So they still connect to their children, to their relatives, to their friends, even though there isn't a man around. But for American men, their primary emotional connection in which they might be vulnerable was accompanied by a sexual relationship in which they felt less vulnerable because they were the man having sex, not just the man getting emotional comfort and kindness. And so short of an intimate relationship with a woman, many men are lost. And then there are the right-wing hate

radio incentives, she left you, she's a feminazi, kill him, and so on, who direct that hatred against women in general, and not against the actual conditions under which marriages flounder, relationships flounder, and men are alone. And they're very alone. 50% of divorced or separated men never see their kid again after five years. So that is severed as well. And that's for a mixture of reasons. But you have disconnected people. As the country and Western song says, they're talking about a breakup, you've been thinking, but I've been drinking. Because the macho alternatives for men are not to seek comfort from other people. Even in the basic things that they say happen to people in a crisis,

which is that you run or you fight, fight or flight, they've found that they were just studying males, that for females it's connect with support systems. And so that men have been really endangered by the male gender role and feel that they're unmanned if they have to stay home because they're unemployed. They're unmanned if they do the housework and the child care. And because of that, the average unemployed man with an employed wife does less housework than his fully employed wife because he feels unmanned enough being unemployed. He's not going to be doing women's work. And so that's the gender polarization interacting with the class change

and the export of jobs overseas. And that's something that I can see really clearly and comes out in the hatred that men have for women and the blame for their whole lives on women. And that psychologically is also due to something else in a society like the United States. And much here, it's changing in Europe much faster and Sweden and Germany and France. But in the United States, where boys and girls are brought up by women, they're brought up in a matriarchy. The omnipotent women, the babysitter, the mother, the grandmother, the daycare worker are all women. And so their most vulnerable times are at the hands of omnipotent women, and they harbor a huge resentment against women for that. Women can identify with

other women, so they identify with a mother who's their carer. And so they may be somewhat prejudiced, but not as prejudiced because they identify. Whereas males brought up entirely by women have a male identity based on, I am not a woman. I am a male because I'm not that. I'm not the one who takes care of children. I'm not the one who does housework. And so when a man is unemployed and home, it's an added insult, adding insult to injury to also be helpful. And that causes enormous disturbance. Even Donald Trump, when asked, you know, the troubles he had with Marla Maples, wife two, which he didn't repeat with wife three,

wife two wanted him to actually take a stroller and walk in the park with their child. Imagine him behind a stroller. He never changed diaper, and he's not going to do that, and that's not what he does. I mean, that's the old style to find. And if you're rich enough, you find a nubile younger woman who's a sex object for you and takes care of all those needs, or manages servants to take care of them for you, like a feudal manager of an estate. And that's what Melania Trump does for Donald Trump. So he doesn't have anything to do with the household or child care.

So that, you know, by looking at what's gone on, I help people see themselves in a social context, what happened, and to let go a little bit of the gender stereotype that traps them. And that really can be changed. Sometimes I imagine as I walk around New York City and on the buses and in billboards, there's these ads for movies of men with looking down the barrel of a gun, getting revenge for TV programs and movies. And I think, what if each of them was changed with a guy with a vacuum cleaner?

What would be the impact of that? I'm making this world a cleaner, better place. Join me. Rather than, this is the last day day you'll die in cold blood, you know, the revenge fantasy, which is omnipresent in the United States. And it's a male fantasy. That's why there haven't been female mass killers. There was one who joined her husband, but that's it. Yeah. When I worked as a rape crisis counselor, one of the key things that we learned is that sexual violence is the result of someone wanting

power and control. It's all about power and control. There's kind of a myth that it's about kind of sex. Oftentimes it's, you know, sex isn't really even a main motive. So it's really about power and control. And so looking at men and masculinity, like that's what a lot of prevention really aimed at. How do we really allow men to break out of the boxes, the stereotypes of masculinity? And how do we, as women, but anyone, support men in different expressions of masculinity or in non-dominant expressions of masculinity? That's right. Also, you know, if you've been taught, as American men generally are, that crying is for sissies, you learn to hate your own emotional needs. and women represent that.

The neediness, the emotionality, the clinging. And their need is hated, and they turn on it in the form of women, their vulnerability. And if that were changed, if people understood that they're both vulnerable, that would be a huge change in the violence level. It wouldn't stop the American environment of violence. I mean, we make much more than half of the whole world's armaments and are always at wars, not at war, but at wars. And you would have to change the atmosphere of violence in which the economic draft of people who can't find jobs, people go to become post-traumatic stress disorder mental cases or shot or just traumatized in order to live, whereas other people are benefiting.

