About this podcast
A psychotherapist explores topics relating to psychotherapy, philosophy, culture, and religion.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 385 episodes
- A Pause, and Possibly a Goodbye · 27 min · Season 5 Episode 385In this episode, I share why I’ve decided to step away from the podcast—at least for now.After five years of meaningful conversations and connections, I’ve been reflecting on the…
- The Fool's Path · 12 min · Season 5 Episode 384One of my favorite passages in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is his reflection that he had to become a fool before he could truly awaken. It echoes the Prodigal Son and countless…
- Polyamory & Depth Psychology · 23 min · Season 5 Episode 383In this episode, I’m reflecting on love, polyamory, jealousy, projection, and the strange multiplicity of the human psyche. This is not an episode arguing that polyamory is…
- Jung’s Complicated Relationship to Monogamy · 28 min · Season 5 Episode 382In this episode, I explore Jung’s complicated relationship to monogamy, sexuality, and love. Jung’s own life with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff seems to resemble what we might now…
- The Inward Gaze · 30 min · Season 5 Episode 381In this episode, I reflect on Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, psychotherapy, and the double-edged sword of introspection. Drawing from an essay on Hesse and a concern raised by JF…
- Novalis & Magical Idealism · 21 min · Season 5 Episode 380In this episode, I reflect on a section from Herman Hesse’s Demian where Emil Sinclair says that Novalis touches him more deeply than almost any other writer, maybe even more…
- Abraxas- The God of the Mixture · 47 min · Season 5 Episode 379In this episode, I reflect on the strange and unsettling figure of Abraxas — the god Hermann Hesse brings into Demianand Carl Jung explores in The Red Book and the Seven Sermons…
- Jung & Hegel's Contradictory Wholeness · 24 min · Season 5 Episode 378In this episode, I reflect on Stanton Marlan’s reading of Jung’s black sun and the Self as a way of challenging the common psychoanalytic caricature of Jung as a thinker of easy…
- Jung as Avant-Garde Conservative · 21 min · Season 5 Episode 377In this episode, I reflect on the conclusion of Jay Sherry’s Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative and the uncomfortable question of Jung’s failures during the Nazi era…
- Theurgy in the Mud · 29 min · Season 5 Episode 376In this episode, I reflect on starting to reread Gregory Shaw’s Theurgy and the Soul and the strange, painful tension of admiring a scholar of Iamblichus while discovering he is…
- The Witch · 24 min · Season 5 Episode 375In this episode, I reflect on finally watching Robert Eggers’ The Witch—with full spoilers—and why the film feels like such a devastating psychological and theological horror…
- Midsommar · 27 min · Season 5 Episode 374In this episode, I reflect on Midsommar after a client recommended I watch it and the film really gripped me. Spoiler warning: I talk openly about major scenes in the movie. What…
- Otto & Jung on the Sacred as the Numinous · 59 min · Season 5 Episode 373In this episode, I reflect on Rudolf Otto and Carl Jung’s idea of the numinous — the sacred as something that terrifies and fascinates, wounds and heals, interrupts and…
- Endless Pain/Love · 35 min · Season 5 Episode 372In this episode, I return to one of the most devastating scenes in All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole lying under the stars after seeing Alejandra for the last time. They…
- Between The Wish & Reality · 25 min · Season 5 Episode 371In this episode, I sit with one of Alfonsa’s most devastating lines in All the Pretty Horses: “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” I explore this through…
- Questions without Answers · 26 min · Season 5 Episode 370In 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…
- Nothing Proven Except Blood · 53 min · Season 5 Episode 369Having 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…
- Mr. Gray · 45 min · Season 5 Episode 368In 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…
- Arks of Longing · 22 min · Season 5 Episode 367Before 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…
- Endless Thread · 38 min · Season 5 Episode 366In 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…
