Psyche

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.