Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies

Philosophical Positions on Humanism, Posthumanism and Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies

We are inviting manuscript submissions for a special issue of PCEP Journal on "Philosophical Positions on Humanism, Posthumanism and Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies."

Humanistic psychotherapy, particularly in its person-centered tradition, has particularly been grounded in a relational ontology of the human subject. Person-centered psychotherapy remains a fundamental human-to-human practice and a clearly humanistic approach. Posthumanism challenges these assumptions by decentering the human subject and "human exceptionalism" is reframing agency as distributed across human and non-human assemblages.

We invite papers that can engage, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Humanism and the person-centered philosophical tradition
• Re-examining person-centered psychotherapy in light of posthumanist critiques
• The ontological status of the "person" in contemporary psychotherapy
• Human–animal relationality and the ethics of animal-assisted therapy
• AI companions, chatbots, and the reconfiguration of therapeutic presence
• Agency in therapeutic assemblages (human–animal–machine systems)
• Ethical, philosophical and clinical implications of posthuman psychotherapy
• The role of technology in reshaping concepts in person-centered psychotherapy
• Comparative epistemologies and research in humanist and posthumanist clinical fields