Therapy for Guys

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, which I recently read in its dramatic form after watching the excellent and very faithful HBO adaptation with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Sitting more deeply with Professor White's despair brought me back to Eugene Thacker's Infinite Resignation and the idea that the only philosophy worth pursuing is one that poses questions without answers. This becomes a meditation on pessimism, faith, despair, and the strange sacredness of staying in the room when no clean answer arrives.

Having finished All the Pretty Horses, I keep returning to John Grady Cole's conversation with Dueña Alfonsa as one of the keys to the whole novel. Alfonsa is not just the woman standing between John Grady and Alejandra. She is history speaking to youth, the old world speaking to the dreamer.In this episode, I explore Alfonsa's vision of hidden strings, blood, sacrifice, freedom, honor, and love — and how John Grady's journey teaches him that nothing beautiful in McCarthy's world stays untouched. Alejandra, Blevins, the prison violence, and John Grady himself all become part of this larger tragic pattern where the world demands blood before it believes.This is an episode about innocence after it has been broken, love after it has failed to save us, and the possibility of carrying the wound without making blood your god.

In this episode, I take a short detour from All the Pretty Horses into Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, the HBO film adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. I reflect on Professor White and Mr. Black, despair and faith, nihilism and sacred obligation, and why I find myself living somewhere between them as “Mr. Gray” — drawn to the dark clarity of pessimistic philosophy, but still unable to escape the sacred call to be there for another human being.

Before I jump back into All the Pretty Horses, I wanted to offer a shorter reflection on a line I recently found from Cormac McCarthy's unpublished screenplay Of Whales and Men: “I believe that we are arks of the covenant… and our true nature is longing.”In this episode, I explore McCarthy's vision of longing alongside psychoanalysis, James Hillman's notion of pothos, and Augustine's famous line that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But maybe God is not simply where restlessness ends. Maybe God is the restlessness at the core of our being.This is a meditation on desire, nostalgia, melancholy, sacred ache, and why longing may not be something to cure, but something to honor.

In this episode, I reflect on a dream that woke me up in terror and left me sitting with images I still don't fully understand: my childhood bedroom, my father reading Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, cherry cola concentrate, spiders, and my mother pulling an endless clear line from my throat. Rather than trying to decode the dream or claim one final interpretation, I use it as a way into McCarthy, the unconscious, and dream work as part of my own post-secular spirituality — a way of honoring symbolic life without reducing it to certainty, doctrine, or simple explanation.

In this episode, I explore All the Pretty Horses through the image of “a boy is a gun,” drawing on Lacan to think about masculinity, lack, fantasy, and the desperate need to be recognized.John Grady Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins are boys trying to enter the symbolic world of men, but McCarthy shows how dangerous that passage becomes when masculinity is tied to humiliation, violence, and the need to prove oneself. Blevins becomes the clearest tragedy of this, while John Grady reveals something more complicated: a masculinity that is beautiful, tender, courageous, and still deeply marked by blood.This episode is about boys, guns, horses, desire, shame, and the question underneath so much male suffering: do I have to become dangerous in order to be seen?

I finished All the Pretty Horses, and before moving into The Crossing, I'm staying a little longer with John Grady Cole.In this episode, I explore one of the most devastating moments in the novel: John Grady's killing of the cuchillero in prison and the strange new life that begins afterward “breath to breath.” This is not adulthood as triumph or toughness, but adulthood as wound, survival, and the loss of innocence.I reflect on how John Grady struggles with the fact that he has killed someone, even in self-defense, and how McCarthy refuses to make violence clean or heroic. Instead, he shows us the unbearable pain of life, the danger of being consumed by sorrow, and the fragile courage of continuing to live one breath at a time.

In this episode, I'm reflecting on one of the darkest sections of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are taken to Saltillo and the romantic dream of Mexico collapses into violence, corruption, and prison.I spend time with Pérez's chilling claim that evil is not merely something inside a person, but “a true thing” that goes about on its own legs. From there, I explore McCarthy's dark philosophy of evil: evil as visitation, as atmosphere, as something personal and impersonal at the same time.This is an episode about innocence, violence, adulthood, and what it means to keep carrying some wounded form of goodness through a world where evil is real.

In this episode, I reflect on the end of section two of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady Cole is exhausted, heartbroken, and unsure of what has happened after Alejandra leaves the hacienda. What stood out to me was a small but powerful moment with Rawlins, where male friendship shows up not as some grand emotional speech, but as presence.I explore the fragility of male friendship in Cormac McCarthy, the limits of stoicism, and the way men often long for connection without knowing how to say it directly. I also connect this to my work as a therapist with men, where so much of the work is helping men practice vulnerability, build real friendships, and find fragile bonds that can help them bear the difficulty of existence.

