Psyche

Quique Autrey
  • 5.0 (15)
  • MENTAL HEALTH
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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

  1. What is Pleasure?

    2D AGO

    What is Pleasure?

    I’ve been using the phrase ethical hedonism in recent episodes, but I realized I hadn’t slowed down enough to ask a foundational question: what do I mean by pleasure? In this solo reflection, I think out loud about pleasure as subjective, embodied, relational, and psychologically complex. I explore the neuroscience of dopamine, the difference between craving and deep presence, and how culture shapes what we’re allowed to enjoy. This episode isn’t definitive. It’s a work in progress. A serious attempt to ask whether pleasure — when it enhances vitality, connection, and coherence — might actually be an ethical guide rather than something to mistrust.

    16 min
  2. Winsome Traps

    2D AGO

    Winsome Traps

    In this solo episode, I explore a tension that I’ve encountered both personally and clinically—the way some high-control religious communities can feel deeply warm, relational, and inviting at first, and yet over time reveal a much more rigid and exclusionary structure underneath. I begin with a personal reflection on being re-exposed to Douglas Wilson while listening to conversations about Christian nationalism, and how his winsome, calm, and disarming tone stands in stark contrast to what I see as deeply dangerous ideas—especially when it comes to democracy, pluralism, and the ability for real difference to exist. From there, I unpack what I’m calling aesthetic hospitality—the way warmth, attentiveness, and belonging can function as a kind of soft power that draws people in before they’ve had the chance to fully discern what they’re stepping into. Drawing on psychoanalytic insights, including Todd McGowan’s critique of community and James Hollis’ distinction between internal and external authority, I explore how belonging in these systems is often conditional, particularly for LGBTQ+ individuals, and how exclusion is frequently reframed as truth, morality, or righteousness. This episode is ultimately an invitation to develop a deeper kind of discernment—not just asking whether a community is kind or welcoming, but whether it can actually tolerate your full existence without requiring you to become someone else in order to belong.

    14 min
  3. Vital Pleasure

    3D AGO

    Vital Pleasure

    What if suffering isn’t the clearest sign I’m on the right path? In this episode, I explore the legacy of high-control Christianity and its elevation of pain as virtue, contrasted with a different ethical vision rooted in aliveness, pleasure, and embodied experience. Drawing on David Congdon, Linn Tonstad’s resurrection-centered theology, and Carrie Jenkins’ work on love, I begin to reframe pleasure as something deeper than indulgence—as a guide toward a more fully lived life. This is an exploration of ethical hedonism, not as an escape from suffering, but as a way of no longer centering it.

    15 min
  4. The Uses of The Erotic

    4D AGO

    The Uses of The Erotic

    I’ve been reading Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown as a way of making sense of what I’ve been calling my own ethical hedonism — not indulgence, not impulsivity, but the question of whether pleasure might actually function as guidance. Included in that book is Audre Lorde’s classic essay The Uses of the Erotic, which I recently told a group chat might be one of the best essays I’ve ever read. In this solo episode, I unpack why. Lorde reframes the erotic not as performance or spectacle, but as a form of embodied knowledge — a deep connection to our capacity for joy that becomes a lens through which we evaluate our lives. When we reconnect with that internal hum of aliveness, she argues, we can no longer settle for what is merely safe, conventional, or externally approved. Along the way, I explore a resonance I can’t ignore — the connection between what Lorde calls erotic knowledge and what James Hollis describes as inner authority. They are not saying the same thing. They are not operating in the same tradition. And yet both point toward an internal guidance system that asks us to live from alignment rather than expectation. This episode weaves together ethical hedonism, embodied joy, clinical reflections, and the responsibility that comes with knowing your own capacity for depth. Once you know your capacity for joy, you are responsible to it

