What Psychology Ought to Be: Lessons with Brent Robbins

Introduction

I have the immense privilege of speaking about someone who has not only shaped my academic journey but also profoundly influenced my understanding of what psychology (and indeed what life) ought to be. That person is Dr. Brent Dean Robbins. Working alongside Brent as a mentee, student, and collaborator over the past 4 years has been a transformative experience. Today, I want to honor that impact by sharing reflections on his academic and pedagogic style, the generous way he mentors, and the lessons he offers us about the essential role of emotion (and of love) in psychology.

What Brent Teaches About Psychology

Brent’s work is animated by one central, courageous question: What does it mean to live a good life? Moreover, not just in the abstract but in the thick of suffering, amidst the inevitable trauma, grief, and uncertainty of being human. He challenges us to confront the implicit notions of normativity that guide our work, urging psychology to be not merely a field concerned with pathology, but a practice rooted in meaning, joy, love, and connection (Robbins, 2008). In Brent’s vision, psychology ought to be a guide for flourishing, a companion to suffering, and a steward for the sacredness of human life.

His scholarship, mentorship, and clinical philosophy reflect an unwavering commitment to existential honesty and moral imagination. Brent invites us to resist the reduction of persons to symptoms, diagnoses, or data points and instead to recognize the poetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of their existence (Robbins, 2003b, 2015, 2018). He sees therapeutic work not just as treatment but also as an ethical encounter, a space where dignity is restored, agency is honored, and life’s deepest questions are allowed to unfold. For Brent, to practice psychology is to engage in a profoundly human art, one that must always remain attuned to the complexity, fragility, and beauty of being alive.

Anesthetic Consciousness

One of the most important lessons I have learned from Brent is the centrality of death in understanding life. In modern Western society, death has been largely scrubbed from daily experience, often hidden away in institutions, denied in language, and bypassed in cultural rituals (Robbins, 2018). This avoidance gives rise to what Brent calls an “anesthetic consciousness” (Robbins, 2018 p. 5), a condition in which we are numbed to the very realities that make life meaningful. In this dulled state, we turn people, the natural world, even ourselves into objects to be manipulated, optimized, controlled, or discarded. This dissociation from mortality feeds alienation, undermines empathy, and sustains systems of exploitation, violence, and shallow consumption.

Brent points us to a different path, one that is illuminated by the wisdom of indigenous and ancestral traditions that do not exile death but rather fold it into the rhythms of daily life (Robbins, 2018). In these worldviews, death is not an adversary to be conquered but a sacred teacher to be honored. Rituals of mourning and remembrance, practices of ancestor veneration, and the embrace of impermanence all serve as portals to a deeper engagement with life’s mysteries (Robbins, 2018). Brent challenges us to dismantle anesthetic consciousness by facing death not as a morbid fixation but as a spiritual imperative. In doing so, we are invited to live more fully, to love more deeply, and to root ourselves again in the relational, embodied, and sacred fabric of existence.

The Phenomenology of Joy: A Dialectic Between Light and Dark

Perhaps Brent’s most beautiful and quietly radical contribution to psychology is his articulation (and research) of joy, not as a fleeting pleasure or the sparkly optimism of self-help culture, but as a profound existential phenomenon, deeply rooted in the full experience of being alive (Robbins, 2006; 2003a, 2003b, 2021; Robbins et al., 2024). In this view, joy is not something we chase or manufacture; it is something that reveals itself when we are fully present with the world. It emerges not from the avoidance of suffering, but from a wholehearted engagement with life’s intensity (its sorrow, beauty, longing, and mystery). Joy is not the opposite of grief; it is grief’s companion. The more deeply we allow ourselves to feel loss, the more available we are to the glimmers of joy that arise not in spite of it, but in combination with it.

In his research and his presence alike, Brent teaches that joy is a lived, embodied phenomenon (Robbins, et al., 2024). It arises through the integration of mind, body, and spirit (not as a theoretical ideal), but as a real, sensory, relational encounter with the world (Robbins, 2003a, 2003b, 2006, 2021). Joy might come in the stillness of sitting beside a dying loved one, or in the laughter that erupts in the wake of shared pain. It might emerge in nature (in the hush of snowfall, in the riot of springtime blooms, or in the sacred quiet between two people who truly see each other (whatever that may be)). As I write this, joy arises gently from the warmth of my cat, Nora, curled in my lap, her purring a steady rhythm of healing. Just beyond the window, the Columbia River glimmers beneath the quiet beauty of the Wenatchee Mountains. For Brent, joy is often (or I might even say always) relational. It unfolds not in isolation, but in communion (with others, with the earth, with the sacred—maybe they are all one). It is a disclosure of being, a moment when the veil thins and we catch a glimpse of something more: a sense that existence itself has meaning, that we are connected, that we are held (Robbins, 2006, 2021; Robbins et al., 2024).

