Toward a Human(us)tic Psychology:
Actualizing Hope and Healing through Liberation and Justice for All

Humanistic psychology, we have been summoned. Your family, your colleagues, your worldwide allies, your community, and your transpersonal spirit are calling out. Nature weeps in melting ice caps and rages through repeatedly unprecedented catastrophic events. Children reduced to collateral sacrifices in local and global devastation wail while sheltering behind upturned classroom desks and exposed on the front lines of wars. Women are dying in waiting rooms as misogyny obstructs their rights to healthcare, inescapable poisonous social expectations have become intrusively consuming, and elders are embattling stagnation. People have become impoverished by the insatiability of capitalistic bloodshed, too starved to engage in satiating confluence. Differently abled and neurodiverse persons are being denied their authentic existence. The safety of the LGBTQ+ community remains backed against a stone wall. People indigenous to their lands are abandoned to dehumanizing internments, reduced to strangers of their own homes. Survivors of enslaved racial trafficking along with immigrants, pursuing safety as much as opportunity, continue to be weaponized as marginalized invaders. Your pain is felt. We cannot give in to hopelessness. Universally allied in our collective protests of grief, we cannot wait any longer for our humanity to be valued. It is time to govern our own liberation and healing.

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you" (Rumi).

So we are called. Humanistic psychology, as much as ever, our here-and-now compels us to mobilize our psychology of responsibility and compassion to rise and answer. Holding each other up and accountable, we are positioned as both witness and action; empathy and advocacy. In an exhausting world, our empowerment prevails in keeping our eyes open, remaining awake, refracting the illumination. 

We brave hope and healing together. It is a proactive and progressive mission for humanistic psychology to dedicate our voices to liberation and justice. We will keep doing this work together. The social compact of belonging to a humanistic society is grounded in mutual care, our interconnectedness. In authentic alliance we will actualize an inclusive, human-justice society, our human(us)tic society.

with Hope and Loving Kindness,
Roxanne Christensen, PsyD, SHP President (2024-2025)

Conference Call

SHP is inviting students, practitioners, scholars, academicians, researchers, theoreticians, philosophers, and all in alliance to share in community at the 18th Annual MidWinter Conference in Atlanta (Georgia Institute of Technology) from March 14-16, 2025.

Submissions reflecting the theme Toward a Human(us)tic Psychology: Actualizing Hope and Healing through Liberation and Justice for All will be given priority consideration.

Humanistic Psychology is at-potential as an existential conduit in the pathway to liberation and justice, in reciprocal congruence with hope and healing. SHP is inviting proposal submissions in stewardship of these values:

What does liberation and justice look like within your cultural contexts and how can humanistic psychology meet its responsibility to actualize this? How can it show up for your communities’ needs, visions, and missions? How does it show up in your philosophies, theories, and practices?

What needs to be present to foster integrated and comprehensive psychologies that bridge us from a surviving society to a thriving one? How can humanistic psychology decolonize and de-pathologize the science and medicine of human healing? How do we need to show up when tragedy summons us to service? 

What commitments are uniquely needed from humanistic psychology to inspire our communities toward action, hope, and healing? 

Proposals can be submitted by anyone within or interested in humanistic psychology at any position of interdisciplinary education and profession. Submissions considered include posters, speakers, panels, experiential engagements, and personal narratives. We invite philosophical, theoretical, conceptual, artistic, and research works. Proposals for continuing education credits are encouraged.

The proposal period is now closed and we are working to put together an amazing program for you - thank you for your brilliant submissions! See you in Atlanta!