    13 min
  5. Blue Flame

    6D AGO

    Blue Flame

    In this solo episode, I return to James Hillman’s chapter on the puer aeternus and pothos from Loose Ends — and explore how longing may not be a problem to solve, but the very engine of being alive. Building on Jung’s reflections on the wanderer while moving beyond a mother-centered interpretation of desire, Hillman reframes longing as structural to consciousness itself. I weave his insights together with Lacan’s notion of lack, Jaak Panksepp’s SEEKING system in affective neuroscience, Emmanuel Coccia’s reflections on fear as the death of desire, and even a Rumi quote I strongly disagree with. This episode is also deeply personal. I reflect on my own journey in therapy, the suspicion of desire within Christian spaces, the demonization of the puer archetype, and why I’m learning to trust longing again — including how erotic pursuit can become a conscious participation in that blue flame rather than a distraction from it. What if wandering isn’t immaturity? What if desire isn’t deception? What if depression is, at least sometimes, the extinguishing of the flame that keeps us reaching? Not all who wander are lost.

    17 min
  6. The Erotic Mind

    FEB 13

    The Erotic Mind

    Esther Perel has named Jack Morin as a major influence on her thinking about desire — so I returned to The Erotic Mind. What emerged was a theory of passion that feels even more relevant now. In this episode, I explore Morin’s Erotic Equation — attraction plus obstacles equals excitement — and connect it to psychoanalytic reflections on lack, resistance, and the structure of desire. Drawing on Todd McGowan and Fichte’s concept of Anstoß, the obstacle that functions as both barrier and propulsion, I examine why desire often thrives in tension rather than total security. This is a deep dive into longing, ambivalence, power, and the paradox that keeps erotic life alive.

    14 min
  7. Second Skin

    FEB 11

    Second Skin

    When Bella Freud—great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud—sat down with Esther Perel on Fashion Neurosis, I knew I had to listen. What unfolds is not a conversation about trends or aesthetics, but about identity, masculinity, desire, and the psychology of being seen. In this solo reflection, I explore clothing as a kind of “second skin”—a psychological boundary between self and world. Drawing from Perel’s thinking on Eros in Mating in Captivity, Valerie Steele’s idea of fashion as skin ego, and even a touch of Jack Morin’s erotic equation, I reflect on why what we wear is never neutral. I share a story from my therapy room about helping an autistic client build confidence through intentional style, what it’s like to shop for clothes with my 16-year-old son, and why paying attention to how people craft themselves might be one of the most countercultural practices available to us right now. Fashion isn’t superficial. It’s relational. It’s embodied. And in a world where we rarely look up from our screens, noticing what someone is wearing might be one small way of saying: I see you.

    13 min
  8. Looksmaxxing & Lacan

    FEB 10

    Looksmaxxing & Lacan

    More and more men are showing up in therapy convinced that desire is a technical problem—something that can be solved through optimization, symmetry, and self-correction. Jawlines, ratios, bodies, images. Looksmaxxing promises certainty, control, and relief from rejection, but what it actually delivers is anxiety, perfectionism, and a dead end. In this episode, I bring together several threads that have been colliding for me lately: re-watching Mad Men, clinical conversations with men struggling under the pressure to optimize themselves, and Jacques Lacan’s unsettling idea of objet petit a—the object-cause of desire that can never be perfected, possessed, or secured. Along the way, I draw on Slavoj Žižek’s famous example of Cindy Crawford’s mole, and on Jessica Paré’s portrayal of Megan Draper, whose gap-toothed beauty in Mad Men illustrates a simple but uncomfortable truth: desire doesn’t emerge from flawlessness, but from the excess, the gap, and the imperfection that refuses to be optimized away. This episode is a critique of looksmaxxing culture, perfectionism, and the fantasy that being desirable means becoming complete—and an invitation to think about desire as something far less controllable, far less marketable, and far more human.

    15 min
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5
out of 5
15 Ratings

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Quique Autrey
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    289
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Quique Autrey
  • Show Website
    Psyche

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