Psychology & the Other Boston
Boston Conference
At a Glance
September 10-12, 2027
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA
Submission Portal to Open October 2026
September 10鈥�12, 2027
Boston College | Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Preconference workshops: September 9, 2027
Psychology & the Other brings clinicians, scholars, students, writers, artists, theologians, and philosophers into conversation about psychological life as embodied, relational, historical, and interpretive. Across these conversations runs a shared concern with the forms of attention adequate to persons. How do we understand psychological experience without separating it from the histories, relationships, institutions, and meanings through which it takes shape? What happens to clinical practice as technologies, markets, and systems of care change around it? How might psychology remain in conversation with forms of knowledge that approach the psyche through interpretation, encounter, aesthetic experience, and contemplation? The conference will consider what these different approaches disclose about psychological life and what kinds of knowledge they make possible.
We welcome proposals that take up these questions through one or more of the conference tracks below. Contributions may be clinical, empirical, philosophical, historical, theoretical, theological, literary, artistic, or interdisciplinary. We particularly welcome work that brings distinct traditions into serious conversation and attends closely to psychological experience in its personal, relational, cultural, and historical contexts.
See the "Proposal Submission Form" tab for the link to submit your proposal.
Psychological life takes form within institutions, histories, languages, and relations of power. This track welcomes psychoanalytic, Lacanian, critical, and sociocultural approaches to the relation between psyche and institution. Topics may include mental health systems, ideology, political economy, race, class, gender, authority, organizations, law, medicine, education, incarceration, and the institutional production and interpretation of suffering.
Art offers its own forms of psychological knowledge. This track explores literature, writing, visual art, performance, character, voice, imagination, and authorship as modes of inquiry into psychological life. Contributions may consider aesthetic experience, literary character and subjectivity, creativity, clinical writing, the relation between art and psychic life, or the role of artistic form in giving expression to experiences that resist direct explanation.
This track examines competing accounts of what it means for human lives and communities to fare well. We welcome work that places psychological research on well-being and flourishing in conversation with philosophical, theological, moral, cultural, relational, and contemplative traditions. Proposals may consider measurement and its limits, virtue, meaning, suffering, love, community, transcendence, formation, and the ways different traditions understand psychological and moral development.
This track brings phenomenology into conversation with consciousness studies, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychopathology, embodiment, and first-person inquiry. We welcome work concerned with affect, perception, temporality, consciousness, subjectivity, embodiment, and the structure of lived experience. Particular attention is given to methods that begin from experience and to the conceptual problems involved in describing psychological life from within.
How does narrative bring us into relation with the Other (outside the self or within)鈥攁nd where might it fail to do so? Psychological life is shaped through acts of remembering, telling, interpreting, and revising, yet these acts are never confined to a self-enclosed narrator. They arise through encounters with others outside the self and with forms of otherness within: the unconscious, the forgotten, the traumatic, the embodied, and the not-yet-understood. This track welcomes work exploring the relationship between narrative and alterity across narrative psychology, narrative therapy, memory, testimony, life writing, identity, biography, and illness and recovery narratives.
Psychology and religion share long histories of interpreting suffering, healing, and the care of persons. This track brings religion, theology, and spiritual care into conversation with psychoanalysis and clinical psychology around the work of accompanying suffering. Drawing on constructive and practical theology, chaplaincy and spiritual care, religious studies, psychology of religion, and psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and liberationist traditions, we welcome proposals on the inheritances shared by religious and clinical practices of care, the theological dimensions of secular helping practices, and questions of justice within religious, clinical, and institutional settings.
This track considers the changing conditions of psychotherapy and the forms of clinical practice that may follow from them. We welcome work on depth and relational therapies, artificial intelligence and digital mental health, evidence and outcome research, clinical judgment, training, access, institutional pressures, and the organization of care. Proposals may address what psychotherapy asks of the clinician, what kinds of change it seeks, and how therapeutic relationships are shaped by the systems in which they occur.
We welcome proposals for individual papers, group symposia, and posters that bring psychology into conversation with philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, literature, the arts, and related disciplines. Contributions may address psychological experience, psychotherapy and care, narrative and memory, institutions, spiritual life, creativity, or flourishing. Student submissions, including posters, are encouraged.
