Fredrick Douglas said:
When a slave sees a free man, he can think one of two thoughts: Either, "There is a free man, why am I not free like he is?" or, "There is a free man, why is he not a slave like me?"
Harriet Tubman said:
I could have freed more slaves, if only I could have convinced them that they were slaves.
To be fair, just about anything could be a mental construct.
It is to psychology and other liberal disciplines such as womens studies, they do like to reduce life to an abstract theory.
Why? To get some nice juicy government funding.