“All Real Living Is Meeting”: Brent Robbins on Love, Death, and the Possibilities of Psychology

Brent Dean Robbins is a psychologist, scholar, and all-around thoughtful human whose work has profoundly shaped existential and humanistic psychology—not to mention my own path as a clinician, writer, and, frankly, as a person just trying to make sense of things.

Dr. Robbins is one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive—not just a collection of theories and data, but a field full of urgent, deeply human questions. He’s a professor of psychology and the director of the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology program at Point Park University, where he’s helped create one of the most distinctive training programs in the country. He earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne University—home to some of the most beautifully dense phenomenological work you’ll ever have to read twice—and is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania.

He is the current president of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA Division 24) and a former president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology (APA Division 32). He co-founded and serves as editor-in-chief of Janus Head and sits on the editorial boards of The Humanistic Psychologist, Qualitative Psychology, and several other journals I suspect he reads for fun.

Brent’s scholarship revolves around the search for meaning—how we live with uncertainty, how we make sense of suffering, and what it means to be fully human. His work spans everything from the cultural history of mental illness to mindfulness, death anxiety, and resilience—not the hollow kind that comes from pretending everything’s fine, but the kind that comes from staring into the void and refusing to flinch. His book, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture, is a stunning critique of how modern medicine’s mechanistic view of the body has dulled our sense of what it means to be alive. He’s also co-editor of Eros and Psyche: Existential Perspectives on Sexuality, a two-volume series that explores some of the most tender and tangled aspects of being human.

Beyond academia, Brent has been a leading advocate for mental health reform, particularly through his work with the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s Task Force for Diagnostic Alternatives. If you’ve ever felt uneasy about the DSM—wondering why grief or doubt might be classified as disorders—Brent has likely articulated that unease more sharply and compassionately than you thought possible. His belief that we should be diagnosing systems, not people, is a radical and necessary shift, challenging the idea that mental health struggles happen in individuals rather than to individuals within their social and cultural contexts.

On a personal note, Brent has played a foundational role in my own journey. I first encountered him as a graduate student in his Humanistic and Phenomenological Psychology course—a class that felt like someone had thrown open a window after years of sitting in a stifling room. The ideas felt imaginative, daring, and deeply humane, inviting me to rethink not only the field of psychology but my own way of being in the world. That class, and Brent’s mentorship, weren’t just influential—they’re the reason I became a psychologist at all, and specifically the peculiar, critical kind of psychologist that I am today.

In this conversation, we’ll explore Brent’s career—from his early work critiquing the overmedication of children to his scholarship on metabletics and cultural therapeutics. We’ll also discuss how he’s navigating his current health journey and cancer diagnosis as an existential psychologist and his hopes for the future of the field—how we might reimagine mental health care in ways that embrace the messy, wondrous, irreducible nature of being human.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Part 1…

Part 2…

 

Justin Karter: Thank you for being here, Brent. Let’s start with your personal story. Could you share how you first became interested in psychology? How did your background and early experiences shape your passion for humanistic and existential approaches in particular?

Brent Robbins: I actually didn’t start out in psychology. I studied filmmaking, with a minor in literature and language—not even psychology. But my path to existential thought started much earlier, thanks to my mother.

She went to Wheeling Jesuit College in West Virginia, where phenomenology was a hot topic in the ‘60s. As a result, our house was filled with books on existentialism and phenomenology from her college days. She often referenced Martin Buber, especially his idea that “all real living is meeting.” And she didn’t just say it—she lived it. She was the kind of person who, by the time she finished checking out at the grocery store, knew the cashier’s name, their kids’ names, and half their life story. She genuinely believed that connecting with people was what life was all about. That had a profound influence on me.

My father was also a major influence. He studied art and English in college and worked as a high school teacher before going into business with his father. In the ‘80s, he became deeply interested in Carl Jung, and through him, I was introduced to Jungian thought. Those early conversations planted seeds that would later shape my thinking.

By the time I got to college, I took an introductory psychology class—but it was awful. Just a conventional, mainstream course, and it completely turned me off from the field. Fortunately, I had to take a second psychology course as part of my core requirements, so I signed up for Theories of Personality. That class changed everything.

We studied Freud, Jung, and even some existentialist thinkers, and suddenly, all those early influences from my parents clicked into place. When I finally had the chance to systematically study these ideas—reading Freud, Jung, and the existentialists and seeing how their ideas applied to psychology—it felt like I had found something I could truly connect with.

Even then, I didn’t immediately switch my major to psychology. I still thought I might integrate those ideas into filmmaking. But by the time I finished undergrad, I had lost interest in filmmaking and started working at a rehabilitation facility for people with traumatic brain injuries. I was in a residential care role, and I found myself fascinated by how these injuries reshaped people’s lives. More than that, I loved the interpersonal aspect of the work. I felt like I was good at it, and that maybe I had found my real calling.

So, I decided to go back and take psychology courses. Unfortunately, most of them were pretty mainstream—dry, shallow, and missing the intellectual depth of that Theories of Personality class. I started studying existential and humanistic psychology on my own, bringing those ideas into my papers whenever I could. Eventually, I began searching for graduate programs with that orientation.

When I discovered that Duquesne University had the only doctoral program in the country with an existential-phenomenological approach, I was stunned. I had grown up just ten minutes from campus and had no idea such a program existed. It felt like fate.

Karter: Coming home, yeah.

Brent Robbins: Yeah, so I was literally coming home. I thought, Okay, maybe that’s why I was so drawn to this—it was in my backyard all along. I came back to Pittsburgh, back home, and by then I had met my wife.

Duquesne was something else. I got in, and I landed an assistantship working at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center—an archive in the basement of the library filled with books on phenomenology and existentialism. It was like being a kid in a candy store. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, completely immersing myself in that world.

Some of my peers weren’t as deeply invested in it—they were just looking to get their degree. But I wanted to suck the marrow out of that program, to absorb everything I possibly could. It was profoundly transformative—almost like a religious conversion. Phenomenology has that effect. It doesn’t just introduce new ideas; it changes the way you see the world in a fundamental way.

And for me, it was personally therapeutic. It made my life richer, more meaningful, more alive. That experience set me on my path.

 

Karter: We’ll come back to phenomenology and theory, but I want to ask about your connection to critical psychiatry. That’s not a leap people often make—from philosophical psychology to critiques of the pharmaceutical industry and medicalization.

One of your first co-edited books was Drugging Our Children. How did you move into that world of critical psychiatry early in your career?

Brent Robbins: When I was an undergrad in St. Louis, I went to Webster University. I had a group of friends who were kind of Deadheads—they loved the Grateful Dead, followed Phish, and were really into ‘60s counterculture. One of my best friends at the time bought me a book for my birthday: The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing. I had never heard of Laing before. I think my friend was into him because of his connection to the counterculture movement. I just thought, Oh, that’s a thoughtful gift, and put it on my shelf without thinking much about it.

