Psychotherapy, Spirituality, and Democratic Socialism: A Conversation with Frank Gruba-McCallister

Frank Gruba-McCallister is a clinical psychologist, educator, and scholar whose career spans more than three decades of teaching and academic leadership. 

He served as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Adler University, where he helped to reorient the institution’s mission toward training socially responsible practitioners. His leadership and curricular reforms contributed to Adler’s doctoral program receiving the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs Award for Innovative Practices in Graduate Education in 2007. He has also taught at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and worked as a clinician in both medical settings and private practice.

Throughout his career, Dr. Gruba-McCallister has been a steady voice at the intersection of critical psychology, humanistic and existential thought, and spiritual inquiry. He is the author of Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering, a book that examines how internalized oppression and ideological mystification compound human suffering and how healing demands a deep and sometimes painful confrontation with illusions.

His newest book, Radical Healing: No Wellness Without Justice, published by University Professors Press, draws from liberation theology, critical theory, existential psychology, and transpersonal thought to explore the structural and spiritual roots of suffering. At its core is a call to restore moral responsibility, to reclaim compassion and justice as central to any meaningful model of care, and to invite those who seek to heal others to do so with humility, courage, and radical honesty.

In our conversation, we discuss the origins of this work, the crises that shape our current moment, and what it might mean to envision psychotherapy as both a spiritual and political act.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Justin Karter: Let’s begin with your own story. What first drew you to psychology, I guess, broadly as a field, and what were some of your early experiences, whether they were personal, professional, or spiritual, that shaped your sense of what psychotherapy is and what it could be?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Well, you know, I think in line with what so much research has shown, many people go into psychology from a troubled background. That was certainly true for me. Both of my parents dealt with psychological issues, my father with addiction as well. I ended up really having, even from an early age, problems with what you might call a mood disorder. Part of it was basically trying to make sense out of my own experience.

Somehow, I ended up considering psychology. That’s what I then decided to major in when I went to college. However, when I took my first psychology course, I was not happy because it seemed overly scientific to me. I sometimes describe it as psychology makes the trivial important and the important trivial. I really felt ambivalent, and I’ve always been, you might call, an ambivalent psychologist.

I stuck with it because I was a blue-collar boy. Even though I took as many philosophy courses as psychology, I knew that was not going to be a way to make a living. I went to graduate school. I studied with somebody who was more humanistically oriented. When I was in college, I was introduced to existential thought, which had a profoundly impactful effect on me. However, when I completed my first internship, I realized I wanted to work with individuals who were not in a traditional psychiatric setting.

I did three of my, what they called, rotations with people who were either dealing with medical issues or neurological issues. A significant portion of my work was in what you might call health psychology. What it taught me is that often, people experiencing suffering are, in fact, ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances. That helped me to understand that it’s important not to pathologize people who are in distress. That became a theme for me.

Even though I was in a medical setting, I didn’t believe in the medical model. In fact, I often saw the medical model as exacerbating people’s problems rather than recognizing that they are simply trying to come to terms with extreme circumstances and doing the best they can with what they are faced with.

The other thing that shaped me was that, very early on, I discovered Erich Fromm. To me, he really opened my eyes to so many things. He was trained as an analyst, but he was also a sociologist. But the most important thing is that he was trying to integrate Marx with psychology. That appealed to me, having grown up as a blue-collar person.

Justin Karter: Yeah, Fromm had a significant influence on me as well, so I appreciate that connection. I’m placing you in time here. In college, you’re trying to move toward psychology because you’re trying to make sense of a little bit of your family, your own development, but you’re also exploring philosophy. It sounds like existential thought was really helpful for you at that time. Then, when you move into psychology graduate school, you start to have this expanding critique of the field that you’ve committed to.
You’re seeing some of the pathologization, you’re resisting the medical model, and you also are building and starting to build this political critique from sort of a Marxist perspective through the Frankfurt School and Fromm.

