The Fractured Self Podcast

Who are you when you drop the mask? Join Rich as he explores the intersection of depth psychology, existential philosophy, and authentic identity. This isn't self-help or motivation, it's a step into the unconscious patterns, shadow work, and existential questions that shape who we really are. Drawing from Jungian psychology, existentialist thought, and raw personal reflection, each episode examines the fractured spaces where our authentic selves hide beneath societal conditioning. For those ready to question not just what they believe, but why they exist at all.

The Fractured Self Podcast is a society podcast hosted by Rich Bennetts, with 16 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Rich Bennetts hosts The Fractured Self Podcast, a society show with 16 episodes published.

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  Episode #16

  Why Camus Said Most People Are Already Dead

  Jun 3, 202614 minS0

  <p>Camus thought a successful, unexamined life was a quieter kind of suicide. Here's what he actually argued. <br/><br/>Albert Camus was twenty-eight, stranded in occupied France with diseased lungs, when he wrote that there is only one serious philosophical question: whether to go on living. Almost everyone misremembers what came next.</p><p>The line about Sisyphus being happy gets quoted everywhere. The argument that earns it almost never survives the trip. This episode walks the whole thing: the absurd as a collision that can't be solved by changing either side of it, the three responses Camus said w...

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  Episode #15

  The False Self Was Never the Problem

  Jun 1, 202614 minS0

  <p>In 1942, Donald Winnicott was assessing children evacuated out of London during the Blitz, and the ones the system marked as coping best were the ones he found most disturbing. They had stopped crying for their mothers. They had made themselves useful. Within days of arriving at a stranger's farmhouse they had become whatever that stranger seemed to need. The institution called this settling well. Winnicott called it the False Self, and he spent eighteen years working out what it was.</p><p>This episode follows what he actually meant, because the version that has survived into the authenticity discourse...

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  Episode #14

  Jung on the Persona: Why Dropping the Mask Is the Wrong Instruction

  May 28, 202615 minS0

  <p>Jung never said drop the mask. He said understand it. Why the persona is necessary, what the shadow really is, and why "find your authentic self" is the trap. <br/><br/>In December 1913, Carl Jung was thirty-eight, professionally successful, internationally known, and by his own account on the edge of psychosis. He had broken with Freud, lost the identity of the chosen heir to psychoanalysis, and discovered that underneath the man he had built there was nothing he recognised. Out of the four years of crisis that followed came his concept of the persona, and one of the most m...

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  Episode #13

  Das Man: Heidegger on the Self That Isn't Yours

  May 26, 202615 minS0

  <p>Heidegger called it das Man: the self made of borrowed opinions and issued tastes. Why trying to be authentic is part of the same trap. <br/><br/>The German philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a name to the self that isn't yours: das Man, the one, the they, the everyone-and-no-one. It's the form of existence in which your opinions are absorbed rather than reached, your tastes issued rather than chosen, and your life lived by you rather than lived by. Heidegger argued this is the default state of being human, not a failure to be fixed.</p><p>This episode e...

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  Episode #12

  The Fourth Given: Yalom on Meaninglessness

  May 24, 202624 minS0

  <p>Irvin Yalom called meaninglessness the fourth ultimate concern of human existence. Why it can't be solved, and what changes when you stop trying. <br/><br/>Irvin Yalom, the existential psychiatrist, identified four ultimate concerns at the centre of human life: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. This episode is about the fourth, and about why the contemporary "meaning crisis" tends to misread what Yalom actually meant.</p><p>The episode works through Tolstoy's collapse at the height of his success, the structure of Yalom's four givens, the difference between Yalom and Viktor Frankl on whether meaning can be sought directly, a...

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