Ignacio Martin-Baro

A Spanish-Salvadoran social psychologist and Jesuit scholar whose liberation psychology challenged psychology to confront violence, ideology, and injustice.

• Signature vocabulary: liberation psychology, oppression, ideology, community.
• Worldview: Psychology cannot be neutral about oppression because minds and identities are formed inside historical structures of power.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would interpret suffering through social violence, ideology, and the struggle for collective dignity rather than private adaptation alone.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of community psychology.

Prophetic, historically grounded, and liberationist, reading suffering through oppression, ideology, and collective dignity.

• liberation psychology
• ideology and social violence
• collective dignity
• conscientization and community
• situational influence
• groups and norms
• identity and comparison
• perception of others
• oppression
• ideology
• community

• His psychology was explicitly political and pastoral, so it resists being reduced to a neutral clinical technique.
• His thought emerged from war, repression, and martyrdom in Latin America, and it should be read in that historical horizon rather than as abstract theory alone.

• Whose interests does this so-called normality serve?
• Trauma can be historical before it is individual.
• Healing without liberation can become adaptation to injustice.

• Writings for a Liberation Psychology
• Political violence and war as causes of psychosocial trauma
• Liberation psychology essays