Although he was not a formal psychologist, for Bulhan, Fanon was a psychologist in a practical sense, or at least his analyses and questions were oriented towards and served psychology. Therefore, “[writing about liberation psychology was not his objective, because (...) there was first the need to clearly define the problems, placing them in a historical and also conceptual perspective” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 256). However, although Fanon did not leave us with a treatise on Liberation Psychology, his practice makes such an ethical-political undertaking possible, and it should be reviewed, developed and even criticized or overcome. Bulhan (1985) himself provides an overview of the criticisms made to Fanon, agreeing with some and rejecting others that did not hold up (e.g., dogmatic Marxist criticism) or, in the case of Hannah Arendt, those that expressed racism.

According to Bulhan (1985, p. 6), despite the significant number of works published in English, “much of the literature on Fanon has largely ignored his psychological contributions”. For Bulhan, there are three main reasons: (a) emphasis on Fanon’s political thought resulting from his revolutionary militancy; (b) his works on psychiatry and psychology were more restricted to academic circles, in scientific publications, while his reflections on violence and criticism of the bourgeoisie – understood as political and not psychological – had greater capillarity, influencing movements around the world and generating considerable controversy and debate; and (c) most of the works on Fanon were produced by political scientists and historians, minimizing his psychological contributions. Furthermore, the disregard for Fanon by psychology, especially Euro-American psychology, is due to his critical nature, which calls into question the role of psychology in justifying oppression and maintaining the status quo.

Passos (2018, 2019) also notes that Fanon has been deleted from the field of mental health in Brazil, despite his relevance to Franco Basaglia, a key activist in the Anti-Asylum Struggle and Psychiatric Reform. In a dialogue with the author, Sevalho and Dias (2022) go beyond mental health, pointing to Fanon’s relevance regarding public health. Along with Fanon’s obliteration due to racism and the problems in the psychiatry field highlighted by Bulhan (1985) – and by Fanon –, Costa and Mendes (2021) point out: the lack of translations of his psychiatric texts, with publications only in recent years in this country and the late reception of his reflections. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that there is no dissociation between Fanon the psychiatrist and the revolutionary: “the revolutionary, anticolonial and antiracist is the psychiatrist, and vice versa; in short, Fanon is a multiple totality” (Costa & Mendes, 2021, p. 68).

According to Bulhan (1985), Fanon will initially benefit from the theoretical arsenal provided by psychology. As he deepened his trajectory and activism in the African context, where the discrepancies between reality and theory (and practice) became increasingly evident, he began to criticize and overcome this Eurocentric psychology – if not in its entirety, at least some of its foundations – in a movement of sublation. However, since his training in medicine and the beginning of psychiatric practice in France, Fanon had already come across theoretical and practical problems of psychology and its Eurocentric character, scrutinizing them.

The psychology with which Fanon critically dialogues, and which he sets out to overcome, is that of the psychodynamic tradition, the psychoanalysis and its ramifications. Bulhan focuses on the criticisms of Freud, Adler and Jung – and later of Mannoni –, but in a totalizing analysis that sees these authors as singular expressions of psychology and its hegemony at the time, so that “Fanon’s criticism of this trio is best appreciated within the framework of a general critique of Euro-American psychology” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 63). Furthermore, in the analysis of Euro-American psychology up until the mid-1980s, Bulhan also points to behaviorism as another hegemonic trend in psychology, especially in the psychotherapeutic field, criticizing it based on Fanon.

According to Bulhan (1985, p. 94), “Fanon was convinced that psychoanalytic theory itself was inadequate to explain the colonial situation”. We are interested in the reasons that led Bulhan to reach this conclusion, which refer to what he called the precondition of Fanonian radical psychology: sociogeny. According to Fanon (2008, p. 28) “the alienation of the black person is not just an individual issue. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny there is sociogeny”. In the case of psychoanalysis and psychology, there was a psychologizing reductionism and an essentialism resulting from equally essentialist, determinist (and Eurocentric) ontogenic explanations, denying the vocation of the human being as a subject of history and capable of transforming himself and his reality. Medicine and psychiatry incurred the same issue, only due to phylogeny, determinism, and biological essentialism.

