The contemporary discipline of psychology finds itself at a historical impasse. Despite decades of critical reforms, multicultural adaptations, and the proliferation of cross-cultural methodologies, mainstream psychological science remains predominantly tethered to an insular, Eurocentric worldview. This dominant episteme assumes an atomized, self-contained Cartesian subject whose inner psychic life can be isolated from historical realities, geopolitical locations, and structural systems of subjugation. By universalizing the mental architectures, developmental trajectories, and affective registers of the Global North, standard psychological practices have systematically contributed to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos termed epistemicide: the active extermination, silencing, and delegitimization of indigenous, racialized, and subaltern forms of knowing and being. Mental distress is routinely torn from its socio-historical and political matrix, repackaged as individual pathology, and subjected to biopolitical regimes of behavioral normalization and pharmacological pacification.
To dismantle this imperial infrastructure, psychological theory must look beyond the cosmetic concessions of institutional diversity and multicultural competency. It requires an ontological and epistemological rupture that interrogates the enduring legacies of European colonialism—not merely as a bygone historical epoch, but as an ongoing ontological, political, and psychic matrix termed coloniality. In this intellectual and clinical context, the confluence of two formidable thinkers from the Global South—the Bolivian Aymara sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and the Puerto Rican philosopher and decolonial theorist Nelson Maldonado-Torres—provides a radical foundation for a Decolonial Psychology Model. Their respective conceptualizations of the coloniality of being and ch’ixi subjectivity construct an incisive paradigm for understanding the psychic fractures wrought by colonial domination, while outlining pathways toward collective psychic liberation and structural de-alienation.
This article elaborates an integrative Decolonial Psychology Model that synthesizes the Caribbean phenomenological decolonial philosophy of Maldonado-Torres with the Andean indigenous sociology and visual sociopoetics of Rivera Cusicanqui. By tracing the genealogical lineage from the imperial ego conquiro to modern existential trauma, and countering it through the dialectics of the motley, contradictory ch’ixi self, we propose an operational model for psychological research, clinical intervention, diagnostic critique, and communal healing. Far from offering a purely theoretical abstraction, this model articulates a clinical posture rooted in the “decolonial attitude,” transforming therapy from an instrument of institutional pacification into a site of collaborative resistance, ethical re-humanization, and somatic-territorial reclamation.
1. Theoretical Foundations of Decolonial Psychology: Epistemological Ruptures
1.1 Critique of Eurocentric Hegemony in Modern Psychological Science
Mainstream psychology emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developing within the institutional and economic epicenters of Western European and North American industrial capitalism. Consequently, the discipline adopted an ontological framework derived from the Cartesian-Lockean tradition, which conceptualizes the human being as an autonomous, self-contained, and rational agent. This model presupposes a radical split between mind and body, subject and object, individual and collective, and organism and environment. Within this epistemological paradigm, the European bourgeois individual was elevated to the universal archetype of psychological maturity, cognitive sanity, and emotional equilibrium. By establishing this localized archetype as a global normative baseline, psychological science naturalized a deeply parochial architecture of human consciousness while presenting its empirical findings as objective, culture-free, and universally applicable laws of nature.
This universalist Western episteme operated in direct complicity with European imperial expansion and colonial governance. As modern colonial empires subjugated indigenous populations across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, psychology, anthropology, and medicine supplied the pseudoscientific rationales required to justify racial subjugation. Early psychological testing, cranial measurements, and early behavioral assessments were deployed to delineate racial hierarchies, asserting that colonized peoples possessed defective cognitive capacities, volatile emotional dispositions, and developmental arrests that necessitated paternalistic imperial stewardship. Mainstream psychology did not merely observe this imperial subjugation; it actively constructed the discursive and scientific categories that rendered colonial violence historically intelligible and morally permissible. The resulting epistemicide systematically delegitimized indigenous epistemologies, dismissing communal ways of knowing, spiritual ontologies, and relational cosmological frameworks as primitive superstitions or forms of psychopathology.
In the contemporary era, this legacy persists through the subtle biopolitical control exerted by psychological disciplines. By insulating the human psyche from its historical, geopolitical, and structural context, psychology operates as an apparatus of individualization. Structural violence, poverty, racialization, forced displacement, and land dispossession are systematically de-politicized and transformed into private neuroses, affective disorders, or personal chemical imbalances. The subaltern subject, crushed under the material and symbolic weight of global coloniality, is instructed to seek remedies in internal emotional regulation, cognitive reframing, and psychopharmacology. In this manner, mainstream psychology functions as an ideological apparatus that pacifies dissent, protects the structural status quo, and demands that the oppressed adjust to the very conditions that traumatize them, thereby completing the biopolitical circuit of imperial domination.
1.2 Defining the Decolonial Paradigm in Contrast to Postcolonial and Cultural Psychologies
To construct a truly decolonial psychological paradigm, it is necessary to demarcate its epistemological, political, and ontological boundaries from adjacent frameworks, most notably postcolonial theory and cultural or cross-cultural psychology. While postcolonial psychology—frequently informed by the textual, literary, and deconstructive traditions of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak—has yielded critical insights into the discursive representation of the colonial “Other” and the hybridity of post-imperial cultures, it often remains tethered to academic textual analysis and discursive critique. In contrast, decoloniality, emerging from the Latin American and Caribbean traditions through thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and María Lugones, insists that colonialism did not end with legal decolonization. Instead, it gave way to coloniality: a persistent, underlying matrix of global power, knowledge, and being that continues to organize world systems. Decolonial psychology is therefore an intervention anchored not simply in textual disruption, but in material, somatic, territorial, and ontological restructuring aimed at liberation.
Similarly, decolonial psychology fundamentally rejects the premises of liberal cross-cultural and multicultural psychology. Mainstream cultural psychology routinely operates via an additive methodology: it accepts the Euro-Western psychological canon as the foundational, normative core, and subsequently appends superficial “cultural variables” to explain localized deviations among non-Western populations. This framework commodifies culture, treating it as an exotic, static, and ahistorical set of beliefs, traits, or values that can be seamlessly incorporated into existing cognitive-behavioral or psychodynamic models. Multiculturalism of this kind remains an assimilationist technology that leaves the underlying Eurocentric epistemological hegemony untouched. It celebrates decorative diversity while obscuring the coloniality of power, structural racism, and economic imperialism that actively produce human suffering in the Global South and racialized enclaves of the Global North.
Decolonial psychology shifts the analytical axis by foregrounding what Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres designate as the geopolitical and body-political locus of enunciation. It asserts that all psychological knowledge is inextricably bound to the geographic, historical, and racialized body of the knower. Rather than striving for an illusory, detached, and god-like objectivity—what Santiago Castro-Gómez critiqued as the “point zero” hubris of Western science—decolonial psychology deliberately anchors its theoretical and clinical praxis within radical indigenous struggles, subaltern social movements, and Global South liberation frameworks. It does not seek the inclusion of the marginalized into a pre-existing, exclusionary psychological canon; instead, it labors for the abolition of that canon’s epistemic monopoly and the validation of a pluriversal understanding of psychic reality, relational health, and collective liberation.
1.3 The Epistemic Convergence: Rivera Cusicanqui and Maldonado-Torres
The formulation of an integrative Decolonial Psychology Model finds its theoretical anchor in the synthesis of two Latin American and Caribbean intellectual traditions: the Andean indigenous sociology and anarcho-syndicalist activism of Bolivia’s Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and the Caribbean decolonial philosophy and existential phenomenology of Puerto Rico’s Nelson Maldonado-Torres. While operating from distinct geographic, linguistic, and cultural sites of enunciation, their work converges on an understanding of coloniality as an ontological and psychic wound, offering complementary paradigms for diagnosing structural suffering and activating subaltern resistance.
Maldonado-Torres brings to psychological theory a radicalized phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon, unmasking how imperial modernity creates an ontological hierarchy that denies full human status to racialized subjects. His concept of the “coloniality of being” excavates the foundational violence embedded within Western philosophy, tracing how the Cartesian imperative transforms into an imperial logic of domination that inflicts existential dread, melancholia, and ontological invalidation on colonized bodies. Complementing this existential-phenomenological critique, Rivera Cusicanqui provides an empirical, historical, and socio-somatic framework derived from centuries of Andean indigenous resistance against the Bolivian nation-state and Spanish imperialism. Her critique of “internal colonialism” and her construction of the Aymara concept of ch’ixi—a non-synthetic dialectic that honors the coexistence of contradictory, antagonistic psychic and cultural realities—provide psychological theory with a non-binary framework for conceptualizing colonized subjectivity.
Crucially, both thinkers mount an uncompromising critique of the co-optation of decolonial discourse by North American and Western European academic elites. Rivera Cusicanqui explicitly indicts the modern/colonial research group for engaging in intellectual extractivism—commodifying indigenous concepts, packaging them into institutional jargon, and divorcing them from grassroots indigenous and working-class struggles. Maldonado-Torres similarly cautions against the domestication of decolonial thought, insisting that decoloniality must retain its radical ethical orientation and its Fanonian imperative toward real socio-material de-alienation. By weaving together Maldonado-Torres’s existential-phenomenological critique of the coloniality of being with Rivera Cusicanqui’s somatic, oral, and anti-assimilationist sociology of the ch’ixi self, we establish the foundational principles of a decolonial psychology that is simultaneously philosophically rigorous, structurally conscious, and grounded in community healing praxis.
2. Nelson Maldonado-Torres and the Coloniality of Being
2.1 Ontological Foundations: From ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ to ‘Ego Conquiro’
To understand the psychological trauma inflicted by colonial modernity, decolonial psychology must interrogate the philosophical foundations of modern human subjectivity. In his seminal treatise, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, Nelson Maldonado-Torres excavates the historical and philosophical genealogy of modern European identity, demonstrating that the celebrated Cartesian formula cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. Following the philosophical interventions of Enrique Dussel, Maldonado-Torres argues that the Cartesian ego cogito was historically preceded, enabled, and philosophically anchored by the imperial ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”). The capacity of the European subject to conceive of himself as a detached, self-grounding, and sovereign consciousness was forged through the violent conquest, enslavement, and territorial expropriation of non-European peoples across the Americas and Africa from 1492 onward.