Months later, I picked it up and started reading. That book was my first real introduction to critical psychiatry, and it was a turning point. At that stage in my academic journey, I had no background in Laing or critical psychiatry, so it was a real awakening. I struggled to understand the text at first—I think I had to read it multiple times just to get a sense of what he was saying.

Then, when I got to Duquesne, I was incredibly fortunate. During my first year, I took a course with Daniel Burston—Laing’s biographer. Dan had written extensively on critical psychiatry, drawing from Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly Erich Fromm. He had also written a lot about Fromm, so I was getting a heavy dose of critical psychiatry through him.

Dan was married to Sharna Olfman, who is a former faculty member at Point Park University, where I teach. She was deeply involved in critical psychiatry and critiques of the pharmaceutical industry. She had an entire book series with Praeger, publishing an edited volume every year on critical psychiatry. I got to know her through those books and through a conference she organized at Point Park every year. I attended those conferences, soaked everything in, and read everything Dan and Sharna had written.

I also had another mentor, Michael Sipiora, who was heavily influenced by Herbert Marcuse, in addition to Heidegger. He brought together critical theory and Heideggerian phenomenology in his work. He had studied at the University of Dallas with James Hillman and Robert Romanyshyn, so through him, I was also introduced to that depth psychological tradition. I started integrating all of these influences into my own work, trying to make sense of it and synthesize it in a way that felt coherent to me.

Then it became personal.

After grad school, I was teaching at Daemen College when my mother had a mental health crisis and was hospitalized. I still don’t know exactly what happened, but my suspicion is that it was a side effect of medication she had been prescribed. She had what I can only describe as a psychotic break—she was experiencing paranoid delusions, which was incredibly unusual for someone her age. She was in her 50s at the time. They put her on antipsychotics.

That was an incredibly disturbing period of my life. Your mother is often your anchor to reality, and when she loses reality, it feels like you’re losing it too.

At the same time this was happening, Dan Burston invited Robert Whitaker to give a talk at Duquesne. I went to see Whitaker, and he presented a systematic, well-researched critique of antipsychotics, laying out the long-term harms in a way that was deeply grounded in empirical literature. I walked out of that lecture thinking, Holy crap, I have to get my mother off this garbage.

But my stepfather was completely opposed to the idea. In fact, he pushed for her to receive electroconvulsive therapy. She ended up undergoing 12 sessions of ECT, which caused brain damage she never fully recovered from.

During that time, I was trying desperately to talk him out of it. Eventually, he got so frustrated that he kicked me out of the house. I wasn’t living with them, but he wouldn’t allow me to visit for a while because he thought I was a bad influence on her.

Then, over time, he started to come around—because everything I had warned him about happened. She developed akathisia, along with all the other terrible side effects. He saw it play out in real time.

From that point on, it wasn’t just an academic interest for me—it was personal. That experience fueled my passion for reform. And as it happened, that was right around the time the DSM-5 was being prepared for publication. That’s when I got involved in the fight against it.

 

Karter: You’ve been a leader in pushing for diagnostic reform, particularly in resisting the DSM-5 through the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s Task Force on Diagnostic Alternatives. Can you talk about how that task force started and the role you played in challenging the DSM’s dominance in mental health care?

Brent Robbins: Yeah, the whole thing was really serendipitous—the timing was just perfect. I had just joined the board of the Society for Humanistic Psychology as secretary. At the time, David Elkins was president, and Louis Hoffman—who was a good friend of both Dave’s and mine—was the incoming president. I was slated to take over after Louis, so we had this trio of leadership, all of us on board with this project from the start.

It all started at the APA convention in San Diego. I had just read a statement from the British Psychological Society (BPS) that absolutely eviscerated the DSM-5. It was written by Peter Kinderman, who at the time I didn’t know personally, but would later become a close ally and friend. He was the president of the BPS, and he led this full-frontal critique of the DSM-5 on behalf of the organization.

I was stunned that the BPS had taken such a strong stance. I went to Dave Elkins and said, Have you seen what they’re saying? Why aren’t we doing something like this in the U.S.? Dave agreed completely. We supported everything in the BPS statement and had even more critiques we wanted to add.

At that same time, Sarah Kamens—who was then a graduate student and is now the editor of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology—had just completed her master’s thesis on the development of the DSM-5. She had an incredibly deep understanding of the entire process, far beyond what Dave and I knew at the time. So, the three of us formed a task force.

Initially, it was just us, but we quickly expanded to include others like Donna Rockwell, Jonathan Raskin, and Frank Farley (a former APA president). Together, we drafted an open letter laying out the problems with the DSM-5. That letter is still online—if you Google Open Letter to the DSM-5, you can find it. It’s not very long, but it succinctly outlines the core issues.

To summarize, I think there were two primary critiques. First, the DSM-5 marked a shift toward more biological and reductionist language, even more so than previous editions. That was deeply concerning. Second, the DSM loosened diagnostic criteria in ways that massively expanded the number of people who would qualify for various disorders. This blurred the line between actual clinical problems and everyday existential concerns, pathologizing normal human experiences.

Initially, we were just going to send our critique directly to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). They had an email address for feedback, but we knew it would probably just disappear into a black hole. So, I suggested making it an open letter—something we could post publicly and attach to a petition, allowing others to sign on. Dave and Sarah agreed, and the Division 32 board approved it. We put it on an activist petition site and sent it out.

What happened next was completely unexpected. We ended up with nearly 20,000 signatures—not just from psychologists, but from psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals. Even more significantly, a majority of APA divisions signed on, along with the British Psychological Society and numerous other international organizations. Dozens of professional groups joined in.

The letter gained even more traction when Allen Frances—the lead editor of the DSM-IV—started promoting it. He was deeply critical of the DSM-5 and had essentially launched a Twitter war against it. His endorsement helped amplify our reach.

As a result, we started getting media coverage. I ended up on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was particularly amusing because the chair of the DSM-5 task force worked at the University of Pittsburgh. I can only imagine him opening the newspaper and seeing a front-page critique of the DSM-5 in his own city. The story was also picked up by The San Francisco Chronicle, Nature, The Washington Post, and other major outlets. It became a viral story in the media for a while, which really drove the number of signatures up.

Of course, the DSM-5 was published anyway. But we never expected to stop it. Peter Kinderman and I had a conversation early on about what our actual goal was. We knew the APA wouldn’t reverse course—they had too much financial and institutional investment in the DSM. What we could do, though, was shift the narrative.

At the time, the DSM was commonly referred to as the “Bible of Psychiatry.” We wanted to change that. Our goal was that, by the time the DSM-5 was released, the headlines wouldn’t call it the definitive manual of psychiatry—they would call it controversial.

