Psyche

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.