Were you sort of politically active at that time as well? Can you place us in time—what was going on, and how did you start to link politics to your critique of psychotherapy and your profession?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: I think back then I was not as political, I think, because I was so focused on getting an education and making my way in life. It wasn’t until later, I think really, that I became more aware that, as a psychologist, I had an obligation—also as a citizen, you might say—that I can’t separate myself from my civic obligations to address larger issues that I saw happening in our country.

Justin Karter: In between working in health service psychology and then intentionally trying to shift Adler’s focus toward social responsibility for psychologists, something shifted. What happened during that time that led you to see social responsibility as being such an imperative part of the process of developing clinicians?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Well, I think the groundwork, again, was laid by the idea that I saw many people who didn’t have pathology, but they were still diagnosed as if they had a pathology, like a reactive depression—whatever that is. In other words, you’re depressed because you have a good reason to be. It’s like, you know.

However, upon closer examination, I noticed that specific individuals were more susceptible to these types of issues. For example, I became more aware of how poverty puts people more at risk and how a capitalist ideology distorts our understanding of poverty, because we hold people who are poor responsible for their poverty, as if people, you know, want to be poor.

I began to see how systemic inequalities put people at risk, or what are now referred to as social determinants of health. But when you reflect on your education and training, which I did, I realized that nobody talked about those things. It was completely absent.

Justin Karter: So that when you stepped into a leadership role at a doctoral program, you very consciously wanted to shift the emphasis, and shift the training toward being able to prepare psychologists to think along these lines—to think about marginalization, to think about oppression, to think about ideology and the shaping of the psyche. How did that go? Because PhD programs are traditionally set up to produce researchers, and many focus on manualized treatments, they tend to be apolitical and placed in a scientific, objective framework. In contrast, PsyD programs typically focus on producing clinicians rather than emphasizing scholarship. I know these are characterizations that aren’t always true, but this is the sort of stereotype. What limitations did you see in these models that you were moving into? What kind of pushback did you get on trying to change the model?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Well, one of the advantages I had was I was at Adler, and at least in its mission it had a commitment to social justice. What I thought was that we need to revise the curriculum completely.

Justin Karter: Can you say something about what kind of psychologist the curriculum was set up to produce that needed to be changed?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: A traditional psychologist. What I mean by that is fixation on individualism. The idea is that we’re only going to focus on the person, even though we talk about the person as being embedded in contexts; we don’t really give any serious attention to those contexts. If there’s something wrong with you—and almost always there is something wrong with you—it’s something inside of you, and so we have to fix whatever’s inside of you, even though that means putting you back in the situation that created your misery.

That’s what we were doing: creating people who felt that they were to blame, blaming the victim, and saying just fix yourself and everything will be okay, even though you live in a crappy neighborhood, even though you can’t find a job, even though people are discriminating against you. Maybe it’s that your beliefs are dysfunctional, or perhaps it’s because you’re developmentally arrested—whatever the hell that means.

Most psychology is that; it really is. The curriculum is loaded that way. I didn’t want courses to be called psychopathology. Then I wanted there to be an introductory course that talked about what are the assumptions we make about what is health and illness. Before you even talk about what an illness is, how do our assumptions inform that?

I wanted there to be a course on primary prevention and the public health model. The public health model has done more to advance the well-being of people than the medical model, as it recognizes the profound impact of the environment on individuals. This is particularly important. Human beings have the most protracted period of dependency of any species. What that means is that human beings are more vulnerable to the adequacy of their material and social environment than any other species. What that means is that the accident of birth dictates, for most people, the course of the rest of their lives.

Justin Karter: As you reoriented the clinical psychology training program to be more socially oriented and context- and environmentally focused, did students react to that? How did things start to change? What was the process like?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: The biggest challenge was I could get the faculty to say, you know, that’s an excellent idea, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, because they weren’t trained that way.

