Psyche

In 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 better than monogamy, or that everyone should rethink their relationship structure. I’m more interested in what polyamory opens up as a psychological image: the idea that we are not always as unified as we pretend to be. We are...

In 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 call a vee relationship, similar in some ways to the painful arrangement between theologian Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. I also bring in Otto Gross and the provocative idea that conventional...

In 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 Martel on  Weird Studies , I explore how the search for authenticity can become either a path toward responsibility or a trail of tears for the people around us. As a Four on the Enneagram, this tension speaks deeply to me: th...

In 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 than Nietzsche. Since I’ve already known how important Nietzsche was for Hesse, this made me curious about Novalis and his strange, beautiful idea of magical idealism. I explore Novalis as a poet, philosopher, mystic, and t...

In this episode, I reflect on the strange and unsettling figure of Abraxas — the god Hermann Hesse brings into  Demian and Carl Jung explores in  The Red Book  and the  Seven Sermons to the Dead . Abraxas names something deeper than a simple “good versus evil” split. He becomes an image of the mixture of reality itself: light and shadow, creation and destruction, spirit and instinct, the sacred an...

In 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 wholeness or spiritual closure. Putting Jung into conversation with Hegel, especially the idea of the Absolute as contradiction rather than harmony, I explore whether Jung’s Self might be read not as the place where contra...

In 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. Sherry helps us see Jung not as a timeless sage floating above history, but as a brilliant and deeply flawed thinker whose mythic imagination sometimes became an ethical liability. Jung’s language about the German psyche, W...

In 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 currently involved in a contested legal case where a woman is accusing him of stealing over 80k from her on a dating website . This is not a verdict, a defense, or an accusation. It is a meditation on projection, spiritu...

In 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 story. I explore Thomasin, Puritan fear, original sin, repression, the shadow, and the dark parody of individuation at the heart of the film. Drawing loosely from Jung and depth psychology, I think about what happens when a...

In 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 stayed with me most was the tension between modern individual alienation and the seductive pull of collective religious belonging.  Midsommar  is disturbing because the horror is wrapped in beauty, ritual, shared grief,...

In 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 transforms. Since beginning  The Crossing , especially Billy Parham’s journey with the she-wolf, I’ve found myself returning to this older language for the sacred: not as clean doctrine or easy comfort, but as mystery, awe, dread,...

In 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 love each other, and yet they cannot be together. I explore this moment as one of McCarthy’s clearest expressions of tragic religious philosophy — a world where love is real but not always powerful enough to save us, where...

In 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 Freud and psychoanalysis — the movement from childish wishing into the painful terrain of reality, mourning, and adulthood. John Grady’s love for Alejandra is not dismissed as fake or foolish. The longing is real. The beauty...

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...

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 lov...

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,...

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...

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...

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 t...

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, a...

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...

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 Corm...

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 cla...

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 illum...

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 id...