Psyche

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...