In this episode, I explore Cormac McCarthy's dark, postsecular vision of the sacred alongside Carl Jung and David Tacey's idea of the “darkening spirit.” I reflect on the sacred not as something safely contained by institutional religion or reduced to comfort, goodness, and light, but as the numinous: beautiful, violent, disruptive, terrifying, and transformative.Drawing on Jung's provocative claim that organized religion can protect us from a direct experience of God, I think through McCarthy's landscapes, violence, longing, animals, grief, and mystery as places where the sacred returns after the collapse of easy belief and easy unbelief. This is not an anti-Christian reflection. I share how deeply I've been shaped by Christian symbols while also wrestling with why I can no longer affirm a vision of the divine that cannot face evil, shadow, and violence as real powers within the greater whole.

In this episode, I reflect on All the Pretty Horses and the moment John Grady Cole meets Alejandra — not just as a love story, but as a beautiful and tragic opening into adulthood.I explore how young love, desire, fantasy, emerging sexuality, heartbreak, and betrayal become formative terrain for adolescent boys. Through McCarthy's world of light and darkness, I think about how longing can illuminate us and blind us, awaken us and wound us, and how therapy can help young men suffer honestly without turning pain into cruelty, cynicism, or contempt. As McCarthy puts it, “the world's heart beats at some terrible cost,” and much of growing up happens in that painful space “between the wish and the thing.”

In this episode, I reflect on a strange and haunting scene in All the Pretty Horses where John Grady Cole plays pool with the hacendado in what used to be an old chapel. What seems like a small moment opens into something much bigger: the sacred, institutional religion, reason, violence, memory, and the strange ways God may linger in places we think have been emptied out.I explore McCarthy's idea that “what is sacred is sacred,” and how the holy may exceed the control of priests, institutions, and rational explanation. This becomes a way into thinking about the post-secular sacred: not a simple return to religion, but also not a flat, disenchanted world where mystery disappears.Along the way, I also wrestle with the hacendado's critique of reason, his fear that reason can become monstrous when it tries to master everything, and McCarthy's larger vision of the sacred as beautiful, violent, terrifying, and impossible to fully control.

In this episode, I reflect on one of the most haunting lines I've encountered so far in All the Pretty Horses: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”As John Grady Cole and Rawlins arrive at the hacienda and begin working with horses, the old man Luis offers this dark, beautiful meditation on war, memory, and the souls of men and horses. I explore how McCarthy complicates any easy nostalgia for the old cowboy world. The horses are beautiful, almost sacred, but they are not innocent. The past is alluring, but it is not pure. And progress does not necessarily mean we have become less violent.This episode is about horses, war, masculinity, beauty, violence, and the unsettling possibility that human beings may not simply learn war from the outside. Maybe something in us already recognizes it. McCarthy gives us romance without illusion, beauty without innocence, and a vision of the human heart that continues to haunt me.

Cormac McCarthy is often caricatured as a conservative writer, and maybe there's something to that, but that claim gets reductionistic fast. In this episode, I explore Chapter 7 of Patrick O'Connor's Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned, “A Maelstrom of Doing and Undoing: McCarthy's Political Imaginary,” and think through McCarthy as a political writer whose work can't be easily mapped onto our usual categories.Rather than giving us a clean ideology, McCarthy forces us to sit with the tension between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, community and exclusion, freedom and violence. I reflect on Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper, The Stonemason, Tocqueville, technocracy, fragile dwellings, and the strange dignity of making a world even as it comes undone.This is McCarthy's politics: not a platform, not nostalgia, not utopia, but tragic attention to the people and places buried beneath the official story of progress.

In this episode, I use a question Rawlins asks John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses as a doorway into the feeling of being ill at ease in the world. I bring McCarthy into conversation with Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Peter Zapffe, and Thomas Ligotti to wrestle with the strange burden of consciousness, the ache of modern ennui, and the palliatives we need to cope with the sheer difficulty of existence.This is not an episode about finding a neat cure for the human condition. It's about asking what it means to live honestly inside discomfort, to recognize that civilization both shelters and wounds us, and to find forms of friendship, art, ritual, love, humor, and courage that help us keep the fire going against the dark.