Part of what I had to do was to bring in experts from critical psychology and conduct in-services. That helped.
Now, with students, it was a mixed bag. To some extent, it wasn’t bad because that’s how Adler, you might say, advertised itself, and so students said, well, that’s what I’m looking for. However, some students came from a privileged background, and I don’t think they always bought into it. Some even openly resisted it and said, How is this going to get me a job? How will this help me secure an internship? It’s an uphill battle.

Justin Karter: You’re framing it such that you were also embracing disillusionment at some point—that the needle didn’t move maybe as much as you had hoped—and you were reflecting on some of the barriers to moving the field in this direction.

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Absolutely. Part of that—there are two parts of that, really. One is when I was working in rehab, and it was mostly with older adults, and they had had strokes and neurological problems and amputations, some really very significant loss. At some point, you’re dealing with immense suffering, but suffering that you can’t remove.

Suffering is something that people have to do. At some point, when I was there, I asked myself, Am I really doing well with these people? Am I really meeting them where they are? I didn’t think I was. I decided I’m going to study suffering.

Suffering has been a preoccupation of mine since a very early age. I said, well, I’ll start reading whatever psychology has written about suffering. Well, that didn’t take very long. What I did find was something like existential thought. I had to go somewhere else.

One of the areas I explored was religion and spirituality. Religion is, in many ways, a response to the question of why life is so painful. Why is it so hard? That’s sometimes called the soteriological function of religion, which started in what’s called the Axial Age, when all the great religious traditions really began. That was because human beings were becoming more self-reflective, and so they were asking themselves questions like, Why am I suffering? Why is life so hard? What’s going to happen after I die?

The soteriological function of religion is a recognition of the pain of existence with the belief that suffering is redemptive.

Justin Karter: I think some of our listeners will be familiar with the critical psychology critique of psychology as a discipline and also psychotherapy, reinforcing capitalist ideology or the neoliberal self, or the funding structures, and all of these things that we’ve talked about.

But it’s maybe less common to also pair that critique with what you, in Radical Healing, really elaborate on: spirituality as an essential part of becoming a healer through contemplative practice, not explicitly any religion—you draw from wisdom traditions.

I wonder if you could elaborate on how you brought those pieces together. I guess, if Marx influences Fromm, and Marx says religion is the opium of the masses, you’re moving away from that political critique of religion and embracing a way of using religion to actually promote a form of healing that is politically revolutionary in some way. Can you say more about how you bring those things together?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Let’s start with Marx for a minute. Marx was not against spirituality per se, but he was against religion as an institution because we can see one way that religion connects to politics is not very good.

For example, it was used to justify and support colonization, right? We see it in white Christian nationalism—not a good picture. We must be cautious, recognizing that there may be a connection between religion and spirituality, but they’re not the same.

Religion, to me, is more driven by doctrine. In other words, you have to subscribe to a creed. Spirituality, for me, is the essence of what we call the perennial philosophy. That is, all the mystical traditions throughout time and across religious traditions preach the same two values: compassion and justice.

Mystics always get in trouble. They’re troublemakers. The Buddha was a critic of his social circumstances. I mean, Jesus—I mean, come on. I mean, Jesus was crucified because he was rattling the status quo, because he had this idea of preferential option for the poor.

If you have that insight, if you have that deep connection to your fellow human beings, then you’re naturally going to object to oppression. You’re naturally going to object to violence. You’re naturally going to object to exploitation. But that contemplative tradition is also wedded to the prophetic. That’s where justice comes into play, which is, it’s not enough to connect with the suffering of the masses. You have to speak out vocally, openly, strongly against injustice.

Justin Karter: I’m thinking about some psychologists who might be on board with the political critique, but they might ask, How do I address this in the room? Isn’t that beyond the scope of what I’m able to do? I’m not a social worker. I’m not a public health worker. Maybe I can be politically active, but I don’t bring that into the session, right? Maybe that’s work I do outside.

