Therapy for Guys

In this episode, I explore Heraclitus through James Hillman's beautiful foreword to Heraclitus' Fragments, especially the idea that the psyche is not something fixed, stable, or easily explained, but something always in motion, always in tension, always touched by contradiction.Heraclitus gives us a way to think about psychotherapy beyond neat explanations and rigid identities. The self is not a finished object. It is a river. It is fire. It is the strange truth that “I am as I am not.”I also bring in Borges' short story “The Other” as a way of thinking about the divided self across time—the younger self, the older self, the wounded self, the becoming self—all meeting beside the river without ever fully resolving into one simple identity.This episode is about therapy as a place where contradiction can be held, where symptoms can be listened to as signs, where dreams and fragments matter, and where change is not just something we seek, but something we already are.

In this episode, I explore the fantasy of the inner circle — that persistent feeling that somewhere, just beyond where we are, there is a more exclusive room, a deeper friendship, a more serious group, a hidden circle of people who really know, really belong, and really matter.Building from C.S. Lewis's essay “The Inner Ring,” I think through why the desire to belong can so easily become a desire to be inside because others are outside. I also bring in the image of the temple and the Holy of Holies as a way of asking whether even the innermost room would ever be enough, or whether we would simply begin searching for another room beyond it.From there, I move into psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory, especially the idea that there is a lack or gap at the center of human life that no group, friendship, artistic recognition, or achievement can finally fill. I also reflect personally on my own friendships and the subtle ways this fantasy can still show up even when we are already loved and already belong.Throughout the episode, I share a clinical reflection about an anonymous client, a college student on the autism spectrum, whose growing life as an artist has brought with it the fantasy that fulfillment will come only when he is accepted into the “real” inner circle of artists. His story becomes a way of thinking about the difference between genuine belonging and fantasy completion.This is an episode about exclusion, desire, art, friendship, therapy, and the difficult but freeing possibility that the life we are looking for may not be waiting behind some hidden door.

In this episode, I continue working through New Perspectives on Henry Corbin by focusing on Joan Copjec's chapter on Corbin, Lacan, Kiarostami, and the Cloud.What surprised me most was seeing someone from the world of Lacanian theory take Corbin seriously — not as an odd mystical detour, but as a thinker who might help us rethink psychoanalysis, politics, cinema, and reality itself. Copjec brings Corbin's Islamic neo-Gnosticism into conversation with Lacan's Real and Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case to explore what makes resistance possible when power wants everything visible, teachable, governable, and controlled.I reflect on Copjec's idea of the Cloud as a hidden dimension inside reality, her distinction between nihilism and apophatic theology, and the radical political force of a God who cannot be possessed by the state, religion, ideology, or authority. This is not a politics of easy re-enchantment, but a politics of keeping the world open.I also talk about Copjec's recently published book Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, where she develops these themes further through Kiarostami, Corbin, and Lacan — a book I'm hoping to read soon.At the heart of this episode is a question that feels urgent right now: What happens to politics, therapy, religion, and the person when there is no longer any hidden remainder, no unborn dimension, no Cloud, no Real — nothing that escapes power? And what kind of listening might help us hear the unlocated sound that keeps the world from closing?

In this episode, I spend time with New Perspectives on Henry Corbin, edited by Hadi Fakhoury, and reflect on why Corbin still feels so strangely alive right now.Corbin is difficult to place. He moves through Islamic philosophy, Suhrawardi, Shi'ism, Heidegger, Neoplatonism, angelology, psychoanalysis, esotericism, and the imaginal world, but what keeps pulling me in is his refusal to reduce spiritual reality to dogma, psychology, politics, or fantasy. He gives us a way to think about imagination not as escape, but as a form of perception.I also reflect on some of the chapters I'm most excited by, including Charles Stang on Corbin and Neoplatonism, Joan Copjec on Corbin, Lacan, and Kiarostami, Matthew Dillon on James Hillman's democratization of Corbin's imaginal thinking, and Wouter Hanegraaff's haunting portrait of Corbin's Freemasonry, neo-Templar spirituality, and personal longing for a hidden community of the spirit.This is less a summary of the whole book and more an invitation into Corbin as a provocation: What kind of world do we think we are living in? What kind of knowing have we allowed ourselves to trust? And does the soul still have access to images strong enough to guide it?

In this episode, I return to Henry Corbin's The Paradox of Monotheism and explore his strange, beautiful, and deeply provocative argument that monotheism can become idolatrous when God is imagined as the highest being rather than the mystery of Being itself.Drawing from Ibn Arabi, Shi'a theosophy, Proclus, angelology, and Corbin's reflections on mystical kathenotheism, I think through what it means to say that the One does not erase the Many, but reveals itself through many names, mirrors, angels, and Faces.This is an episode about theology after rigid certainty, spirituality beyond flat relativism, and the possibility of a re-enchanted symbolic world where plurality is not a threat to transcendence, but one of its deepest forms of disclosure.

In this episode, I continue exploring creative expressions of Christianity and religion through an unexpected connection between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Carl Jung.After discovering Henry Corbin in therapy years ago, I eventually came across Jung's correspondence with Corbin around Answer to Job, where Jung acknowledges Schleiermacher as one of his “spiritual ancestors.” That admission opened up a fascinating question for me: what if Schleiermacher is best understood as Jung's theologian?I explore Schleiermacher's famous idea of the “feeling of absolute dependence,” not as weakness or regression, but as a profound recognition that we are not self-grounding beings. From there, I connect this to Jung's lifelong concern with the relation between the finite and the infinite, the ego and the Self, psychology and religion, and the rebirth of the God-image in modern life.This episode is about theology that survives as atmosphere, religion after certainty, and the possibility that what looks like psychology may sometimes be theology returning in another form.

