Third talk of the 2026-2027 season M. Mookie Manalili, LICSW & Jason Ri, LMHC
.Michael Mookie Manalili and Jason Ri have discovered uncanny parallels in their lives. Alongside their shared commitments to existential philosophy and psychotherapy, both have been pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and have journeyed, in different ways, through “incarnational” Jesuit Christian traditions. These experiences have led them to wonder together about movement, contact and presence. How do meaningful encounters with others – and with ourselves – occur through virtual space? How do psychological and spiritual movements happen when bodies meet through screens? These questions have become increasingly urgent as psychotherapy and society have rushed headfirst into the digital age, with limited reflection on how the virtual medium differs from the face-to-face encounter. What happens to the body, the unconscious, and the shared world of psychotherapy when therapist and patient meet at a distance? This presentation begins from the premise that virtual
therapy is not bodiless but differently embodied; the screen expands access and continuity while reorganizing presence, attention, intimacy, contact, and the clinical frame. Drawing on clinical, philosophical, cultural and spiritual experiences – and especially on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of flesh, and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbol – Manalili and Ri explore excarnation: the loosening of words, images and identities from the lived bodies, places, rituals and traditions that give them weight. They consider how virtual platforms and artificial intelligence may leave persons unmoored from cultural, spiritual and communal worlds, even as these technologies create new possibilities for connection, belonging, and psychological care. Rather than rejecting virtual psychotherapy or romanticizing the physical consulting room, this presentation asks what forms of embodied attention, symbolic anchoring, and relational practice might preserve psychotherapy as a meeting between speaking bodies. What is the nature of human contact in the virtual age, and what might the future of psychotherapy require of us – as clinicians pilgrimaging into the landscape of our patients’ sufferings and meanings?
We are hosted by and located at
Boston College, Lynch School of Education
Campion Hall, Room 139
(Google Maps link)
Join us in-person, over Zoom, or watch the recorded talk.
Current members do not need to register
Please complete an anonymous evaluation for this talk!
Please note that to receive CEUs, you must…
attend all four talks of the series,
complete all four post-tests,
and pay for CEUs. (Link to purchase.)