And that’s exactly what happened. When it was finally published, every major media outlet referred to it as the controversial DSM-5. We succeeded in changing the public discourse.

After that, the next question was: What now? We realized we weren’t going to reform the DSM from within, so we shifted our focus to promoting alternatives. A lot of people assume the DSM-5 is the only diagnostic system available, but there are alternatives—there just aren’t enough of them. Our goal became fostering and advocating for new models that could eventually gain enough traction to be accepted by insurance companies and provide a viable alternative to the DSM and ICD.

That’s what the task force continues to do today, now under Sarah Kamens’ leadership. We’re still working to advance alternative frameworks. In fact, we’re hosting a panel at the APA Convention in August in Denver, where we’ll be having a critical conversation about diagnosis itself—questioning some of the most fundamental assumptions about what it even means to diagnose.

 

Karter: I want to highlight this because, as you’re saying, it’s not just about having a different diagnostic code or an alternative manual for clinicians to reference. The deeper question is: What role does diagnosis play in our society? Why is it expanding so rapidly—not just medically, but in how people think about themselves and the language they use to describe their experiences?

Two of your biggest critiques of diagnosis are, first, that it serves as a form of scapegoating—locating problems in individuals rather than in the systems that shape them. And second, that we diagnose people rather than the social conditions that contribute to suffering. Can you say more about these critiques and how you see diagnosis functioning in our culture?

Brent Robbins: Yeah, those critiques are closely connected. Erich Fromm was a big influence on me in this regard. He introduced the concept of the pathology of normalcy, which I think is both profound and surprisingly difficult for many people to grasp.

We tend to think of psychopathology as what is abnormal—what falls outside the norm. But then the question becomes: What do we mean by “norm”? Statistically speaking, something is abnormal if it deviates significantly from the average. But we don’t diagnose someone with a disorder just because they’re 30 points above the mean on an IQ test—only if they’re 30 points below it. So, clearly, statistical abnormality alone isn’t enough to define psychopathology.

Instead, psychiatry implicitly assumes another kind of norm—one tied to social expectations, well-being, or functioning. But here’s the problem: No one in psychiatry has ever clearly defined what that norm is. It’s just taken for granted. That lack of an explicit standard means the DSM can continually expand its diagnostic categories—because there’s no clear boundary for what should not be considered a disorder. There’s no inherent limit to medicalizing human experience.

Fromm’s argument is that an entire society—or a social system—can be pathological. Something can be considered normative within a culture, meaning it’s common, rewarded, or expected, and yet still be profoundly unhealthy. That’s hard for people to grasp because we’re conditioned to think of pathology as deviation from the norm, rather than recognizing that the norm itself might be sick.

A clear example is Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was normative—it was not just accepted but actively promoted. Eugenics programs were seen as logical extensions of that worldview. But of course, we wouldn’t call that healthy. It was socially pathological—causing profound harm not only to the victims but also to the perpetrators. The system itself created the conditions for suffering and moral injury.

Once you make that conceptual shift—realizing that social systems can be pathological—you start to see how many of the people we diagnose are actually suffering because of the environments they’re embedded in. Not always, of course—there are exceptions—but in many cases, people are responding to pathogenic social conditions. Yet rather than changing those conditions, we label the individual as disordered. We medicalize their suffering, validate the system as “normal,” and try to adjust them back into the very conditions that made them sick in the first place.

I can give a lot of examples of this.

One I’ve been thinking about lately, which I’m writing a paper on, is war as social pathology.

War is normative. It’s how most nations defend themselves. Historically, war has been constant, and it remains a dominant feature of global politics. But can we think of any social reality that is more harmful? War produces mass death, injury, and trauma. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is essentially an expected outcome—combat veterans are never the same. Some have more severe symptoms than others, but nearly everyone who experiences combat shows some level of post-traumatic symptomatology.

If we frame PTSD as an individual disorder, we ignore the larger reality: War itself is a psychopathogenic social system. The people experiencing PTSD aren’t malfunctioning—they are having a normal response to an abnormal system. War is what’s disordered, yet we treat the soldier as the one who needs fixing.

Another example I’ve studied and presented on is anorexia.

We diagnose individuals with anorexia because they restrict their food intake to the point of physical harm, sometimes leading to death. But we know from research that one of the strongest drivers of eating disorders is the thin ideal—a cultural standard that equates female attractiveness with thinness. This ideal is embedded in media, advertising, fashion, and everyday social expectations.

If you follow this cultural ideal too successfully, you become so thin that it endangers your health. But instead of diagnosing the social norms that promote disordered eating, we diagnose the individual who internalizes those norms most intensely. We tell her she has a disorder, rather than acknowledging that the broader system of objectifying women through body standards is pathological.

René Girard talks about how societies create “faithful citizens”—people who internalize and enact dominant norms to an extreme degree. In the case of anorexia, the person is simply taking a normative expectation to its logical conclusion. Rather than changing the thin ideal, we label the person who falls victim to it as mentally ill.

These are just two examples, but you can see the pattern. We diagnose people, rather than the systems that shape them. In doing so, we make it harder to recognize how much of what we call “mental illness” is actually a rational response to deeply disordered social conditions.

 

Karter: This connects to a theme that runs through much of your work—one that is both existential and psychoanalytic. It highlights the social defense mechanisms we use to avoid seeing our own pathology reflected back at us. When we encounter extreme cases—people or situations that expose the contradictions in our beliefs or our participation in harmful social systems—we often react with othering as a defense. It’s a way of deflecting the discomfort of recognizing our own complicity.

Brent Robbins: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The Frankfurt School critical theorists were deeply influential in thinking through this—especially in how they integrated Marx and Freud. They saw how the unconscious overlaps with the Marxist idea of false consciousness, where we come to accept social norms even when they’re harmful to us.

That said, I don’t think Marx adequately explains why this happens. Personally, I find Ernest Becker’s perspective much more satisfying.

For Becker, culture gives us meaning. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to engage in what he calls a hero project—some overarching pursuit that makes us feel worthy, good, or valuable. Culture provides the framework for these goals, the values by which we measure ourselves and others. It gives us a way to evaluate success and failure, a structure for self-esteem.

But for Becker, this isn’t just about identity—it’s about death anxiety. At the core of everything is the inescapable awareness that we are going to die, and that it could happen at any moment. Culture provides a protective framework that helps us make sense of that reality. Without it, we are left exposed to existential terror.

This is why questioning the social structures that give life meaning is so difficult—because what’s the alternative? If we reject the system we’ve built our lives around, we risk falling into nihilism, meaninglessness, or what sociologists call anomie—a state of normlessness, where the structures that once guided us no longer hold. That’s terrifying. Legitimately terrifying.