Submission deadline:听Friday, February 12th, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time
Notification of decisions: Early April
Featured Plenary Speakers
Mental health reporter, The New York Times
Author, therapist, and creative writing educator, Boston College
Professor of the History of Science in Residence, Harvard University
Chair and Co-Founder, Psychotherapy Action Network; psychologist in private practice, Chicago
Associate Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University
Associate Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College
Professor in Neuropsychology, University of Cape Town
Professor; Counseling Psychology PhD Program, Boston College
Journalist and author; founder and publisher, Mad in America
Invited Speakers
Associate Professor of Psychology, Culture, and Religion; Director of Chaplaincy Studies, Phillips Theological Seminary
Founding Director, Gubbio Seminars; Psychologist and clinical supervisor, New York City
Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society Emeritus, College of the Holy Cross; Senior Fellow, Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, Boston College.
Clinical psychologist in private practice; Editor, Journal of Humanistic Psychology; President, the Society for Humanistic Psychology
Assistant Professor of Theology, Boston University School of Theology
Director of Strategic Projects and External Relations, CPHE; Assistant Professor, Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College
Clinical psychologist, Pape Psychological Services; faculty member, Seattle University
Joseph Professor in Catholic Spirituality, Boston College
Thursday, September 9, 2027
Boston College | 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. | One-hour lunch break
Continuing education details forthcoming
Begin the Boston gathering with a full day of clinical inquiry on Thursday, September 9. Workshops led by Amelio A. D鈥橭nofrio and Linda Michaels consider the therapeutic encounter and the changing technological and institutional conditions of depth psychotherapy.
Drawing on psychoanalytic, existential, and phenomenological traditions, this seminar explores depth psychotherapy as a poetic process in which patient and therapist discover and revise meaning together. It considers how metaphor, silence, symbolic form, and unconscious communication shape clinical listening and the therapeutic encounter.
Participants will examine how trauma, death anxiety, and the therapist鈥檚 own assumptions enter clinical work. Particular attention will be given to sustaining uncertainty, receiving unformulated experience, and understanding the therapeutic frame as a holding environment and a source of communication. The seminar considers how these forms of attention may help patients develop a more inhabitable and self-authored relationship to their lives.
Morning session | Attuning to Suffering: From Ordinary Discourse to Poetic Listening
Afternoon session | Transformation as Reappropriation: From the Therapist鈥檚 Desire to the Poem Becoming Poet
Workshop leader: Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA
This full-day workshop examines the changing institutional environment of psychotherapy, including artificial intelligence, digital platforms, corporate consolidation, practice-management systems, and pressures toward efficiency and scale. Michaels will consider how these developments affect privacy, clinical judgment, therapeutic relationship, time, and the aims of treatment, while also addressing questions of access, affordability, evidence, and contemporary clinical practice.
Depth psychotherapy is taking shape within a rapidly changing clinical and economic environment. Insurers increasingly scrutinize the duration and frequency of treatment; practice-management companies and corporate ownership are reshaping independent practice; digital platforms are changing how therapy is marketed and delivered; and generative AI is being proposed as a substitute for forms of mental health care once organized around a therapeutic relationship. These developments are often framed through efficiency, scalability, and access.
Led by PsiAN Chair Linda Michaels, this workshop examines what these changes mean for therapies of depth, insight, and relationship. Drawing on psychotherapy research, market research about what clients seek from therapy, and PsiAN鈥檚 advocacy work, participants will consider how to make a persuasive case for relational treatment, sustain clinical practice, and expand access while preserving the depth and integrity of psychotherapy.
Morning session | Making the Case for Depth
Afternoon session | Understanding the Landscape and Responding Strategically
Registration will open in March 2027.
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Professionals & Faculty听
(Excluding Boston College)
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$400
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Boston College Faculty & Staff
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$75
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Exclusively Online Digital Streaming
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$250
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Fellows, Analysts, and PostDoc Candidates
(Excluding Boston College)
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$200
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Boston College Students
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$0
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On-Site Registration
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$500
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Undergraduate and Graduate Students
(Excluding Boston College)
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$100
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Co-Sponsor Affiliates
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$50
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Conference Team
Dean, Woods College of Advancing Studies; Executive Director, Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, Boston College
Psychotherapist; Part-Time Faculty, Boston College; Researcher, Danielsen Institute - Boston University
Program Director, PsyD in Clinical Psychology, Boston College
Assistant Director of Programming, Marketing, and Events, Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, Boston College
Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society Emeritus, College of the Holy Cross; Senior Fellow, CPHE, Boston College
Questions? Please email psychumanities@bc.edu for more information.
The Santiago conference takes place at Universidad Alberto Hurtado on January 8鈥�9, 2027.
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Keep an eye out for future news and programming through our听Psychological Humanities & Ethics听offerings!
