By Philip Chanin, Ed.D, ABPP, CGP
Board Certified Clinical Psychologist
Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
www.drphilchanin.com
philchanin@gmail.com

Paulo Freire (September, 1921—May, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and Marxist philosopher whose work revolutionized global thought on education. He is best known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he reimagines teaching as a collaborative act of liberation rather than simple transmission. A founder of “critical pedagogy,” Freire’s influence spans literary movements, liberation theology, postcolonial education, Marxism, and contemporary theories of social justice and learning. He is widely regarded as one of the most important educational theorists of the twentieth century, alongside figures such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori.

Freire worked with illiterate Brazilian peasants. For Freire, the basic goal of the literacy process is to enable the peasant to reflect critically on his own environment and situation by gaining some distance from it. A photograph or sketch of a real situation, a “favela” (slum), for example, is projected on a slide, and the learners gain distance from the knowable object, an operation which is basic to the “act of knowing.”

Educators and learners together then can reflect critically on this knowable object which mediates between them. Thus, the learner moves from the first stage of “decodification,” to problematizing the situation and coming to a deeper understanding of it as an objective reality which exists outside the learner, in which the learner is no longer submerged, which may be acted upon and changed. It is this second stage of decodification which is most important and results in a critical examination by the learner of his own situation which before he could not see as anything but permanent.

The adult literacy process, says Freire, “must engage the learners in the constant problematizing of their existential situations” if it is to be that “act of knowing” by which the learners objectify their situation and take action in order to change it. Freire terms this process of awareness and action “conscientization.” Men are able to overcome the situation which limits them, he writes, only as they are able to separate themselves from the world and from their own activity and locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others. He writes:

“Only as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley, and men can come to perceive it as an objective-problematic situation—only then can commitment exist. Men emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality—historical awareness itself—thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientization of the situation. Conscientization is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence.”
(Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 101)

Thus, I see a connection between a Freire “seminar,” or any seminar in which the emphasis is upon searching dialogue, and psychotherapy. Each is a process of “emergence,” in which one learns to objectify the situation in which one is submerged—be it a book, a slum community, or one’s own unconscious.

A recent article in The New York Time Magazine (3/15/26), entitled “Intimacy Coordinator,” by Daphne Merkin, focuses on the work of psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz. He shares his perspective on how psychoanalytic work, similar to Freire’s ideas, enables the patient to not be so consumed with his suffering:

“What can change is the patient’s relationship with their damage through thinking about it with someone. To me, a crucial part of the analytic experience is that experience of being accompanied, so that what was once lived completely in isolation is now held in a relationship. Hopefully that experience can now be thought about and understood together, without the patient being overwhelmed.” (p. 41)

Throughout Freire’s writing the idea recurs that speaking a word is not a true act unless it implies both action and reflection. Otherwise it is an inauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality because a dichotomy has been imposed between its two constitutive elements. Jose Ortega y Gasset, in The Self and the Other, traces our problem as a culture to this split between thought and action, and to our Greek inheritance of the deification of pure thought:

“There is then no authentic action if there is no thought, and there is no authentic thought if it is not duly referred to action and made virile by its relation to action. But this relation—which is a true one—between action and contemplation has been persistently misunderstood. When the Greeks discovered that man thought, that there existed in the universe that strange reality known as thought…they felt such an enthusiasm for ideas that they conferred upon intelligence, upon logos, the supreme rank in the universe.”

“Compared with it, everything else seemed to them ancillary and contemptible…Hence they believed that man’s destiny was solely to exercise his intellect…This doctrine has been given the name ‘intellectualism’; it is an idolatry of the intelligence which isolates thought from its setting, from its function in the general economy of human life.” (p. 196)

As Harold Taylor has said of our plight: “It is the lack of a collective will in the world to act humanely on the knowledge we already have.” It is a short leap from our cultural norms to the personal manifestation of the dichotomy between thought and action. As Martin Buber said in his book The Way of Man, “The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow man is that I do not say what I mean, and that I do not do what I say.” (p. 158)

What, we might ask, does this have to do with psychotherapy? I think of my work as a couple’s therapist, and how I am often I am talking with wives, in particular, who have become bitter and resentful at husbands who may give lip service to changing their behavior, but in fact they continue to act in the same frustrating ways.

As research psychologist John Gottman has written in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: “In unstable marriages, perpetual problems…eventually kill the relationship. Instead of coping with the problem effectively, the couple gets gridlocked over it. They have the same conversation about it over and over again. They just spin their wheels, resolving nothing. Because they make no headway, they feel increasingly hurt, frustrated, and rejected by each other. They are on the course toward parallel lives and inevitable loneliness—the death knell of any marriage.” (pp. 130-132)

Earlier in this article I discussed Paulo Freire’s emphasis on “conscientization,” which is the process of developing a critical awareness of one’s reality through reflection and action, often leading to social change. I think of psychotherapy also as a process of conscientization, as together therapist and patient reflect on the circumstances of the patient’s life, with the goal of taking action in order to live a healthier and more fulfilling life.

Earlier in this article I quoted from Daphne Merkin’s recent New York Times piece. She writes, “I’ve been a patient long enough to know that even in the most motivated of patients, it is so difficult in part because it involves letting go of a familiar script, no matter how painful. I pressed (Dr. Grosz) on whether real, lasting change can ever come about through psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.”

“’The last person we speak to is ourselves,’ Grosz explained. ‘And that dialogue with ourselves becomes more modified, more curious rather than persecuted.’ He continued, ‘Suffering is, in many ways, my ally. Suffering motivates people to come to me to seek help, to want to change…For many people, what we know best is suffering. Our suffering. And people stay there. They stay there because it’s familiar and because it’s safe. But if I can get them to start looking at it the way we’re talking right now, that spell can be loosened.” I think Paulo Freire would be in agreement with this perspective.