ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Women’s Liberation movement took over from the Black Power movement and adapted to its own needs a set of ideas about the psychological dynamics of oppression which, for want of a better name, I shall call ‘liberation theory’. Liberation theory was less concerned with the virtues of oppressed groups than were the subsequent radical theories which soon displaced it. Its focus was on the deforming effects of oppression, the most central of which were identified as the psychological dependence of oppressed people and their intense mutual antagonism, the characteristic ‘division of the oppressed’. This emphasis was partly due to the fact that the theory understood itself as a ‘critical theory’ where the point of explanation is more to change the world than to interpret (or to represent) it.1 For the aim of liberation theory was to demonstrate the possibility of a psychological transformation, namely the transformation of the distortions due to oppression into the virtues of personal autonomy and loyalty to one’s fellow oppressed. Liberation theory fused psychology with politics in so far as the conditions of the desired transformation were understood to be intimately bound up with the workings of power. Here, too, its stance was in sharp contrast with that of the theories which replaced it.2 The effects of oppression, it was maintained, could not be eliminated from the psyche by way of the oppressed seeking power, although this was understood to be a likely, if not necessary, transient development. Ulti-
mately a stand would have to be taken against power. Liberation theory, then, was based on the anticipation of human relationships without power, in the specific sense in which it understood power and which I shall shortly define.