This understanding of joy radically reframes the therapeutic endeavor/encounter. While mainstream clinical discourse often centers symptom reduction and functional outcomes, Brent insists that therapy must also make space for reverence, for beauty, for joy (Robbins, 2003a, 2003b, 2021). He invites us to see therapy not only as a response to pathology but also as a sanctuary where the full range of human experience can be honored. Joy, in this context, is not a luxury or an afterthought but an ethical necessity. It reminds us what we are here for. It reorients us toward what matters. Even—especially—in the shadow of despair, joy can be cultivated. Brent’s psychology resists the binary of cure and illness; he embraces the paradox that healing often involves staying with pain long enough for joy to break through. This joy is not lighthearted escapism but bears the imprint of survival. It teaches us that the task of therapy is not merely to restore functioning, but to restore wonder.

Hermeneutics of Love and Brent’s Dialectical Style

At the heart of Brent’s scholarship (and his way of being) is a hermeneutics of love (Robbins, 2015). In a field that has long privileged detached objectivity and clinical distance, Brent offers a radical reorientation: interpretation as an act of care, inquiry as a gesture of love. A hermeneutics of love does not approach the other (whether a text, a person, or an idea) as a problem to be solved or a concept to be mastered, but as a mystery to be reverently encountered (Robbins, 2015). This orientation refuses domination or reduction. It listens with the heart as well as the mind. It seeks to understand, not to control. Brent reads, thinks, teaches, and critiques with this ethic of generosity, humility, and relational presence.

Brent is profoundly dialectical, not only in method but in spirit. He holds contradiction with grace: faith and skepticism, joy and grief, critique and affirmation. His critiques are never meant to dismantle for the sake of dominance or cleverness; they are offered in good faith, as invitations to dialogue, as acts of intimacy with ideas and with people. In a cultural moment increasingly marked by polarization, cynicism, and intellectual one-upmanship, Brent models another way. He shows that it is possible to be rigorous without rigidity, incisive without cruelty, and brilliant without being arrogant. He embodies the kind of scholar (and the kind of human being) who reminds us that love is not separate from the life of the mind. It is what gives it meaning. A hermeneutics of love, then, is not simply an interpretive stance but an existential commitment: (at the very least attempt) to see others clearly, to honor their complexity, and to remain open to transformation in the process.

His Generosity

Brent’s intellectual and relational generosity (his openness of interpretation, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing) allows him to serve as a bridge between diverse and often siloed domains: psychology, philosophy, cosmology, indigenous wisdom, theology, phenomenology, aesthetics, and spirituality. He resists the imposition of rigid categories, instead cultivating an ethic of integration. Brent weaves connections between ideas (and between people) with patience, imagination, and hope. In doing so, he creates spaces where multiplicity is not only tolerated but also embraced, where seemingly incongruent perspectives coexist in dialogue. Under his guidance, community becomes a site of creative tension, generative paradox, and shared meaning-making.

I have had the privilege of witnessing this ethos firsthand through my participation in Brent’s Joyful Life Lab, where he has served as my advisor, dissertation chair, and just overall mentor. One moment in particular stands out as emblematic of who he is and what he teaches. During my first year, I felt unexpectedly overlooked. We had a meeting scheduled, and when I knocked on his office door (and waited for awhile), I heard laughter from within (he was still engaged with another student). I quietly walked away, flooded with that all-too-familiar sense of shame and self-doubt. From the bathroom, I sent him a timid email. Within a minute, I heard footsteps echoing through the hallway. Brent was sprinting (literally sprinting) through the department, knocking urgently on the bathroom door to apologize. When we finally met face-to-face (him breathless from running, me red-eyed and still holding back tears) he did not deflect or justify. He listened. He apologized. He repaired. That small moment of care, humility, and responsiveness continues to exemplify the very principles he lives and teaches: relational accountability, the courage to meet others in their vulnerability, and the power of presence in the work of repair.

Carrying Brent’s Lessons Forward

To study with Brent is to be called into a different way of being. It is to learn that we are tasked not just with doing good science but with living good lives (and being good people—whatever that means to you). It is to be reminded that grief and joy are inseparable. That flourishing requires the courage to feel. That psychology, at its best, is a radical act of love.

Brent was diagnosed with stage four cancer this past year. I will never forget the moment he shared the news with our entire program as we gathered together in a conference room, he spoke with remarkable existential courage and clarity, laying out every detail (making jokes about how he has trained his whole life for this). The room was overcome with the sound of quiet (and not so quiet) sobs (it was a room full of people who love him, the emotion in that space was and still is hard to put into words—how could I try? Literally ineffable). Yet, in that moment I was reminded of the words of Brown (2017), a quote which has become almost a mantra for my own life and something that encapsulates much of what I have learned from Brent:

Remember you are water. Of course, you leave salt trails. Of course, you are crying.

Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of grief upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations:

In honoring Brent, we honor the spirit of psychology as it ought to be: A practice of humility. A practice of presence. A practice of radical love. Let us honor these lessons not just in our academic work but in how we live, how we relate, and how we cultivate joy even in the face of suffering. Thank you.