Private Practice Podcast Dan Brown & James Hall

Oliver Sacks is known for his way of communicating ideas about neuroscience in the form of best-selling page-turners. He lived a life as interesting as his patients and he is also Dan's hero. We used this episode not so much to talk about the contents of his books, but the way he communicated how he saw people who were outliers in their neurological perceptions.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat, trying to pick up her head and put it on his own as if it were a totally different object, is the most famous of Oliver Sacks' patients. He represents how human perception is not as black and white as to be thought right or wrong, it's more of a range. Yet the woman's head is a fact of physics; it's not a hat, and nor is it a social construct of the patriarchy, no matter what the American media tells you! We discuss how Oliver Sacks found a balance between objectivity and interpretation, studied interpretations scientifically, and simultaneously managed to treat his patients more like a psychotherapist than a research scientist.

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This is the first in our season of episodes swimming in the waters of Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person, and the first in a three-part mini-series on his six fundamental life learnings. It was first published in 1967 and we'll be seeing if it still outshines the millions of words people have cobbled together since, to essentially describe what it is to grow as a person.
Carl Rogers "baffled and annoyed" psychiatrists in his day, as he refused to accept Freud's analytical approach to therapy; he didn't like being told what to think. In this episode, Dan and James will happily baffle and annoy you, taking you through the first three of the six life learnings Rogers considered to be his most significant; being honest with emotions, accepting himself, and understanding other people's interpretations. With examples of the desire to murder grandmas in the supermarket and express rage in a job interview, we're bringing you a discussion about dilemmas that often remain as unclear as ever, half a century after the book's publication. 
If you want to read along with us, we thoroughly recommend the book, but if you just want the nonsense then you've come to the right place.

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This is the second of a three-part mini-series on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. In friendship, war and family, Carl has something to say about how much your feelings matter, and whether or not they legitimise mass murder. If you like what we do on this podcast, you're in for a treat. 
Small Talk is back to forward your life clock, as James adjusts to a double time zone shift and leaves out not a single minute from the story (although he still gets the details wrong if you pay attention), while Dan has to deal with a decapitated rat. The life learnings this week involve the allowance of others to overshare, accepting others despite everything, and resisting jumping into other people's lives to fix them. It's hard to tell if this is a conversation about the megalomaniac child's rites of passage, or foreign policy and international diplomacy with psychopaths at very long tables. Either way, the nuclear reactor has some warm water for you to bathe in.

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This is the third of our episodes on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. The ultimate introduction to his big ideas, and just the beginning of our odyssey towards the light of a sun that can melt your hand off. 
Small Talk is lost in favour of James having a production meeting with himself, before getting right into the topic suspiciously quickly. This incorporates the weighing up of right- and left-hemisphere interpretations of experience, allowing facts to flow, and remembering that the only child is not, in actual flowing fact, special. Fans of Flow will fondly remember that Flow is a verb, a doing word, and you'll be delighted to discover that the Flow activity of Becoming is a right Carry On. 
This concludes Part One of the book, and we'll be back for plenty more as long as we don't flow too close to the sun.

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If all this Becoming of late is becoming overwhelming, we take a break from On Becoming a Person to talk about a new film from New York, called Adieu, Lacan, featuring an interview with the director, Richard Ledes. The film is fictional, but the main character of Seriema, played by Ismenia Mendes (Orange is the New Black), is based on the real life of Betty Milan, a Brazilian woman who traveled to Paris for a series of analytic sessions back in the 1970s with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, played by David Patrick Kelly (Twin Peaks). 
Dan was ill with no voice for the recording of this episode, so in lieu, as English-speakers like to say, is a French person, Sammy, who has many opinions—quelle surprise—on both Lacan and the film.
The episode starts with an interview with the director, followed by a review of the film, a discussion of Lacan and his views on politics and relationships, and then a conversation about psychoanalysis around the world, the language of existentialism (and K-pop group BTS), and Freud becoming a totem in France. 
To watch the film, it's available now on many streaming platforms from www.adieulacan.com
“Freud thought a film could never transmit what happens in an analysis... but I am quite sure if Freud saw this film he would fall in love with it... at last, psychoanalysis has reached the cinema”
— Marco Antonio Cortinho Jorge, Corpo Freudiano do Rio de Janeiro


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We jump back into Carl Rogers this week with a discussion of the idea of congruence between the internal and external worlds. Dan is back and recording from a hotel room in Hitchin because he is on a business trip; his small talk about this is so boring that it's an easy win for James with his witty and concise tale of a night out in Casablanca. But small talk is not a competition and so there are no prizes. 
How fortified is your inner world? Do you pride yourself on being able to scream with mean, defenestrating laughter at someone on the inside, but slap on a façade of faux compassion to get away with it? If so then you are objectively wrong and Carl says so. This is followed by skipping over Carl's introduction to Unconditional Positive Regard (because we have made whole episodes on this subject in the past) to ask the question, what is empathy? Baby don't hurt me. James refuses to stop judging Dan and Dan just wants to understand why.

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