In my opinion, we’re not going to be able to solve these deep social problems until we come to terms with our own mortality. As long as we avoid facing that reality, we will continue to cling to social defenses that scapegoat others rather than reckoning with what’s really at stake.

 

Karter: Some of your recent work on metabletics connects with this idea that the structure of society—the meaning system that culture provides—is not fixed over time. When we study how different cultures and historical periods shape meaning, it reveals the limits and constraints placed on our thinking in the present. This approach allows us to see the edges of our worldview, the assumptions that shape how we interpret our lives, relationships, and even our own suffering.

It also links phenomenology with existential concerns, particularly with Becker’s work on death anxiety. Could you say more about metabletics and how you see it informing the work you’re doing now?

Brent Robbins: Yeah, metabletics has its roots in the work of Jan Hendrik van den Berg, a Dutch psychiatrist and phenomenologist. He was also a critical psychiatrist, drawing on phenomenology as a foundation for his critique of psychiatry. His most well-known book on critical psychiatry is A Different Existence, but metabletics was the central focus of his career.

Van den Berg argued that what we often call neurosis is actually sociosis—that psychological suffering must be understood within its social and historical context. He developed metabletics as a method for studying how cultural transformations shape the emergence and disappearance of certain forms of psychopathology. In other words, different kinds of suffering are not just discovered but created by shifting cultural conditions.

I was introduced to Van den Berg in grad school, particularly through my mentor Michael Sipiora, though a number of Duquesne faculty engaged with his work. Duquesne has a strong connection to the Dutch phenomenological tradition because it was founded by the Holy Ghost Fathers, a Dutch order. Adrian van Kaam, who helped establish the psychology program with its continental philosophical orientation, was also Dutch. He brought Van den Berg’s work into the program, which is how it made its way into American psychology.

That’s a bit of history, but the key idea is this: Psychopathology is not really abnormal. It’s not a simple deviation from the norm. Rather, it often takes what is normative and pushes it to an extreme—so extreme that it threatens to expose the fundamental assumptions of a society that are usually taken for granted. This makes pathology revelatory—it discloses hidden dimensions of the social order that people would rather not confront.

You can see this across different historical periods.

Phil Cushman’s work comes to mind. I don’t know if Cushman was influenced by Van den Berg—he doesn’t cite him—but his analysis of how psychotherapy evolves within specific cultural moments is very much in line with what Van den Berg was doing.

Karter: Yeah, Cushman references Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Heidegger, but not Van den Berg, as far as I remember.

Brent Robbins: Right. Well, Van den Berg was influenced by Heidegger, so there’s a shared intellectual lineage there. He was also a contemporary of Foucault, though he later acknowledged that Foucault’s work—particularly his archaeological and genealogical approaches—was essentially doing metabletics by another name.

Karter: Van den Berg focused more on the method, how you actually do this kind of analysis, rather than just describing what historical shifts reveal.

Brent Robbins: Exactly. His emphasis was on developing a structured way of studying these historical transformations in meaning. There are differences between Van den Berg and Foucault, but the spirit of what they were doing is very similar. Both were concerned with how historical conditions shape human experience in ways that often remain invisible—until they start to break down.

Van den Berg lays out metabletics as a theory of changes—essentially, the idea that society is constantly shifting, and as culture changes, so does our understanding of what it means to be a person. And when our understanding of personhood changes, so too does the implicit philosophical anthropology that shapes our definitions of normality and pathology. These concepts are never fixed; they’re always embedded within a particular socio-cultural system.

To illustrate this, I know our conversation has been fairly abstract so far, but let me give a historical example.

We can actually trace the origins of biological psychiatry—what eventually became the dominant medical model—back to the 1840s in France. I highly recommend the work of Ashley Bobak, who graduated from our doctoral program. I chaired her dissertation, and she did brilliant work tracing the genealogy of biological reductionism in psychiatry back to that period.

Without getting lost in all the historical details, here’s the broad picture:

France in the 1840s was still reeling from the aftermath of the Revolution and The Terror. The entire country—really, all of Europe—was in a state of post-traumatic disarray. Political upheaval continued, culminating in the Revolutions of 1848, which were unfolding across the continent. In France, this was happening right on the heels of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which further fueled revolutionary sentiment.

During this period of crisis, a cultural movement emerged known as The Decadent Movement. It was a literary and artistic movement that arose from a widespread sense that society was unraveling. These writers and artists didn’t try to resist this decline—they embraced it. They saw the world as decadent and corrupt, so they chose to revel in it. Baudelaire, one of the movement’s central figures, wrote a poem called Get Drunk, which pretty much captures the ethos—indulging in excess, drugs, and alcohol as a kind of aesthetic and existential rebellion.

I think of the Decadent Movement as similar to what happened in the U.S. between the flower children of the late 1960s and the punk movement of the 1970s. What started as an idealistic, utopian counterculture turned into something much darker—think of The Velvet Underground or the rise of heroin use in that era.

At the same time that French culture was experiencing this crisis of meaning, psychiatrists were trying to explain the rising prevalence of mental illness. Some theorized that social disorder—the breakdown of traditional families, addiction, and political instability—was creating psychological distress. But then came a crucial shift.

Some thinkers argued that social degeneration wasn’t just a cultural or psychological issue—it had a biological effect. They proposed that societal decline was damaging people at the genetic level, and that these defects were being passed down to future generations.

This is where you see the emergence of a physiological theory of mental illness—one that took social dysfunction and reinterpreted it as a problem of heredity. Over time, they dropped the social part of the equation entirely, and psychiatry became exclusively focused on biological degeneration.

And right on the heels of that? Eugenics.

If mental illness was a genetic problem, then eugenics—the selective breeding of humans—became the logical “solution.” Positive eugenics aimed to promote reproduction among those with “good genes,” while negative eugenics sought to prevent reproduction among those deemed “defective.”

Of course, this eventually leads directly to Hitler’s Final Solution. But before it reached Nazi Germany, it passed through the United States, where eugenics became a mainstream scientific movement in the early 20th century.

My first introduction to this history was through Mad in America by Robert Whitaker. He has a chapter—I think it’s called The Dark Turn—where he lays out the role of eugenics in shaping modern psychiatry. That chapter blew me away when I first read it. Ashley Bobak, in her dissertation, traces this history even further back, showing how the shift from social explanations to biological reductionism was already well underway in 1840s France.

What’s so striking is that this pattern repeats itself: There’s an initial recognition that social dysfunction leads to suffering, but that insight gets buried, forgotten, or repressed. Over time, the conversation shifts to a purely biological framework—erasing the social causes of distress and treating individuals as defective rather than recognizing the deeper systemic issues at play.