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo's After Christianity, a book that was incredibly helpful to me during my own journey of faith, deconstruction, psychotherapy, and trying to figure out whether there was still some version of Christianity I could hold onto after the older structures of belief had begun to fall apart.Vattimo's work came back into my mind recently as I've been reading more Italian thinkers, especially around psychoanalysis, theology, and philosophy. What I found so compelling in Vattimo years ago was his ability to think Christianity after the death of God—not as a simple return to orthodoxy, and not as a clean rejection of faith, but as a fragile, interpretive, weakened form of belief.This episode explores Vattimo's idea of “believing that one believes,” his understanding of Christianity after metaphysics, and the possibility that what remains after certainty is not nothing, but a message, a trace, a form of life, and perhaps even a different kind of faith.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with Massimo Recalcati, and that rabbit trail led me to Luca Di Gregorio's Lacan in Italy—and specifically to a line that completely grabbed me: that Lacan's legacy “demands invention up to the limit of heresy.”In this episode, I explore what it might mean to truly inherit a thinker without becoming their disciple in the worst sense of the word. What does it mean to be faithful to an intellectual tradition through creativity rather than imitation? Does Recalcati mean we should push right up to the edge of heresy without crossing it—or that real thinking inevitably looks heretical to somebody?Along the way, I reflect on Jung's famous anti-dogmatic spirit, the Zen phrase “kill the Buddha,” my own experience with a deeply Jungian therapist who embodied intellectual generosity rather than orthodoxy, and the strange tribalism that can emerge around thinkers like Lacan, Hegel, Freud, and beyond.This becomes an episode about psychoanalysis, philosophy, therapy, and maybe even psychological adulthood itself—the difficult task of learning from our intellectual fathers and mothers without remaining their children forever.

I've been reading Massimo Recalcati's The Son's Secret: From Oedipus to the Prodigal Son, and a particular passage stopped me in my tracks. His reflection on the child as an irreducible mystery—foreign, distinct, impossible to fully comprehend—opened up something much bigger for me about personhood itself.In this episode, I explore an idea I've privately thought about as anthropological apophaticism—the notion that every person contains a radical mystery that exceeds our interpretations, our diagnoses, even our empathy. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Richard Boothby's reading of Lacan's das Ding, theology's apophatic tradition, and my own clinical work, I reflect on what happens when we forget that the people in front of us are not problems to solve but enigmas to encounter.I also explore how this dynamic shows up in couples therapy, where the problem is often not that partners don't know each other, but that they've become convinced they already know everything. When mystery dies, curiosity dies. And when curiosity dies, so often desire goes with it.This is an episode about the ethics of not reducing people to your explanations of them. About the limits of understanding. About why love may require reverence for what remains unknown.

In this episode, I veer away from Hegel for a moment to follow a curiosity that opened up after listening to the latest Why Theory discussion of After the Hunt. That conversation sent me back to John Howard Yoder, one of the most important theologians of Christian nonviolence in the twentieth century, and also someone who shaped the theological world I was formed in during seminary.But Yoder was not only a theologian of peace. He was also a man who sexually abused and exploited women, including women in his academic and religious orbit. And what makes his case so disturbing is not only the hypocrisy, as horrifying as that is, but the way he tried to turn his abuse into a theological experiment.Drawing from Isaac Villegas and Rachel Waltner Goossen's work on Yoder's abuse, I explore how Yoder used the language of Christian freedom, community, nonviolence, intimacy, and moral discernment to rationalize his behavior and avoid accountability. I also reflect on the psychoanalytic insight that we are often most dangerous when we find beautiful, moral, or spiritual language to explain away the harm we are causing.This episode is about abuse, power, self-deception, theology, institutions, and the need for a hermeneutic of suspicion toward our own noblest explanations. It asks what happens when the language of peace becomes a shelter for violence, when theology becomes an alibi, and when someone else's suffering is finally allowed to interrupt the story we prefer to tell about ourselves.

For this episode, I'm diving into one of Hegel's most haunting phrases from the Phenomenology of Spirit: “the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.”What happens when philosophy is not primarily about acquiring knowledge, but about surviving the collapse of the certainties that once organized your world?In this episode, I explore Hegel's vision of negativity, contradiction, and transformation, moving through the religious symbolism of crucifixion and Calvary, the initiatory and almost alchemical feel of the Phenomenology, and why thinkers like Todd McGowan and Žižek help us see that contradiction is not simply a flaw in our thinking, but something woven into reality itself.Along the way, I reflect on the strange and compelling resonance between Hegel, psychoanalysis, and Christianity, especially the idea that truth may emerge not through the preservation of certainty, but through the collapse of the fantasy of wholeness.If philosophy has ever felt less like collecting ideas and more like losing your footing in the most productive way possible, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I'm continuing my slow entrance into Hegel by looking at Glenn Alexander Magee's account of Hegelian panentheism — this strange, difficult, and fascinating idea that God is not simply outside the world, but also not reducible to the world.What Magee helps clarify is that Hegel's God is not the static, self-contained God of much classical theology. Hegel gives us a God who unfolds through nature, history, and Spirit; a God whose life includes the world; a God who becomes actual through the movement of reality coming to know itself.I walk through the basic shape of the argument: Hegel's Logic as God “in himself,” nature as the externalization of Idea, Spirit as the place where reality becomes self-conscious, and Christianity as a symbolic form of this deeper philosophical movement. I also touch on why Hegel is close to Spinoza but not simply Spinozist, why panentheism may be a better word than pantheism, and why Hegel's theology remains so strange, compelling, and difficult to classify.This is not an episode about proving or disproving Hegel's God. It's an attempt to sit with the architecture of the argument and ask why this vision still feels so powerful: a God not merely above us, a world not merely separate from God, and human consciousness as one of the places where reality begins to understand itself.

