Psyche

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

  1. Theurgy in the Mud

    -1 d.

    Theurgy in the Mud

    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 case where a woman is accusing him of stealing over 80k from her on a dating website . This is not a verdict, a defense, or an accusation. It is a meditation on projection, spiritual idealization, moral humility, and our desire to believe that people who study the sacred somehow rise above the mud of human existence. Through Iamblichus, theurgy, psychoanalysis, and the messiness of real life, I explore why genuine spirituality cannot be about escaping embodiment, failure, shame, or contradiction. Maybe the soul is not healed by finding flawless people to worship. Maybe it is healed by giving up the fantasy of flawless people altogether.

    29 min
  2. The Witch

    -2 d.

    The Witch

    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, original sin, repression, the shadow, and the dark parody of individuation at the heart of the film. Drawing loosely from Jung and depth psychology, I think about what happens when a religious world has no room for desire, embodiment, grief, or becoming—and how the parts of the psyche we refuse to face often return in monstrous form. The Witch is not just a story about the Devil in the woods. It is a story about what happens when a family, a theology, and a whole moral universe cannot metabolize their own shadow.

    24 min
  3. Midsommar

    -2 d.

    Midsommar

    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 between modern individual alienation and the seductive pull of collective religious belonging. Midsommar is disturbing because the horror is wrapped in beauty, ritual, shared grief, and the promise of family. Dani’s pain is finally witnessed, but it is also used. I explore the film through psychoanalysis, cult dynamics, and the post-secular question of whether we can create rituals that hold grief, transition, and longing without violating our freedom or individuation. I also reflect personally on my own suspicion of high-control religion, especially the ways these environments can stunt individuality while calling it belonging.

    27 min
  4. Otto & Jung on the Sacred as the Numinous

    -4 d.

    Otto & Jung on the Sacred as the Numinous

    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, especially Billy Parham’s journey with the she-wolf, I’ve found myself returning to this older language for the sacred: not as clean doctrine or easy comfort, but as mystery, awe, dread, beauty, and psychic depth. This is a reflection on Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, Jung’s psychology of archetypes and God-images, and why numinous experience still matters for therapy, dreams, grief, art, nature, and ordinary life after certainty.

    59 min
  5. Endless Pain/Love

    -5 d.

    Endless Pain/Love

    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 together. I explore this moment as one of McCarthy’s clearest expressions of tragic religious philosophy — a world where love is real but not always powerful enough to save us, where beauty and suffering remain bound together, and where the soul’s warmth is both what makes us alive and what makes us vulnerable: “He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.” This is an episode about heartbreak, adulthood, pain, and the terrifying possibility that there may be no limits to what the human soul can suffer — but also no easy limits to what it can bear witness to.

    35 min
  6. Between The Wish & Reality

    -6 d.

    Between The Wish & Reality

    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 childish wishing into the painful terrain of reality, mourning, and adulthood. John Grady’s love for Alejandra is not dismissed as fake or foolish. The longing is real. The beauty is real. But McCarthy shows us that desire always has to pass through the world: family, history, class, gender, violence, loss, and forces outside our control. This becomes an episode about heartbreak, fantasy, regret, and the impossible “might have been.” Psychoanalysis helps us see that maturity is not the death of desire, but the painful transformation of desire into something human-sized. The wish remains, but it can no longer demand that the world obey it.

    25 min
  7. Questions without Answers

    22. juni

    Questions without Answers

    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. Sitting more deeply with Professor White’s despair brought me back to Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation and the idea that the only philosophy worth pursuing is one that poses questions without answers. This becomes a meditation on pessimism, faith, despair, and the strange sacredness of staying in the room when no clean answer arrives.

    26 min
  8. Nothing Proven Except Blood

    20. juni

    Nothing Proven Except Blood

    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 Alejandra. She is history speaking to youth, the old world speaking to the dreamer. In this episode, I explore Alfonsa’s vision of hidden strings, blood, sacrifice, freedom, honor, and love — and how John Grady’s journey teaches him that nothing beautiful in McCarthy’s world stays untouched. Alejandra, Blevins, the prison violence, and John Grady himself all become part of this larger tragic pattern where the world demands blood before it believes. This is an episode about innocence after it has been broken, love after it has failed to save us, and the possibility of carrying the wound without making blood your god.

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

Informasjon

  • Skaper
    Quique Autrey
  • År i produksjon
    2022 - 2026
  • Episoder
    376
  • Vurdering
    Eksplisitt
  • Copyright
    © Quique Autrey
  • Vis nettsted
    Psyche

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