Psychology & the Other Boston

Ellen Barry is a mental health reporter for The New York Times and a former international correspondent and bureau chief.

Barry’s journalism offers a way to examine how clinical language, public policy, and individual stories shape what readers understand about suffering and care.

Kyleigh Leddy is an author and therapist who teaches creative writing at Boston College. Her memoir, The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister, brings literary practice into conversation with grief, family relationships, and experiences of severe mental illness.

Leddy’s work asks how writing can attend to another person’s suffering while recognizing the limits of the narrator’s knowledge and perspective.

Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology at Harvard University. Her scholarship examines the concepts and practices through which psychological expertise has shaped modern understandings of the self.

Lunbeck brings a historical perspective to contemporary claims about what psychotherapy is and what it can accomplish.

Linda Michaels is a clinical psychologist and Chair and Co-Founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN). Her clinical and advocacy work advances therapies of depth, insight, and relationship and their place in public understandings of mental health care.

Michaels’s work connects The Future of Psychotherapy with questions about how evidence, technology, and the organization of care shape clinical practice. Her workshop examines what happens to therapeutic relationships and clinical judgment as AI, digital platforms, and corporate ownership change the conditions of treatment.

Eric Severson teaches philosophy at Seattle University and writes at the intersections of philosophy, psychology, and theology. His scholarship draws on Emmanuel Levinas to examine time, embodiment, and responsibility to other people.

Severson’s work asks what ethical responsibility requires when another person exceeds our understanding of them. 

Devin Singh is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, where he studies religion in relation to economics, politics, and social thought. His scholarship traces connections among theological ideas, money, debt, and the organization of collective life.

Singh’s work brings political economy into the conference’s inquiry into the worlds that shape psychological experience. It asks how ideas of debt, obligation, and value organize relationships and possibilities for a shared future.

Usha Tummala-Narra is a professor in Boston College’s Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology and its Counseling Psychology PhD program. Her research and clinical work address immigration, trauma, and culturally informed psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Tummala-Narra’s work brings the cultural and historical conditions of suffering into the therapeutic encounter. 

Robert Whitaker is a journalist and author who founded Mad in America. His books and reporting examine the history of psychiatry, research on treatment, and the institutions that shape mental health care.

Whitaker’s work makes the production and public interpretation of psychiatric knowledge a subject of inquiry, asking how evidence, professional authority, and lived experience enter debates about suffering and treatment.

Peter Capretto is a pastoral theologian and philosopher of religion at Phillips Theological Seminary, where he directs Chaplaincy Studies. His scholarship examines care, empathy, trauma, disability, and the ethical demands of responding to suffering.

It brings spiritual care into dialogue with psychological and institutional questions about whose suffering is recognized and how accompaniment is practiced.

Amelio A. D’Onofrio is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and Founding Director of the Gubbio Seminars. Formerly a Clinical Professor at Fordham University, he brings psychoanalytic and existential psychotherapy into conversation with theology, tragedy, and mysticism.

D’Onofrio’s work raises questions of presence, receptivity, and therapeutic encounter. His workshop considers how uncertainty, imagination, and unconscious communication shape what becomes possible between therapist and patient.

Mark Freeman is a narrative psychologist whose scholarship examines memory, self-understanding, ethical life, and the psychological humanities. His books include Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward, The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self, and Toward the Psychological Humanities.

Sarah Kamens is a clinical psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines psychological distress and alternatives to prevailing diagnostic frameworks. She is Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and author of Reconceptualizing Schizophrenia: The Phenomenology of Urhomelessness.

Filipe Maia is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. His scholarship brings liberation theology and continental philosophy into conversation with economics, political life, and ideas of the future.

His attention to speculation, hope, and futurity also asks how social arrangements shape what persons and communities can imagine as a flourishing life.

Zenobia Morrill is a psychologist, researcher, and faculty member at Boston College, where she directs strategic projects and external relations for the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics. Her work addresses psychotherapy process, critical and liberation psychology, qualitative inquiry, and ethical questions in mental health care.

Her research asks how relational practice and broader forms of evidence can support care that attends to people’s social worlds.

Kathleen M. Pape is a clinical psychologist in Seattle and a faculty member in Seattle University’s MA in Psychology program. Her work draws on existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminist thought, and hermeneutics, with interests in bereavement, motherhood, and psychological theory.

Brian Robinette is the Joseph Professor in Catholic Spirituality in Boston College’s Department of Theology. His work brings systematic and mystical theology into conversation with phenomenology, hermeneutics, mimetic theory, and contemplative practice.

It invites reflection on how contemplative traditions can deepen psychological accounts of transformation and the human good.