In this episode, I reflect on finally sitting down and slowly working through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which has felt a little like wading into a vast, dark ocean. Near the end of the Preface, I came across a passage where Hegel warns against retreating into private feeling, into the “oracle” within, as if truth could simply be possessed inwardly without the hard human work of reason, communication, and shared agreement.Around the same time, I was watching a documentary on Miss Cleo, the famous TV psychic from the 1990s, and I couldn't stop thinking about the strange connection between Hegel's critique of private certainty and the cultural seduction of psychic revelation. This episode brings those two threads together: Hegel's insistence that humanity lives in the commonality of consciousness, and the danger of anyone who claims private access to truth in ways that bypass evidence, accountability, and the shared world.This is an episode about reason, universality, politics, manipulation, charisma, feeling, and why our deepest humanity is not found in simply staying inside what we privately feel, but in the difficult and necessary labor of making ourselves intelligible to one another.

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek's Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, turning to Chapter 3, “Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real.”This chapter centers on a deceptively simple idea: the order matters. In quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, history, politics, and even theology, the same elements can produce a very different reality depending on the sequence in which they appear. What comes first, what comes later, what gets observed, what gets named, and what gets repeated all shape the meaning of what is happening.I reflect on Žižek's use of quantum measurement, Freud's sequence of remembering, repeating, and working through, and the way later events can retroactively change the meaning of the past. This is not about saying that facts do not matter, or that everything is just interpretation. It is about taking seriously the strange way truth arrives in time.The episode continues the larger question of this series: what would it mean to have a materialism that is not flat or reductionistic, but strange enough to think collapse, contradiction, repetition, and the Real?

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek's Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, turning to Chapter 2, “Why Quantum Mechanics Needs Hegel.”Building on the first episode's focus on Žižek's claim that collapse comes first, this chapter asks the question from the other direction: not only why a Hegelian might be drawn to quantum mechanics, but why quantum mechanics may need something like Hegel if we are going to think through its deeper philosophical consequences.I explore Žižek's attempt to avoid both a flat, common-sense realism and a vague spiritual reading of quantum physics. Instead of saying that consciousness creates reality, or that reality is simply sitting there fully formed before us, Žižek pushes us toward a stranger kind of materialism — one shaped by contradiction, observation, retroactivity, and the absence of any final God's-eye view.This episode reflects on the observer, the void, the impossibility of a complete perspective, and the idea that reality may not be held together by a final guarantee, but by the very gaps and collapses that prevent it from becoming a closed whole.

In this episode, I begin a new series on Slavoj Žižek's Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, starting with the Introduction and Chapter 1, “Why a Hegelian Needs Quantum Mechanics.”This is not an attempt to turn quantum mechanics into a vague spiritual metaphor, and it is definitely not a physics lecture. Instead, I'm interested in what Žižek is trying to do philosophically: to rethink materialism after quantum mechanics, Hegel, psychoanalysis, and the strange collapse of our ordinary categories of reality.The central idea I explore here is Žižek's claim that collapse comes first. Rather than imagining reality as a stable field of possibilities that later collapses into one outcome, Žižek asks us to consider whether collapse retroactively gives shape to the field itself. From there, I reflect on Hegel, the observer, the Real, contradiction, history, and why a truly materialist philosophy may need to become much stranger than the older, flatter versions of materialism allowed.This first episode is meant to be careful and in-depth, but still digestible — a way of entering the book without reducing it, and of staying with the difficulty of Žižek's thought without turning it into jargon or easy summary.

In this first episode of a new series within Psyche Podcast, I begin a deep dive into Jon Mills' Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality by reflecting on the introduction and the enduring psychological power of the God idea. I explore why human beings seem so drawn to ultimate explanations, how desire and imagination shape belief, and why spiritual hunger may tell us as much about the structure of the psyche as it does about theology. I also make clear that, although my own position in life is a kind of agnostic atheism, I am not interested in mocking faith or reducing religion to something simplistic. Many of my clients are deeply religious, and we often find deeply meaningful ways of relating to each other across those differences. This episode opens the series by asking a philosophical, psychoanalytic, and deeply human question: why God at all?

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I explore Stanley Cavell's understanding of skepticism, finitude, and acknowledgment, and why I think his work matters so deeply for psychotherapy. Rather than treating skepticism as a merely abstract philosophical problem, Cavell helps us see it as one of the central ways human beings try to evade the truth of their own condition. We want certainty, we want guarantees, we want to get beyond vulnerability, separateness, and the limits of human knowledge, and yet Cavell invites us to consider that the task is not to escape those conditions, but to live within them more honestly.I reflect on Cavell's profound insight that human community is not about overcoming isolation so much as learning how to share it, and I connect that vision to the therapy room, where healing so often has less to do with certainty than with acknowledgment, answerability, and presence. Along the way I explore how Cavell offers a powerful alternative to both metaphysical overreach and cynical despair, and why his philosophy gives us such a rich language for thinking about relationships, suffering, and what it means to meet another person without illusion.