 

Podcast Part 2

Karter: This connects with your book, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture, which goes beyond the usual critiques of medicalization—like those in critical psychiatry that focus on how social problems get absorbed into the medical sphere. Your argument takes it a step further. You acknowledge that the medical gaze can be useful for solving certain problems, but when it becomes the dominant way of interpreting ourselves and the world, it becomes deeply problematic—pathogenic, as you say.

Can you say more about how your work on medicalization relates to the cultural problems you see at the root of today’s mental health crises?

Brent Robbins: Yeah, I was following a similar line of inquiry as Ashley Bobak’s dissertation—though I had been working on these ideas for decades. I was interested in tracing not just the origins of the medical model, but also how the medical model shaped Western culture as a whole.

I traced this process back to the Renaissance and the emergence of modern anatomy. I studied that history closely, and what I found was striking. As Western society became increasingly secularized during the Enlightenment, medicine gradually took over many of the existential functions that had traditionally belonged to religion.

Where people once turned to priests for guidance on fundamental questions—on suffering, life, and death—they now turned to doctors. And doctors, by and large, were deeply uncomfortable in this role. They weren’t trained to answer existential questions, but society put them in that position anyway.

From an anthropological perspective, this makes sense. Across cultures, the healer—whether a shaman, priest, or doctor—is often the person who stands at the boundary between life and death. In earlier societies, these roles were merged. But in the modern era, as spiritual foundations weakened, medicine took on a cultural authority it wasn’t necessarily equipped to handle.

So I started asking: How did we get here?

What I discovered was that between the 12th and 15th centuries, there was a profound transformation in how the body was understood—one that set the stage for modern medicine.

One of the most interesting myths I came across was the idea that dissection was taboo in the Middle Ages. That’s actually not true. People did perform autopsies on loved ones—not for medical research, but out of concern for their families. For instance, if a mother died, a father might commission an autopsy to determine whether the illness was hereditary, so he could assess potential risks for his children. Even back then, people had a basic concept of genetic inheritance.

I drew heavily from the work of historian Katharine Park, who has done incredible research on this. She documents cases where medieval Europeans commissioned dissections not out of scientific curiosity but out of care for their families.

There was also another kind of autopsy—one performed on prospective saints. In convents, when a revered nun or mystic passed away, the other sisters would dissect her body—not for medical reasons, but to search for signs of holiness. They believed the divine could leave marks on the body, so they would look for stigmata, crosses formed in the heart tissue, or even symbolic objects—like three stones in the gallbladder, interpreted as a sign of the Trinity.

In these cases, the body was seen as sacred—as something that could reveal divine mysteries.

But something changed in the 14th century when medical schools began institutionalizing dissection. A new attitude toward the body began to emerge—one that was less reverential and more detached.

To avoid ethical concerns, medical schools established rules: The bodies used for dissection had to come from at least 10 miles away, ensuring they were strangers rather than local community members. More importantly, they had to be criminals.

And here’s the key shift: These individuals did not volunteer to become medical specimens. Dissection was an extension of their punishment. Judges would sentence criminals to public execution and postmortem dissection as an added form of humiliation.

This, to me, is crucial. Unlike the earlier dissections, where bodies were treated with reverence—whether for familial care or religious veneration—these were stigmatized bodies. The act of dissection was no longer about honoring the body but about degrading it.

I believe this played a foundational role in shaping what later became known as detached concern—the emotional distancing that medical professionals are trained to adopt.

You see this in modern medical education: Gross anatomy—where students dissect cadavers—is placed at the very beginning of medical school. Why? Because it serves as a socialization process. It teaches future doctors to see the human body as an object—as something they can cut into without emotional attachment.

This, I argue, is the origin of what I call anesthetic consciousness—a way of relating to the body that numbs emotional response. It allows doctors to confront death and suffering without feeling overwhelmed, but at the cost of a fundamental estrangement from the human experience.

And that’s where the problem begins. Because once this detached gaze moves beyond the medical profession and becomes a dominant cultural mode, it shapes how we see ourselves—how we interpret suffering, identity, and even mental health.

 

Karter: You see this becoming pervasive in the culture as well—this connection between anesthetic culture and anhedonia, along with other forms of disconnection from our own bodies.

Brent Robbins: Right. Because doctors have taken on the role of secular priests, people turn to them not just for medical care but for guidance on what is normative. As a result, the clinical detachment that doctors are trained in becomes an ideal—a model of how to relate to the world, particularly for men.

This is happening well before the women’s movement, so in many ways, detached concern becomes a masculine ideal—an emblem of rationality, control, and professionalism. But it doesn’t stay confined to medicine. It extends beyond the medical establishment and into the culture at large.

I think it also profoundly influences modern science. This epistemology—the idea that to truly know something, you have to strip away subjectivity and be left only with the objective—has its roots in this medicalized way of relating to the body.

It’s important to remember that in the Renaissance, the boundary between science and medicine wasn’t as rigid as it is today. Many of the great scientists of the time were also medical doctors. Galileo, for instance, was contemporary with this shift, and it predates figures like Newton and Descartes. The early scientists were trained both medically and scientifically, and those two ways of thinking shaped each other.

 

Karter: So detached concern becomes a cultural standard—not just in medicine but in how we relate to the world at large. And particularly, how we relate to our own bodies. You focus a lot on the lived body and embodiment in your book.

Can you say more about anhedonia and how our relationship with the body has changed in a post-Cartesian world?

Brent Robbins: Yeah, this insight came out of research I did on medical training. I was already studying these historical patterns, but I became interested in how they play out today, specifically in medical education.

When I was at Daemen College in Buffalo, they had a physician assistant (PA) program, and all PA students were required to take gross anatomy in their senior year, which meant dissecting a cadaver. I collaborated with PA faculty and an undergraduate student to conduct an ethnographic and phenomenological study of these students.

We observed them during dissection, took field notes, and had them keep personal journals where they reflected on their experiences. They submitted these journal entries to us via email throughout the semester. Then we analyzed the data using phenomenological and ethnographic methods.

One of the key findings was that most students experienced the body as ambiguous. On the one hand, they knew it was a person—someone’s grandmother, someone whose family was probably still mourning them. Certain details, like seeing nail polish on a hand, would suddenly remind them of this reality.

On the other hand, they were also being trained to view the body as a specimen—a fascinating biological machine.

The vast majority of students couldn’t hold these two perspectives together. They had to suppress the idea that this was a person in order to continue the dissection. It was either a person or a specimen, but not both at the same time.

However, there was a small minority—two students, in fact—who were able to hold these two perspectives together. They approached dissection almost as a relational process. They named their cadavers, even though they didn’t know their real names. They constructed imagined stories about the person’s life, piecing together details based on what they observed during dissection. They even described having internal conversations with the cadaver as they worked.

I found this remarkable. But for most students, it was simply too difficult to acknowledge the personhood of the cadaver while performing dissection.