This analysis converges with that of Faustino (2018, p. 150), for whom sociogeny is the guiding thread of the “Fanonian theoretical edifice”. Thus, instead of a supposed epistemic break between the young existentialist, subjectivist Fanon and the mature revolutionary Fanon, we have a Fanon as continuity, even if it occurs with some discontinuities; a multiple, contradictory totality, with sociogenesis as the grounds of his praxis. In this connection, the germ of Fanon’s critique of psychology, more specifically, of its colonized, oppressive character, refers to his apprehension of the social genesis of the human being and its actual making in a given concrete reality, that is, considering his condition of being social and how it is produced in a given sociohistorical reality, at the same time that it produces it. With this, phylogeny and ontogeny are not denied, but they should be analyzed in the historical grounds in which they are effected and/or produced.

Sociogeny is relevant to the analysis of psychology as a science and profession, that is, to the genesis and social function of psychology – and to other fields of know-how. This is, in fact, the basis of Bulhan’s (1985) analysis of Euro-American psychology and its oppressive character, understanding “the history of psychology within the history of global violence against people of skin color” (p. 63).

For Bulhan (1985, p. 64), Euro-American psychology was produced in Europe and became hegemonized throughout the world through “imperialism in psychology”; therefore, it is a Eurocentric psychology. Its conception of the human being is the white European man, universalizing him along with his reality. Thus, it not only shows little interest in oppression, ignoring Third World problems, but its theories and practices also underpinned European expansion and domination. The characteristics of Euro-American psychology are: (a) body-mind dualism; (b) nature-culture dichotomy and its derivation in individual-social Manichaeism, in which not only are “everything that is external to the person” (p. 55), something static, separated, but the social is understood as “environment”; (c) individualism, taking the individual-monad in the liberal-capitalist mold as synonymous with the human being, and, therefore, its unit of analysis, as well as individual freedom as its horizon; and (d) numerical fetishism, in which numbers speak for themselves, giving an air of scientificity to psychology, and the phenomenal appearance expressed by numbers is synonymous of the essence, the whole.

This is, therefore, a solipsistic psychology, in which the self is, abstractly, the individual in itself, autonomous, and, empirically, the European, male, white, middle-class. Although Bulhan emphasizes that the ideal type of human being was that of the middle class, his postulates lead us to believe that the most coherent type is that it should be the bourgeois. For example, he critically called the “human reality” of Freud, Jung and Adler “bourgeois psychological reality (...) as the condition of man everywhere. Hence, conformity or deviation from this bourgeois reality became the absolute criterion of health and pathology” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 80).

Methodologically, such solipsism manifests itself, on the one hand, through subjectivism and, on the other, through positivism. The first takes the point of view of the subject, but not just any subject – as we have pointed out. On the other hand the second (positivism) starts from the object, but the object in its phenomenal appearance, its expressions externally revealed, and statically, not in its complexity and as movement.

In the case of subjectivism, what is assumed about subjects and their realities is taken as truth and imputed to humanity. When oriented towards analysis and intervention with the oppressed, any action of questioning or breaking with the status quo will be understood through (reductionist) “psychologisms” such as: deviations, character problems, personality problems, psychic or family destructuring, etc.; or biologicisms (e.g., brain or chemical imbalance). This is the case addressed by Fanon of the North African black seen as lazy, impulsive, with a personality prone to criminality, the causes of which supposedly lie in his psychic structure or personality (Fanon, 2015, 2020a). Furthermore, imperialist and colonial domination and the entire dynamic of underdevelopment of the colonized by the development of the capitalist “powers” is explained by the inferiority of the colonized.

Positivism, on the other hand, reduces human action and its meaning to data and consequent mathematical operations, which are value-free, disregarding that such theories, instruments and methodological choices express hegemonic worldviews - and, thus, justify and naturalize the objective reality that is expressed in/by them. Many of the experiments that foster theoretical productions in psychology have as participants the ideal types of humanity or take them as models to be followed. Therefore, we have the perpetuation of the oppressive status quo, via social control, adjustment, psychopathologization, segregation, etc.