In this episode, I explore Stanley Cavell alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein and reflect on the idea that the therapist can, in an important sense, be understood as a kind of ordinary language philosopher. I talk about first encountering Cavell years ago in seminary in a social ethics class with Dr. Jonathan Tran, and why Cavell's way of thinking about voice, acknowledgment, skepticism, and the ordinary has stayed with me ever since. From there, I trace how Wittgenstein's therapeutic vision of philosophy and Cavell's deepening of ordinary language philosophy can help us think differently about what is happening in the therapy room.Along the way, I explore how people often suffer not only from pain itself, but from words that have become rigid, totalizing, and hard to live inside; how therapy can sometimes work by loosening the grip of those descriptions; and why solution-focused questions can serve as interventions into grammar, possibility, and perception rather than mere information gathering. I also spend time with several beautiful passages from Cavell on forms of life, the uncanny return of the familiar, and the search not for final answers so much as directions worth the time of a life to discover. This is an episode about language, skepticism, acknowledgment, and the quiet, demanding work of helping someone come back into voice.

In this episode in my Philosophy and Solution-Focused Therapy series, I reflect on Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea that meaning is use. After a recent client urged me to finally watch the film, I did, for the first time, and absolutely loved it. What especially stayed with me were the scenes between the Bride and Pai Mei, where repetition, correction, action, and discipline begin to look like more than just training. They begin to look like a philosophy of practice.I explore how Wittgenstein's thought helps us see that understanding is not primarily a hidden inner possession, but something that takes shape in use, in action, in learning how to go on within a form of life. From there, I connect Pai Mei's brutal pedagogy to psychotherapy, and especially to solution-focused therapy's attention to small actions, exceptions, patterns, and the lived practices through which change becomes possible.Along the way, I consider what Kill Bill reveals about repetition, mastery, embodiment, and the difference between having an idea and being formed into a capacity. This is an episode about training, meaning, action, and the ways new futures become real not only through insight, but through practice.

In this episode, I explore Wittgenstein's idea of forms of life and what he once called the “whole hurly-burly of human actions,” that living background of practices, relationships, gestures, expectations, and shared meanings within which anything we say or feel can make sense at all. I reflect on the temptation, in both philosophy and psychotherapy, to reduce reality to atomistic parts, hidden inner objects, or eternal foundations, and I make the case that human suffering cannot be understood apart from the swarm of life in which it takes shape. Along the way, I bring this into a clinical register, thinking about anxiety, identity, autism, couples work, and the ways therapy can become less about isolating explanatory units and more about listening for the background against which a life becomes legible. I also weave in a line from Wittgenstein that has stayed with me deeply: “Perhaps what is inexpressible … is the background against which whatever could express has its meaning.” This is an episode about context, mystery, collaboration, and the living weave of human life where both suffering and change become possible.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my series on the philosophical foundations of solution-focused therapy by doing a close reading of Nick Drury's essay “Wittgenstein and the Tikanga of Psychotherapy.” Drawing on Wittgenstein's later philosophy, Drury challenges the Cartesian and medicalized picture of the person that has shaped so much of modern mental health discourse, and instead invites us into a vision of therapy rooted in language, relationship, ethical responsiveness, and forms of life. He also explicitly connects Wittgenstein's idea of “disappearing” problems through a changed way of living to solution-focused therapy's way of working.  I use the episode to explore why solution-focused therapy is so often misunderstood as simplistic when, in fact, it rests on a deeply serious philosophical vision of human life. Along the way, I unpack Drury's distinction between “know that” and “know how,” his critique of diagnosis-heavy and decontextualized models of care, and his account of therapy as a space where new language-games, new forms of relation, and new possibilities for living can emerge.  I also bring these ideas down to the level of practice with vivid clinical examples, showing how a Wittgensteinian and solution-focused sensibility can shift the way we listen, the way we ask questions, and the way we understand change itself. This is an episode about clarity, humility, and the ethical depth of therapy when it becomes less a laboratory of explanation and more a living conversation in which people can begin to speak and live differently together.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my Philosophy & Solution-Focused Therapy series by turning to Steve de Shazer's essay, “Don't Think, But Observe: What Is the Importance of the Work of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy?” In it, I explore why Wittgenstein matters so deeply to Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, not because he gives it some hidden grand theory, but because he helps us see why the longing for that kind of theory can pull us away from the living reality of therapy itself. I reflect on de Shazer's argument that meaning is rooted in use, in context, in forms of life, and I consider what that means for a therapeutic practice that refuses to get trapped in diagnostic abstraction and instead stays close to language, relationship, exception, and observable change. Along the way, I make the case that Solution-Focused Therapy is far more philosophically serious than its critics often assume, and that its restraint, its precision, and its attention to what is actually happening in a person's life may be part of what makes it so radical.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my series on the philosophy behind solution-focused therapy by taking up a fascinating and delicate question: can Ludwig Wittgenstein be understood as an autistic man, and if so, what might that help us see about his philosophy, about neurodivergence, and about therapy itself?Drawing from Alan Griswold's essay on Wittgenstein, along with broader reflections on Wittgenstein's life and thought, I explore the limits of retrospective diagnosis while still taking seriously the possibility that his relationship to language, precision, social life, and meaning may have emerged from a distinctly neurodivergent form of experience.From there, I connect Wittgenstein's ideas about language-games, meaning, and forms of life to a more humane and expansive way of understanding autism. I also connect those ideas to the spirit of solution-focused therapy, with its deep attention to language, lived reality, and the creation of more workable futures.This is an episode about philosophy, neurodivergence, and what becomes possible when we stop treating difference simply as defect and begin listening for a different grammar of being.

