Louis Hoffman, PhD

Hoffman works in private practice and nonprofit leadership, serving as an adjunct faculty member and clinical supervisor at the University of Denver.

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

I am excited to begin this new journey as editor of The Humanistic Psychologist. Since 2007, I have been consistently involved in leadership roles in humanistic organizations, including currently serving as the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Humanistic Counseling and Psychological Association and providing oversight for its International Existential and Humanistic Archives. After 19 years in full-time academia, I transitioned in 2019 to private practice, writing, editing, and nonprofit leadership while continuing to teach and supervise part-time at the University of Denver.

Over the past 20 years, I have been involved with publishing as an author and editor of books as well as serving in editorial roles with multiple book publishers. My writing credits include editing the forthcoming APA Handbook of Humanistic and Existential Psychology and completing two other volumes to be published by APA Books, one accompanied by a video from APA Videos. I have also served on various journal editorial boards, and I am currently serving as the senior international editor for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and on the editorial board of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. My own scholarship has focused on existential–humanistic psychotherapy, theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology, religious and spiritual abuse, social justice, empathy, and poetry and healing. Drawing from the ideas of Nietzsche, I write because it is who I am: a writer. Engagement with writing and scholarship is essential to my way of being. It is meaningful to me to bring this valued part of my life to the editor role at The Humanistic Psychologist.

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

It is an important time for humanistic psychology and its mission of humanizing the field of psychology and the world. Given advancing technology, increasing global conflict, growing polarization, and rising frequency of hate incidents, it is critical that psychology address these issues in the therapy room and through engagement with society at large. A key priority for me as the editor of The Humanistic Psychologist will be engaging scholarship with consistent consideration of praxis.

Humanistic scholarship is diverse, including philosophical, theoretical, literary, and research contributions. Each of these ways of knowing and pursuing knowledge informs the others. This unique integration of different forms of scholarship reflects the rich epistemological pluralism that is foundational to the humanistic tradition. The Humanistic Psychologist will continue to embrace these different approaches to scholarship while bringing them into conversation with each other.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now?

It is critical for scholarship to address what is transpiring in the contemporary world. In recent years, the growing monoculture in professional psychology has been gaining increased attention. Monoculture has, to the detriment of the field, stifled growth, limited the breadth of training, and hampered the ability of professional psychology to meet the needs of the diverse consumers of mental health. Humanistic psychology has long served as a corrective to the narrow focus of psychology, counterbalancing trends toward the medicalization of psychology (i.e., reliance on the medical model), the objectification of individuals with psychological difficulties, and myopic understandings of psychological science.

The empirical and evidence-based foundations of humanistic therapy are not well-known by many in the field. The Humanistic Psychologist provides an essential platform for publishing relevant research on humanistic psychology and clinical practice. To advance and support humanistic psychology and psychotherapy, I and the editorial team of The Humanistic Psychologist will develop special issues and seek articles that address the evidence-based foundations of humanistic therapies. Humanistic psychology has long provided philosophical depth to the field of psychology. While seeking to increase the number of research articles, I will continue to aim to publish in The Humanistic Psychologist articles clarifying and advancing the philosophical and theoretical foundations of psychology.

APA Journals is taking the lead on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in its practices and systems. How will you promote EDI as editor of the journal?

The Humanistic Psychologist has made great strides in its relevance to diversity and social justice, particularly through emphasizing that epistemological and methodological diversity need to accompany cultural diversity. Efforts to build on this success are in progress. A critical step will be to substantively and authentically diversify the editorial leadership. I will be adding multiple senior editors and senior consulting editors to guide this process. Additionally, the process of diversifying the editorial board has begun. An increasingly diverse editorial board will help assure that authors are receiving consistent feedback on issues related to EDI.

An emphasis will be placed on recruiting articles that engage EDI in substantive, innovative, and meaningful ways. To help accomplish this goal, I will be asking The Humanistic Psychologist’s senior editors and other leaders in the field to develop special issues that showcase critical psychology, liberation psychology, decolonialization efforts in psychology, and international perspectives. We invite articles that reflect socially engaged scholarship and address political, cultural, and environmental realities that affect the mental health of people today.

Explore APA Journal’s EDI initiatives.

APA Publishing is proud to support APA’s mission to promote psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives. How will your editorship further support this mission?

The understanding of psychological science must remain broad and inclusive, incorporating human science perspectives. Since its inception, The Humanistic Psychologist has been a champion of human science. When the field of psychology has gravitated toward narrow views of science or scientism, humanistic psychology has consistently been present, providing critiques. Through the years, the understanding of human science has evolved, as it should. This includes an increased emphasis on epistemological and methodological pluralism, which serves as a foundation for anti-racist, decolonial, and liberatory advances in psychological science.

Psychological science must not be removed from the people it is studying or the social context. Human science perspectives recognize that psychologists have often failed to understand and address aspects of being human because of their reliance on natural science methods. This failure has often stemmed from the field’s dependence on reductive methods that objectify and simplify aspects of human nature that are better elucidated from other ways of knowing. Humanistic psychology provides a space for dialogue across ways of knowing, including quantitative, qualitative, philosophical, literary, indigenous, spiritual, and cultural ways of knowing. We at The Humanistic Psychologist invite articles embracing epistemological humility and pluralism that honor the complexity of what it means to be human.