Fanon operated critically in a similar way with psychiatry. Initially, at the Saint-Albain Psychiatric Hospital in France, based on work with Institutional Psychotherapy (influenced by his supervisor François Tosquelles), and in the first years in Blida, Algeria, we have a praxis that still aimed at the humanization of the psychiatric institution par excellence, the psychiatric hospital, and its asylum-mental health logic. By working in a context of colonization and war, Fanon radicalizes his psychiatry criticisms and its colonial character, especially ethnopsychiatry and the “monsters that are those classical psychiatric hospitals” (Fanon & Geronimi, 2020, p. 100), concluding that they cannot be humanized (Fanon & Geronimi, 2020). Thus, he resigned in 1956, investing even more energy in his revolutionary militancy, but also working as a psychiatrist in a day hospital in Tunisia, in another care model.

In the Fanon-Bulhan dialogue, we see how the oppression inherent in colonization and capitalist development has sophisticated weapons in medicine and in the field of psychology: “[w] hen men at arms failed to achieve imperialist goals, European doctors rose to the occasion. Their contribution to colonial conquest thus secured them a special place in the history of oppression” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 90).

Fanon (2015, p. 350), for example, refers to psychiatrists as “colonialist scientists,” pacifying and domesticating. In the cases addressed by Bulhan (1985), medicine is evident as a domination instrument, based on evidence devoid of values, propagating the inferiority of “the poor in general, and [of] people of color in particular,” especially in “periods of intensified crisis and social change” (p. 88). If “the occupation of land culminated in the occupation of psyches” (p. 101) much of this was due to the psych field used as a colonial arm (Costa & Mendes, 2021).

It is worth noting that such Fanonian radicalization with the psych field is limited to the radicalization of its praxis as a whole, with the need for social transformation and, in this, of the psych field and the asylum as an expression of our oppressive structures: “[t]he function of a social structure is to build institutions permeated with concern for man. A society that corners its members in desperate solutions is a non-viable society i.e. a society that ought to be replaced” (Fanon, 2018, p. 62). However, this process was not without its contradictions, ranging from an “excessive confidence in the medical model” (p. 252), to the use of controversial treatment methods, which came to be criticized – for example, electroshock therapy (Bini method) –, even though they were constantly evaluated by Fanon, safeguarding the scientific evidence and ethical parameters of his time.

Fanon’s radicalism and his critique of medicine, specifically psychiatry, and the dialogue with Bulhan that expands and develops it in psychology, imply its transformations. The aim of this is to liberate all the exploited and oppressed, especially the colonized or those who are in the wake of colonization through racism, such as non-whites. In this sense, Fanon’s revolutionary psychiatry and Bulhan’s Liberation Psychology are positioned.

According to Bulhan (1985, p. 195), “[f]or Fanon, psychology was essentially social psychology and psychiatry was also fundamentally social psychiatry”. To this end, it is necessary to reflect on the social character and function of both, since there is no depoliticized, neutral medicine-psychiatry, psychology or any other discipline or profession in a historical void. The conscious politicization of psychiatry and psychology is necessary for its use as a weapon for the liberation of the condemned of the earth. As Bulhan (1985, p. 240) puts it:

Fanon’s active commitment to social liberation also implied a commitment to psychological liberation. Despite claims to the contrary, he never abandoned psychiatry for politics, nor did he neglect the relationships between individual anxieties and the prevailing social order. Indeed, it was his ability to connect psychiatry to politics or private problems to social problems, and, having made the connection conceptually, to act boldly, that made him a pioneer of radical psychiatry.

Furthermore, “the essential weapon of psychiatry is psychotherapy, that is, a dialogue between the mentally ill and the doctor” (Fanon, 2020b, p. 232), rather than a Manichaean and oppressive relationship that expresses and shapes “a Manichaean world inhabited by different ‘species’ – that is, masters and slaves, colonizers and colonized, bourgeoisie and workers” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 101). From this dialogue, the psi Manichaeism resulting from colonial Manichaeism and that shapes it is questioned, evidencing a psychology of oppression and oppression by psychology. According to Bulhan (1985, p. 117), oppression for Fanon is:

(…) above all, the practice and institutionalization of violence - both gross and subtle. This widespread violence imposes a Manichean world, erodes basic human values and dehumanizes all involved. The exploitation that motivates and perpetuates this violence is not only economic, but also psychological and cultural.