I needed a way to describe what was being suppressed in this process. I called it the memorial body—the body as it exists in memory, as a representation of the person who once lived.

A funeral is a good example of an environment that honors the memorial body. In a funeral setting, the personal parts of the body—the face, the hands—are put on display, emphasizing the deceased’s humanity. The opposite happens in a cadaver lab.

In gross anatomy, dissection typically begins with the body lying face-down. The students start by dissecting the back. The face, hands, and feet—the most personal and expressive parts of the body—are kept covered. It isn’t until halfway through the semester that the body is flipped over, and the students see the face for the first time.

This is a profound moment. Many students experienced anxiety and even nightmares leading up to this point. Because once they see the face, it becomes much harder to deny that this was a person.

Through this research, I realized that medical education actively promotes anesthetic consciousness—this kind of clinical detachment that suppresses personhood. Gross anatomy, in a way, trains students to distance themselves emotionally from their patients.

To be charitable, I recognize that there are contexts where this is necessary. If you’re a neurosurgeon operating on a three-year-old child, you probably don’t want to be thinking, I’m cutting into the brain of a three-year-old child. You need to focus on the mechanics of the procedure. In that context, compartmentalization is a useful coping mechanism.

But this detachment isn’t always helpful.

It’s not helpful in general medicine, where bedside manner is crucial. It’s not helpful in psychiatry, where the therapeutic relationship is the foundation of treatment. And when this way of seeing extends beyond medicine into culture at large, it becomes deeply problematic.

I trace this suppression of personhood beyond medicine—into scientific racism and other oppressive systems. Consider the 1800s in the U.S., when chattel slavery was the norm. How do you psychologically cope with reducing human beings to property?

One way is to detach—to cultivate a way of seeing that suppresses the personhood of the enslaved. You have to learn to objectify people in order to justify their treatment as commodities.

In my book, I argue that this same epistemology—this aspiration to objectivity—extends into many problematic cultural practices. We see it in the way medicine, science, and even psychology have historically participated in systems of oppression. And we still see it today in the way our culture struggles to fully acknowledge the lived, embodied experiences of marginalized groups.

 

Karter: This kind of detachment can emerge in extreme, potentially traumatizing situations—whether it’s a surgeon operating on a three-year-old child or a soldier in combat. In those contexts, it functions as a psychological defense, preventing the person from fully confronting the personhood of the other.

But when that same psychological response becomes a cultural norm for dealing with others, it can be used to justify all sorts of horrific acts.

Brent Robbins: Right. It becomes a way of objectifying people—stripping them of their humanity in a way that allows them to be used as means to an end, without concern for their well-being.

Whether we’re talking about slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples—which I discuss in the book—or the objectification of women, these all stem from the same cultural logic. They’re all products of this broader culture of anesthetic consciousness.

 

Karter: So what begins as a way of numbing ourselves to the horror of loss ends up becoming the very tool by which we oppress and destroy.

Brent Robbins: Exactly. But there’s actually something hopeful in what I’m saying.

The detachment I’m describing—it’s not natural. It’s something we have to be socialized into.

Men aren’t naturally inclined to objectify women in this way. People aren’t naturally predisposed to see others as objects. We are taught to think this way. We are trained—culturally, socially—to relate to others through this detached, instrumental lens.

And if we are taught to see others this way, then we can also unlearn it.

This means we need to fundamentally rethink what it means to know something. For too long, we’ve been conditioned to believe that to know something is to detach from it—to separate oneself emotionally and view it “objectively.”

But what if real knowledge doesn’t come from detachment, but from engagement?

This may sound a little sentimental, but I call it a hermeneutics of love.

You truly get to know something if you love it.

Abraham Maslow talked about this in his work. He called it love knowledge. When he was working with rhesus monkeys alongside Harry Harlow, he cared about them. He wasn’t just observing them as specimens—he loved them.

And he later reflected that if he hadn’t loved them, he wouldn’t have learned as much as he did.

He was deeply disturbed by what happened to them in Harlow’s experiments, and that discomfort—his moral engagement—played a role in his shift toward humanistic psychology.

So there’s a lesson here. If we can move away from this cold, detached way of knowing—if we can cultivate a way of engaging with the world that is rooted in care rather than distance—then we can begin to undo some of the damage this cultural logic has caused.

 

Karter: I remember you driving this point home for us as students—this was ten years ago for me now—when you had us do Goethean science.

You didn’t just have us study the botany of a plant in the classroom. You had us draw it—again and again—asking us to engage with it through a lens of loving attention, curiosity, and care. You had us observe its changes over time, to notice the subtle transformations that we might otherwise overlook.

And through that process, we came to know the plant in a way that would have been completely inaccessible had we just studied it from a traditional, “objective” scientific perspective.

Brent Robbins: Exactly. I’ve written a couple of papers on Goethean science as a cultural therapeutic because it offers a fundamentally different epistemology—one that stands in contrast to the detached, anesthetic model of objectivity.

Goethean science teaches that intimacy—not detachment—is the key to truly knowing something. You come to understand something in the same way you come to know a friend—through relationship, engagement, and an openness to its dynamic nature.

Craig Holdrege, a contemporary Goethean scientist, describes this beautifully in his work. You probably remember reading his paper back in grad school about the skunk cabbage.

When I first read that paper, I had no idea what a skunk cabbage was. If someone had asked me to identify one, I wouldn’t have had a clue. And I’m not a botanist—I don’t have the kind of knowledge where I can walk through the woods and name every plant I see.

But after reading Holdrege’s description, I cared about the skunk cabbage. I felt a kind of affection for it, almost like you would for a familiar face. And now, whenever I’m in the woods and I see one, I get excited.

That’s because Holdrege doesn’t describe the skunk cabbage as just another mechanism in nature. He brings it alive—as a living being with its own meaning and purpose.

It’s the opposite of a reductive, mechanistic approach to science. Rather than stripping away uniqueness, it reveals it. And in doing so, it cultivates a sense of recognition—a respect for the intrinsic dignity of even something as humble as a plant.

 

Karter: This feels like the perfect moment to connect everything back to your critique of psychiatry and psychology.

The diagnostic framing you pushed back against in the DSM-5 lends itself to a particular way of seeing—a medicalized, distancing, and supposedly “objective” gaze. It encourages us to view clients, others, and even ourselves through a lens that reduces people to diagnostic labels rather than recognizing them as complex, evolving beings.

By contrast, the humanistic and existential psychology you advocate for calls us into relationship—with the world, with others, with our clients, and with ourselves. It opens up the possibility of a different kind of experience—one that is more engaged, more alive.

Brent Robbins: Exactly.

