Psyche

In this episode, I reflect on one of the most haunting lines I’ve encountered so far in  All the Pretty Horses : “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.” As John Grady Cole and Rawlins arrive at the hacienda and begin working with horses, the old man Luis offers this dark, beautiful meditation on war, memory, and the souls of men and horses. I explore how McCarthy complic...

Cormac McCarthy is often caricatured as a conservative writer, and maybe there’s something to that, but that claim gets reductionistic fast. In this episode, I explore Chapter 7 of Patrick O’Connor’s  Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned , “A Maelstrom of Doing and Undoing: McCarthy’s Political Imaginary,” and think through McCarthy as a political writer whose work can’t be ea...

In this episode, I use a question Rawlins asks John Grady Cole in  All the Pretty Horses  as a doorway into the feeling of being ill at ease in the world. I bring McCarthy into conversation with Sigmund Freud’s  Civilization and Its Discontents , Peter Zapffe, and Thomas Ligotti to wrestle with the strange burden of consciousness, the ache of modern ennui, and the palliatives we need to cope with...

In this episode, I reflect on Vereen M. Bell’s essay “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy” and use it as a way into one of the biggest questions that haunts McCarthy’s work: is McCarthy simply a nihilist, or is something more complicated happening? I explore how McCarthy strips away easy meaning, cheap hope, and sentimental moral order, while still leaving us with beauty, attention, witness,...

In this episode, I reflect on rereading Cormac McCarthy’s  All the Pretty Horses  as a coming-of-age novel and bring it into conversation with one of my favorite books from high school, J.D. Salinger’s  The Catcher in the Rye . I explore the tragic and beautiful passage into adulthood — the loss of innocence, the grief of seeing the world more clearly, and the difficult courage it takes to keep lo...

In this solo episode, I put Carl Jung and Cormac McCarthy into creative conversation around the idea that life is a battleground of opposites: good and evil, beauty and violence, devotion and despair. I reflect on Jung’s quote from  Man and His Symbols , Petra Mundik’s reading of McCarthy and “diverging equity,” my current rereading of  All the Pretty Horses , and why I still have this fantasy of...

In this episode, I reflect on Matthew Potts’  Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament , especially chapter 2, “Fate: Nietzsche against Holden.” Potts is quickly becoming one of my favorite readers of McCarthy because he brings a deeply theological imagination to the novels without reducing them to easy Christian answers. I explore Potts’ reading of fate, Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and the fra...

In this episode, I reflect on D. Marcel DeCoste’s  Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment , but I’m not approaching McCarthy from a Catholic confessional perspective. Instead, I’m interested in DeCoste’s insight that McCarthy may raise all the right religious questions without necessarily giving us clear or easy answers. I explore how McCarthy’s darkness...

In this episode, I reflect on the recent  Vanity Fair  article, “Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence,” and the complicated story of Augusta Britt, the woman who appears to have haunted and shaped parts of McCarthy’s fiction. Rather than idealizing McCarthy or reducing the story to a simple moral category, I try to sit with the tension: art and exploitation, rescue and possession, geni...

In this episode, I reflect on Petra Mundik’s  A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy  and the way her reading has deeply shaped my understanding of McCarthy’s underlying philosophy and spirituality. While McCarthy once described himself as a materialist, his fiction never feels flat or reductionistic. It feels charged, haunted, and almost sacramental in its attention to blo...

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s only published nonfiction essay, “ The Kekulé Problem, ” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves. I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian dep...

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s dark and haunting vision of the world through the lens of a recent Substack essay on his “gnostic conservatism.” Rather than treating McCarthy as a political writer in any simple sense, I explore his deeper existential concerns: violence, fate, evil, tenderness, and the fragile mystery of goodness in a fallen world. I think about  Blood Meridian ,  N...

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy’s novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional...

In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology. At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that confe...

In this episode, I reflect on theopoetics as a way of returning to Christian theology without returning to literalism, dogmatism, or the need to win theological arguments. As I’ve been rereading Christian theology, I’ve found myself drawn again to the strange, wounded, imaginative heart of religious language. I don’t take these ideas literally in the way I once did, but I do still find myself move...

In this episode, I reflect on René Girard’s  I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning , especially the chapter entitled “Satan,” and explore how Girard’s understanding of mimetic desire opens up a powerful way of thinking about Christianity, violence, scapegoating, and the dangerous comfort of accusation. Girard helps us see that desire is not as original as we imagine. We learn what to want through others...

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo’s  After Christianity  and his provocative reading of Joachim of Fiore, secularization, and the possibility of a Christianity after metaphysics. Vattimo helps us imagine secularization not as the simple disappearance of faith, but as one of Christianity’s own historical effects — a weakening of domination rooted in the incarnation and the self-emptying o...

In this episode, I explore Heraclitus through James Hillman’s beautiful foreword to  Heraclitus’ Fragments , especially the idea that the psyche is not something fixed, stable, or easily explained, but something always in motion, always in tension, always touched by contradiction. Heraclitus gives us a way to think about psychotherapy beyond neat explanations and rigid identities. The self is not...

In this episode, I explore the fantasy of the inner circle — that persistent feeling that somewhere, just beyond where we are, there is a more exclusive room, a deeper friendship, a more serious group, a hidden circle of people who really know, really belong, and really matter. Building from C.S. Lewis’s essay “The Inner Ring,” I think through why the desire to belong can so easily become a desire...

In this episode, I continue working through  New Perspectives on Henry Corbin  by focusing on Joan Copjec’s chapter on Corbin, Lacan, Kiarostami, and the Cloud. What surprised me most was seeing someone from the world of Lacanian theory take Corbin seriously — not as an odd mystical detour, but as a thinker who might help us rethink psychoanalysis, politics, cinema, and reality itself. Copjec brin...

In this episode, I spend time with  New Perspectives on Henry Corbin , edited by Hadi Fakhoury, and reflect on why Corbin still feels so strangely alive right now. Corbin is difficult to place. He moves through Islamic philosophy, Suhrawardi, Shi’ism, Heidegger, Neoplatonism, angelology, psychoanalysis, esotericism, and the imaginal world, but what keeps pulling me in is his refusal to reduce spir...

In this episode, I return to Henry Corbin’s  The Paradox of Monotheism  and explore his strange, beautiful, and deeply provocative argument that monotheism can become idolatrous when God is imagined as the highest being rather than the mystery of Being itself. Drawing from Ibn Arabi, Shi’a theosophy, Proclus, angelology, and Corbin’s reflections on mystical kathenotheism, I think through what it m...

In this episode, I continue exploring creative expressions of Christianity and religion through an unexpected connection between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Carl Jung. After discovering Henry Corbin in therapy years ago, I eventually came across Jung’s correspondence with Corbin around  Answer to Job , where Jung acknowledges Schleiermacher as one of his “spiritual ancestors.” That admission open...

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo’s  After Christianity , a book that was incredibly helpful to me during my own journey of faith, deconstruction, psychotherapy, and trying to figure out whether there was still some version of Christianity I could hold onto after the older structures of belief had begun to fall apart. Vattimo’s work came back into my mind recently as I’ve been reading mo...

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with Massimo Recalcati, and that rabbit trail led me to Luca Di Gregorio’s  Lacan in Italy —and specifically to a line that completely grabbed me: that Lacan’s legacy “demands invention up to the limit of heresy.” In this episode, I explore what it might mean to truly inherit a thinker without becoming their disciple in the worst sense of the word. What does...