We therefore have Liberation Psychology as the negation and the overcome of violent psychology, of violence through psychology, even though it is still psychology, but another psychology, not only in form but in content; the overcoming of its oppressive character – whether through the justification and naturalization of oppression or through the oppressive practice of psychology itself – which implies its recognition, at least in hegemonic psychology. If the exploitation that motivates and perpetuates this violence is not only economic, but also psychological, how can psychology contribute to unveiling capitalist exploitative-oppressive violence – and its particularities in colonial violence – in its psychological dimension? Well, firstly, by recognizing it as violence, in its varied forms and manifestations. Secondly, by focusing on the individuals who have been violated and their needs – resulting from the violence they have suffered –, contributing to their processes of liberation and humanization.

In a dialogue with other authors, Bulhan (1985) defines violence as a social relationship, a process in which individuals or groups violate others physically, socially and/or psychologically, and may be personal, institutional and/or structural. This definition derives from the author’s own criticism of how violence is hegemonically understood in psychology by functionalist, individualizing and psychologizing perspectives in accordance with the social order. Furthermore, “[a] situation of oppression involves structural, institutional and personal violence. Oppression and one of its expressions, racism, legitimize structural violence, rationalize institutional violence and impersonalize personal violence” (Bulhan,1985, p. 137).

Thus, the Liberation Psychology proposed by Bulhan based on Fanon is a radically human and humanist psychology, just like Fanon’s (and Bulhan’s) radical humanism. Human, because it is based on the human being and everything he can be; on human universality – including, as a result of human action, socio-historical, which is not essentialized – and not on fictions, universalizations of particulars and negations of certain humans. Humanist because it considers that the human being, as a social being, produces himself in his action, even if not in the desired or necessary conditions, at the same time that it is oriented towards the realization of this being in his humanity and universality (and not in/through dehumanization, alienation and oppression). Humanist also because it is oriented towards contributing to the process of liberation from everything that alienates, oppresses, exploits and, therefore, dehumanizes the human being.

As Bulhan (1985, p. 255) inquires: “[c]an psychologists, given their vocation to seek solutions to human problems by human means, contribute to changing our common legacy of violence and the contemporary dilemma?” Even if the answer to the question is beyond their scope and predictive capacity, by proposing the Liberation Psychology, the author sets himself such a challenge – which can and should be pursued by us.

Furthermore, by being radically humanistic in a context of colonization, oriented towards overcoming this colonized character – of society and psychology −, starting from the perspective and needs of the oppressed, it is also an anti-colonial psychology. Pavón-Cuellar (2019, p. 91), for example, characterizes Bulhan as the “founder of psychological anti-colonialism”, which we could add to Fanon’s own praxis and his pioneering work in terms of anti-colonial psychiatry.

It is not our intention, nor would we be able to do so in this setting, to make an honest analysis of the decolonization movements in psychology, whether labeled decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, among others. We rescue the revolutionary praxis of Fanon, who was not pleased with epistemologically questioning the field of psychology, but began to fight to transform capitalism, colonialism and racism that were expressed in/through the field of psychology, so that we can understand decolonization not only as an objective, but also as a process, and that, therefore, becomes a struggle. An anti-colonial struggle that must draw on the anti-colonial struggles and liberation movements in Africa, Asia and the Americas – of which Fanon was a part and contributed – and continue them. According to Césaire (1978), by being anti-colonial means anti-capitalist and not pre-capitalist, in which “the problem is not one of a utopian and sterile attempt at reduplication, but of overcoming”, “a new society [and psychology] that we need to create” (p. 36). And, by being anti-capitalist, it must be, in principle and coherently, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, etc.

In this regard, “only a dialectical consideration offers a fruitful analysis and a program of action”, in order to grasp “the dialectical relations between infrastructure and superstructure, mode of production and culture, praxis and psyche (...)” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 13). The warning serves to enhance the complex, contradictory and dynamic character of reality, capable of being grasped dialectically, rejecting mechanisms, reductionisms and solipsisms that constitute Euro-American psychology, as Bulhan correctly captured. Furthermore, it reiterates praxis as a criterion of truth, in which theory (analysis) and action are consubstantiated.

A dialectical consideration is also necessary in the psychological work with the singular, that is, with individuals in their singularities, so that “a deep understanding of a single patient can emphasize the universal in the human condition” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 9). As much as psychological suffering and psychopathology are singular – speaking of how subjects produce themselves singularly – they express how social structures are personalized in such subjects, how they manifest themselves in/through them. If our society is oppressive, we have oppression psychopathologies, which psychology will be called upon to analyze, explain and act on. Disregarding this, psychopathology, that is, the ways of studying and understanding human suffering, will be a “form of violence and oppression” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 179).