Studying psychiatry, psychology, and psychopathology from a human science perspective—specifically from a phenomenological perspective—is very much in the tradition of Goethean science.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to quantitative research or experimentation. Those methods are valuable in the right context. The problem is reductionism—when we take a whole person and collapse them into a formula, a set of symptoms, or a statistical model. When we do that, we lose all the richness, complexity, and uniqueness of the actual human being in front of us.

Phenomenology brings in the idiographic—what is distinctive about each person—while still allowing us to recognize general patterns. It holds both individual uniqueness and broader insights in mind at the same time.

Karter: And it shifts the way we approach diagnosis and treatment as well.

Brent Robbins: Right. And this is something I’ll be talking about at APA because I think we really need to rethink what we’re even doing in clinical psychology.

The way we currently diagnose and formulate cases in psychology, psychiatry, and even social work—though social work should be an exception—is almost entirely based on symptom reduction.

The process goes like this: We identify a diagnosis, list the symptoms, and then focus on reducing those symptoms.

But let’s take anxiety as an example. Anxiety is categorized as a symptom—something to be eliminated. But what could be more human than anxiety?

If you completely eliminated anxiety, that wouldn’t be a psychiatric success—you would be left with something inhuman.

I write about this in my book—if you put someone on anti-anxiety medication, for example, it doesn’t just reduce their anxiety. It also diminishes their capacity for empathy. Emotions are not isolated—they serve multiple functions. So when you suppress one, you suppress others as well.

This is why we need to move away from the idea that therapy is about reducing symptoms and instead shift toward expanding a person’s possibilities for being in the world.

Here, I have to give credit to Medard Boss, one of the earliest existential psychiatrists who was influenced by Heidegger. He argued that the goal of psychiatry shouldn’t be to eliminate symptoms but to expand a person’s potentiality.

Because when you focus on reducing something, you’re narrowing a person’s possibilities. You’re taking something away. But therapy should be about expansion—helping people live more fully, not simply making them less symptomatic.

This is the kind of paradigm shift I’d love to see happen.

 

Karter: And part of that shift involves expanding what we diagnose—moving beyond just individuals to the systems that produce distress in the first place.

Brent Robbins: Yes, exactly.

Right now, our diagnostic system is structured in a way that forces us to locate pathology inside the individual—even when we know that the real problem is relational or systemic.

Take couples therapy, for example. If a couple comes in for therapy, billing requirements force the therapist to diagnose one of the individuals.

But anyone trained in couples therapy knows—you’re not treating an individual, you’re treating the couple. The relationship itself is the thing in need of healing.

So why don’t we have diagnostic categories for couples? Why don’t we recognize dysfunctional family systems in our diagnostic manuals?

The same logic applies on a larger scale.

If we acknowledge that families can be pathological, why stop there? Why don’t we have ways to diagnose psychopathogenic neighborhoods? Toxic workplaces? Harmful corporations? Pathological nations?

We have no conceptual tools for thinking about these things in psychiatry or psychology. And because we don’t label them, they remain invisible.

If we don’t create a language for these systemic harms, they will continue to be ignored. And when they’re ignored, the mental health system will continue to collude with the scapegoating we talked about earlier—placing the burden of suffering on individuals rather than addressing the structures that create that suffering in the first place.

This is something I hope to see real movement on in the coming years.

 

Karter: Brent, I have to admit, even asking this question feels impossible. And yet, here we are. You’ve spent your career helping us see how our culture is built around an aversion to death—how we scramble to keep it at arm’s length, to explain it away, to turn from it instead of toward it. And now, in these past months, you’ve been faced with the thing itself.

I wonder if you could share what that experience has been like—what it’s been like to meet this moment, not just as an existential psychologist and theorist, but as you. A person. A husband, a father, a friend. What has it meant to face this reality, not just intellectually, but personally?

Brent Robbins: Yeah. This has been a profoundly transformative experience.

I’ll never forget the date—October 21st.

I had been experiencing pain under my rib cage, some unusual changes in my bowel movements and urine, and then I noticed my skin was becoming jaundiced—turning yellow. Seeing those symptoms together, I suspected it could be something related to my liver, so I went to my doctor.

Things moved quickly after that. I ended up in the ER, where they did a CT scan. Within two hours, the doctor came back and told me, very frankly, that I had a large mass on my pancreas.

He didn’t hedge. He said, “Given the size of it and the way it’s growing, this is almost certainly pancreatic cancer.”

He told me they would still need to do a biopsy, that there was a chance it could be something else—but that I should prepare myself.

My wife was with me when we got the news.

Over the next few days, as more tests came back, we learned that not only did I have pancreatic cancer, but that it was stage four. It had already metastasized to my liver.

If you’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, this is one of the worst you can get in terms of prognosis.

When I met with my oncologist for the first time, she told me, very directly:

“There is no cure for this cancer.”

They could offer chemotherapy, but only as palliative care. The treatment would be aimed at prolonging my life for a time, maybe improving my quality of life by shrinking the tumors temporarily—but ultimately, the cancer would win.

I spent a week in the hospital, undergoing tests—waiting, thinking. They had to do a biopsy. They also had to place a stent to clear a bile duct that had become blocked. So I had a lot of time to just lie there and think.

And there’s no way to overstate it—news like this radically changes your relationship to life.

But at the same time—and this is what I find interesting—two things have really stood out to me.

The first is that all of my work in existential psychology—everything I’ve studied, taught, and written about—prepared me for this moment.

I’ve never approached my work as just an intellectual exercise. The ideas I write about—mortality, meaning, the confrontation with death—these have always felt deeply personal to me.

And now, in the moment where it matters most, I can honestly say that all of that preparation paid off.

Even in the hospital, receiving the worst possible news, I felt a certain equanimity—an acceptance that even surprised me.

I didn’t follow the Kübler-Ross model. I didn’t experience denial. The thought that came to me was simple: “Okay. I’m going to die. You don’t survive this. It’s just a matter of time.”

And then, I moved immediately into very practical concerns.

“Are my wife and kids going to be financially secure? Will they be okay?”

“Can I keep teaching my classes while I’m undergoing chemotherapy?”

I asked direct questions right away—hard questions. And within a few weeks, I had worked through most of them. I coordinated with my department chair and HR to figure out how to keep teaching, and I was relieved to find that we have strong insurance policies in place to take care of my wife and kids when I’m gone.

Once those practical concerns were settled, something unexpected happened.

I found myself overwhelmed by an outpouring of love—from so many people.

And I don’t just mean my immediate family or close friends. People I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out.

An ex-girlfriend’s sister—someone I barely knew, who just happened to be friends with me on Facebook—wrote me a long letter about how much I had meant to her when I was twenty years old.

I’ve received so many letters, emails, phone calls. I’ve reconnected with old friends. Everywhere I turn, I’m met with love.

And I’ve realized: If I had just died suddenly—if I had a heart attack and dropped dead—I would have missed this.

I wouldn’t have had the chance to hear from all these people, to know the impact I had on them.