In this episode, I begin a loose new series exploring the philosophical influences behind Solution-Focused Therapy, especially the work of Steve de Shazer. Too often, Solution-Focused Therapy gets caricatured as simplistic, overly optimistic, or not serious enough about suffering. I argue that this misses something much deeper. Beneath its lightness of touch is a remarkably sophisticated way of thinking about language, change, and the construction of possibility.I offer a biographical sketch of de Shazer and then trace some of the major intellectual currents that help illuminate his work, including Wittgenstein, pragmatism, Derrida, and Paul de Man. Along the way, I reflect on why Solution-Focused Therapy may be less about uncovering the hidden truth of a problem and more about helping create new descriptions that make different futures imaginable.This is an episode about language, suffering, restraint, and the quiet radicalism of asking a different kind of question.

In this episode, I explore a question that has followed Richard Rorty for years and feels especially urgent now: did his pragmatism, and his rejection of universal foundations for truth, help create the post-truth culture we are living in? Drawing from Eduardo Mendieta's article “Rorty and Post-Post-Truth” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I argue that this is ultimately a caricature of Rorty. What Rorty challenged was not facts, evidence, or public accountability, but the fantasy that truth requires a metaphysical guarantee outside human history, language, and democratic life. Rather than leading to cynicism or political manipulation, his work points us back to the communal labor of justification and to the fragile social conditions that make truthfulness possible at all.I also make the case that what has far more plausibly given rise to our post-truth moment is the erosion of social trust, the collapse of social capital, and the polarizing effects of algorithmic media environments that reward outrage, identity, and reaction over shared inquiry. So this becomes not just an episode about Rorty, but about what democratic culture needs in order for truth to have public life at all.

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty's essay “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy” from Essays on Heidegger and Others and think through one of the tensions that has been staying with me lately: how to honor private self-creation without letting it collapse into a form of individualism that forgets public responsibility. I reflect on Rorty's reading of Foucault, his idea of the “knight of autonomy,” and why I find myself deeply resonating with that figure through my own sense of being an otrovert — someone drawn to autonomy, inward authority, and the refusal of borrowed foundations.At the same time, I wrestle with my fear that the private/public distinction can leave democratic life too thin, even as I remain deeply doubtful that a return to shared religious, philosophical, or universal foundations would actually produce the solidarity people imagine. From there, I explore Rorty's provocative suggestion that people can be humane without being universalists, and I consider how art and culture — including the imperfect but moving example of Apple TV's Shrinking — may help create a shared public vocabulary through empathy, grief, failure, and recognition rather than through doctrine or theory.This is an episode about autonomy, democracy, suffering, self-creation, and the difficult task of trying to remain faithful to one's own vocabulary while still taking part in the shared work of making the world more decent for others.

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty's chapter “Freud and Moral Reflection,” a reading of Freud that has really stayed with me as I've been getting more into Rorty lately. I make it clear that I'm not claiming this is simply the definitive or orthodox way to understand Freud, and that many people in psychoanalysis would likely push back on Rorty's interpretation, but I do find his perspective deeply suggestive and very alive for thinking about therapy. Moving through Rorty's contrast between self-purification and self-enlargement, I reflect on what it might mean to approach the psyche not as a battleground between the noble and the beastly, but as a complex inner world populated by voices, parts, and what Rorty calls "inner peers". Along the way, I think about how this chapter can help us imagine therapy less as a moral washing and more as a place of curiosity, interpretation, and greater internal hospitality.

If the philosopher is a poet, what does that make the therapist?In this episode, I work through insights from Richard Rorty's Philosophy as Poetry and begin to trace their implications for psychotherapy, arriving at a shift that feels both subtle and profound—therapy not as a process of uncovering truth, but as a collaborative act of creation.Moving away from the idea of a fixed self waiting to be discovered, I explore a Rortyan approach where identity is continuously constructed through language, relationship, and imagination, and where the therapist is no longer the one who knows, but a curious partner in the process of redescription.What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it opens up new ways of living.This is a conversation about agency, experimentation, and the quiet but radical idea that therapy is not about finding yourself……but about helping to write what comes next.

In this episode, I reflect on Adam Phillips' essay “On Getting the Life You Want,” the first chapter of his new book Getting the Life You Want, and use it as a way of thinking through some questions that have been deeply alive for me lately. Starting from my growing obsession with American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty, I explore why Phillips feels so striking to me at this moment, as someone who seems able to bring Freud, psychoanalysis, and a kind of pragmatist pluralism into the same conversation.This is also my first real attempt to seriously read Phillips, even though my friend Barry Taylor has been suggesting him to me for years, and part of what makes this encounter feel so timely is how much his work resonates with my own sense that neither psychoanalysis nor philosophy gives us final truths so much as powerful descriptions, usable fictions, and ways of opening a life.Along the way, I explore Phillips' contrast between pragmatism's question — what life do you want? — and psychoanalysis's more difficult question — why might you not want to know what you want? What follows is a meditation on desire, authority, self-creation, ambivalence, and the strange difficulty of living a life that actually feels like your own.