The biggest profits and the biggest sales in the United States are the military, which creates a very violent atmosphere. One in which I think if people were more aware, they would say, let's spend that trillion dollars on infrastructure, on free and universal childcare and healthcare, on after-school programs, on supports for the elderly, on humane activities. But the military is an enormously powerful economic force in the United States. It's quite spectacular. The environment of male violence, which is why in the military, rape is rampant. Because you're supposed to repress your gentleness,

your tenderness, your emotionality, your kindness, your wish to connect as a way of surviving. All those things are repressed. And so rape is rampant, not only rape of women, but the less reported huge amount of rapes of men who are ashamed to report it. So that there's gender here and capitalism really intersect with class around that violence and the violence of the angry men who are so angry that they just shoot up everybody that they can. It's just anger that has random fury attached to anyone who comes in their path. And here I think that although I consider myself

a feminist in that I value the things that have been traditionally attributed to women, which are nurturing and taking time to make things beautiful and clean and taking care of an environment and children. I think the feminist movement, of which I certainly was a founder and a part, made a huge mistake in designating those things as debilitating, unworthy work, rather than extending them. Instead of developing, what are the learnings you get from taking care of people and the environment that has never been developed. So when you go in, what is emotional labor? That I've developed some and other people have, and Arlie Hochschild started writing about that, and in the nursing field it's been developed. But what is emotional labor for other people where you use your brain and muscle and

emotion to help them feel better, do better in their lives? And why isn't it compensated? What are the learnings that a mother has when she goes back to work? It isn't that she's doing nothing. All the lessons have not been spelled out by the feminist movement or anyone else. And that's a real lack. I remember Gloria Steinem's idea that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. We all need each other, no matter who we are. Brecht, playwright and poet, in one of his poems, he talks about a woman who's poor, working as a chambermaid, and aborts her fetus. And the chorus is, you, I beg you, show not wrath and scorn, for we need help from every

creature born. And I think if we men and women both understood that, that would be a tremendous step for the world. And in the United States, it would probably mean lack of tolerance for the militarization of our society and different way of educating boys and men, and including more men in boys' education in their homes, so that they would have a male model when they were little and helpless, and someone to identify with positively rather than having a negative male identity as not female. And now what's happening is with women's financial necessity comes entrance into the labor force and empowerment.

And so women are not willing to just work for men in a kind of feudal household where they're just working for their keep. They want more. And men are resentful and angry rather than understanding the more that they could have by doing some of the work that was traditionally assigned to women and devalued. So I'm a feminist, and I think that all people need all the skills and powers and possibilities both in the household and in their emotional lives and in their sexual lives and in their work lives and in their political lives. And that's something that was not developed. And I am an offender in the early women's movement.

We didn't do that. And if we had, we'd have had a stronger, more consistent feminist movement. So, last question, unfortunately. What are the questions right now that you're thinking about, or the things that you're really contemplating or the questions right now that you're thinking about or the things that you're really contemplating or thinking about right now as we have the current state of affairs and we have your years of work? What is it that's really alive for you right now? Well, I think what's most alive is the necessity for men and women to see one another as people and work together for a better America.

Because we're really in trouble on so many levels. It's a failing empire, which is the biggest the world has ever seen, and the most militarily armed and frightening. And it would be uniting together to create a humane America. And I do think people are needing that and wanting that. It's a question of how to get it across. And so in my own modest way, as a much older person, I'm writing about it and talking about it. As a younger woman, I spent about 20, 30 hours a week going door to door and talking to people and building the civil rights movement in my area and a feminist movement in my area and a public school quality movement

in my area and a midwifery rights movement in my area. Those were more activist projects. But we at that point thought we could tweak the United States. Things had not grown what they are now. I mean, in 1970, we were the most egalitarian nation in the Western industrialized world. We are now the least egalitarian. So my reality as a younger woman was very different. But as an older woman, I want to write things that'll make people feel what's going on, not only understand it intellectually, but emotionally understand it, and have compassion for themselves and also want to change it at the same time. And I do get a lot of responses like that on the radio. Some guy said he was suicidal, but he realized it wasn't his fault. An older guy who

lost his job and lost his position in the family, lost his sense of self-respect, which was related to his net worth. And so I'm glad to reach people and hopefully encourage them to join a movement because we all need each other that way too. Not going to win as separate people, but as connected people. And that's what I'm working on. You've been listening to an Up conversation on liberation psychology our guests today were psychotherapist hypnotherapist and host of the capitalism hits home podcast harriet fraud and daniel jose hatambite newness author of the book a people People's History of Psychoanalysis, from Freud to Liberation Psychology. Thank you to No Name for the intermission music and to Neil Ballard for

this episode's cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Support for this episode was provided by the Guerrilla Foundation, the Resist Foundation, and listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the non-profit Independent Arts and Media, all donations to Upstream in the U.S. are tax-exempt.

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