So in the midst of receiving this terrible news, I have also been given this beautiful opportunity—to witness the love that surrounds me.

It’s been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

And it’s not just about other people—it’s also transformed my relationship with my wife.

I remember, when we were in the hospital, I looked at her and said, “I don’t want this to pull us apart. I want this to bring us closer.”

And it has.

We are more intimate, more affectionate, and closer now than we’ve ever been in all our years of marriage.

The second thing I’ve noticed—and this is difficult to describe without sounding trivial—is how profoundly alive everything has become.

Little things feel utterly significant.

A sunset. The leaves changing in the fall. The first snowfall of the season.

I live in Pennsylvania, and I looked outside today and saw the snow falling—and it was beautiful.

But what made it even more beautiful was the realization that this could be my last winter. Given my prognosis, if I live beyond a year, I’ll be beating the odds.

So I look out at the snow, and I think: This might be the last time I see this.

And that thought doesn’t make me despair—it makes the experience richer.

So here I am, facing what should be the worst experience of my life, and yet I am having some of the most joyful moments I have ever had.

This is the paradox I’ve spent my whole career trying to articulate:

We spend our lives fearing death, believing it to be the ultimate horror.

But when we truly face it—when we look it in the eye—it gives birth to the deepest joy and the most profound love we can experience.

I’ve spent years writing about this academically, but now, I know it’s true.

Because I’m living it.

 

Karter: I just want to take a moment to say thank you—for being so open, for sharing these deeply personal aspects of what it’s been like to receive this news and to live within the reality of it.

It strikes me that everything you’ve been saying is, in some profound way, a validation of the work and ideas you’ve been exploring throughout your career.

If we could create a culture—or, to be a little less ambitious, even just a field of psychology—that could truly make peace with our existential condition, that could look directly at it rather than turning away, it might change everything.

Because when we do that—when we allow ourselves to face finitude—it doesn’t shrink life, it expands it. It opens up a way of knowing ourselves and the world that creates the conditions for love. For joy. For gratitude. It gives us a sense that our smallness—our brief existence on this spinning rock—isn’t just insignificant, but deeply meaningful in its very limits.

Brent Robbins: Yeah, absolutely.

And yet, there’s always this danger of it sounding trivial. Because culturally, we’ve trivialized love.

We’ve sentimentalized it, reduced it to clichés. But more and more over the course of my career—even long before I got sick—you know, Justin, this has become the focus of my work.

For me, it’s about what I’d call agapic love—in the classical tradition. Love that isn’t about what you get out of it. Love that isn’t transactional. It’s just caring—a deep, unconditional desire to help others flourish, simply because that’s what it means to live well.

But we live in a culture that’s so individualistic, so competitive, so built around the idea of getting ahead, that people can be deeply suspicious of that idea.

Tell someone to live that way, and they assume you have an ulterior motive. They think you’re trying to get something from them.

But I truly believe—not just as a matter of faith, but because the science backs it up—that living with that kind of orientation to the world is what allows people to flourish.

It’s not just about becoming a more virtuous person, though that’s part of it. It’s about becoming a more joyful person.

And yet, it’s surprising how resistant people can be to that idea.

I had this experience at APA once. I won’t say who it was because I don’t want to embarrass them, but it was the president of another division. We were in a meeting with other presidents from different societies, and someone started interrogating the president of Division 32—Humanistic Psychology—almost challenging her, saying, “What has humanistic psychology even done lately?”

Roxanne—who was the president at the time—handled it beautifully. She didn’t take the question too seriously, just made a joke and moved on.

But after she finished, I looked at the guy and said, “I think humanistic psychology is a hermeneutic of love.”

And I swear to God—he just turned around and walked away.

It was such a bizarre moment.

And it’s not the first time I’ve seen that kind of reaction. There are people who have a visceral aversion to this idea.

I honestly don’t fully understand it. But I suspect—I strongly suspect—it has to do with what I’ve been calling anesthetic consciousness.

Because to truly take in the idea of love—not as sentimentality, not as something soft or naïve, but as the very ground of meaning—it requires a kind of openness. And maybe that’s what’s so frightening about it.

 

Karter: It seems like this isn’t just a clinical point—it’s a cultural one too. If you numb yourself to caring deeply for others, if you take an ironic distance from things that actually matter, you don’t just shield yourself from pain—you cut yourself off from meaning. From fulfillment. From really enjoying life.

Brent Robbins: Yeah, I think part of the problem is that people have bought into this myth—this idea that happiness comes from being self-serving, from maximizing your own pleasure and material gain, even if it’s at the expense of others. That idea is so ingrained in our culture—it’s the air we breathe. It’s baked into the neoliberal mindset.

So when you say something like, actually, no, the deepest meaning in life comes from connection, it sounds profoundly countercultural. And culture has its ways of defending itself—it doesn’t just reject these ideas outright, it trivializes them. It turns love into something soft, sentimental, even contemptible. Something we’re embarrassed to talk about.

I think that’s a big problem, and I think it’s especially a problem for men. I actually have another project I’ve been working on, looking at masculinity—not just critiquing toxic masculinity, but asking, what’s the alternative? But maybe that’s a conversation for another time.

 

Karter: Yeah, I know I’ve kept you for a couple of hours now, and there’s still so much more we could talk about. But I want to give you space—are there any final thoughts you want to share? Any threads we haven’t pulled together yet?

Brent Robbins: You know, I hope that through this conversation, people can start to see how all of these different areas of my work—phenomenology, psychiatry, existential psychology, metabletics—actually connect.

From the outside, if you just look at my CV, it might seem like I’ve been studying a bunch of unrelated things. But to me, they’ve always been deeply intertwined.

I study the history of psychiatry because I believe we can’t make sense of where we are now unless we understand how we got here. You can’t undo a system’s mistakes if you don’t recognize their origins. It’s that old saying—those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

But at the heart of everything I do, at the very center, is an ethical concern—a commitment to preserving human dignity. And what I believe reveals human dignity, what allows us to see the irreplaceable, non-fungible preciousness of another person, is exactly what I’ve been calling love. Not love in a sentimental, greeting-card way. Love as a way of seeing. Love as an orientation to the world.

And that brings me right back to the very first question you asked me—back to my mom.

“All real living is meeting.”

That was her lesson, long before it became mine. And here I am, at 54 years old, facing the end of my life, and I can tell you—she was right.

Looking back, I can say with certainty that making this my priority—making meeting people, truly seeing them, the center of my work and my life—was the best possible choice I could have made. And I am so, so grateful that she set me on that path.

Karter: You’ve spent a lifetime writing a million pages of footnotes on those five words.

Brent Robbins: Yeah. I guess I’ll end on that note.

Karter: That’s a beautiful full circle. Thank you, Brent.

 

 

 

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