Relational-cultural therapy has long shaped how I think about growth—that we are formed in and through connection, and that much of our suffering comes from disconnection. But in this episode, I take that idea further by sitting with something my friend Helena Vissing shared with me, drawing from Stephen Grosz's Loves Labor, about the twin anxieties of engulfment and abandonment.What unfolds is a deeper look at what RCT calls the central relational paradox—not just as a relational pattern, but as something more fundamental to who we are. The very strategies we develop to preserve connection are the same ones that prevent us from being known within it. And even more than that, the tension between closeness and distance may not be something we overcome, but something we live.I explore what it means to think about love, connection, and authenticity through this lens—where the goal is not to get the distance exactly right, but to become more aware of how we move within it, and how we repair when it inevitably goes wrong.

What happens when a society becomes so certain it's right that it starts shaping everyone else's life around that certainty?In this episode, I finally sit with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty—a text I had long avoided—and find in it a sharp critique of something very alive today: the moral and cultural force of Christian nationalism.Mill warns that oppression doesn't just come from governments, but from social pressure, moral consensus, and the demand that everyone fit one approved way of living.I'm not here to endorse Mill—but to think with him, and to push back against any ideology that claims it already knows, for all of us, what a life should look like.

The Fool, the zero card of the tarot, isn't a symbol of naïveté so much as a break from the system itself—a figure who stands both inside and outside the structures that try to define a life. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Plato, I explore the Fool as a different kind of subject—what I'm calling the ortovert: someone oriented toward autonomy and individuality without collapsing into individualism or rejecting the shared world altogether.Along the way, I think through the Fool's wandering, rhizomatic path, its resistance to optimization and forced belonging, and its connection to what Plato might call a kind of holy madness. And with David Abram in the background, I turn to the often-overlooked presence of the animal in the card, not as a minor detail but as something essential—a reminder that whatever freedom the Fool represents is not disembodied, but grounded in instinct, sensation, and a return to forms of life that aren't governed by constant performance or self-optimization.

In this episode, I sit with Jorge Ferrer's Substack piece “Not a Summit, but a Forest: Why One True Religion May Be a Biological Absurdity,” not as an endorsement or critique, but as a way of thinking through a deeper question about how we organize meaning and live alongside difference. Ferrer challenges the assumption that truth must converge into a single dominant position, offering instead a vision of plurality as something inherent to life itself—something generative rather than problematic. I follow that thread beyond spirituality, asking what it might look like to move away from hierarchical systems that demand one right answer, and toward a way of living that can hold difference without collapsing it into sameness.

I picked up Junji Ito's Black Paradox again the other day, and what stayed with me wasn't just the horror—it was the structure underneath it. The sense that even our attempts to escape ourselves don't actually take us out of the loop… they just reorganize it.In this episode, I use the story as a way into something I see all the time in the therapy room: the difference between wanting to die and wanting relief from being who you are. Drawing on Richard Boothby's rethinking of the death drive, Lacan's notion of objet a, and Todd McGowan's work on capitalism and desire, I explore how what feels like an exit often becomes a new object that keeps us moving.Even death, in this story, becomes something that can be extracted, priced, and sold.And Pitan—the most unsettling figure in the narrative—ends up embodying a kind of subject without lack. Not trapped in the loop, but perfectly adapted to it.This isn't an episode that offers resolution. It's an attempt to stay with a harder question: what do you do with a desire for an outside… when there is no outside?Maybe the work isn't to escape the loop.Maybe it's to start seeing it more clearly.

In this episode, I sit down with Helena Vissing—a licensed psychologist based in California, educator at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and host on the New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast.What unfolds is a wide-ranging and deeply honest conversation at the intersection of psychoanalysis and somatic therapy—two fields that often sit in tension, but, as Helena argues, may actually need each other more than we think.We explore the limits of both traditions: the risk of reducing the body to “nervous system tinkering,” and the equal risk within psychoanalysis of losing the body altogether. Along the way, we wrestle with the mind-body problem, the unconscious, and what it might mean to “free associate” not just through speech—but through sensation itself.This is also a personal conversation. I share my own resistance to somatic work, my tendency to live as a “brain on legs,” and the deeper questions that raises about embodiment, knowledge, and the illusion of mastery.We get into:Why both psychoanalysis and somatics can drift toward false certaintyThe danger of treating therapy as a problem to solve rather than something to encounterIntegration vs. multiplicity—and whether a unified self is even possibleThe role of not-knowing in both analytic and somatic workAnd how the body may be present even in its absenceThis is less a definitive statement and more an opening—a conversation that stays with the tension rather than resolving it.

What if the thought you just had wasn't quite yours?Not in the sense of influence or conditioning—but structurally. At the level of what thinking is, and where it happens.In this episode, I sit with a reading from Alenka Zupančič's Disavowal that I haven't been able to shake. Moving through Descartes and Lacan, I explore the idea that the cogito—I think, therefore I am—doesn't ground the subject in certainty, but actually marks a split. Something gets discarded in Descartes' method, and that remainder doesn't disappear. It continues.Lacan locates the unconscious right there—not as hidden content, but as a thinking process that exceeds us. Impersonal. Active. Ongoing.It thinks.Not: I have unconscious thoughts. But: thinking is happening—and I'm not necessarily where that thinking is.I work through what this means philosophically, clinically, and personally—especially how it challenges the idea that therapy is about gaining full ownership over your mind. Because as useful as that goal can be, it might also miss something essential.

