Psyche

Quique Autrey
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  • Mental Health
  • Updated weekly

A psychotherapist explores topics relating to psychotherapy, philosophy, culture, and religion.  

  1. Mr. Gray

    13 hr ago

    Mr. Gray

    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. Black, despair and faith, nihilism and sacred obligation, and why I find myself living somewhere between them as “Mr. Gray” — drawn to the dark clarity of pessimistic philosophy, but still unable to escape the sacred call to be there for another human being.

    45 min
  2. Arks of Longing

    1 day ago

    Arks of Longing

    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into All the Pretty Horses, I wanted to offer a shorter reflection on a line I recently found from Cormac McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay Of Whales and Men: “I believe that we are arks of the covenant… and our true nature is longing.” In this episode, I explore McCarthy’s vision of longing alongside psychoanalysis, James Hillman’s notion of pothos, and Augustine’s famous line that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But maybe God is not simply where restlessness ends. Maybe God is the restlessness at the core of our being. This is a meditation on desire, nostalgia, melancholy, sacred ache, and why longing may not be something to cure, but something to honor.

    22 min
  3. Endless Thread

    2 days ago

    Endless Thread

    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 concentrate, spiders, and my mother pulling an endless clear line from my throat. Rather than trying to decode the dream or claim one final interpretation, I use it as a way into McCarthy, the unconscious, and dream work as part of my own post-secular spirituality — a way of honoring symbolic life without reducing it to certainty, doctrine, or simple explanation.

    38 min
  4. The Boy is a Gun

    3 days ago

    The Boy is a Gun

    In this episode, I explore All the Pretty Horses through the image of “a boy is a gun,” drawing on Lacan to think about masculinity, lack, fantasy, and the desperate need to be recognized. John Grady Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins are boys trying to enter the symbolic world of men, but McCarthy shows how dangerous that passage becomes when masculinity is tied to humiliation, violence, and the need to prove oneself. Blevins becomes the clearest tragedy of this, while John Grady reveals something more complicated: a masculinity that is beautiful, tender, courageous, and still deeply marked by blood. This episode is about boys, guns, horses, desire, shame, and the question underneath so much male suffering: do I have to become dangerous in order to be seen?

    37 min
  5. Breath to Breath

    4 days ago

    Breath to Breath

    I finished All the Pretty Horses, and before moving into The Crossing, I’m staying a little longer with John Grady Cole. In this episode, I explore one of the most devastating moments in the novel: John Grady’s killing of the cuchillero in prison and the strange new life that begins afterward “breath to breath.” This is not adulthood as triumph or toughness, but adulthood as wound, survival, and the loss of innocence. I reflect on how John Grady struggles with the fact that he has killed someone, even in self-defense, and how McCarthy refuses to make violence clean or heroic. Instead, he shows us the unbearable pain of life, the danger of being consumed by sorrow, and the fragile courage of continuing to live one breath at a time.

    1hr 3min
  6. Evil Has Its Own Legs

    5 days ago

    Evil Has Its Own Legs

    In this episode, I’m reflecting on one of the darkest sections of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are taken to Saltillo and the romantic dream of Mexico collapses into violence, corruption, and prison. I spend time with Pérez’s chilling claim that evil is not merely something inside a person, but “a true thing” that goes about on its own legs. From there, I explore McCarthy’s dark philosophy of evil: evil as visitation, as atmosphere, as something personal and impersonal at the same time. This is an episode about innocence, violence, adulthood, and what it means to keep carrying some wounded form of goodness through a world where evil is real.

    44 min
  7. Fragile Friendships

    12 Jun

    Fragile Friendships

    In this episode, I reflect on the end of section two of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady Cole is exhausted, heartbroken, and unsure of what has happened after Alejandra leaves the hacienda. What stood out to me was a small but powerful moment with Rawlins, where male friendship shows up not as some grand emotional speech, but as presence. I explore the fragility of male friendship in Cormac McCarthy, the limits of stoicism, and the way men often long for connection without knowing how to say it directly. I also connect this to my work as a therapist with men, where so much of the work is helping men practice vulnerability, build real friendships, and find fragile bonds that can help them bear the difficulty of existence.

    34 min
  8. The Dark Sacred: Cormac McCarthy, Jung, and the Postsecular Numinous

    11 Jun

    The Dark Sacred: Cormac McCarthy, Jung, and the Postsecular Numinous

    In this episode, I explore Cormac McCarthy’s dark, postsecular vision of the sacred alongside Carl Jung and David Tacey’s idea of the “darkening spirit.” I reflect on the sacred not as something safely contained by institutional religion or reduced to comfort, goodness, and light, but as the numinous: beautiful, violent, disruptive, terrifying, and transformative. Drawing on Jung’s provocative claim that organized religion can protect us from a direct experience of God, I think through McCarthy’s landscapes, violence, longing, animals, grief, and mystery as places where the sacred returns after the collapse of easy belief and easy unbelief. This is not an anti-Christian reflection. I share how deeply I’ve been shaped by Christian symbols while also wrestling with why I can no longer affirm a vision of the divine that cannot face evil, shadow, and violence as real powers within the greater whole.

    50 min
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About

A psychotherapist explores topics relating to psychotherapy, philosophy, culture, and religion.  

Information

  • Creator
    Quique Autrey
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    368
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Quique Autrey
  • Show Website
    Psyche

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