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Turning on the Mind: Harville Hendrix, AM'65, PhD'71, on Chicago, Critical Thinking, and the Origins of Imago Therapy
March 25, 2026
When Harville Hendrix, AM'65, PhD'71, arrived at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he imagined a life in scholarship and ministry. But the intellectual culture he encountered in Swift Hall, one shaped by rigorous attention to method, interdisciplinary inquiry, and deep mentorship, would fundamentally reshape his thinking about knowledge itself.
Today, Hendrix is widely known as the co-founder of Imago Relationship Therapy, a global approach to couples therapy he developed with his partner Helen LaKelly Hunt. The intellectual foundations of that work trace directly back to his time at the Divinity School.
Hendrix recently spoke with Criteria in a conversation that reflected on his discovery of “method” at UChicago, Don Browning's mentorship, and the clinical encounters that ultimately pushed him from academic theory toward a new understanding of human relationships.
This Q&A has been edited for length and readability.
You studied at the Divinity School during a remarkable and specific moment in its intellectual history, while giants of the field, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, and Martin Marty, were on the faculty. What do you remember about that experience, and how did the Divinity School shape the way you began thinking about psychology, theology, and human relationships?
I grew up on a farm in South Georgia, so the complexity of abstract academic thought was pretty foreign to me. I didn’t really encounter that world until I came north. Before the University of Chicago, I studied at Union Theological Seminary. But Union was still largely a training institution for ministry. A divinity school is different from a seminary. When I arrived in Chicago, I realized quickly that I didn’t yet know how to swim in those intellectual waters.
The big discovery for me was method. As I often say, “When I got to Chicago, I ran into something called ‘method.’” Put simply, there are several ways to approach a subject. Suddenly, I discovered that you can’t write a paper at the Div School without knowing and stating your methodology.
That was completely new to me. I had assumed that writing meant choosing a subject and discussing it. At UChicago, I had to explain how I was approaching the subject and why.
That realization produced a profound shift in how I understood knowledge. I began to see that things are not simply what they are—they are how they are perceived. Or as I often put it, “you don’t see things, you see the perspective through which things show up for you.”
The Divinity School brought me out of my intellectual naïveté. It taught me to examine assumptions and recognize that every discipline approaches its subject through a particular lens.
Looking back, that was the turning point for me intellectually.
Your dissertation advisor, Don Browning, was only slightly older than you, and you’ve described the relationship as a kind of “soul connection.” How did Browning’s mentorship influence the direction of your work?
Don Browning was tremendously important in my intellectual life. When he returned to University of Chicago after time in the field, he took me under his wing in a very generous way. I remember him basically saying, “Harville, we’ll just meet and talk about this until you get it.”
What Don gave me was not my conclusions but my intellectual tools. He trained me to think critically about arguments. Does a scholar’s thesis actually lead to their conclusions? Are the assumptions visible? Does the logic hold together?
At the time, we were working in the area where theology and psychology intersect, which many people framed as a conflict. But eventually I came to see that debate differently.
As I came to understand it, theology and psychology are two methodological approaches to the same thing.
Both disciplines are really attempts to grapple with the mystery of being: human consciousness, existence, and the deeper questions about reality. One approaches it empirically, the other imaginatively and philosophically.
Once I realized that, the conflict between them stopped being very interesting. They were simply different windows into the same mystery.
While you were a student, you were also beginning to work with people in clinical settings. How did those experiences shape the questions you were asking academically?
One of the most important people in my life was Wayne Oates, a pastoral counselor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
At one point, he said something to me that was both blunt and absolutely correct. He said, “Harville, you don’t know a damn thing about human beings.”
What he meant was that I had spent my life in books and seminars without encountering real human suffering. So he arranged for me to work with him and do internships in hospitals. My first day was in a psychiatric ward, and it was overwhelming.
One of the first people I spoke with introduced himself as Jesus Christ. At first, I tried to correct him. But after spending time with him, I began to understand the internal logic of his experience.
Then something extraordinary happened.
He paused and said quietly, “Actually, my name is John.”
And then he said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life: “When somebody sees me for who I am, then I do not have to be what I am not.”
That moment changed how I understood caregiving. It taught me that you don’t approach people from a position of superiority. You listen. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer someone is the experience of being truly seen.
Your work eventually led to the development of Imago Relationship Therapy and a global audience through books and workshops. Looking back, how did your intellectual formation inform the approach you ultimately developed?
My time at the University of Chicago didn’t give me the content of my work; it gave me the process for discovering it.
The training there required examining personal assumptions and looking for patterns. When I began working with couples, I started by questioning my own assumptions about what they needed.
Often, I discovered that couples themselves already knew what they needed. My role became helping them articulate those needs and creating ways to express them in the relationship.
Over time, I began noticing patterns. UChicago had trained me to look beneath surface differences to see underlying structure.
Eventually, I realized that traditional psychotherapy wasn’t working with couples. Instead of having couples talk to me, I turned them toward each other and helped them learn a structured dialogue.
Once couples felt safe enough to really listen to each other, something remarkable happened: many of the problems they came in with began to dissolve.
Dialogue became the engine of the therapeutic process.
In many ways, the entire Imago system grew out of the habits of thinking I learned at Chicago—examining assumptions, identifying patterns, and building a theory that could actually work in practice.
And that’s why I still say today: Chicago is where my brain turned on.