Psyche

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.