In your book, you make the case that this kind of political theory should inform psychotherapy. You even developed some integrative frameworks for how to conduct an assessment from a radical healing perspective. Can you respond to that question from clinicians and also walk us through, practically, how this gets implemented in the room?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Yeah, sure. The big shift that the practitioner has to make is to understand that the vast amount of suffering that people they are working with experience is based on an ideology.

That ideology is capitalism. Capitalism is the disease because it is a hegemony. In other words, it’s an all-encompassing worldview and is presented to us as common sense, as reality, as the way things are, because that then prevents people from questioning it. That also maintains the status quo, keeping those in power in power and those who are privileged, privileged.

Narcissism is a big problem in our society. Why? Because it’s a value of capitalism: selfish, competitive, self-interested—that’s the way to be. We have made everything commodified. Healthcare is commodified. Relationships are commodified. Everything’s for sale. Why? That’s capitalism.

Consider most of the problems people face. It all goes back to capitalism and the bill of goods that they’ve been sold. That’s false. Like, happiness is what matters in life. How can I know how to be happy? Take a drug, buy a new car, go to therapy, but no matter what, you’re going to pay if you want to be happy. Happiness is not the goal of life. It’s a side effect of pursuing other things that are important and meaningful.

When therapists say that’s not within my purview, I think they’re delusional. I think they’re complicit with capitalism. I reject that outright.

Justin Karter: To be clear, it’s because you’re saying that when people come into the room, whatever symptoms they’re presenting with are tangled up in this worldview that’s sort of unquestioned, that informs the whole way that they show up in the world—what they value, how they approach relationships, how they think about their own worth.

This sort of invisible ideology informs all of that. So you really can’t talk about any particular symptom or any “self-esteem” or boundary, or any of the sort of therapy lingo, without also talking about the kind of cultural landscape in which these ideas about what it means to be a person are reinforced all the time.

This is where you make the connection to democratic socialism, right? I’ll let you make the case for why democratic socialism is sort of necessary for improving well-being.

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Democratic socialism—well, let’s talk about it from a Marxist point of view. Class is not based on how much money you make. Class is based on what your role is in the production system.

There are two roles in capitalism: employer and employee. Three percent of the American population are employers; ninety-seven percent are employees. What is the relationship between employers and employees? It’s exploitative because employers are trying to extract as much work as possible from employees at the lowest possible wage. They control what is produced. They determine the amount charged for it. They control where it’s sold. They control most of the profit.

If you’re an employee, how much say-so do you have? Zero. Capitalism is undemocratic.

It’s even undemocratic now because money has a dominant influence on politics. What socialism does is remove greed and the profit motive from the economy through worker cooperatives, for example, where workers have a role in running the company. They have a role in what they get paid, and they have a role in taking ownership of what, by rights, they have created.

Another thing is the universal basic income. Everybody needs a certain amount of money to live. What’s the argument for that? Consider the income inequality prevalent in our country. The disparity in wealth is staggering. There’s no justification that one can make for that.

Another key point is that, as Marx suggested, socialism is intended to create a society that fosters the maximum flourishing and development of all its members. I agree with that. That’s what justice is.

That means free healthcare, free education, and free childcare. We create a society where people’s material and social needs are met, irrespective of who they are.

I believe that if there’s an ideology that’s responsible for why people are ill, you have to abolish that ideology. I’m an abolitionist. I believe in revolution, not reform.
You can’t reform capitalism. They tried during the New Deal, right? As soon as Roosevelt died, they systematically started to undo it because it was still capitalism. We need a new ideology, an ideology that supports flourishing—the optimal development and well-being of all human beings—where the accident of your birth does not dictate the course of the rest of your life, which, to me, again, is one of the most egregious forms of immorality I can imagine. I mean, children suffering just because of the circumstances under which they’re born—that staggers my mind.