This genealogy reveals that modern ontological security—the fundamental confidence in one’s own humanity, rationality, and right to exist—is intrinsically bound to imperial domination. The European conqueror established his human subjectivity not through mere internal contemplation, but by constructing an absolute ontological boundary between the colonizer and the colonized. In this imperial taxonomy, the world was divided between the realm of the fully human (*humanitas*) and the realm of the subhuman or non-human (*anthropos*). Maldonado-Torres details how this boundary functions as an ontological difference: while the European subject is endowed with an ontological presence characterized by agency, rationality, morality, and interiority, the racialized subject is plunged into an ontological void, defined solely by lack, pathology, and instrumental utility.
The consequence of this structure is what Maldonado-Torres designates as the coloniality of being: the systematic production of non-being and sub-ontological negation in racialized subjects. Within the imperial order, the colonized are not simply viewed as human beings who happen to lack education or modern technology; their very existence is framed as a fundamental error of nature. The Cartesian certainty of selfhood is denied to them. In its place, the imperial matrix imposes a presumption of ontological deficiency: “You do not think, you do not possess an interior soul, you are an object of mastery; therefore, you are not.” This sub-ontological negation forms the baseline of the colonized condition, constituting a violent philosophical infrastructure that predates and continually organizes modern psychological vulnerability.
2.2 The Psychological Manifestations of the Coloniality of Being
The philosophical negation embodied in the coloniality of being is not merely an abstract metaphysical proposition; it produces profound affective, existential, and psychological disruptions in the daily lives of racialized peoples. When human beings are systematically denied ontological recognition by every major social, legal, linguistic, and scientific institution, the psychic consequence is a pervasive, transgenerational condition of systemic melancholia and existential dread. The colonized subject wakes each day into a world that continually communicates, through structural violence and cultural micro-invalidations, that their presence is superfluous, threatening, or inherently pathological. This constant existential invalidation erodes the fundamental subjective ground required for healthy psychological development, generating a chronic crisis of meaning and an enduring sense of precariousness.
Maldonado-Torres directly engages Frantz Fanon’s formulation of the zone of non-being to map this psychological reality. The zone of non-being is an extraordinary, sterile, and arid region of the human experience, a descending circle where the racialized subject is stripped of all subjective interiority. In this zone, standard psychological categories fail. Depression is no longer an idiosyncratic chemical deficiency or a cognitive misattribution; it becomes an intelligible affective response to the condition of social death. Internalizing the white, imperial gaze, the colonized subject is forced into a state of self-alienation, experiencing their own somatic and cultural reality through the eyes of a master who despises them. This dynamic naturalizes feelings of racial inferiority, where the colonized individual may unconsciously come to loathe their skin, their ancestral languages, their family lineages, and their cultural memories.
Over generations, the psychological manifestations of the coloniality of being harden into enduring disruptions of personal and collective agency. When societies are maintained in a permanent state of sub-ontological negation, individuals develop deep-seated feelings of powerlessness, self-doubt, and fragmented identity. Collective self-worth is systematically undermined by historical narratives that frame the subaltern as passive spectators of their own subjugation rather than historical protagonists. The psychic rupture of existing in the zone of non-being fractures existential coherence, leaving individuals torn between a futile, psychologically devastating desire to assimilate into a colonial ideal that will never fully accept them, and an agonizing, pathologized identification with their own denigrated communities.
2.3 The Coloniality of Being as Structural Trauma
From the vantage point of Maldonado-Torres’s framework, the dominant diagnostic concepts of psychological trauma utilized in contemporary mental health are fundamentally inadequate. The standard psychiatric conceptualization of trauma, epitomized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), operates on an episodic, event-based model. It presumes that an individual, possessing an antecedent baseline of psychological equilibrium, encounters an anomalous, discrete, and temporally bounded catastrophic event (such as a vehicular accident, an assault, or an acute military engagement), which temporarily disrupts their cognitive and affective integration. Healing, in this framework, is conceived as an individual process of processing the discrete memory and returning the patient to the pre-trauma state of functioning.
Decolonial psychology, grounded in the coloniality of being, reframes structural coloniality as an enduring, ontological, and transgenerational condition of psychological trauma. For indigenous, enslaved, and racialized populations, colonial violence is not a discrete historical event located safely in the past, nor is it an exceptional disruption of an otherwise peaceful life. Rather, coloniality constitutes the very air they breathe; it is a permanent, continuous, and atmospheric violence that organizes their material conditions, legal statuses, socioeconomic distribution, and psychic realities. The baseline itself is violent. Consequently, standard PTSD frameworks cannot encapsulate a form of suffering where there is no “post” to the trauma, because the historical systems that initiated the violation continue to structure the social order.
This atmospheric structural trauma operates through complex affective economies of shame, guilt, and existential alienation. The racialized subject is made to bear the affective burden of the colonizer’s violence. Systemic deprivation, social marginalization, and educational exclusion are translated by the dominant culture into individual moral failings, generating acute affective shame within subaltern subjects. Concurrently, survivors of colonial violence often experience profound survivor’s guilt, alongside the alienation of being disconnected from their ancestral epistemologies, sacred lands, and communal kinship networks. Decolonial psychology reconceptualizes these affective burdens not as intrapsychic pathologies, but as the direct, predictable psychological consequences of surviving within an ongoing colonial world-system that requires the psychic fragmentation of the subaltern to preserve imperial hegemony.
3. The Decolonial Turn in Psychological Epistemology and the Decolonial Attitude
3.1 Conceptualizing the ‘Decolonial Attitude’ (Maldonado-Torres)
To interrupt the ontological negation generated by modern coloniality, Nelson Maldonado-Torres introduces the concept of the decolonial attitude. In philosophical discourse, an “attitude” denotes a fundamental existential posture, an intentional orientation toward reality that dictates how an individual perceives, interprets, and ethically responds to the world. Modern European thought, according to Maldonado-Torres, is characterized by an “imperial attitude”—a posture of entitlement, hubris, objectification, and profound ethical indifference toward the suffering of colonized populations. The imperial attitude approaches the world as a territory to be surveyed, classified, extracted, and dominated. Within modern psychological science, this attitude manifests in the detached, clinical gaze of the researcher or diagnostician who treats the patient as an exotic specimen, an algorithmic collection of symptoms, or a passive object of behavioral control.
The decolonial attitude represents an intentional, militant disruption of this epistemological indifference. It is an existential, ethical, and political commitment to the restoration of the colonized subject’s full humanity. Rather than adopting an posture of Olympian scientific detachment, the practitioner or theorist operating with a decolonial attitude begins with an attitude of radical openness, epistemic humility, and relational responsibility. This posture requires that the psychologist recognize their own complicity in the structures of coloniality, deliberately relinquishing the authoritative position of the all-knowing imperial expert. The decolonial attitude acknowledges that the subaltern subject is not a deficit-laden entity awaiting clinical rescue, but an epistemic agent possessing critical knowledge forged through survival and historical struggle.
Translated into clinical and psychological settings, the decolonial attitude fundamentally transforms the therapeutic encounter and investigative orientation. It demands that the clinician listen to the patient’s distress not merely through the diagnostic manual, but through the historical and sociopolitical realities that shape their life. The therapeutic posture shifts from one of unilateral interpretation to one of radical ethical co-presence. In this space, the practitioner enters into a shared commitment to unmask the systems of power that produce psychological suffering, validating the patient’s pain not as irrational pathology, but as an intelligible, human response to dehumanizing conditions. The decolonial attitude thus operates as the ethical precondition for any therapeutic or research practice that aims to liberate rather than pacify.
3.2 Re-reading Frantz Fanon: Phenomenological Approaches to Racial Alienation
The operationalization of the decolonial attitude relies heavily upon Maldonado-Torres’s phenomenological re-reading of Frantz Fanon, specifically Fanon’s seminal 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks. Whereas mainstream psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology historically relegated Fanon to the margins as a revolutionary polemicist, Maldonado-Torres recognizes Fanon as an architect of existential phenomenological psychology. Fanon’s revolutionary contribution was his concept of sociogeny. Rejecting the dualistic extremes of pure phylogenetic (biological) determinism and ontogenetic (individual psychological) development, Fanon asserted that human neurosis, identity formation, and psychic suffering in colonial environments are fundamentally sociogenic—rooted in the sociopolitical fabric and racialized structures of the modern world.
Maldonado-Torres unpacks Fanon’s exploration of the “psycho-existential complex” and the dialectic of epidermalization. Colonialism operates by projecting social hierarchies directly onto physical, bodily markers—the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the accent of speech. Through this process of epidermalization, the racialized body is overdetermined from the outside. The colonized subject does not simply experience their body from within as an authentic locus of intentionality and agency; instead, their body is captured, dissected, and weighted down by a hostile sea of imperial signs, myths, and racist projections. Fanon’s famous lament—”I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects”—captures this psychological collapse from subjective being to objectified otherness.
This dynamic gives rise to the tragic psychological compulsion to wear “white masks”—the agonizing, self-destructive effort by the colonized subject to secure ontological recognition by adopting the language, aesthetic preferences, behavioral mores, and cognitive frameworks of the colonizer. Fanonian disalienation, which Maldonado-Torres posits as a central aim of decolonial psychology, requires the systematic dismantling of this colonial desire. It demands that psychological therapy become an exploratory space where the colonized individual, accompanied by the clinician, identifies how the desire for whiteness was internalized as a defense mechanism against social death. The therapeutic process is realized only when this white mask is stripped away, and the subaltern reclaims their historical dignity, shifting their psychic investment from imperial validation toward collective, anti-colonial solidarity and self-actualization.