In this solo episode of Psyche, I explore a provocative idea from philosopher Quentin Meillassoux: the possibility of a God that does not yet exist, but may one day come into being. Drawing from his essay The Immanence of the World Beyond, I unpack his argument that the only true necessity in the universe may be contingency itself—that reality is radically open and the future is not fixed.What interests me most is how this philosophical vision resonates with my work as a therapist. People often arrive feeling trapped in narratives of inevitability, convinced their lives cannot be otherwise. In contrast, I've long been drawn to what Bill O'Hanlon calls possibility thinking—not positive thinking, but the simple refusal to close the future.This episode explores how Meillassoux's philosophy of radical contingency might offer a surprising metaphysical foundation for a kind of hope that doesn't rely on certainty—only on the possibility that something new may still emerge.

In this episode, I reflect on Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere and what it reveals about the world of online masculinity influencers. As a therapist who works primarily with young men—and as the father of three teenage sons—I feel a responsibility to understand the ideas shaping how many young men think about identity, power, and relationships.Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic philosopher Mari Ruti and her essay “The Portable Phallus,” I explore how the bravado of the manosphere can be understood as a performance of the phallus—the symbolic marker of power and authority in psychoanalytic theory—rather than genuine confidence. What looks like dominance on the surface often reveals a deeper insecurity and anxiety about masculinity underneath.Along the way, I also reflect on how a claim made in the documentary—that men have no inherent value and must create it—echoes, but deeply distorts, themes found in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ultimately, the conversation turns toward a deeper question raised by Erich Fromm: the need for richer frames of orientation that help young men develop strength, responsibility, and intimacy without reducing masculinity to domination or status.

In this solo episode, I explore the Dark Forest theory—a provocative answer to the Fermi paradox suggesting that intelligent civilizations may survive by remaining silent and hidden in a dangerous universe.From there, I follow a series of philosophical and theological connections. I discuss the work of Bogna Konior, traditions of negative theology and the hidden God, Gnostic suspicions about the cosmos, and the darker vision of nature explored by Jill Carroll in The Savage Side: Reclaiming Violent Models of God. I also bring in mystical ideas from Kabbalah—like Tzimtzum and Ayin—alongside psychoanalytic reflections from Richard Boothby on the sacred and the encounter with Das Ding.This episode is speculative and exploratory, asking what it might mean if the deepest structure of reality is marked less by revelation than by silence, hiddenness, and mystery.

In this solo episode of Psyche, I reflect on a provocative article by Manu Bazzano titled Against Integration. Bazzano challenges one of the deepest assumptions in modern psychotherapy—the idea that the goal of therapy is to integrate the self into a unified whole. Drawing on philosophical currents influenced by thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he invites us to consider whether the human psyche might be better understood as a multiplicity rather than a singular identity.In this episode, I explore why I find Bazzano's work so compelling while also sitting with the tension it creates for me as a practicing therapist. On one hand, I resonate deeply with the critique of reducing a person to a single, unified self. Anyone who has spent time in a therapy room knows that human beings are complex, contradictory, and often composed of multiple voices pulling in different directions.At the same time, I also wrestle with a practical question that emerges both in my own life and in the lives of my clients: is a radically multiple self actually livable? When identity becomes too fragmented, people often experience anxiety, instability, and the unsettling feeling that they are not really a self at all.Rather than choosing between the ideal of perfect integration and the chaos of pure multiplicity, I explore the possibility that psychological health might lie somewhere in between. Perhaps the task of therapy is not to eliminate our inner plurality but to learn how to negotiate among the different parts of ourselves—creating enough coherence to live meaningfully while still honoring the multiplicity that makes us human.This episode is less about settling the debate and more about dwelling inside the tension. Because sometimes the most important conversations in psychology are the ones that refuse to offer easy answers.

Many people think burnout just means they need more rest. But what if burnout isn't really about being tired?In this episode I explore the deeper psychology of burnout and why it often emerges when our work becomes disconnected from meaning. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, and clinical experience, I unpack why rest alone often doesn't fix burnout—and what actually helps people reconnect with purpose, agency, and a sense of aliveness.

Lately I've been carrying a specific kind of dread. Watching the situation with Iran develop, and noticing how often God gets woven into the justification for violence — quietly, almost liturgically, until you can't tell where the political calculation ends and the sacred mission begins. That observation sent me back to Slavoj Žižek, and to an argument I find both uncomfortable and urgent: that it isn't the absence of God that makes everything permissible. It's the presence of God. Or more precisely, the certainty that you're acting in his name.In this episode I trace both sides of that paradox — including the challenge my stepson puts to me constantly, that without God there's no real ground for ethics at all. I spend time with Hegel, Paul Tillich, and Todd McGowan on the idea of a God who doesn't control history and therefore can't be invoked to sanction it. No clean resolution. Just a question I think we need to be asking right now.

