About
The Psychology & the Other Conference is a yearly convening that aims to revitalize psychology by bringing it into dialogue with philosophy, theology, and other humanities rich traditions. Since its inception in 2011, the Conference has served to gather under a single intellectual roof perspectives that had heretofore been largely isolated from one another. Attended by clinicians, academic psychologists, philosophers, theologians, historians, poets, anthropologists, and cultural theorists, this community attempts to foster new and emergent ways of speaking to human identity, suffering, and potential in order to better serve the call of the suffering Other.
One of the distinctive features of the conference is the intentional pairing of plenary speakers with persons from different disciplines to create a type of catalytic engagement that upsets the insularity and jargon-laden fixtures that often come to determine the currency of exchange at discipline-specific conferences.
“Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without a prior commitment… is prior to freedom. The face of the other in proximity… is the way of the infinite.”
The Other
Driven by a shared passion to challenge some of the insularity of our concepts and creatively invite the possibility of more ethically dynamic means of understanding persons and health, participants in this Conference have found in the idea of the Other an important vehicle for bringing into meaningful dialogue disciplines and fields of inquiry within psychology that share something of a common purpose. The word Other carries with it several meanings and this Conference attempts to serve each, inviting psychology to benefit from other disciplinary understandings, recognizing the ethical responsibility we each bear for one another, and attending to those who have been othered by the world: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, those living on the margins of society.
A Vibrant Community of Scholars
This community of scholars and practitioners include (but are not limited to) psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, social workers, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, clergy, and graduate students of all persuasions. All are welcome to the conversation.
