Psyche

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...

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...

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 actuall...

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 subj...

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....

In this episode, I reflect on  Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere  and what it reveals about the world of online masculinity influencers. As a therapist who works primarily with young men—and as the father of three teenage sons—I feel a responsibility to understand the ideas shaping how many young men think about identity, power, and relationships. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic philosoph...

In this solo episode, I explore the Dark Forest theory—a provocative answer to the Fermi paradox suggesting that intelligent civilizations may survive by remaining silent and hidden in a dangerous universe. From there, I follow a series of philosophical and theological connections. I discuss the work of Bogna Konior, traditions of negative theology and the hidden God, Gnostic suspicions about the...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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 pape...

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...

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 defini...

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...

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 structu...

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 unmi...

In this solo episode, I explore what Jeffrey Kripal calls  the traumatic secret  — the uneasy coordination between trauma and transcendence in mystical literature — through the philosophy of Georges Bataille. I reflect on how Kripal shaped my own intellectual and spiritual development during a season of deconstruction, teaching me how to remain open to mystery while staying critically grounded. Fr...

I don’t believe in astrology. But while reading  I Don’t Believe in Astrology  by Deborah Silverman, I found myself unexpectedly confronted — especially by the fact that Capricorn is traditionally associated with The Devil card in the tarot. Not evil. Attachment. In this solo reflection, I explore ambition, purpose, materialism, and the subtle chains we don’t realize we’re wearing. I talk about be...

I’ve been using the phrase  ethical hedonism  in recent episodes, but I realized I hadn’t slowed down enough to ask a foundational question: what do I mean by pleasure? In this solo reflection, I think out loud about pleasure as subjective, embodied, relational, and psychologically complex. I explore the neuroscience of dopamine, the difference between craving and deep presence, and how culture sh...

In this solo episode, I explore a tension that I’ve encountered both personally and clinically—the way some high-control religious communities can feel deeply warm, relational, and inviting at first, and yet over time reveal a much more rigid and exclusionary structure underneath. I begin with a personal reflection on being re-exposed to Douglas Wilson while listening to conversations about Christ...

What if suffering isn’t the clearest sign I’m on the right path? In this episode, I explore the legacy of high-control Christianity and its elevation of pain as virtue, contrasted with a different ethical vision rooted in aliveness, pleasure, and embodied experience. Drawing on David Congdon, Linn Tonstad’s resurrection-centered theology, and Carrie Jenkins’ work on love, I begin to reframe pleasu...

I’ve been reading  Pleasure Activism  by adrienne maree brown as a way of making sense of what I’ve been calling my own  ethical hedonism  — not indulgence, not impulsivity, but the question of whether pleasure might actually function as guidance. Included in that book is Audre Lorde’s classic essay  The Uses of the Erotic , which I recently told a group chat might be one of the best essays I’ve e...

In this solo episode, I return to James Hillman’s chapter on the  puer aeternus  and  pothos  from  Loose Ends  — and explore how longing may not be a problem to solve, but the very engine of being alive. Building on Jung’s reflections on the wanderer while moving beyond a mother-centered interpretation of desire, Hillman reframes longing as structural to consciousness itself. I weave his insights...

Esther Perel has named Jack Morin as a major influence on her thinking about desire — so I returned to  The Erotic Mind . What emerged was a theory of passion that feels even more relevant now. In this episode, I explore Morin’s Erotic Equation — attraction plus obstacles equals excitement — and connect it to psychoanalytic reflections on lack, resistance, and the structure of desire. Drawing on T...