Hospitality is a key concept in contemporary philosophy that emphasizes how we can welcome the stranger in particular and otherness in general. Not only is hospitality a key ethic for many world religions, but it also has been applied to political issues like immigration. However, hospitality has received less attention in the psychotherapy literature, though some have discussed it in the context of different modalities such as family therapy and humanistic therapy. In the world of clinical psychology and psychiatry, the person with psychosis is often viewed as “other”, a stranger whose presence can unsettle clinicians who do not know how to engage or create a dialogue with a person experiencing psychotic symptoms. 

In this presentation, I will lean on the philosophical writings of Richard Kearney (Kearney & Fitzpatrick, 2021) and apply the concept of hospitality to the clinical setting and how to form a relationship and facilitate a dialogue with a person suffering from psychosis. I will look at hospitality from various angles: relational hospitality, linguistic hospitality, and narrative hospitality. Relational hospitality refers to the ways clinicians can invite the patient into the encounter and welcome in their otherness, which most often manifests in their psychotic symptoms. Therapists function in the role of both host and guest in the clinical situation. Both roles will be examined, as well as the ways in which the patient is both a guest in the clinical space and, in other ways, the one who hosts the conversations and sets the boundary for the dialogue. Second, I will look at the question of how we welcome in the patient’s often idiosyncratic use of language. At the same time, I will advocate for the therapist to also hold on to their own linguistic home to allow for a rich dialogue across language and differences. Finally, I will consider the importance of narrative hospitality, i.e., the recognition that stories can always be told from multiple angles. People with psychosis have often been told that their stories do not make sense, which can lead to them feeling shut down or rejected. Instead, I will advocate for the value of holding in tension that different narratives and how the therapist can also look for the presence of trauma that might be concealed behind the psychotic symptom. Brief clinical vignettes will be presented throughout to flesh out these more conceptual points.