Tanya Marie Luhrmann, PhD, is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. At the heart of the work is the sense of being called, and its possibilities and burden.

Awais Aftab, MD, is a psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He leads the popular interview series “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry” for Psychiatric Times, which engages with prominent commentators within and outside the profession who have made meaningful criticisms of the status quo. He is currently working on a book adaptation of the interview series for Oxford University Press (2023). 

Nancy McWilliams, PhD, teaches at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and practices in Lambertville, New Jersey. She is author of Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994, rev. ed. 2011), Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004), and Psychoanalytic Supervision (2021) and is associate editor of both editions of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2006, 2017). A former president of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, she has been featured in three APA videos of master clinicians. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Austen Riggs Center. Her books are available in 20 languages; she lectures widely both nationally and internationally. 

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