Psyche

I’ve been reading Massimo Recalcati’s  The Son’s Secret: From Oedipus to the Prodigal Son , and a particular passage stopped me in my tracks. His reflection on the child as an irreducible mystery—foreign, distinct, impossible to fully comprehend—opened up something much bigger for me about personhood itself. In this episode, I explore an idea I’ve privately thought about as  anthropological apopha...

In this episode, I veer away from Hegel for a moment to follow a curiosity that opened up after listening to the latest  Why Theory  discussion of  After the Hunt . That conversation sent me back to John Howard Yoder, one of the most important theologians of Christian nonviolence in the twentieth century, and also someone who shaped the theological world I was formed in during seminary. But Yoder...

For this episode, I’m diving into one of Hegel’s most haunting phrases from the  Phenomenology of Spirit : “the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.” What happens when philosophy is not primarily about acquiring knowledge, but about surviving the collapse of the certainties that once organized your world? In this episode, I explore Hegel’s vision of negativity, contradiction,...

In this episode, I’m continuing my slow entrance into Hegel by looking at Glenn Alexander Magee’s account of Hegelian panentheism — this strange, difficult, and fascinating idea that God is not simply outside the world, but also not reducible to the world. What Magee helps clarify is that Hegel’s God is not the static, self-contained God of much classical theology. Hegel gives us a God who unfolds...

In this episode, I reflect on finally sitting down and slowly working through Hegel’s  Phenomenology of Spirit , which has felt a little like wading into a vast, dark ocean. Near the end of the Preface, I came across a passage where Hegel warns against retreating into private feeling, into the “oracle” within, as if truth could simply be possessed inwardly without the hard human work of reason, co...

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek’s  Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy , turning to Chapter 3, “Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real.” This chapter centers on a deceptively simple idea:  the order matters . In quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, history, politics, and even theology, the same elements can produce a very different reality dependin...

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek’s  Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy , turning to Chapter 2, “Why Quantum Mechanics Needs Hegel.” Building on the first episode’s focus on Žižek’s claim that  collapse comes first , this chapter asks the question from the other direction: not only why a Hegelian might be drawn to quantum mechanics, but why quantum mechanics may need...

In this episode, I begin a new series on Slavoj Žižek’s  Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy , starting with the Introduction and Chapter 1, “Why a Hegelian Needs Quantum Mechanics.” This is not an attempt to turn quantum mechanics into a vague spiritual metaphor, and it is definitely not a physics lecture. Instead, I’m interested in what Žižek is trying to do philosophically: to rethink...

In this first episode of a new series within  Psyche Podcast , I begin a deep dive into Jon Mills’  Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality  by reflecting on the introduction and the enduring psychological power of the God idea. I explore why human beings seem so drawn to ultimate explanations, how desire and imagination shape belief, and why spiritual hunger may t...

In this episode of  Psyche Podcast , I explore Stanley Cavell’s understanding of skepticism, finitude, and acknowledgment, and why I think his work matters so deeply for psychotherapy. Rather than treating skepticism as a merely abstract philosophical problem, Cavell helps us see it as one of the central ways human beings try to evade the truth of their own condition. We want certainty, we want gu...

In this episode, I explore Stanley Cavell alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein and reflect on the idea that the therapist can, in an important sense, be understood as a kind of ordinary language philosopher. I talk about first encountering Cavell years ago in seminary in a social ethics class with Dr. Jonathan Tran, and why Cavell’s way of thinking about voice, acknowledgment, skepticism, and the ordinar...

In this episode in my Philosophy and Solution-Focused Therapy series, I reflect on Quentin Tarantino’s  Kill Bill  through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that meaning is use. After a recent client urged me to finally watch the film, I did, for the first time, and absolutely loved it. What especially stayed with me were the scenes between the Bride and Pai Mei, where repetition, correction,...

In this episode, I explore Wittgenstein’s idea of forms of life and what he once called the “whole hurly-burly of human actions,” that living background of practices, relationships, gestures, expectations, and shared meanings within which anything we say or feel can make sense at all. I reflect on the temptation, in both philosophy and psychotherapy, to reduce reality to atomistic parts, hidden in...

In this episode of  Psyche Podcast , I continue my series on the philosophical foundations of solution-focused therapy by doing a close reading of Nick Drury’s essay  “Wittgenstein and the Tikanga of Psychotherapy.”  Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Drury challenges the Cartesian and medicalized picture of the person that has shaped so much of modern mental health discourse, and instead...

In this episode of  Psyche Podcast , I continue my  Philosophy & Solution-Focused Therapy  series by turning to Steve de Shazer’s essay,  “Don’t Think, But Observe: What Is the Importance of the Work of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy?”  In it, I explore why Wittgenstein matters so deeply to Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, not because he gives it some hidden grand theory...

In this episode of  Psyche Podcast , I continue my series on the philosophy behind solution-focused therapy by taking up a fascinating and delicate question: can Ludwig Wittgenstein be understood as an autistic man, and if so, what might that help us see about his philosophy, about neurodivergence, and about therapy itself? Drawing from Alan Griswold’s essay on Wittgenstein, along with broader ref...

In this episode, I begin a loose new series exploring the philosophical influences behind Solution-Focused Therapy, especially the work of Steve de Shazer. Too often, Solution-Focused Therapy gets caricatured as simplistic, overly optimistic, or not serious enough about suffering. I argue that this misses something much deeper. Beneath its lightness of touch is a remarkably sophisticated way of th...

In this episode, I explore a question that has followed Richard Rorty for years and feels especially urgent now: did his pragmatism, and his rejection of universal foundations for truth, help create the post-truth culture we are living in? Drawing from Eduardo Mendieta’s article  “Rorty and Post-Post-Truth”  in the  Los Angeles Review of Books , I argue that this is ultimately a caricature of Rort...

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s essay  “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy”  from  Essays on Heidegger and Others  and think through one of the tensions that has been staying with me lately: how to honor private self-creation without letting it collapse into a form of individualism that forgets public responsibility. I reflect on Rorty’s reading of Foucault, his idea of the “knight of...

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s chapter “Freud and Moral Reflection,” a reading of Freud that has really stayed with me as I’ve been getting more into Rorty lately. I make it clear that I’m not claiming this is simply the definitive or orthodox way to understand Freud, and that many people in psychoanalysis would likely push back on Rorty’s interpretation, but I do find his perspective...

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 t...

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,...

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...

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,...

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 with...