Bulhan (1985) provides several examples of how black oppression – focusing on the United States – manifests itself as a symptom in the form of illness, suffering, etc., indicating that “there is an undeclared war against black Americans” (p. 165). We emphasize, for example, the complexity and depth of his analysis of the relationship between black people and alcohol and other drugs, and suicide. All of this produces a morbid and fatal reality, whose fatalization mechanisms are plentiful, revealed in the most different forms; not only physically (death), but in a symbolic, subjective way; not just once, but slowly and gradually, through processes of history deletion, depersonalization, alienation, dehumanization.

In the meantime, psychic suffering and its most acute and alienating form in madness must be understood not only as social symptoms, that is, the psychopathology of oppression, but dialectically, as pathologies of freedom, after all, they are alienating expressions of an alienated being, a sign of such alienation, as well as a protest against it. Freedom here does not mean that, through them, people are freeing themselves; or that there is something in them to be romanticized. On the contrary, “madness is one of the means that man has of losing his freedom” (Fanon, 2018, p. 62) and is a cry, even if unconscious, individualized and disorganized for that which is missing, that which is being hindered; a denial of the denial (of the denied, alienated, oppressed being). And “if madness is a pathology of freedom (...) then the therapeutic task consisted mainly in restoring freedom” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 240).

This also serves to break with the maxim of the oppressed as a passive, docile, submissive being. There are tensions and protests, but they are not understood as such, because they are not necessarily conscious, declared or organized in/by the militancy. Many of them, in fact, turn against the individuals themselves, worsening their alienated, oppressed condition. For example, black people’s drug addiction, violence, criminality, and homicides committed against themselves “constitute expressions of misdirected rebellion and collective self-destruction” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 163). The role of oppression psychology is to mystify this complexity, making the individual passive/docile and further blaming him/her.

In contrast, the goal of Liberation Psychology is to demonstrate that violence, because it is violent, has its violent negation. Thus, Fanon’s analysis of violence is not apologetic, but rather acknowledges reality; it is not a call for aggression arguing that psychology should take up arms, but that it is the role of psychology, in order to liberate the oppressed, to confront the individual with his condition and with the basis of his suffering, of his dehumanization; to inform, guide, and strengthen the subjects in the process of becoming aware; to politicize their existence – which is political – instead of taking it as private, socializing not only the determinations, but also the responses: “Fanon’s argument was that the conscious and determined confrontation of the oppressed was inevitable if the oppressed wanted to rehabilitate themselves and that this confrontation was necessarily collective and directed towards a goal” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 147).

In line with Costa and Mendes (2021), Fanonian dialectics and sociogenesis used to assess the approach to psychic suffering, madness, and illness lead us to see them not as things in themselves, but

(…) symptoms of a society, signs of a condition of existence; they are, therefore, denunciations: Here lies a dehumanized human, a non-human! However, this is not only an observation, but a challenge: This individual, transformed into an object, wants to become a human; moreover, not only does he want to, but he acts in that direction - now, “if it were not so, he would not suffer”. (p. 70)

In the case of black people, there is a double alienation: as workers and from the most impoverished, dispossessed layers of the working class as well as black, in a “zone of non-being” (Fanon, 2008, p. 26) i.e. a non-human. This is the need for blackness in a society in which black people are negative and white people assert themselves as human in/through the plundering of black people, in/through their negation. With blackness, we have the positive affirmation of black people, a movement in which they affirm themselves as humans, without denying white people. However, it is reactive, it is a reaction to whiteness (as a negation of black people), and cannot be taken as an end, but as a means to overcome that which it denies and, therefore, to overcome itself. In Fanonian dialectics, we have blackness as a means to human emancipation, in which the universal expresses, in fact, the countless concrete and singular possibilities of being, while the human being, when forging himself concretely, historicizes and conforms to the universal.