3.3 Decolonial Epistemic Disobedience in Psychological Research
The realization of a decolonial psychology demands more than revisions to clinical posture; it mandates a direct rebellion against the methodological orthodoxies of mainstream psychological science. Walter Mignolo characterizes this methodological rebellion as epistemic disobedience—an intentional refusal to submit to the epistemic rules, verification standards, and ontological assumptions established by the imperial Western academy. For psychological research, this entails rejecting positivist objectivity, which insists that human consciousness can be meaningfully understood exclusively through quantitative measurement, operationalized variables, and experimental detachment.
Positivist psychology functions as an imperialist technology by systematically stripping human narratives of their qualitative depth, historical context, and affective resonance. When subaltern pain is converted into a score on a standardized inventory, the structural systems causing that pain vanish from analytical view. Decolonial epistemic disobedience restores affective, embodied, and situated epistemologies to the center of psychological inquiry. It affirms that suffering, joy, grief, and resilience cannot be comprehended through detached observation, but must be understood through the lived, embodied experience of historical subjects who inhabit specific geopolitical locations. Decolonial research validates subaltern narratives, oral traditions, and visceral, bodily reactions as authentic, rigorous, and philosophically deep sources of psychological knowledge.
Consequently, the decolonial psychological researcher abandons the mythical posture of the neutral, value-free observer. As Maldonado-Torres and Linda Tuhiwai Smith argue, research is never politically neutral; it either reinforces existing systems of imperial domination or actively contributes to decolonization. The decolonial researcher consciously embraces the role of a decolonial militant—an intellectual who places their methodological tools at the service of marginalized communities. Operationalizing the “Epistemologies of the South” outlined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, decolonial psychological research becomes a collaborative, participatory endeavor. In this framework, research subjects are no longer passive objects of extraction, but co-researchers who participate in defining the questions, interpreting the data, and mobilizing the knowledge to achieve collective liberation and territorial self-determination.
4. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and the Concept of Ch’ixi Identity
4.1 Ontology of the Ch’ixi: Andean Dialectics and Mestizaje Critique
While Nelson Maldonado-Torres excavates the philosophical negation that characterizes the coloniality of being, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui provides a transformative framework for conceptualizing colonized subjectivity from the living historical context of the Bolivian Andes. Central to Rivera Cusicanqui’s theoretical contribution is her revitalization of the Aymara cosmological and linguistic concept of ch’ixi. In Aymara textile weaving and cosmological thought, ch’ixi refers to a specific color register that defies simple chromatic categorization: it describes a mottled, speckled, or heathered fabric composed of infinitely small, juxtaposed black and white threads. From a distance, the textile appears grey; yet upon closer examination, one observes that the black threads remain undeniably black, and the white threads remain undeniably white. They do not blend, fuse, or dissolve into an indeterminate synthesis; rather, they coexist in their radical distinctness, generating an intense, vibrant, and dynamic tension.
Rivera Cusicanqui mobilizes this indigenous concept to mount an incisive critique of the official, state-sponsored ideology of mestizaje. Throughout Latin America, post-revolutionary and nationalist states promoted *mestizaje*—the racial and cultural mixing of European and indigenous peoples—as a progressive, democratic narrative of national unity. Rivera Cusicanqui unmasks this ideology as an assimilationist, biopolitical project designed to achieve the gradual, structural “whitening” (*blanqueamiento*) of the population. Official *mestizaje* requires the systematic erasure of indigenous language, cosmological memory, and political autonomy in exchange for marginal inclusion into the modern capitalist state. It is a harmonious fiction that seeks to neutralize the radical potential of indigenous resistance by absorbing it into a homogenous national identity governed by Eurocentric elites.
In direct opposition to this assimilationist logic, Rivera Cusicanqui proposes the ontology of the ch’ixi as a non-binary, non-Hegelian dialectical model of human subjectivity. Unlike Western Hegelian dialectics, in which a thesis and an antithesis are inevitably subsumed and resolved into a higher, harmonizing synthesis, the ch’ixi dialectic maintains that contradictory, antagonistic realities can and must coexist without resolution. Applied to psychological theory, the ch’ixi model conceptualizes the colonized self not as a unified, harmonious whole, but as a site of constitutive, creative tension. The colonized subject is both indigenous and European, ancestral and modern, subaltern and privileged, inhabited by competing historical forces that pull simultaneously in opposing directions. The ch’ixi self refuses the colonial demand to choose between an idealized, static pre-colonial purity and an obliterating, modern Westernization, instead asserting a dynamic subjectivity that thrives within the very heart of contradiction.
4.2 Psychic Bricolage and the Navigation of Antagonistic Worlds
The psychological implications of the ch’ixi framework are transformative for clinical theory and practice. Under the diagnostic regimes of Euro-Western psychology, an individual experiencing profound, unresolved internal contradictions, fragmented cultural allegiances, or competing epistemological registers is routinely diagnosed with identity diffusion, borderline organization, or dissociative states. The Western psychological paradigm pathologizes multiplicity, demanding that a mature, self-actualized ego achieve linear coherence, internal harmony, and a singular, integrated narrative identity. For racialized, colonized, and migratory subjects, this insistence on unified subjective coherence functions as an instrument of psychological violence, requiring them to amputate parts of their historical memory and cultural reality to satisfy the demands of an alienating standard of mental health.
Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi consciousness reframes this psychological dynamic, reconceptualizing what mainstream psychology terms pathology as a sophisticated, necessary form of psychic bricolage. The colonized subject living in modern urban centers or colonial enclaves must navigate profoundly antagonistic social, economic, and cultural worlds on an hourly basis. A person may speak an indigenous language at home with their grandparents, converse in colonial Spanish or English in the university or workplace, engage in traditional ancestral rituals during communal assemblies, and utilize digital, late-capitalist technologies in their daily labor. Rivera Cusicanqui argues that this navigation does not represent a state of cognitive dissonance or colonial schizophrenia; rather, it is a creative, resilient, and deeply strategic psychological adaptation that allows the subaltern to survive within the fissures of internal colonialism.
Psychic multiplicity is thus reclaimed as an engine of resilience and political resistance. The ch’ixi subject recognizes that their internal contradictions are not their private moral failings, but are the accurate psychological reflections of a deeply contradictory and violently stratified society. By cultivating a ch’ixi consciousness, individuals learn to hold these competing registers in productive tension without succumbing to the pressure to resolve them. The individual embraces the black threads and the white threads of their lived experience, deriving strength from their ancestral indigenous lineage while strategically deploying the tools, languages, and technical capacities of the modern colonial system to defend their territory and preserve their community. Psychological stability, in this decolonial model, is achieved not through false harmony, but through the conscious, empowered navigation of enduring historical tension.
4.3 The Politics of Bodily Memory and Somatic Resistance
A foundational tenet of Rivera Cusicanqui’s decolonial sociology is that the human body functions as a living, historical archive of colonial violence and anti-colonial subversion. Mainstream psychological paradigms, heavily influenced by cognitive-behavioral dogmas, locate memory almost exclusively within the cerebral, synaptic networks of the brain, conceptualizing it as informational data that can be verbally accessed, cognitively restructured, and rationally mastered. Rivera Cusicanqui challenges this cerebral reductionism, asserting that centuries of conquest, racialized labor, sexual violence, and territorial dispossession are somatically sedimented within the muscles, tissues, postures, and sensory apparatuses of subaltern bodies. The body remembers what the conscious, colonized mind has been coerced or educated to forget.
This bodily memory acts as an enduring counterweight to the official narratives promulgated by the colonial state, educational systems, and religious institutions. While official textbooks and psychiatric manuals may proclaim historical progress, racial harmony, and the benevolence of modernization, the subaltern body registers the ongoing reality of internal colonialism through chronic somatic tension, visceral anxiety, respiratory restriction, and deep-seated, transgenerational pain. However, Rivera Cusicanqui insists that the body is never merely a passive surface upon which colonial oppression is inscribed; it is simultaneously a vibrant site of somatic resistance, historical memory, and epistemic resurgence.
Somatic resistance is activated through physical practices, everyday movements, collective labor, and sacred rituals that have survived in the subaltern underground. When an indigenous woman wears her traditional, multi-layered pollera skirt in an urban financial district, when communities engage in collective ritual dances during patronal festivals, or when social movements mobilize physically to blockade highways, the body enacts a potent political and psychic defiance. These somatic performances bypass the linguistic, cognitive constraints of the colonizer, allowing the subaltern to reconnect with deep, ancestral registers of memory and power. In Rivera Cusicanqui’s decolonial praxis, psychological healing cannot occur solely through the talking cure within the sterile confines of an office; it requires embodied interventions that re-activate sensory memory, liberate somatic blockages, and reconnect the physical body with the territorial land from which it was violently estranged.
5. Internal Colonialism and the Architecture of Subjectivity
5.1 Rivera Cusicanqui’s Formulation of Internal Colonialism
A central pillar of Rivera Cusicanqui’s political sociology is her rigorous theorization of internal colonialism (*colonialismo interno*). Drawing upon the historical trajectory of Bolivia, Rivera Cusicanqui demonstrates that the formal wars of independence that swept Latin America in the nineteenth century did not emancipate indigenous, Black, and popular sectors. Instead, they merely transferred administrative state power from the Spanish imperial crown to a domestic, Euro-descendant creole (*criollo*) and mestizo oligarchy. The newly founded nation-states retained and intensified the racialized, linguistic, economic, and regional hierarchies of the Spanish empire. Rivera Cusicanqui’s seminal work, Oppressed But Not Defeated, illustrates how the modern nation-state continues to function as an engine of internal colonial subjugation, maintaining indigenous peoples in a state of political subordination and economic dispossession.
