Colonialism, Subjectivity, and Psychology in Latin America

The present article critically addresses the colonial character of the dominant psychological approaches to subjective experience in the Latin American context. These approaches are described as imbued with objectivism, dualism, individualism, and disciplinaryism, and are compared with Mesoamerican indigenous conceptions of subjectivity. It is assumed that what we usually call “psychology” is a cultural–historical manifestation of European capitalist modernity that was introduced in America by colonization. This assumption allows a problematization of the decolonial psychological project by suggesting that decolonization demands a break with psychology. Although decolonization is always unfinished and the colonial–postcolonial condition makes subjective experience always already psychologized, subjectivity is also always still resistant to its psychologization for the same reason that it still resists its complete Europeanization. Instead of the notions of hybridism and cultural miscegenation, the article asserts a conflictive coexistence of the colonizing and the colonized in the subjective sphere of Latin American societies and stresses the need to give an anticolonial and, inevitably, antipsychological orientation to decolonial and postcolonial perspectives in psychology.