Regarding psychology, it is up to this science to be guided by a truly universal and not by the universalization of particulars (Europeans, whites); not abstractly, guided by essentialisms that mystify reality, even if with good intentions. Nor can it have as its ultimate goal only a greater number of black (non-white) psychologists, however pressing this may be. Much less should it believe that, by focusing on the black population – not surprisingly more impoverished – it is per se less racist or elitist. On the contrary, it can reproduce paternalisms, messianisms and fetishisms that deny the other the condition of subject, of agent (after all, the subject is the psychologist) or sophisticate and intensify oppression and domination under the guise of good deeds, of novelty. Bulhan (1985), when warning us about the hegemonic social function of control psychology and the dangers of taking psychotherapy as a panacea, touches on the following: “‘modern psychotherapy’, if made available and accepted by the oppressed, tends to emphasize self-committed adjustment, not liberating revolt against an intolerable status quo of oppression” (p. 255).

From Bulhan’s analysis (1985, p. 30) on how Fanon goes “from blackness to revolutionary praxis”, we can extract from psychology the necessary movement of consciously racializing oneself – even because, unconsciously, it is already racialized –, aiming to contribute to a deracialized sociability. A Psychology having as its object of study and intervention, ontologically, epistemologically and practically, the human being and his concrete reality, thus contributing to the liberation of this being from his alienated, exploitative and oppressive condition.

For Fanon, “the primary tasks of psychology and psychiatry are to uncover the relationship between the psyche and the social structure, to rehabilitate the alienated, and to help transform social structures that run counter to human needs” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 195). Guided by these, Bulhan outlines three tasks for Liberation Psychology: (a) to move from individualism to collective well-being, breaking with individualistic ethics in psychology (and in society), since liberation is collective; (b) to move from a praxis of instincts, as if subjects were static or organic beings (animals), to the needs of social beings that are formed in social relations, prioritizing the needs of the oppressed; and (c) from adjustment and control to the empowerment of subjects through a psi praxis (psycho-praxis) “that reconnect people through organized actions toward common goals, restores their lost attributes as subjects, and helps them recover the rights that were denied to them” (p. 275).

Bulhan uses the term empowerment. There is a debate in critical social psychology about the individualist-liberal perspective of empowerment, conceiving power as detached from the material base. The concept of strengthening has been used, according to which members of a community collectively and consciously develop means to meet their needs (Montero, 2009). In our view, Bulhan’s meaning is more in line with the notion of strengthening.

For Bulhan (1985, p. 277):

[a] liberation psychology would give primacy to the empowerment of the oppressed through organized and socialized activities with the aim of restoring individual biographies and a collective history that has been derailed, atrophied and/or become an appendage to those of others.

By accomplishing such tasks, psychology can contribute to Fanon’s goal: the liberation of the damned of the earth and the production of a new being and a new society.

We begin this section with Bulhan’s (1985, p. 39) question – and answer – “[h]ow does a community of oppressed and alienated people regain its self-respect and confidence in order to challenge the colonizer coming from the outside? Psychotherapy is out of the question for at least five reasons”, namely: (a) the fact that psychotherapy deals with individuals – at most, with families and small groups; (b) the problems are not purely psychopathological or subjective, but rather with oppression, with concrete conflicts that are subjectivized in the form of oppression psychopathologies. Reducing them to individual, subjective, or psychopathological manifestations not only mischaracterizes them, but also results in blaming the victims; (c) the class character of psychology, which, in the case of psychotherapy, when it is aimed at the oppressed, traditionally constitutes itself as oppression tool (adjustment, pathologization, segregation), even if with good intentions; (d) its predominantly Eurocentric orientation; (e) the very condition of psychotherapy as a commodity, governed by the limits of accumulation and consumption “capacity”.

These findings make us reflect on three points. Firstly, they show us that, despite the necessary construction of a Liberation Psychology, this psychology shows contradictions and limitations, which become more evident when subjected to a horizon of transformation of the reality that forges it and is forged by it. It is also urgent to transform and overcome the oppressive and Manichaean psychology of the system, that is, how its Manichaean and oppressive character manifests itself psychologically, subjectively.

However, this movement is also limited and contradictory, and should be considered in terms of a set of actions, beyond psychology, in the process of raising awareness and strengthening the historical subjects who transform their realities. According to Pavón-Cuéllar (2021, p. 114), what if psychology is “part of the problem of coloniality” or the dependence of peripheral countries, which manifests the totalizing development of capitalism and which is unequal and combined, Eurocentric, colonialist, imperialist? For example, in the Latin American context, colonization also occurred via psychology, or even before it, through the psychological ideas that justify and naturalize colonization, and the “importation of psychology into the Latin American context was a fundamental mechanism of the colonizing process” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2021, p. 113).

