Welcome to Deja Psych! I’m Deja, and this blog is to share ideas and knowledge regarding psychology, thanatology, and counseling. I will be posting topics of interest starting with my below thoughts on Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Feel free to post your comments.

We have been well guided during the development of our professional formation in counseling, and continue to be influenced by the multicultural competences that each of us bring to the program and by the socioeconomic disadvantage of a country like Mexico. By implementing our counseling views we can practice counseling with perspectives on social justice and advocacy, which are essential to our professional counselor’s duty. This requires that we be prepared to assume responsible roles to be proactive change agents, and advocates for social, economic, and political justice. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Frerie lets us know that through “dialogue,” people can find their voice and be empowered, an essential element in our work helping people. I find these paragraphs extremely important:

“Were it not possible to dialogue with the people before power is taken, because they have no experience with dialogue, neither would it be possible for the people to come to power, for they are equally inexperienced in the use of power. The revolutionary process is dynamic, and it is in this continuing dynamics, in the praxis of the people with the revolutionary leaders, that the people and the leaders will learn both dialogue and the use of power. (This is as obvious as affirming that a person learns to swim in the water, not in a library.)

Dialogue with the people is neither a concession nor a gift, much less a tactic to be used for domination. Dialogue, as the encounter among men to “name” the world, is a fundamental precondition for their true humanization” (Frerie 137).

Can humble approach in dialogue be learned by counselors to help the oppressed?