In this episode, I reflect on Vereen M. Bell's essay “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy” and use it as a way into one of the biggest questions that haunts McCarthy's work: is McCarthy simply a nihilist, or is something more complicated happening?I explore how McCarthy strips away easy meaning, cheap hope, and sentimental moral order, while still leaving us with beauty, attention, witness, mystery, and the fragile possibility of carrying something human through the darkness. This episode moves through McCarthy's brutal landscapes, his refusal of easy answers, and the strange moral power of looking at the world without lying about it.Ultimately, I think McCarthy does not give us nihilism as a final answer. He gives us a passage through nihilism, asking what remains when the old guarantees fall apart — and whether, even then, we can still carry the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on rereading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as a coming-of-age novel and bring it into conversation with one of my favorite books from high school, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. I explore the tragic and beautiful passage into adulthood — the loss of innocence, the grief of seeing the world more clearly, and the difficult courage it takes to keep loving, working, and showing up anyway.I also connect these themes to my work as a therapist with adolescents and young adults, where therapy can become a kind of initiation space — a place to grieve what is lost, discover what is gained, and learn how to care less about the crowd while caring more about the right people. Along the way, I bring in the idea of la lucha — the struggle, the fight, the refusal to let the bastards get you down — as part of what adulthood asks of us.

In this solo episode, I put Carl Jung and Cormac McCarthy into creative conversation around the idea that life is a battleground of opposites: good and evil, beauty and violence, devotion and despair.I reflect on Jung's quote from Man and His Symbols, Petra Mundik's reading of McCarthy and “diverging equity,” my current rereading of All the Pretty Horses, and why I still have this fantasy of one day teaching a course on the gnostic spirituality of Cormac McCarthy from a depth psychological perspective.I also bring in the series finale of Euphoria, which felt to me like a Cormac McCarthy short story in TV form: devastating, mythic, violent, and yet still holding onto a fragile glimmer of human goodness.This episode is less about giving answers and more about staying with the tension: if evil may be greater, what does it mean that there is still possibly some good?

In this episode, I reflect on Matthew Potts' Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, especially chapter 2, “Fate: Nietzsche against Holden.” Potts is quickly becoming one of my favorite readers of McCarthy because he brings a deeply theological imagination to the novels without reducing them to easy Christian answers.I explore Potts' reading of fate, Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and the fragile possibility of something beyond violence. At the center of the episode is Hannah Arendt's powerful emphasis on forgiveness and promise: forgiveness as the answer to the irreversibility of the past, and promise as the answer to the uncertainty of the future.This is an episode about McCarthy's darkness, but also about the small signs that still matter: a wife's hand, a stone trough, a father carrying fire, and the possibility that even in a world of blood and fate, human beings may still be capable of beginning again.

In this episode, I reflect on D. Marcel DeCoste's Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment, but I'm not approaching McCarthy from a Catholic confessional perspective. Instead, I'm interested in DeCoste's insight that McCarthy may raise all the right religious questions without necessarily giving us clear or easy answers. I explore how McCarthy's darkness, ambiguity, and moral seriousness connect to the crucible of therapy, where people often have to struggle with the question rather than have the answer handed to them too quickly. I also bring in a moment from Apple TV's Shrinking, where Paul warns against meddling and solving clients' problems for them, because doing so can rob them of the dignity of their own struggle and discovery.

In this episode, I reflect on the recent Vanity Fair article, “Cormac McCarthy's Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence,” and the complicated story of Augusta Britt, the woman who appears to have haunted and shaped parts of McCarthy's fiction. Rather than idealizing McCarthy or reducing the story to a simple moral category, I try to sit with the tension: art and exploitation, rescue and possession, genius and harm, the romance of the muse and the reality of a vulnerable young woman whose life became part of a literary mythology. This is an episode about reading McCarthy without innocence, without worship, and without losing sight of the human being behind the myth.

