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.

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