Internal colonialism operates through the construction of physical and subjective geographies of exclusion. Nation-states are divided by invisible, yet brutally enforced, internal borders that separate the civilized, modern, Europeanized urban centers from the backward, racialized, and disposable rural peripheries and urban shantytowns. These internal borders are not solely territorial; they are etched directly into the subjectivity of citizens. In cities like La Paz, the indigenous Aymara and Quechua populations face spatial, linguistic, and cultural segregation, where access to legal protections, economic stability, and educational opportunities is contingent upon the systematic disavowal of their indigenous heritage. This spatial and structural dynamic produces profound psychological alienation, as indigenous and mestizo bodies navigate urban environments that constantly treat them as dirty, illegitimate, and dangerous interlopers within their own ancestral lands.
For a decolonial psychology model, Rivera Cusicanqui’s formulation of internal colonialism is vital because it shifts the clinical lens from foreign empires to domestic institutions. Mental distress in the post-colonial nation-state cannot be comprehended solely as the historical echo of a long-departed colonial administrator; it is the direct consequence of contemporary state policies, national economic systems, and judicial infrastructures that continue to treat subaltern populations as internal colonies. Psychologists must recognize that the national courts, public hospitals, universities, and mental health institutions within their own borders are often the primary vehicles through which colonial violence is reproduced daily. Diagnosing an individual without accounting for the suffocating architecture of internal colonialism is a form of malpractice that serves only to naturalize domestic imperial oppression.
5.2 The Internalized Colonizer: Micropolitics of Power in Everyday Life
The persistence of internal colonialism is ensured not solely through state armies and legal codes, but through its infiltration of the micro-physics of daily life. Rivera Cusicanqui meticulously examines how the coloniality of power reproduces itself within intimate, interpersonal spaces—the family, the primary school, the kitchen, the church, and the romantic relationship. In these micro-domains, internal colonialism installs what Fanon described, and Rivera Cusicanqui illuminates, as the internalized colonizer: an unconscious, psychic apparatus through which the oppressed individual becomes an active agent of their own subjugation and the subjugation of their kin.
This internalized coloniality manifests as an everyday performance of whiteness and linguistic self-policing, adopted as indispensable survival strategies. In internally colonized societies, social mobility, economic survival, and personal safety depend on an individual’s ability to approximate European cultural markers. Indigenous and mestizo parents, motivated by a desire to shield their children from the brutal racial violence they endured, often forbid their offspring from speaking their ancestral languages, compelling them to learn unaccented colonial Spanish or English. Indigenous names are legally altered, traditional garments are replaced with cheap Western consumer fashion, and skin-bleaching or Eurocentric cosmetic practices are embraced. This linguistic and cultural self-policing inflicts a profound psychic wound, requiring the child to disavow their parents’ heritage and internalize the message that their native identity is a badge of shame that must be buried.
The resulting psychopathology of internalized racism fuels intra-community and domestic violence. When the subaltern subject is blocked from expressing their rage, frustration, and existential humiliation against the entrenched ruling elite, that repressed violence is diverted inward and laterally. It erupts as domestic abuse, lateral hostility against darker-skinned or more traditionally indigenous community members, and deep-seated intra-ethnic contempt. Rivera Cusicanqui unmasks the subtle, insidious hierarchies that govern interpersonal relationships within marginalized communities, where individuals continually assert minute degrees of racial, linguistic, or class superiority over their peers to protect their fragile, contested status within the internal colony. Decolonial psychology must confront this internalized colonizer directly, recognizing that liberation requires an internal decolonization of the micropolitics of power just as much as an external restructuring of the state.
5.3 Discourse versus Practice: Exposing Academic and State Hypocrisy
A hallmark of Rivera Cusicanqui’s intellectual legacy is her uncompromising exposure of the profound contradiction between radical discourse and reactionary practice. In her influential essay, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses, she takes aim at the emergence of “ornamental multiculturalism” adopted by Latin American states, non-governmental organizations, and international financial institutions such as the World Bank. During the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal states incorporated indigenous terms, constitutional recognitions of plurinationality, and decorative cultural displays into their public apparatuses. Rivera Cusicanqui demonstrates that this discursive celebration of cultural diversity functioned as an ideological smoke screen: the state praised indigenous identity in the public sphere while simultaneously granting multinational corporations concessions to strip indigenous lands of water, minerals, and forests. The radical political content of indigenous struggles was gutted, transformed into folkloric tourism and harmless institutional rhetoric.
Rivera Cusicanqui extends this scathing critique to the global academic industry, targeting prominent North American and European universities that have transformed decoloniality into an elite, abstract intellectual brand. She explicitly critiques male-dominated intellectual groups—including figures such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano—for engaging in a form of intellectual extractivism. These academic elites, operating from prestigious universities in the Global North, consume the theoretical concepts, historical sacrifices, and lived struggles of indigenous and subaltern social movements, convert them into high-level sociological jargon, and build lucrative, insular academic careers without ever engaging in real material solidarity with the communities whose thought they have expropriated. This creates a severe cognitive dissonance: a radical decolonial discourse entirely divorced from everyday transformative practice.
For a Decolonial Psychology Model, this critique provides an essential ethical boundary. Decolonial psychology cannot become another trendy academic subdiscipline, an intellectual game of publishing papers, organizing conferences, and teaching fashionable seminars while marginalized communities continue to suffer the violent brutalities of internal colonialism. Rivera Cusicanqui insists on the concept of praxis—the dialectical unity of thought, reflection, and concrete bodily action. An authentic decolonial psychology must be organically rooted in grassroots struggle, community defense committees, independent indigenous assemblies, and working-class resistance. The legitimacy of a decolonial psychological practitioner is measured not by their academic credentials or their mastery of decolonial terminology, but by their direct, accountable, and sustained ethical engagement in the material liberation of the communities they serve.
6. Synthesizing Rivera Cusicanqui and Maldonado-Torres: An Integrative Matrix
6.1 Bridging the Ch’ixi Subject with the Colonized Being
Synthesizing the insights of Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui allows us to construct an integrative matrix that serves as the theoretical engine of our Decolonial Psychology Model. This synthesis bridges Maldonado-Torres’s existential-phenomenological mapping of the *coloniality of being* with Rivera Cusicanqui’s socio-historical and somatic formulation of the *ch’ixi* subject, forging a dynamic framework for understanding and treating the psychic fractures of modernity/coloniality.
Maldonado-Torres’s concept of the “zone of non-being” exposes the depth of the ontological negation inflicted upon the colonized subject, illustrating how imperial power strips racialized human beings of their ontological presence and pushes them into an existential void. However, if left unmediated, an exclusive focus on this negation risks reducing the colonized subject to an absolute victim, a passive object permanently crushed under the machinery of imperial power. This is where Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi ontology provides an indispensable intervention. By mapping the ch’ixi tension onto the zone of non-being, decolonial psychology reveals that the zone of non-being is never an empty, dead space; rather, it is a contested, vibrant site of constant struggle, survival, and profound generative resistance.
The sub-ontological difference identified by Maldonado-Torres is re-articulated through Rivera Cusicanqui not as a final condition of human impossibility, but as the very ground upon which the ch’ixi subject weaves their complex, multi-layered existence. The decolonial subject is defined by an enduring dialectical tension between systemic negation and continuous indigenous and subaltern resurgence. In this integrative profile, the subject is neither an autonomous, self-contained Western ego, nor a helpless, traumatized victim of colonial history, nor a preserved pre-colonial fossil. The decolonial subject is a resilient, dynamic, and contradictory agent who actively balances antagonistic realities, utilizing the very fissures of the colonial matrix to generate alternative forms of life, meaning, and relational solidarity.
6.2 Affective Dimensions of Decolonial Subjectivity: From Misery to Indignation
The integration of Maldonado-Torres and Rivera Cusicanqui enables a radical reconfiguration of human affectivity within psychological theory. Eurocentric psychology categorizes affective states such as depression, anxiety, grief, and rage as individual emotional dysfunctions that must be tamed, medicated, and returned to an emotional mean that values passive compliance and economic productivity. In contrast, an integrative decolonial psychology analyzes affectivity through the historical relations of coloniality, examining how affective economies either sustain imperial subjugation or fuel political liberation.
Under the weight of the coloniality of being, the psychological energy of the colonized is frequently paralyzed into what Rivera Cusicanqui terms passive colonial sorrow—an immobilizing melancholia, a sense of historic inevitability, and an internalized despair that resigns the subject to perpetual defeat. Decolonial psychology envisions the clinical and communal encounter as an alchemical furnace designed to transform this passive sorrow into active, transformative *indignation*. Indignation is not simple, undisciplined rage; it is an ethical, politically directed affective response to injustice. It restores agency to the subject by moving their pain from an inward-facing, self-destructive pathology to an outward-facing, collective demand for systemic change. Indignation breaks the spell of colonial resignation, reconnecting the individual with their collective historical dignity.
This affective transformation is mediated through the mobilization of ancestral grief and communal mourning. Rather than forcing the individual to “move on” from historical loss through individualized therapeutic closure, decolonial psychology makes space for communal grief. Mourning the loss of land, the silencing of language, and the physical deaths of ancestors becomes a shared, sacred practice that binds the community together in love and resistance. Furthermore, Rivera Cusicanqui emphasizes the role of festive subversion—the carnival, the communal feast, the shared laughter, the satirical public performance—as profound psychological coping and resistance mechanisms. In the collective celebration, the subaltern temporarily inverts the social order, mocks the colonial master, reclaims somatic joy, and generates an affective community that shields its members from the atomizing, depressive machinery of the modern colonial state.
6.3 Epistemological Pluralism: Uniting the Oral and the Phenomenological
At the level of clinical assessment and psychological methodology, synthesizing Maldonado-Torres and Rivera Cusicanqui produces an epistemology that unites phenomenological inquiry with subaltern oral methodologies. Maldonado-Torres’s Fanonian phenomenology provides the conceptual tools to rigorously dissect the subjective, existential textures of the client’s inner life, unveiling how colonial categories structure their perception, their self-image, and their intentional relationship to the world. However, this phenomenological investigation is brought down to earth through Rivera Cusicanqui’s commitment to oral history and communal dialogue.