Just like Fanon’s analysis of blackness, subsuming it, if Liberation Psychology is a reaction to the Psychology of Oppression, a movement to deny it, it must be understood as a means to overcome psychology itself, to depsychologize reality – which is not the disregard of the subjective dimension of reality –, also being realized outside of psychology. A Liberation Psychology is, therefore, oriented towards the liberation of psychology.

Secondly, we must be careful not to transpose analyses from other contexts without mediation, disregarding their particularities. Bulhan starts from the US, because that is where he studied, being imbued with the historical grounds on which he was forged – even his criticisms. This is valid to support us in his praxis and that of Fanon, but based on Brazilian particularities and how this shapes Brazilian psychology, also, in its particularity. For example, the elitist character of our psychology is well known, and has been criticized in recent decades, along with its social function of maintaining our unequal, racist, patriarchal dependent capitalism, in an attempt to build a politicized psychology (and field of psychology) that is more coherent with the popular majority and their needs (Costa & Mendes, 2020; Damico & Paula, 2021; Kawahala & Soler, 2010; Lanza, 2021).

The third point is Bulhan’s reduction of psychiatry praxis to psychotherapy. This is also due to Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, going to more open, community-based settings. We see a limitation in Bulhan’s analysis, when it is based on Fanon and, consequently, on psychiatry to think about psychology. We therefore have a psychiatrization of psychology: the reduction of psychology to what psychiatry has historically constructed for itself as a perspective of action: psychotherapy, outpatient practice, clinical practice. On the other hand, again, this is also due to the context in which Bulhan wrote the book, in which the proposals for criticism of the psychiatry field, especially by Preventive Psychiatry or Community Mental Health in the USA, despite being important, also had many limitations, even more so when compared to movements carried out in Latin America, whether in mental health or specifically in psychology, such as Community Social Psychology.

We enhance the importance of Fanon for Martín-Baró and his Liberation Psychology (Costa & Mendes, 2020). Despite the similar nomenclature, the common liberation horizon, and the fact that they are contemporaries, we did not find direct associations between Bulhan and Martín-Baró, such as citations of one by the other and vice versa. Future studies can review convergences and divergences of both, also considering Alberto Merani’s Liberation Psychology proposal. However, we cannot fail to emphasize how Bulhan’s and Martín-Baró’s Liberation Psychologies are nourished by Fanon, share premises, foundations, and, in this, his praxic horizons, as well as express a context still quite marked by anti-colonial struggles and experiences of national liberation on the periphery of capitalism.

Still seeking to enhance Bulhan’s proposal, there is a (non) hidden subject in European colonial expansion and domination: capital (as a social relation). Its expanded reproduction occurred in/through colonization, with racism as a hierarchy, subjugation of individuals and nations. The productive forces and the dialectical relationship with the subjective, ideological dimension, form a social totality, whose development is combined and unequal, with racism as one of its structures – which is expressed in/through human action, at the same time as it is its fruit.

More than a “reflexive determination between capitalism, colonialism and racism” (Faustino, 2018, p. 148), it is a movement in which capitalism, as a mode of production, spreads, entifies, becoming a totality in/through colonialism and racism, forging a cohesive whole, that is, not existing without them. “Racism and racialization – implicit in the colonial situation – are part of a larger process of domination: the violent and unequal expansion of capitalist production relations to the non-European world” (Faustino & Oliveira, 2020, p. 15). Thus, even though overcoming capitalism does not mean overcoming racism and colonialism per se, it is a condition.

This is not a mere movement of domination by Western Europe, as much as it may have been. And colonialism is not mere “economic and cultural subjugation motivated by greed” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 93), as much as individuals – who, specifically, are representatives of certain classes, are racialized, gendered, etc. – may be driven by greed. However, such greed has a social genesis and function, that is, it must be analyzed within the productive relations in which it is forged and which it expresses (and shapes), as Fanon himself learned in his analysis of madness. For Marx (2008, p. 42), “[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being; on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their consciousness.” It is not that Bulhan disregards such complexity and dynamics or diminishes their importance, but we challenge some traces of subjectivism and moralism in his reflections intended to enhance his contributions to the criticism and transformation of psychology.