What it means is that when a person comes into therapy, you don’t just look at what’s going on inside of them. You talk about what’s going on outside of them. You talk about the circumstances that they have to live with, and you validate the suffering that they experience from that because, by and large, the rest of society denies it or mystifies it by blaming them.

Consider the rhetoric surrounding individuals who are on Medicaid. You know that there are 28-year-old men who play video games and drink beer. Really? But see, that’s the myth. That’s the myth that so much of what the government spends is wasted on cheaters. The vast majority of people on Medicaid, if they don’t have it, they’re going to either get sick or die. That’s the reality that they live with every day of their lives.

Justin Karter: You write about liberation theology and liberation psychotherapy in the book, and this Freire’s notion of deideologization. I’m wondering if you could say a bit about that and how that would work in the therapy room, and what role psychotherapists have to notice or find ways of calling attention to when maybe self-blame or some presenting way of thinking about the self is caught up in this larger ideology that you’re speaking about. Then, how do you do that without imposing your own worldview or ideology on a client who may understand themselves and the world in a slightly different way? How do you navigate that tension?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: That’s a good question. It’s a tension that is inherent in psychotherapy itself.

Psychotherapy is like a dance. It always begins with a kind of radical acceptance of the person’s experience, because that’s how suffering starts. Suffering begins with what I would call mystification, which is the inability to trust one’s own experience. What you think is not what you think. What you feel is not what you feel. What the therapist is saying is, I accept what it is that you think. I accept what you feel. I’d like to hear your actual story. I want to know your narrative. I want to see the world through your eyes.

But validation is not the same as agreement. I can validate, but that doesn’t mean I say, and you’re absolutely right, right? But that’s where the tension then begins.

In the second phase of therapy, I believe it becomes a dialogue, not a monologue. What a dialogue is: I’m going to speak to my experience, and you’re going to speak to your experience. What I’m going to do is I’m going to raise things that might be a different way of thinking about it, or I’m going to ask, could it be different? Or I wonder what it might look like if it were like this, or have you ever thought about this?

This is the idea that is truly inherent in Freire’s model of critical pedagogy. He says you always start with the experience of the oppressed because the oppressed are the experts on what it means to be oppressed. What that then leads to is, what do you think you might call this—what’s happening? They say, well, sometimes I think we’re being cheated, or sometimes I think people are being unfair. Naming is the beginning of the change process. He calls that the raising of consciousness.

You’ve raised people’s consciousness because they are beginning to expand their awareness and say, Oh, is that what’s going on? You mean I can’t get a job because they’re discriminating against me. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a distinct possibility. As a matter of fact, if you were to talk about—this is where we could connect them with other people.

I mean, if you were to go to this group here, you’ll find that there are a bunch of other people who have the same experience as you. Oh, you mean other people are being discriminated against? Yeah, there are.

But then, when you say, I wonder, or could it be otherwise, you’re engaging that dialectical capacity to imagine, and that capacity for imagination, that what if—without that, we would never change—and that Freire calls enunciation, which is: can you conceive of a world that is more just? What would it look like?

That, I think, is the process of change. But there has to be tension. There has to be—clients sometimes have to see, like, there’s something weird with you. You don’t look at the world the way I do. That’s disturbing.

Well, it’s supposed to be disturbing because there’s no waking up without shaking up. The therapist has to shake up, just like an educator, and I have to shake up.

Justin Karter: There’s a critique you can hear from the right, that bringing social justice language, the way that it gets kind of pejoratively labeled, into psychotherapy is a way of convincing people of their victimhood and producing passivity and having people blame systems and not take ownership of their lives. It sounds like—and I want to draw attention to that critique because it’s something to allow you to say how this is not that.

Because you seem to be speaking about a process of empowerment, actually, one of seeing areas in which we can engage with the world in which to change it. But, yeah, could you speak to that critique of this movement in the field?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: Sure. I mean, that again, I think, is because capitalism has a very distorted idea of freedom and responsibility—a contradictory idea. On the one hand, they say, look how free you are.