Decolonial psychology validates subaltern speech acts, oral testimonies, deliberate silences, and linguistic duality as primary diagnostic and therapeutic materials. In internally colonized contexts, the way a person speaks—their hesitations, their sudden shifts between the colonial language and an indigenous mother tongue, the metaphors they draw from everyday manual labor or ancestral mythologies—reveals the fault lines of their psychic survival. Linguistic duality is recognized not as a cognitive hindrance, but as an advanced cognitive technology for preserving subaltern meanings right under the nose of the imperial gaze. Therapeutic listening becomes an exercise in decoding these linguistic layers, respecting the protective function of silence, and honoring the oral archive carried by the client.
This approach overcomes methodological extractivism through the practice of *dialogical co-theorization*. The clinician-researcher does not position themselves as the sole intellectual authority who extracts raw narrative data from the client to interpret it through an elite, Western psychological theory. Instead, the clinical encounter is framed as a collaborative space where the clinician and the client sit together to theorize the client’s lived experience. The client is recognized as the ultimate authority on their own suffering and historical survival. Together, they construct non-imperial criteria for psychological validity, coherence, and healing—criteria that are judged not by their conformity to the DSM or academic conventions, but by their concrete ability to restore dignity, alleviate existential suffering, and empower the client within their community and territory.
7. Decolonial Ethics and the Reconstitution of the Human (Maldonado-Torres)
7.1 The Ethics of Liberation: Dismantling the Logic of the Master
At the center of Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s decolonial project is a radical ethical foundation: the dismantling of what he identifies as the “logic of the master” that underpins imperial modernity. Drawing upon the philosophical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, mediated and transformed through the liberation philosophies of Enrique Dussel and Frantz Fanon, Maldonado-Torres asserts that modern European civilization is fundamentally an enterprise of war. Modernity’s celebration of universal reason and individual rights masked an underlying ontological imperialism that systematically justified the enslavement, exploitation, and genocide of non-European peoples. The “master” of modernity is an egoistic, predatory entity that perceives any external alterity—any racial, cultural, or ontological difference—as a threat that must be conquered, assimilated, or annihilated.
Mainstream psychology, in its dominant clinical and behavioral manifestations, has largely inherited and reified this predatory ethos. Grounded in neoliberal capitalism, contemporary clinical practice frequently operates through a hyper-individualistic framework that conceptualizes mental health as personal adaptability, competitiveness, self-optimization, and the ruthless pursuit of autonomous satisfaction. Therapy within this framework frequently serves as an apparatus that trains the individual to develop an armored, self-interested ego capable of thriving within a violently competitive social terrain. It reproduces the logic of the master by promoting an instrumental relationship with the self, the environment, and others, treating human relationships as transactional investments.
Decolonial psychology counters this with an *ethics of liberation* that establishes the face of the racialized, oppressed Other as an absolute ethical imperative. Following Dussel and Fanon, Maldonado-Torres argues that authentic ethical consciousness does not begin with the contemplation of one’s own rights or interiority, but with an attentive encounter with the suffering Other who cries out from the underside of modernity: “I am hungry, I am colonized, I am denied my humanity.” Psychological therapy, when re-anchored in this decolonial ethic, ceases to be an individualized technology of self-enhancement. Instead, it becomes an act of radical ethical co-presence and mutual de-alienation. The clinician and client meet not as an expert service provider and a consumer, but as two human beings bound by an ethical obligation to dismantle the master’s logic within themselves and in the social institutions they inhabit, transforming therapy into an incubator for human emancipation.
7.2 Restoring Humanity: The Decolonial Re-humanization Process
If the fundamental historical injury of the coloniality of being is the systematic reduction of racialized subjects to a status of sub-ontological non-being, the primary objective of decolonial psychology must be the reconstitution of the human. Maldonado-Torres insists that this re-humanization cannot be achieved by simply begging the colonial master for legal recognition, civil rights, or philanthropic inclusion into an imperial order that was structurally constructed upon their exclusion. Such inclusion is always conditional, paternalistic, and reversible. Rather, the transcendence of non-being requires an autonomous, self-determined process of collective re-affirmation, wherein the colonized declare their own humanity through historical praxis and mutual validation.
The decolonial re-humanization process demands the systematic dismantling of the binary categories invented by modern coloniality. Colonial power relies upon an architecture of mutual exclusions: civilized versus savage, rational versus emotional, modern versus primitive, white versus Black or indigenous. Healing requires that the racialized subject unlearn these colonial bifurcations, reconstructing their identity outside the restrictive categories designed to maintain their subordination. Decolonial therapy facilitates this unlearning by creating a space where the individual can mourn and process the profound *moral injury* inflicted by coloniality—the spiritual, moral, and existential guilt born of being coerced into participating in the humiliation of their own people or compromising their ancestral integrity simply to survive within the modern state.
Ultimately, this re-humanization process culminates in the reclamation of self-determination and political agency as the ultimate therapeutic endpoints. Decolonial psychology breaks decisively with the psychiatric tradition that measures psychological recovery through symptom reduction, medication compliance, or return to productive wage labor within the capitalist market. Within a decolonial paradigm, an individual is considered to be advancing toward psychological health when they recover their voice, re-establish their capacity to critically analyze the historical systems governing their life, and actively align their agency with collective movements for justice. Political agency is not an incidental byproduct of healing; it is the constitutive, therapeutic core of human emancipation.
7.3 Decolonial Love as Resistance and Healing Praxis
To rescue the decolonial struggle from the traps of cynicism, hyper-rationalism, or ideological dogmatism, Maldonado-Torres, drawing upon the feminist interventions of Chela Sandoval, introduces the concept of decolonial love as a radical healing praxis and disruptive political force. Mainstream culture and clinical psychology have thoroughly domesticated the concept of love, reducing it to a sentimental, romantic feeling, an intra-familial attachment, or a privatized consumer lifestyle. Decolonial love, in radical contrast, is conceptualized as an ontological, political, and clinical break with the violent, atomizing logic of modern coloniality.
Sandoval theorized decolonial love as a “hermeneutic of love in the postmodern, postcolonial empire”—a conscious, tactical, and passionate commitment to solidarity across differences that directly challenges the alienation of late capitalism. Maldonado-Torres expands this by positioning decolonial love as the fundamental ontological antidote to the *ego conquiro*. If the imperial attitude is characterized by an insatiable drive to conquer, objectify, and consume the other, decolonial love is the radical capacity to see, honor, and affirm the humanity of the racialized other in all their historical vulnerability. It is an erotic, relational, and political force that binds fractured subjects together, refusing the state-sponsored violence that pits marginalized communities against one another.
In the clinical domain, decolonial love grounds the therapeutic dyad or communal healing circle in an ethic of radical, non-commodified care. It demands that the practitioner move beyond cold, clinical detachment to embody an authentic, tender, and unwavering solidarity with the client’s journey toward liberation. This love is not paternalistic, possessive, or indulgent; it is a fierce, courageous, and transformative commitment to holding space for the other’s pain while walking alongside them as they dismantle the internalized structures of their oppression. Decolonial love re-anchors the colonized subject within living relational webs of mutual care, operating as a psychic shelter against the cold, transactional violence of the modern colonial world system.
8. Memory, Orality, and Embodied Praxis in Decolonial Healing (Rivera Cusicanqui)
8.1 The Sociopoetics of Oral History and Subaltern Narratives
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s pioneering work with the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA—Workshop on Andean Oral History) provides our Decolonial Psychology Model with an indispensable methodological and therapeutic framework: the *sociopoetics of oral history*. Rivera Cusicanqui directly challenges the hegemonic textual monopoly of Euro-Western psychological and historical archives. Western science, deeply rooted in the written word, has systematically privileged the written text—the diagnostic manual, the psychiatric case history, the state record—as the only legitimate repository of truth. Rivera Cusicanqui unmasks this textual supremacy as an imperial technology, noting that written records are historically produced by and for the literate, colonial elite to maintain administrative control over the subaltern. In contrast, the true history of popular struggle, collective trauma, and psychic resilience has been preserved, transmitted, and continuously transformed through the dynamic medium of the oral tradition.
Oral history, in Rivera Cusicanqui’s formulation, is not merely a passive research method for collecting ethnographic data; it is an active, therapeutic mechanism of collective recovery. When subaltern individuals are invited to speak their stories in their own linguistic cadence, utilizing their own metaphors and cultural categories, they engage in a process of narrative reframing. Localized, individual suffering—the private pain, the isolated family tragedy, the hidden domestic humiliation—is historicized. Through communal oral history workshops, the individual discovers that their private misery is inextricably bound to a wider collective history of colonial dispossession and resistance. The burden of guilt and individual pathology is lifted from the shoulders of the individual and understood as a structural consequence of historical forces.
This oral methodology restores the communal storyteller and the oral archive to their rightful places as primary therapeutic agents. In Andean communities, as in countless subaltern societies across the globe, the elder, the community historian, and the oral narrator serve as living custodians of collective mental health. By narrating the triumphs, catastrophes, and rebellions of the ancestors, the oral storyteller provides the younger generation with an existential compass. They remind the community that they are not victims defined solely by their present structural misery, but the living descendants of a resilient, unconquered lineage. Decolonial psychology integrates these oral practices directly into clinical assessment and therapeutic intervention, replacing the rigid, alienating questionnaire with the transformative power of communal storytelling.
8.2 Embodied Epistemology and Somatic Praxis in Communal Spaces
For Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, decolonial healing is fundamentally an embodied, somatic, and territorial endeavor that cannot be confined to intellectual discourse or isolated verbal dialogue. Decolonial psychology must ground its therapeutic interventions in what she identifies as *embodied epistemology*—the profound understanding that human consciousness, emotion, and memory are organically integrated into the physical body and its material engagement with the surrounding environment. True psychological rehabilitation requires the activation of somatic practices that disrupt the bodily conditioning imposed by modern capitalism and internal colonialism.