At the same time, Fanon’s and Bulhan’s critique of economic determinisms in the Marxist tradition are fundamental: “[i]n colonies, the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. Cause is consequence: someone is rich because he is white; someone is white because he is rich. This is why Marxist analyses must always be slightly extended each time the colonial problem is addressed” (Fanon, 2015, p. 56). Such critique corroborates the dialectical relationship between structure and superstructure, objectivity and subjectivity, which constitute the movement of the real and its concreteness, which is concrete by being a synthesis of multiple mediations (Marx, 2008).

We emphasize the importance of Bulhan’s characterization of Fanon as a psychologist, even though he was formally a psychiatrist. This demonstrates Fanon’s totalizing praxis, going beyond the fragmentations of reality that mischaracterize it, after all, the whole cannot be reduced to its parts, nor it is a mere sum of them. Thus, he not only breaks with the partialization of knowledge, but with the partial sciences and their divisions and (hyper)specializations, which express the division of labor in capitalism. According to Bulhan (1985, p. 80):

(…) the fundamental cause of alienation is, firstly, socioeconomic and, secondly, the internalization of social inequality and also violence. To be effective and meaningful, according to Fanon, all efforts at disalienation must therefore intervene at both the socioeconomic and psychological levels.

Therefore, one must act within psychology, but not close oneself off within it, incurring in the psychologization of reality, in which there is subjective or individual disalienation. On the other hand, the objective dimension of reality is subjectivized and subjectivization is objectified in/through praxis; the action and the horizon of liberation outside of psychology are not disconnected from the one inside: “Fanon was a pioneer precisely because he combined the commitment to social transformation with the psychological liberation of individuals” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 150). We must arm ourselves with weapons from other fields of knowledge (political economy, sociology, etc.), acting on fronts and in an organized manner. Such a process is not simple, and can also generate eclecticisms that are also mischaracterizing and mystifying, and must be guided with theoretical-methodological rigor, coherent with the movement of reality, in a process with, from and for reality.

Finally, Fanon’s revolutionary praxis and the dialogue with Bulhan, resulting in the proposal for Liberation Psychology, signal that psychology, in its diversity, must be subsumed under a plan of action that goes beyond it. As much as we have already mentioned, we ought to emphasize that the revolutionary psychiatrist – and psychologist, according to Bulhan – was a revolutionary whose militancy was not limited to psychology or psychiatry. Fanon’s example is therefore a good example for the articulation of a psychology project that contributes to human liberation and emancipation, considering that this will not come through psychology; after all, “organized, conscious and collective action is an antidote to alienation in its different forms” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 276).

Based on Bulhan’s analysis of Fanon’s praxis and his proposal for Liberation Psychology, we have explored: the relationship between Fanon and psychology and his contributions to the latter, even though he was not a trained psychologist; how Bulhan’s proposal for Liberation Psychology, based on Fanon, occurs with the observation of the oppressive social function of hegemonic (Euro-American) psychology, within the framework of capitalist development in/through colonialism and racism; and how the Fanon-Bulhan dialogue points out to us the need to go beyond psychology, in a revolutionary praxis.

The Psychology of Liberation proposed by Bulhan based on Fanon is an anticolonial psychology, radically human and humanist, in contrast to the psychology of oppression and oppression in/by psychology. Dialectically, it is an attempt to deny (and overcome) what hegemonic psychology has been, which refers us to what our sociability has been; it is performed through psychology, while it makes psychology and is performed in/by it.

The Fanon-Bulhan dialectical synthesis, via Liberation Psychology, leads us forward. The Fanonian (and Bulhanian) winds push us to develop their postulates and contributions, understanding the movement of reality and how it presents itself in the particularity of Brazil, putting them into practice and transforming our reality. This work continues the recent movement of debate and appreciation of Fanonian praxis in our reality, opening itself up to new dialogues, syntheses, and overcomings. The fundamental questions still remain: what psychology do we want and for what society? Will we continue with a psychology that justifies and perpetuates oppression or will we build a psychology that contributes to overcoming our oppressive (and exploitative) sociability and, in this, itself?