Freedom is great. But they’re talking about freedom as freedom from, which is, don’t tread on me, right? Don’t tread on me. The more options I have, the freer I am. That’s not freedom. Freedom is the ability to exercise a degree of agency. It’s not just having options. It’s the ability to say, ‘I choose this, not that.’

When you talk to people about empowerment, if they’re a victim, it defeats the whole idea of change being possible because they’ve coalesced their identity around being a victim. I’ve worked with many people like that, where they say, yeah, I’m this way because I had terrible parents, or I didn’t have the proper breaks, right?

What you’re doing in that is you’re evading, again, confronting the discomfort and the suffering that comes with reexamining your worldview. I, again, as a therapist, can be empathic with that because that’s a terrifying thing. But I also have to hold forth the idea that it’s worth the effort. It’s worth the effort. I know it’s painful. I know it’s scary, but there are rewards to doing that.

What I want people to do is understand that people who are in therapy tend to avoid the things they have control over and want to have control over things they don’t have control over. That’s so common because they can’t distinguish between the two.

I call that the distinction between two forms of suffering. The first form of suffering is just suffering—what the Buddha talked about, which is suffering due to transience. You’re going to get old. You’re going to get sick. You’re going to die. Or what Frankl calls the tragic triad: you’re finite, you’re fallible, you’re mortal.

But if you believe that you shouldn’t suffer at all, which some people think—well, an astonishing number of people believe—that suffering is always bad, you meet necessary suffering with resistance, right?

Well, the problem with that is it’s very self-defeating because you’re suffering because you’re suffering. Well, how’s that working out for you, right? You’re piling on.

You have to get people to understand that there are two ways that people suffer. There’s the suffering you have to do, and there’s suffering that you choose to do. The suffering you must endure is met with openness. The suffering that you choose to do, you critically examine and decide whether you want to do something different.

That’s how I respond to these fallacies that you were talking about. But that’s a big part of healing—making that distinction between the two forms of suffering.

Justin Karter: We’re coming to the end of time, so maybe for a final question, I’d like to allow you to speak to young people who are interested in becoming healers of some sort. Perhaps they’re aware of psychology, medicine, maybe even seminary—different ways of pursuing being an agent in the world that can help people make sense of what’s going on in their lives and respond to it differently.

Would you advise people to pursue a doctorate in counseling or clinical psychology? Would you advise people to explore wisdom traditions or spiritual traditions to study philosophy? You’re talking to an 18-year-old looking at starting university—what might you say to them about the type of paths that are available to them, and what would be most beneficial?

Frank Gruba-McCallister: I would say that any of those paths are fine as long as they’re open to looking at the other ones.

To me, let’s say you’re going into psychology. After a while, I don’t know why you bother reading any more psychology. It’s just yadi, yadi, yada, you know. But what you should be reading is history, poetry, novels, sociology, and public health.

First advice is, don’t narrow yourself down. Realize that there are all these different facets of human beings, and how enriched your understanding of them will be if you are open to other ways that people have tried to understand them. That’s number one.

Number two, if you want to be a healer, you have to deal productively with your woundedness because you probably are, in some way, shape, or form. You’re going to have to deal with your own crap in a way that you can translate it into something transformative.

Ultimately, you must understand that healing is a spiritual vocation, which means that the ultimate source of healing comes from something greater than yourself. That you are a channel or an instrument of something bigger, and that that is the great power that comes with healing—that we’re a servant of that.

Now, you might call it a servant of God for some people. You might call it a servant of moral imperatives—whatever it may be—but that you represent something bigger than you, what Tillich calls an ultimate concern. Something for which you’re willing to give everything and which, in return, promises true fulfillment, because that’s the greatest longing that all human beings have. That’s what healing ultimately is. I would say those three things.

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