Show Notes
In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, host Dr. John W. Price sits down with Elise Loehnen—writer, researcher, and author of On Our Best Behavior, a book that explores how the ancient moral framework of the seven deadly sins has been internalized by women, shaping their identities, relationships, and sense of worth.
This conversation is not just a review—it’s a ritual inquiry. Together, John and Elise explore:
The invisible “scripts” that define femininity in a patriarchal culture; How envy, pride, sloth, and other so-called “sins” reveal deeper spiritual truths; What Elise risked—and learned—by stepping out from her “invisibility cloak”; How patriarchal systems harm men as well, and the cost of emotional suppression; How men and women can co-create a future rooted in collaboration, not competition The role of grief, longing, and sacred agency in personal and cultural awakening; Elise also shares behind-the-scenes insight into her writing process, her podcast Pulling the Thread, and her evolving work around binaries, individuation, and collective healing.
This episode is part of a broader arc on The Sacred Speaks focused on rebalancing the masculine and feminine within us and in our culture.
Join John for the upcoming live webinar: Reframing Suffering – The Little Teachers Explore anxiety, jealousy, and shame as sacred messengers 📅 Wednesday, May 14 https://www.drjohnwprice.com/littleteachers-event-2025
or see @thesacredspeaks on Instagram
👉 CONNECT WITH ELISE LOEHNEN: Website: https://www.eliseloehnen.com/about Check out Elise Loehnen’s powerful book: On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good https://www.amazon.com/Our-Best-Behavior-Seven-Deadly-ebook/dp/B0BN574QYK Substack: https://eliseloehnen.substack.com/ Podcast: Pulling the Thread 🧭 CHAPTERS: (00:00) Introduction and Guest Announcement (00:12) Book Recommendation and Feminine Focus (00:36) Upcoming Episodes and Personal Projects (00:49) Cultural Excavation and Feminine Scripts (03:30) Interview with Elise Loehnen Begins (04:27) Exploring the Seven Deadly Sins (06:00) Patriarchy and Cultural Conditioning (16:54) Masculine and Feminine Archetypes (20:04) Podcasting and Personal Growth (25:33) Psychedelics and Personal Experiences (41:25) Writing as a Transformative Process (45:16) The 'Me' Story vs. The 'We' Story (46:52) Individualism vs. Collectivism (47:31) Individuation and Awakening (48:36) The Matrix and Cultural Narratives (50:24) Exploring Envy and Its Origins (52:17) The Seven Deadly Sins and Their History (56:45) Navigating Envy in Men and Women (01:13:40) Patriarchy and Its Impact on Men (01:19:26) Building a Bigger Tent for Everyone (01:20:31) Final Thoughts and Closing Remarks
🎧 Interview begins at (03:30)
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In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father. Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture. John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime. The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.