Rivera Cusicanqui highlights central Andean cultural practices as sophisticated technologies of somatic synchronization and psychological stabilization. One foundational practice is the akulliku—the ritual, communal chewing of the sacred coca leaf. The *akulliku* is far from a mere biological consumption of a plant; it is a sacred, somatic ritual of communion, reflection, and communication. As individuals sit in a circle, slowly chewing the leaves together, their heart rates synchronize, the nervous system regulates, social hierarchies dissolve, and a shared, reflective silence settles over the space. The *akulliku* creates an embodied container where trauma, grief, and community plans can be shared safely without the aggressive, competitive interruptions of modern verbal discourse. Similarly, the practice of ayni—collective, reciprocal manual labor—reconnects the physical body with the community through shared exertion, synchronizing breath, muscle, and territorial belonging, transforming physical labor from an instrument of capitalist exploitation into a somatic celebration of mutual interdependence.
This embodied praxis directly links the alleviation of psychological trauma to the reclamation of physical space and territorial defense. Rivera Cusicanqui champions the Latin American feminist concept of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), which recognizes that the human body and the ecological land are continuous, inseparable entities; the violence inflicted on the land through resource extraction is felt directly in the tissues of the body, and the subjugation of the body mirrors the colonial occupation of the land. Decolonial psychological interventions therefore include physical mobilizations, community walks across ancestral borders, the cultivation of communal food gardens, and somatic grounding within ancestral geographical formations. Psychological stability is restored not within the four walls of an office, but through the physical, somatic re-anchoring of the colonized body into its living, liberated territory.
8.3 Resisting Linear Temporality: The Andean Concept of Pacha
Modern Western psychological science is entirely organized around a linear, teleological, and developmental conception of time. Derived from the Christian narrative of salvation and the secular capitalist ideology of relentless progress, this linear temporality conceives of time as an irreversible arrow moving from the past, through the present, toward the future. In developmental and clinical psychology, this logic manifests as rigid, sequential stages of child development, linear phases of grief (such as the Kubler-Ross model), and a clinical insistence that the traumatized individual must detach from their past, achieve “closure,” and move progressively forward into the future. For populations surviving ongoing coloniality, this demand to leave the past behind functions as an imperial gaslighting technique that demands the erasure of historical memory.
Rivera Cusicanqui counters this Western developmentalism with the revolutionary Andean cosmological and temporal concept of pacha. In Aymara and Quechua thought, pacha is a multidimensional concept that simultaneously encompasses time, space, and cosmos. Temporality in this matrix is fundamentally circular, iterative, and non-linear. This temporal orientation is captured in the profound Aymara formulation: nayrapacha. In the Aymara language, the past (*nayra*) is etymologically located *in front of us* (*nayra* also translates to “eye” or “sight”), because it is the reality that we can see, know, and study; conversely, the future (*qhipa*) is located *behind us*, unseen, unknown, and trailing in our wake. We walk backward into the future with our eyes wide open, fixed firmly upon the past.
This inversion of Western linear temporality has profound implications for a Decolonial Psychology Model. Decolonial healing completely rejects the imperial imperative of historical detachment and linear closure. The past is not dead, nor is it something to be outgrown, processed, and forgotten. Rather, the ancestral presence, historical traumas, and past rebellions are living, active realities that inhabit the present moment. Psychological stability, from a decolonial perspective, is achieved through an active, therapeutic reconciliation with historical memory. Instead of trying to sever the client from their traumatic history, the decolonial clinician helps the client position the past firmly in front of their eyes, mining it for ancestral wisdom, structural understanding, and political strength. The circularity of pacha assures the colonized subject that catastrophic upheavals (*pachakuti*) are inevitable, and that the current imperial order is not the permanent end of history, but a transient cycle that can and will be overturned through collective struggle.
9. Critique of Eurocentric Psychopathology and Diagnostic Hegemony
9.1 The Colonial Pathologization of Subaltern Dissent and Grief
From its inception, Euro-Western psychiatric and psychological nosology has operated as an ideological technology designed to police the boundaries of political sanity and pathologize subaltern dissent. The historical genealogy of Western psychopathology reveals a consistent pattern wherein any refusal to submit to imperial, racial, or class domination was promptly classified as a psychiatric illness. During the era of chattel slavery in North America, physician Samuel Cartwright invented the psychiatric diagnosis of drapetomania to explain the “disease” that caused enslaved Black people to flee their masters. In early twentieth-century imperial Africa, colonial psychiatrists, including J.C. Carothers in Kenya, classified anti-colonial Mau Mau insurgents as mentally defective, suffering from acute mass hysterias, and incapable of rational governance.
In the contemporary era, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), published by the World Health Organization, continue this tradition of diagnostic hegemony under a veneer of scientific objectivity. Operating through the coloniality of power, these manuals universalize a profoundly Eurocentric, bourgeois definition of normal human behavior while systematically pathologizing the natural affective responses of marginalized peoples to structural oppression. Diagnostic categories such as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (ODD) and “Conduct Disorder” are disproportionately weaponized against racialized, working-class youth who demonstrate resistance, anger, and skepticism toward oppressive, discriminatory educational and carceral systems. Political dissent and visceral rejection of subjugation are sanitized of their moral content and converted into individual psychiatric defects.
Similarly, the hegemonic diagnostic apparatus pathologizes subaltern grief and somatic expressions of distress. In many indigenous, Latin American, and Global South traditions, profound distress is expressed through somatic-spiritual idioms such as susto (soul loss), nervios (disturbed nervous flow), or ataque de nervios. Mainstream psychiatry routinely dismisses these complex idioms as culturally exotic forms of panic disorder or somatization, stripping them of their contextual and cosmological meanings. Furthermore, within neoliberal healthcare systems, the profound, enduring grief experienced by communities facing structural violence, ecological devastation, and continuous police terror is pathologized if it extends beyond a few weeks, classified as “Prolonged Grief Disorder” or “Major Depressive Disorder.” In this manner, mainstream psychopathology acts as an ideological police force, demanding that the subaltern quietly mourn their dead within strict temporal limits, take their medication, and return to their positions of exploited labor without disturbing the colonial social order.
9.2 Structural Violence Masked as Neurochemical Imbalance
A primary mechanism of ideological mystification in contemporary psychological and psychiatric science is *biopsychiatric reductionism*. This biological paradigm, heavily bankrolled and aggressively marketed by the global pharmaceutical-industrial complex, posits that the overwhelming majority of mental distress—specifically clinical depression, anxiety disorders, and bipolar conditions—is caused by endogenous neurochemical imbalances, synaptic abnormalities, or genetic vulnerabilities located within the isolated brain of the individual. By reducing human consciousness and suffering to the mechanics of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, biopsychiatry constructs an epistemic wall that completely insulates the human brain from the violent sociopolitical reality in which it exists.
Decolonial psychology, drawing upon the insights of both Maldonado-Torres and Rivera Cusicanqui, mounts an uncompromising critique of this ideological reductionism, unmasking it as a pacifying apparatus tailored for internally colonized populations. When structural violence—such as starvation wages, environmental toxicity from multinational mining, constant racial terror, unlivable housing conditions, and cultural erasure—inevitably crushes the human spirit, the pharmaceutical complex intervenes to diagnose the individual with a chemical deficit. The problem is declared to be inside the victim’s skull rather than in the sociopolitical matrix. The prescribed solution is not unionization, land reclamation, anti-racist mobilization, or community building, but the consumption of a daily psychoactive pill designed to chemically elevate the client’s mood sufficiently to tolerate the intolerable.
Decolonial psychology does not deny the reality of neurobiology or neurochemistry; the human body is inherently biological. However, it radically reverses the causal arrow through Frantz Fanon’s principle of sociogeny. The biochemical alterations observed in depressed or anxious individuals are not the ultimate, primary causes of their distress; they are the physiological, biological inscriptions of structural oppression upon the living organism. When a person is chronically denied food, safety, dignity, and cultural belonging, their biology predictably registers that trauma through neuroendocrine and chemical stress responses. Restoring the sociogenic etiology to psychological suffering exposes psychiatric medications as, at best, temporary palliative crutches, and at worst, technologies of chemical pacification designed to neutralize the revolutionary indignation that could otherwise challenge the modern/colonial world-system.
9.3 Formulating Decolonial Diagnostics: Relational and Structural Assessment
Having dismantled the coloniality embedded within the DSM and biopsychiatric hegemony, our Decolonial Psychology Model constructs an alternative diagnostic architecture: *relational and structural assessment*. Decolonial diagnostics fundamentally abandons the pursuit of individualistic, symptom-counting labels, shifting the diagnostic focus from internal psychic deficiency to the health of the individual’s relational webs and their material positioning within structures of oppression. A decolonial diagnostic process asks not “What is wrong with you?” but rather “What has happened to you, what systems are pressing down upon you, and how have your relational ties to community, land, and ancestors been severed?”
A decolonial assessment operates as a collaborative, transparent investigation conducted between the clinician and the client. The assessment prioritizes the subject’s own self-understanding, linguistic categories, and localized cultural reality. Rather than relying on rigid, standardized diagnostic inventories, the assessment explores four foundational dimensions of decolonial well-being:
- Structural and Geopolitical Location: Evaluating the impact of institutional racism, state violence, economic exploitation, housing insecurity, and environmental racism on the client’s daily existence.
- Territorial and Ecological Relationality: Assessing the degree of alienation from land, territory, nature, and sacred spaces (*cuerpo-territorio*), particularly for indigenous, rural, and displaced populations.
- Communal and Kinship Integration: Mapping the client’s social fabric, evaluating the health of their mutual aid networks, the presence of collective solidarity, and the degree of isolation generated by modern, atomizing capitalist social arrangements.
- Epistemic and Ancestral Alignment: Exploring the client’s relationship with their cultural heritage, ancestral languages, spiritual practices, and historical memory, identifying the presence of internalized racism, cultural shame, or colonial alienation.
By mapping these four relational and structural dimensions, the clinician and client identify the true systemic sources of distress. A diagnosis generated through this framework is not a permanent, stigmatizing label; it is a structural map of the terrain of struggle. It clarifies where relational ties have been severed, validates the client’s pain as an understandable response to systemic oppression, and directly informs an intervention plan that combines psychological processing, somatic regulation, community re-integration, and collective political resistance.
10. Methodological Innovations: Sociopoetics, Subaltern Archives, and Autoethnography
10.1 Sociopoetics and the Visual: Rivera Cusicanqui’s Visual Epistemology
A major methodological innovation of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s scholarship is her development of a visual epistemology through visual sociopoetics. Recognizing that colonial domination in the Americas has historically been maintained through written alphabetic literacy—a privileged technology controlled by the colonial state, the legal system, and ecclesiastical authorities—Rivera Cusicanqui argues that written documents often serve to obfuscate, falsify, and sanitize colonial violence. Indigenous and subaltern peoples, historically excluded from formal alphabetic literacy, developed and preserved complex, sophisticated visual languages to document their reality, critique imperial hypocrisy, and communicate across generations.
A premier example of this visual archive is the seventeenth-century manuscript written and illustrated by the indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, entitled El primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno. In her groundbreaking work, Sociología de la imagen (Sociology of the Image), Rivera Cusicanqui analyzes Guaman Poma’s nearly four hundred hand-drawn illustrations, demonstrating that the images contain an epistemological and sociological depth that directly contradicts the written colonial narrative. Through visual metaphors, spatial arrangements, and bodily postures, Guaman Poma captured the brutality of Spanish exploitation, the profound upside-down world (*pachakuti*) inaugurated by the conquest, and the secret, enduring dignity of indigenous resistance. The image reveals what the written word was carefully constructed to hide.
In our Decolonial Psychology Model, visual sociopoetics is mobilized as a potent clinical and consciousness-raising intervention. In individual therapy and communal workshops, clients are invited to bypass the linguistic constraints of the colonial language through engagement with visual media, communal drawing, photography, and the critical deconstruction of historical image archives. By analyzing visual representations of their ancestors, their neighborhoods, and their cultural practices, clients unearth repressed collective memories that were silenced by formal schooling and state media. Visual sociopoetics provides a non-linear, non-discursive bridge directly into the subaltern affective unconscious, allowing individuals to externalize their trauma, map the spatial dynamics of internal colonialism, and visually reimagine their personal and collective liberation outside the aesthetic codes of the colonizer.
10.2 Decolonial Autoethnography and the Re-siting of the Self
Modern psychological science has historically enforced a strict methodological bifurcation between the detached, objective researcher/clinician and the passive, pathologized research subject/patient. This epistemological stance rests upon the Cartesian myth of the detached observer who can look upon the world without being influenced by their own bodily, racial, or political positioning. Decolonial psychology shatters this methodological illusion through the practice of *decolonial autoethnography*—a methodology that demands the intentional, critical re-siting of the self by the researcher and the clinician.
Decolonial autoethnography requires that the practitioner engage in a rigorous, often painful, autobiographical dissection of their own internalization of colonial power, privilege, and marginalization. Rather than pretending to occupy an ivory tower of axiological neutrality, the psychologist explicitly locates their subjective biography within the historical, geopolitical, and racialized matrix of modern coloniality. Clinicians must ask themselves: How was my mind colonized by the Western academic training I received? What ancestral languages or cultural ways of knowing did I disavow to secure my professional legitimacy? In what ways does my social class, skin color, gender, and geographic location make me complicit in the oppression of the subaltern populations I claim to treat? By publicly interrogating these questions, the clinician relinquishes the false, protective armor of professional expertise.
When integrated into psychological inquiry, autoethnography transforms the personal narrative into a window through which collective historical trauma is analyzed. Following Rivera Cusicanqui’s own autobiographical reflections on her mixed Aymara and creole ancestry, autoethnography allows the practitioner to map the macro-structures of internal colonialism through the micro-events of their own life: family secrets, linguistic silences, romantic choices, and bodily anxieties. This practice humanizes the clinical space, overcoming the hierarchical division between the “healthy” expert and the “damaged” patient. Both are recognized as historical subjects navigating the structural wounds of coloniality, creating the relational conditions necessary for authentic, mutual healing.
10.3 Collaborative Research as Restorative Psychological Intervention
Traditional psychological research methodologies in marginalized and indigenous communities have routinely functioned as forms of *extractive industry*. Outside researchers enter the community, administer invasive psychological batteries, extract personal stories of trauma and suffering, and depart to write academic articles and secure research grants that benefit their personal careers, leaving the community in the exact same conditions of material deprivation and structural violence. Decolonial psychology identifies this practice as an academic reproduction of colonial extractivism that causes secondary trauma to communities by treating their lived suffering as raw material for elite academic consumption.
Decolonial psychology replaces extractive research with *collaborative, participatory research* that functions directly as a restorative psychological intervention. Rooted in the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR) pioneered by Orlando Fals Borda, and informed by Rivera Cusicanqui’s work with the THOA, decolonial research completely dismantles the hierarchical boundary between the researcher and the community. The community is not the object of study; the community is the sovereign subject that initiates the inquiry, defines the research questions, controls the research process, and determines how the resulting knowledge will be utilized.
Within this framework, the very process of collective knowledge production acts as an active, restorative mechanism for community mental health. As community members gather in participatory workshops to investigate their historical origins, document elder oral histories, map environmental toxicities, or analyze their collective challenges, they actively rebuild the social fabric that coloniality severed. The collective investigation restores historical dignity, breaks the isolation imposed by neoliberalism, and reactivates indigenous mutual aid structures. Furthermore, decolonial research strictly respects and protects communal intellectual property and sacred epistemologies, explicitly refusing to publish or commodify esoteric cultural knowledge that communities determine must remain protected within their sovereign cultural circle.
11. Clinical, Community, and Pedagogical Applications of the Model
11.1 The Decolonial Clinical Encounter: De-centering the Expert
When the Decolonial Psychology Model is applied to the individual and family clinical encounter, it fundamentally alters the therapeutic alliance, beginning with the intentional *de-centering of the clinical expert*. In mainstream clinical settings, the therapist embodies institutional authority, armed with esoteric diagnostic knowledge, scientific jargon, and institutional backing designed to assess, interpret, and modify the patient’s behavior. The decolonial clinician explicitly refuses this hierarchical posturing. Drawing upon Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s decolonial attitude, the clinician enters the consulting room with epistemic humility, recognizing the client as the ultimate expert on their own lived experience, suffering, and survival.
The therapeutic alliance is reframed as an egalitarian, co-creative partnership. Within this space, the clinician actively helps the client navigate their ch’ixi contradictions without imposing Western psychological demands for monolithic identity integration. If a client presents with profound cultural, linguistic, or religious tensions—such as feeling caught between ancestral indigenous cosmologies and modern secular or Christian urban lifestyles—the clinician does not pathologize this tension. Utilizing Rivera Cusicanqui’s framework, the therapist normalizes and honors these internal contradictions, affirming that living with un-synthesized, antagonistic parts is an intelligent and necessary adaptation to an internally colonized reality. The therapeutic work focuses on empowering the client to hold these tensions creatively, avoiding the traps of assimilationist shame or guilt.
Crucially, the decolonial clinical encounter requires the active, transparent deconstruction of institutional and racial transference and countertransference dynamics. The consulting room is not an insulated sanctuary free from the coloniality of power; the racial, class, linguistic, and national positions of both clinician and client inevitably enter the space. A decolonial clinician does not hide behind a neutral mask, but openly and sensitively addresses these power differentials when they manifest in the therapeutic relationship. When racialized clients project institutional distrust or defensive compliance onto the therapist, the therapist recognizes this not as irrational resistance, but as an intelligent, historical survival mechanism. Therapy ceases to be an apparatus for personal adjustment and becomes an incubator for political liberation, existential sovereignty, and the reclamation of historical agency.
11.2 Community-Based Interventions: Strengthening the Social Fabric
While recognizing the utility of individual clinical support in acute crises, the Decolonial Psychology Model shifts the primary locus of healing from the privatized, atomized consulting room to the collective, community domain. The historical matrix of coloniality achieved the subjugation of populations precisely by destroying their communal solidarity mechanisms, criminalizing their sacred assemblies, and imposing the hyper-individualistic family structure of the modern bourgeoisie. Consequently, true psychological decolonization cannot occur solely through an individual sitting alone with a therapist; it requires the systematic *rebuilding of the collective social fabric*.
Decolonial community interventions move mental health out of hospitals and clinics and into community assemblies, neighborhood centers, union halls, and sacred ceremonial grounds. Practitioners of decolonial psychology work as facilitators within community-led circles, popular education workshops, and collective rituals. Drawing upon indigenous Andean practices such as ayni (reciprocity) and minka (communal labor), mental health is re-articulated as a collective responsibility. When an individual experiences acute grief, depression, or psychosis, the community does not isolate them in a psychiatric ward; instead, the community mobilizes around the individual, wrapping them in a protective web of mutual aid, shared meals, somatic grounding, and collective reflection.
Furthermore, decolonial psychology recognizes that community mental health is directly linked to the collective defense of territory, cultural reclamation, and the fight for food and environmental sovereignty. When a community organizes to defend its rivers from toxic contamination, halt an unlawful eviction, or build an autonomous, bilingual community school, that collective political action functions as a profound therapeutic intervention. Political mobilization restores agency, shatters the paralyzing effects of structural depression, and reactivates the joy of collective existence. Community storytelling nights, collective mourning vigils, and festive public celebrations are mobilized as structured interventions that alleviate transgenerational trauma, fostering deep psychological resilience rooted in shared history and collective struggle.
11.3 Decolonizing Psychological Pedagogy and Curriculum Design
The institutional sustainability and transformative potential of the Decolonial Psychology Model require an overhaul of university curricula, clinical training programs, and pedagogical methodologies in psychology. Currently, academic psychology curricula across the globe—including throughout the universities of Latin America, Africa, and Asia—remain colonial enclaves that enforce the hegemony of North American and Western European textbooks, theories, and methodologies. Graduate students in the Global South are thoroughly indoctrinated in the developmental models of Piaget, the psychodynamics of Freud, the behaviorism of Skinner, and the cognitive models of Beck, while the profound philosophical and psychological contributions of thinkers from their own continents are excluded from the official syllabus.
Decolonizing psychological pedagogy demands that the canonical dominance of Euro-American texts be decentered. The theoretical frameworks of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith must be integrated into the foundational core of psychological training, not marginalized to an optional “multicultural” elective during the final semester. Students must be trained to critically analyze the DSM through the lens of the coloniality of power, recognizing how diagnostic categories historically functioned to uphold racial and gender hierarchies. Clinical training must equip future practitioners with the historical, sociological, and political literacy required to understand their clients not as isolated neurochemical units, but as historical subjects shaped by centuries of global and internal colonialism.
Pedagogically, this transformation requires moving away from the “banking model” of education critiqued by Paulo Freire, wherein the professor deposits static, Eurocentric data into the passive minds of students. Decolonial psychology pedagogy adopts an interactive, dialogical approach that awakens the student’s *decolonial attitude* and structural empathy. Classroom spaces must become laboratories where students engage in rigorous autoethnographic writing, analyzing how their own subjectivities, racial identities, and family histories have been shaped by the coloniality of being. By confronting their own structural wounds and social privileges within the training environment, future clinicians are prepared to enter the field not as paternalistic instruments of state control, but as critical, culturally responsive, and politically conscious allies dedicated to the collective liberation of the communities they serve.
12. Future Trajectories, Tensions, and Global Implications of Decolonial Psychology
12.1 Tensions Between Academization and Grassroots Activism
As the Decolonial Psychology Model gains increasing visibility within the international intellectual landscape, it faces an internal danger: the risk of elite academic domestication. In her critique of academic decolonial discourse, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui issued a stark warning regarding how radical, disruptive ideas originating from indigenous and subaltern struggles are routinely co-opted, domesticated, and sterilized by the elite academic machine. Decolonial psychology is in danger of being transformed into an abstract, esoteric academic jargon—a collection of fashionable buzzwords utilized by university professors and graduate students to accumulate cultural capital, secure institutional research grants, and publish paywalled articles, while remaining detached from grassroots working-class and indigenous communities.
This academization represents a betrayal of the model’s foundational principles. The primary institutional challenge facing decolonial psychology in the coming decades is maintaining rigorous accountability to the subaltern communities whose lived experiences and conceptual models gave birth to this thought. Decolonial psychologists operating within mainstream universities, medical centers, and professional associations must navigate an intense structural tension: they must balance the requirements for institutional survival—such as tenure metrics, grant funding, and licensing requirements—with their radical ethical commitment to revolutionary praxis. If decolonial psychology fails to bridge this chasm, it risks becoming another ornamental intellectual product consumed exclusively by the elite, leaving the material architecture of internal colonialism undisturbed.
To resist this institutional co-optation, decolonial psychology must build autonomous, community-based pedagogical and clinical spaces that exist outside the financial and ideological control of the neoliberal state and corporate academy. Practitioners must forge active alliances with indigenous governing councils, radical labor unions, migrant justice centers, and autonomous mental health collectives. Research, clinical insights, and theoretical advancements must be published in open-access formats, translated into indigenous and popular vernaculars, and shared through popular education pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and community workshops. The legitimacy of decolonial psychological work must be adjudicated not by peer-review impact factors within the Global North, but by its concrete contribution to the survival, dignity, and sovereignty of grassroots struggles.
12.2 Transnational and Intersectional Coalitions in Decolonial Mental Health
The future trajectory of decolonial psychology depends upon its capacity to build broad, transnational, and intersectional coalitions across distinct historical and geographic loci of oppression. The synthesis of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Andean indigenous sociology and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s Caribbean decolonial philosophy provides an intellectual foundation, but this model must intentionally converse with, learn from, and weave itself into other radical psychological and liberation traditions emerging across the globe.
Decolonial psychology must establish deep theoretical and operational bridges with the traditions of *Black Liberation Psychology*, pioneered by figures such as Frantz Fanon, Hussein Bulhan, and Wade Nobles, as well as the radical insights of *Palestinian liberation psychology*, articulated by scholars such as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. The Palestinian concept of sumud (steadfast, resilient perseverance under continuous occupation) and the Black radical tradition’s understanding of structural anti-Blackness and social death closely parallel the concepts of the coloniality of being and ch’ixi survival. By uniting these distinct yet structurally related frameworks, decolonial psychology can articulate a comprehensive Global South network for psychological liberation that addresses the realities of colonial violence, military occupation, and racialized capitalism across continents.
Furthermore, an authentic decolonial psychology must be rigorously *intersectional*. As the late decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones argued through her theorization of the “coloniality of gender,” the conquest of the Americas and Africa did not merely impose a racial hierarchy; it simultaneously imposed a hierarchical, modern-colonial gender system that violently subordinated women and annihilated non-binary, indigenous sexual and gender ontologies. Decolonial psychology cannot analyze the coloniality of being without simultaneously interrogating how patriarchy, heteronormativity, class exploitation, and racialization operate as a unified, interlocking apparatus of subjective domination. A decolonial clinical and community praxis must be uncompromisingly feminist, anti-capitalist, and queer-affirming, dismantling all forms of domination that fracture the human spirit.
12.3 Toward a Transmodern, Pluriversal Psychological Paradigm
In his historical and philosophical treatise, Enrique Dussel outlines the concept of transmodernity—an intellectual and political project that seeks to transcend the exhausted, universalist dogmas of Eurocentric modernity. Modernity presented itself as the sole bearer of universal civilization, dismissing all non-Western cultural, spiritual, and philosophical traditions as primitive stages of human history that must be eliminated or assimilated. Transmodernity does not seek to replace European modernity with a new, equally authoritarian universalism; rather, it envisions a *pluriverse*—a world, as the Zapatista National Liberation Army beautifully articulated, in which many worlds fit. A transmodern pluriverse honors the radical multiplicity of human ways of knowing, living, and understanding reality.
The Decolonial Psychology Model formulated through the synthesis of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Nelson Maldonado-Torres represents an essential contribution toward this transmodern, pluriversal psychological landscape. Decolonial psychology does not seek to eradicate the genuine scientific insights or useful technical tools produced by Western psychology; rather, it aims to decenter them, strip them of their imperial monopoly, and return them to their proper, localized place as one of many regional psychologies on the global map. In a pluriversal psychological paradigm, European cognitive science, psychodynamics, and neurobiology can sit as equals alongside Andean ch’ixi dialectics, Fanonian phenomenological sociodiagnostics, African communal ontologies of Ubuntu, and Indigenous relational cosmologies.
Decolonial healing is not a static endpoint, a simple therapeutic certificate, or a utopia to be achieved once and for all. As both Rivera Cusicanqui and Maldonado-Torres remind us, decolonization is an ongoing, continuous, and iterative praxis that must be renewed across every generation. The coloniality of power continually adapts, transforms its technologies, and invents new discursive mechanisms to pacify and control human consciousness. In response, psychological science must remain vigilant, self-reflective, and bound to the struggles of the oppressed. By reclaiming the memory of our ancestors, embracing the creative, contradictory tensions of our ch’ixi identities, and cultivating a fearless decolonial attitude grounded in love and ethical solidarity, we can forge a psychological science that honors the full, multi-layered depth of our humanity, paving the way toward collective emancipation.
Conclusion
The Decolonial Psychology Model advanced through the synthesis of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Nelson Maldonado-Torres provides an epistemological, ontological, and clinical rupture from the Eurocentric paradigms that have dominated mental health sciences for over a century. By excavating the imperial genealogy that transformed the Cartesian ego cogito into the predatory ego conquiro, Maldonado-Torres exposes how the modern/colonial world-system produces a “coloniality of being” that systematically plunges racialized, colonized populations into a sub-ontological zone of non-being. This existential negation constitutes a chronic, structural, and transgenerational trauma that cannot be comprehended through the individualized, event-based, and neurobiologically reductionist diagnostic categories of the DSM and mainstream biopsychiatry. Rather, mental suffering in the underside of modernity is sociogenic—a predictable somatic, affective, and psychic consequence of living under continuous imperial violence.
In response to this ontological wound, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui provides a transformative framework for subjective resistance through the Andean concept of ch’ixi identity. The ch’ixi ontology challenges the assimilationist, whitening project of state-sponsored *mestizaje*, offering instead a dynamic, non-binary dialectic wherein contradictory, antagonistic cultural and historical realities coexist without harmonious synthesis. Psychic multiplicity and the navigation of antagonistic worlds are reclaimed not as pathology, but as advanced technologies of survival and psychic bricolage. By centering the human body as a living archive of historical memory, and grounding healing within somatic synchronization, oral histories, territorial defense, and the non-linear temporal circularity of pacha, Rivera Cusicanqui constructs a path toward collective psychic recovery that bypasses the textual and institutional monopolies of internal colonialism.
Ultimately, synthesizing Maldonado-Torres’s decolonial attitude and ethics of liberation with Rivera Cusicanqui’s visual sociopoetics and grassroots praxis constructs an operational, pluriversal model for 21st-century psychology. This model moves clinical therapy out of its individualistic, market-driven isolation and reframes it as an act of radical ethical co-presence, decolonial love, and mutual de-alienation. It de-centers the clinician as an institutional authority, transforming the therapeutic alliance into a collaborative partnership focused on structural analysis and collective empowerment. By linking psychological recovery directly to the restoration of ancestral memory, the rebuilding of the communal social fabric, and the political fight for self-determination, the Decolonial Psychology Model offers more than a critique of the dominant order: it provides an actionable roadmap for healing the wounds of coloniality and reconstituting the full, dignified humanity of the world’s subaltern peoples.
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