Together with guest Noreen Anderson, Martin and Dan probe questions of spiritual, social and material importance and try to envision a future of solidarity, even in times of AI and extended mind. Tune in as we explore truth telling in the digital era!
The guys chat about their week and probe the timeless riddles of pain and healing, fantasy and archetype, and the comforting but unpopular truth that mind and body are one.
Episode 1: “If You Can Be You, Maybe I Can Be Me”
In this episode, Martin, Dan and Joe share a tale involving a psychoanalyst-war-veteran reciting Milton’s Paradise lost at a glamorous garden party, as remembered by a psychoanalytic mystic of the following generation. This led to Dan’s writing his book and from there meeting Martin. It is a collective musing on the power of making bids for connection to one another, paying it forward where it matters and, on how a little can go a long way in life. If you can be you, then maybe I can be me?
Related:
“Faith” by Michael Eigen
Freud’s Lost Chord: Discovering Jazz in the Resonant Psyche
Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Inner Light”
Episode 3: Martin tells a horrifying story, of how a pitch perfect Swedish summer night, within two minutes turned upside down. How one footbridge in Stockholm became a mini-war-zone. The group addresses the trauma of the Real from a metaphysical and existential perspective. How should one approach the fact that sometimes shit happens to us, the world we inhabit changes and perhaps we do, as well?
Related:
Jacques Lacan and the three orders
Netflix “Fightworld”
“Your body keeps the score” by Bassel Van Der Kolk
Afghanistan | The Fallacy of The Argument Itself
An anti-imperialist perspective of the War in Afghanistan, the US retreat, and the subsequent national dialogue. Also, how does the psychology of vengeance, nationalism, and fear factor into the past 20 years of US foreign policy?
Episode 2: “The Pivot, or Invincible Summer”
Dan tells the inside story of boxer Wladimir Klitschko’s rise, professional demise and transformation/rebirth after which he came to dominate heavyweight boxing for the next decade. The group reflects around what it takes to be able to navigate and survive one’s trauma, and start fresh.
Related:
Wladimir Klitschko vs Samuel Peter (2005)
Wilfred Bion’s thoughts about Alpha Function
Keats’ concept of negative capability
Dr. Garrison was professor and Academic Dean at Southwestern College, where he guided a counseling and art therapy program with a unique attention to developing intuitive healing awarenesses. Here is one of our best discussions of things which barely fit into words.
In this episode Joe pops the question of how to best understand the idea of ownership; who can say that they actually own what? Since when? On what terms? What is it that really drives the “liberal guilt” and conservative contempt in society? And is the notion of ownership a sign of our failure to acknowledge and repair the basic empathic failures at the heart of a capitalist world?
Related:
The Dawn of everything
Lacanian ethics and the super ego
Parable: The Emperor Has No Clothes | by Mattimore Cronin | Medium
In this episode, Dan asks whether Homo Sapiens could in fact be better understood as Homo Oneiros, or The Dreaming People? Dreams fill our art and entertainment, our museums, the shows we watch, and our search for truth in science and psychology. We sleep a third of our lifetime, and entertain visionary ideas and imaginatory explorations for much of the remaining two. What if dreaming is the biggest deal of all?
Related:
Bion’s theory of dreaming by James Grotstein
Frank Wilczek on complementarity in Science
Crick, F., Mitchison, G. The function of dream sleep. Nature 304, 111–114 (1983)
In this episode the Real it in crew is visited by Adam Shechter, a practicing psychoanalyst working out of New York. We talk about areas of convergence between physical places; stoops, cafés, Capitol Hill, and stand up comedy arenas, and the psychical avenues these excursions awaken within, across and between us. We speculate on what the attackers of the capitol hill was really ’searching’ for, and reaffirm the ethical imperative that is found in the friendly face of the other.
Emmanuel Levinas and the Face-To-Face Relation
Jerry Seinfeld – Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee
