Show Notes
In this episode, I reflect on the strange and unsettling figure of Abraxas — the god Hermann Hesse brings into Demianand Carl Jung explores in The Red Book and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Abraxas names something deeper than a simple “good versus evil” split. He becomes an image of the mixture of reality itself: light and shadow, creation and destruction, spirit and instinct, the sacred and the terrifying. I use Miguel Serrano’s Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships as a starting point, especially his reflections on Jung, Hesse, and Abraxas as a symbol of the total human being. But I also include a necessary warning about Serrano himself, whose later esoteric Hitlerism and fascist sympathies show how dangerous these symbols become when they are detached from humility, ethics, and compassion. Abraxas is not an excuse to worship darkness, violence, hierarchy, or purification. If these ideas lead us toward hatred or the eradication of other people, we are not doing depth psychology — we are being possessed by the shadow. This episode is about trying to think carefully and responsibly with dangerous symbols, and asking whether wholeness means becoming pure, or whether it means becoming conscious enough to face the terrifying mixture of being human.
More from Psyche
In this episode, I share why I’ve decided to step away from the podcast—at least for now.After five years of meaningful conversations and connections, I’ve been reflecting on the more complicated parts of creating publicly: anonymous feedback, declining ratings, my own sensitivity, and the ways I sometimes shaped my responses to remain in another person’s favor. I also explore my decision to leave social media and my desire to read and think for nourishment rather than continually turning everything into content.This isn’t a judgment of anyone else’s choices, nor is it necessarily a permanent goodbye. It’s an attempt to make more room for my family, my private practice, and whatever creative project might come next.To everyone who has listened, subscribed, shared an episode, or reached out with encouragement: thank you.
One of my favorite passages in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is his reflection that he had to become a fool before he could truly awaken. It echoes the Prodigal Son and countless myths and fairy tales that suggest we often have to lose our way before we can genuinely find ourselves. In this episode, I explore why failure, despair, and disillusionment so often become the soil from which wisdom grows, while wrestling with a paradox I can’t quite resolve. Our mistakes inevitably leave scars—not only on ourselves but sometimes on the people we love. While I believe redemption and transformation are possible, I don’t think the pain we cause can simply be justified because something good eventually came from it. Drawing on Hesse, Carl Jung, and my own work as a therapist, this episode reflects on responsibility, grace, and the difficult question of how we can acknowledge the necessity of failure without ever glorifying it.
In this episode, I’m reflecting on love, polyamory, jealousy, projection, and the strange multiplicity of the human psyche. This is not an episode arguing that polyamory is better than monogamy, or that everyone should rethink their relationship structure. I’m more interested in what polyamory opens up as a psychological image: the idea that we are not always as unified as we pretend to be. We are full of different longings, fears, desires, wounds, and contradictions. I also spend time with jealousy and compersion, and how love can reveal both the most generous and the most possessive parts of us. Ultimately, this episode asks whether love — in whatever form it takes — can help us become more honest, more conscious, and more responsible.
In this episode, I explore Jung’s complicated relationship to monogamy, sexuality, and love. Jung’s own life with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff seems to resemble what we might now call a vee relationship, similar in some ways to the painful arrangement between theologian Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. I also bring in Otto Gross and the provocative idea that conventional monogamy might suffocate the soul — even the troubling claim that a mistress could be necessary for psychic vitality. Rather than romanticizing this, I try to sit with the tension: Jung saw sexuality as something that could become hallowed when expressed through love, but his own life also shows how easily depth, eros, and spiritual language can be used to justify real human harm. This is not an episode offering easy moral conclusions. It is an attempt to think with Jung without worshiping him, to take eros seriously without excusing betrayal, and to ask whether love, once named as sacred, still has to answer to the wounds it leaves behind.
In this episode, I reflect on Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, psychotherapy, and the double-edged sword of introspection. Drawing from an essay on Hesse and a concern raised by JF Martel on Weird Studies, I explore how the search for authenticity can become either a path toward responsibility or a trail of tears for the people around us. As a Four on the Enneagram, this tension speaks deeply to me: the longing for depth, beauty, and self-understanding is real, but so is the danger of turning inwardness into self-absorption. This is a reflection on shadow, therapy, narcissism, and why true self-knowledge has to return us to love, repair, and responsibility.