Psyche

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

  1. Knight of Autonomy

    -1 ДН.

    Knight of Autonomy

    In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s essay “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy” from Essays on Heidegger and Others and think through one of the tensions that has been staying with me lately: how to honor private self-creation without letting it collapse into a form of individualism that forgets public responsibility. I reflect on Rorty’s reading of Foucault, his idea of the “knight of autonomy,” and why I find myself deeply resonating with that figure through my own sense of being an otrovert — someone drawn to autonomy, inward authority, and the refusal of borrowed foundations. At the same time, I wrestle with my fear that the private/public distinction can leave democratic life too thin, even as I remain deeply doubtful that a return to shared religious, philosophical, or universal foundations would actually produce the solidarity people imagine. From there, I explore Rorty’s provocative suggestion that people can be humane without being universalists, and I consider how art and culture — including the imperfect but moving example of Apple TV's Shrinking — may help create a shared public vocabulary through empathy, grief, failure, and recognition rather than through doctrine or theory. This is an episode about autonomy, democracy, suffering, self-creation, and the difficult task of trying to remain faithful to one’s own vocabulary while still taking part in the shared work of making the world more decent for others.

    25 мин.
  2. Freud and moral reflection

    -3 ДН.

    Freud and moral reflection

    In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s chapter “Freud and Moral Reflection,” a reading of Freud that has really stayed with me as I’ve been getting more into Rorty lately. I make it clear that I’m not claiming this is simply the definitive or orthodox way to understand Freud, and that many people in psychoanalysis would likely push back on Rorty’s interpretation, but I do find his perspective deeply suggestive and very alive for thinking about therapy. Moving through Rorty’s contrast between self-purification and self-enlargement, I reflect on what it might mean to approach the psyche not as a battleground between the noble and the beastly, but as a complex inner world populated by voices, parts, and what Rorty calls "inner peers". Along the way, I think about how this chapter can help us imagine therapy less as a moral washing and more as a place of curiosity, interpretation, and greater internal hospitality.

    31 мин.
  3. Psychotherapist as Poet

    -4 ДН.

    Psychotherapist as Poet

    If the philosopher is a poet, what does that make the therapist? In this episode, I work through insights from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry and begin to trace their implications for psychotherapy, arriving at a shift that feels both subtle and profound—therapy not as a process of uncovering truth, but as a collaborative act of creation. Moving away from the idea of a fixed self waiting to be discovered, I explore a Rortyan approach where identity is continuously constructed through language, relationship, and imagination, and where the therapist is no longer the one who knows, but a curious partner in the process of redescription. What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it opens up new ways of living. This is a conversation about agency, experimentation, and the quiet but radical idea that therapy is not about finding yourself… …but about helping to write what comes next.

    14 мин.
  4. Psychoanalytic Pragmatism?

    -5 ДН.

    Psychoanalytic Pragmatism?

    In this episode, I reflect on Adam Phillips' essay “On Getting the Life You Want,” the first chapter of his new book Getting the Life You Want, and use it as a way of thinking through some questions that have been deeply alive for me lately. Starting from my growing obsession with American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty, I explore why Phillips feels so striking to me at this moment, as someone who seems able to bring Freud, psychoanalysis, and a kind of pragmatist pluralism into the same conversation. This is also my first real attempt to seriously read Phillips, even though my friend Barry Taylor has been suggesting him to me for years, and part of what makes this encounter feel so timely is how much his work resonates with my own sense that neither psychoanalysis nor philosophy gives us final truths so much as powerful descriptions, usable fictions, and ways of opening a life. Along the way, I explore Phillips’ contrast between pragmatism’s question — what life do you want? — and psychoanalysis’s more difficult question — why might you not want to know what you want? What follows is a meditation on desire, authority, self-creation, ambivalence, and the strange difficulty of living a life that actually feels like your own.

    20 мин.
  5. Central Relational Paradox

    30 МАР.

    Central Relational Paradox

    Relational-cultural therapy has long shaped how I think about growth—that we are formed in and through connection, and that much of our suffering comes from disconnection. But in this episode, I take that idea further by sitting with something my friend Helena Vissing shared with me, drawing from Stephen Grosz’s Loves Labor, about the twin anxieties of engulfment and abandonment. What unfolds is a deeper look at what RCT calls the central relational paradox—not just as a relational pattern, but as something more fundamental to who we are. The very strategies we develop to preserve connection are the same ones that prevent us from being known within it. And even more than that, the tension between closeness and distance may not be something we overcome, but something we live. I explore what it means to think about love, connection, and authenticity through this lens—where the goal is not to get the distance exactly right, but to become more aware of how we move within it, and how we repair when it inevitably goes wrong.

    18 мин.
  6. On Liberty

    27 МАР.

    On Liberty

    What happens when a society becomes so certain it’s right that it starts shaping everyone else’s life around that certainty? In this episode, I finally sit with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—a text I had long avoided—and find in it a sharp critique of something very alive today: the moral and cultural force of Christian nationalism. Mill warns that oppression doesn’t just come from governments, but from social pressure, moral consensus, and the demand that everyone fit one approved way of living. I’m not here to endorse Mill—but to think with him, and to push back against any ideology that claims it already knows, for all of us, what a life should look like.

    21 мин.
  7. Zero Subject (The Fool)

    26 МАР.

    Zero Subject (The Fool)

    The Fool, the zero card of the tarot, isn’t a symbol of naïveté so much as a break from the system itself—a figure who stands both inside and outside the structures that try to define a life. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Plato, I explore the Fool as a different kind of subject—what I’m calling the ortovert: someone oriented toward autonomy and individuality without collapsing into individualism or rejecting the shared world altogether. Along the way, I think through the Fool’s wandering, rhizomatic path, its resistance to optimization and forced belonging, and its connection to what Plato might call a kind of holy madness. And with David Abram in the background, I turn to the often-overlooked presence of the animal in the card, not as a minor detail but as something essential—a reminder that whatever freedom the Fool represents is not disembodied, but grounded in instinct, sensation, and a return to forms of life that aren’t governed by constant performance or self-optimization.

    15 мин.
  8. Living Plurality

    25 МАР.

    Living Plurality

    In this episode, I sit with Jorge Ferrer’s Substack piece “Not a Summit, but a Forest: Why One True Religion May Be a Biological Absurdity,” not as an endorsement or critique, but as a way of thinking through a deeper question about how we organize meaning and live alongside difference. Ferrer challenges the assumption that truth must converge into a single dominant position, offering instead a vision of plurality as something inherent to life itself—something generative rather than problematic. I follow that thread beyond spirituality, asking what it might look like to move away from hierarchical systems that demand one right answer, and toward a way of living that can hold difference without collapsing it into sameness.

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

Информация

  • Автор
    Quique Autrey
  • Годы выхода
    2022 - 2026
  • Выпуски
    315
  • Ограничения
    С ненормативной лексикой
  • Авторские права
    © Quique Autrey
  • Сайт подкаста
    Psyche

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