In this episode, I reflect on Petra Mundik's A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy and the way her reading has deeply shaped my understanding of McCarthy's underlying philosophy and spirituality.While McCarthy once described himself as a materialist, his fiction never feels flat or reductionistic. It feels charged, haunted, and almost sacramental in its attention to blood, fire, evil, mystery, and the strange persistence of goodness. I explore Mundik's reading of McCarthy through Gnosticism, mysticism, Buddhism, and the Perennial Philosophy, while also being careful not to collapse McCarthy's own beliefs into the voices of his fictional characters.I also share how conversations with my own therapist — who brought together analytic psychology and religious studies — opened me up to a very different understanding of Gnosticism than the one I had received in seminary. Rather than seeing it only as heresy, I began to see it as a powerful imaginative response to suffering, alienation, evil, and the feeling that this world is not quite our home.This episode is about McCarthy's darkness, but also about the fire that remains inside it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's only published nonfiction essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves.I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian depth psychological lens. From there, I explore why dreams may matter—not because they give us easy answers or mystical certainty, but because they can sometimes carry emotional realities that ordinary language has not yet found a way to hold.I also think about this through my work with men in psychotherapy, especially men wrestling with anger, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the difficulty of naming what hurts. Sometimes a dream becomes a doorway. Sometimes an image arrives before the words do. And sometimes the unconscious may be trying to reconnect us with parts of ourselves we have lost contact with: joy, freedom, grief, longing, vitality, and the deeper life beneath our explanations.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's dark and haunting vision of the world through the lens of a recent Substack essay on his “gnostic conservatism.” Rather than treating McCarthy as a political writer in any simple sense, I explore his deeper existential concerns: violence, fate, evil, tenderness, and the fragile mystery of goodness in a fallen world.I think about Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road as works that refuse easy optimism while still leaving room for something like hope. McCarthy's world is often brutal, cold, and morally terrifying, but again and again there is also the image of fire: something fragile, humane, and sacred that must be carried even when there is no guarantee it will prevail.This episode is about darkness without despair, hope without sentimentality, and what it means to keep carrying the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy's novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional repression, and inherited versions of masculinity that have cut them off from tenderness, grief, intimacy, and their own inner lives.Through No Country for Old Men and The Road, I think about masculinity not simply as something to condemn or defend, but as something that can mature or fail to mature. McCarthy gives us men who are brave, capable, haunted, violent, loving, terrified, and often unable to speak directly about what is destroying them. And in that world, “carrying the fire” becomes a powerful image for a different kind of strength: not domination, not invulnerability, not control, but the ability to protect something vulnerable without destroying it.This episode is about fathers and sons, old myths and new possibilities, therapy as a different kind of initiation, and the hope that even in the dark, men can learn to become more fully human.

In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology.At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that conference cracked something open in me. I heard reflections on Johann Baptist Metz's idea of memoria passionis, the memory of suffering, and encountered John Caputo's emerging work on the weakness of God, which later became deeply important to me.I reflect on how Caputo's vision of weakness, vulnerability, compassion, and responsibility helped begin a long process of deconstruction—not as destruction, but as a way of becoming more honest, more human, and more open to the suffering of others.I also share a story that has stayed with me for years: hearing Caputo's former female support staff talk about how he actually lived his philosophy, including taking a pay cut so they could be paid more fairly. That testimony still moves me because it raises the deeper question: do our beliefs make us more compassionate, more generous, and more responsible, or do they simply make us more sophisticated?This episode is about political theology, weakness, memory, vulnerability, and the strange grace of those moments that quietly begin to change us.

In this episode, I reflect on theopoetics as a way of returning to Christian theology without returning to literalism, dogmatism, or the need to win theological arguments.As I've been rereading Christian theology, I've found myself drawn again to the strange, wounded, imaginative heart of religious language. I don't take these ideas literally in the way I once did, but I do still find myself moved by them as metaphors, symbols, wounds, and invitations.I explore Stanley Romaine Hopper, Death of God theology, and John Caputo's weak theology as different ways of thinking about what happens to God-language after certainty. This episode is not about debating belief or unbelief. It is about asking what theology can still do when it becomes poetic, imaginative, weak, ethical, and open to the future.

In this episode, I reflect on René Girard's I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, especially the chapter entitled “Satan,” and explore how Girard's understanding of mimetic desire opens up a powerful way of thinking about Christianity, violence, scapegoating, and the dangerous comfort of accusation.Girard helps us see that desire is not as original as we imagine. We learn what to want through others, and the people who shape our desires can quickly become our rivals. From there, rivalry spreads, communities become anxious, and peace is often restored by finding someone to blame. This is where Girard's reading of Satan becomes so provocative: Satan is not simply a cartoonish figure of evil, but the power of accusation, contagion, and false unity through a victim.I also bring Girard into conversation with contemporary Christian nationalism, especially the way it often identifies immigrants, outsiders, and those who do not fit a narrow heritage vision of America as threats to Christian civilization. But Girard invites a reversal. The satanic is not found in the vulnerable outsider being accused. The satanic is found in the mechanism of accusation itself.This episode is an attempt to think with Girard, not as an expert, but as someone newly struck by the force of his vision, and to ask what it might mean if the cross does not bless our accusations, but exposes them.

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo's After Christianity and his provocative reading of Joachim of Fiore, secularization, and the possibility of a Christianity after metaphysics. Vattimo helps us imagine secularization not as the simple disappearance of faith, but as one of Christianity's own historical effects — a weakening of domination rooted in the incarnation and the self-emptying of God.I explore Joachim's vision of the age of the Spirit, where faith is no longer secured by literalism, fear, or institutional control, but opened through interpretation, freedom, and charity. For Vattimo, the limit of interpretation is not rigid dogma or an outdated metaphysics of nature, but love itself — ama et fac quod vis, love and do what you will.This episode is about what remains after the death of the metaphysical God: not nihilism, but a more fragile and generous Christianity, one shaped by weakness, hospitality, spiritual reading, and the possibility that the Spirit still breathes where it wants.

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.