This episode is a close reading of Saving Genitality: Toward a Freudian Virtue Ethics, a new essay by Sohrab Ahmari published by Everyday Analysis.The argument Ahmari makes is stranger and more interesting than it might first appear. Freud, for all his reputation as the great debunker of bourgeois morality, never managed to evacuate his clinical concept of "normality" of ethical content. His account of psychological health — centred on what he called genitality, the mature organisation of sexuality toward heterosexual, reproductive union — turns out to carry an implicit moral claim: that health and virtue are, in the end, the same thing.That claim puts Freud in unexpected company. It places him closer to Aristotle than to the statistical normality of nineteenth-century medicine — closer to a tradition that insists human beings have a nature, and that living well means living in accordance with it.In this episode I try to unpack that argument carefully and honestly — moving through the collapse of classical teleology, Hume's is-ought problem, MacIntyre's diagnosis of modern moral discourse, the Wolfman case, and the tension between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. I also spend time with where the argument strains: the Lacanian objection, the empirical critiques of Freud, and the political implications of framing one form of sexuality as the mature norm.I don't endorse everything here. But I think it raises questions worth sitting with.Essay: Saving Genitality by Sohrab AhmariPublished by Everyday Analysis (2026) — everydayanalysis.co.uk

What drives people into the arms of white Christian nationalism — and why does it hold them so completely? In this episode, I go beneath the politics and into the psychology, using psychoanalytic theory to deconstruct what the movement is actually doing at the level of the unconscious. Drawing on Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry's The Flag and the Cross, Pamela Cooper-White's landmark paper "God, Guns, and Guts," and the testimony of former evangelical minister Brad Onishi, I examine white Christian nationalism not as a fringe aberration but as a religious power order — a cosmology of hierarchy held together by fear, trauma, and the desperate human need for order in a world that feels like it's coming apart. I move through Freud's group psychology, the narcissistic leader, Klein's paranoid-schizoid splitting, castration anxiety and gun culture, and end with the most unsettling question of all: who is carrying the shadow the rest of us won't claim?

What if the belief that you're special is the very thing keeping you from your own life?In this episode, I explore one of the quietest and most consequential assumptions most of us carry: that we matter in a cosmic sense. That we were meant to be here. That our particular existence is not an accident.Drawing on Adam Phillips' razor-sharp provocation in Missing Out, Ernest Becker's unsettling theory of heroism in The Denial of Death, and Irvin Yalom's clinical insight into what he called the illusion of personal specialness, I trace where the need for significance comes from, what it costs us, and what might be waiting on the other side of it.I look at how parents — out of genuine love — install a sense of cosmic specialness in their children, and what happens when adolescence and adulthood deliver the reckoning. I also spend time in the consulting room, where one client's relational struggles turn out to be rooted in something older and deeper than anyone first suspected.This isn't an episode about giving up. It's about the strange freedom that becomes available when we stop needing the universe to confirm us.

In this episode, I reflect on the 2017 Electric Dreams adaptation of Philip K. Dick's “The Commuter” alongside Adam Phillips' idea of the unlived life. Macon Heights — the town that never officially existed — becomes a powerful metaphor for the life we imagine would have been smoother, more coherent, less burdened.Drawing from my clinical work with autistic clients, I explore whether our defining “symptoms” or fractures are actually structural — and what it would mean to remove them. If you could erase the wound that shaped you, would you still be yourself?This is an episode about fantasy, identity, and the unsettling cost of chasing a seamless life.

In this episode, I explore whether Georges Bataille can be read as a radical theologian precisely because he refuses to save God.Drawing from Allan Stoekl's essay “Bataille, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Death of God,” I contrast Teilhard's vision of convergence and Omega with Bataille's insistence that completion ends in rupture — that absolute knowledge collapses into nonknowledge.Although I no longer identify as a Christian, I remain drawn to radical theology. Here, I wrestle with a tension I feel even within progressive theology: after rejecting a literal deity, do we still preserve a highest ground — a metaphysical guarantor — under another name?Bataille's atheism forces me to ask whether a truly radical theology must relinquish even that.Not comfort.But courage.

In this episode, I explore Georges Bataille's account of religion through Zeynep Direk's reading — not as belief in a divine being, but as the acknowledgment of the movement where life and death pass into each other.I reflect on my own shift beyond doctrinal Christianity and how I'm developing what I call ethical hedonism — a way of honoring pleasure, eros, and vitality without abandoning structure or responsibility.We'll talk about ego, excess, abjection, and the festival as a necessary interruption of productivity — and why building small “festivals” into our lives may be essential for psychological health.

What if transcendence isn't a ladder we climb but a descent we resist?In this solo episode, I explore an intuition that first confronted me in my own therapy — especially when I began taking my dreams seriously. The symbols that unsettled me most were the ones that betrayed my conscious morality and stirred disgust or erotic charge. And yet, those very images carried psychic energy that felt unmistakably sacred.Bringing together Bataille's claim that the sacred can be entered through the latrine, Philip K. Dick's idea of the “trash stratum,” alchemical transformation, Lacan's notion of jouissance, and Kristeva's theory of abjection, I challenge the spiritual-material dualism that elevates prayer above orgasm and transcendence above embodiment.If the sacred erupts precisely where identity destabilizes — in what we expel, repress, or deem impure — then the places we most want to reject may not be obstacles to depth. They may be its doorway.

In this solo episode, I explore what Jeffrey Kripal calls the traumatic secret — the uneasy coordination between trauma and transcendence in mystical literature — through the philosophy of Georges Bataille.I reflect on how Kripal shaped my own intellectual and spiritual development during a season of deconstruction, teaching me how to remain open to mystery while staying critically grounded. From Bataille's ideas about eroticism, death, and transgression to Huxley's filter theory and the destabilization of the ego, I examine the possibility that rupture does not “cause” mystical experience but may sometimes allow it to appear.This is not a romanticizing of trauma or a defense of supernaturalism. It's an inquiry into thresholds — those moments when the structures of the self tremble and something larger presses in.The shell must be broken.What emerges remains a mystery.