Show Notes
In this episode, I continue working through New Perspectives on Henry Corbin by focusing on Joan Copjec’s chapter on Corbin, Lacan, Kiarostami, and the Cloud.
What surprised me most was seeing someone from the world of Lacanian theory take Corbin seriously — not as an odd mystical detour, but as a thinker who might help us rethink psychoanalysis, politics, cinema, and reality itself. Copjec brings Corbin’s Islamic neo-Gnosticism into conversation with Lacan’s Real and Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case to explore what makes resistance possible when power wants everything visible, teachable, governable, and controlled.
I reflect on Copjec’s idea of the Cloud as a hidden dimension inside reality, her distinction between nihilism and apophatic theology, and the radical political force of a God who cannot be possessed by the state, religion, ideology, or authority. This is not a politics of easy re-enchantment, but a politics of keeping the world open.
I also talk about Copjec’s recently published book Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, where she develops these themes further through Kiarostami, Corbin, and Lacan — a book I’m hoping to read soon.
At the heart of this episode is a question that feels urgent right now: What happens to politics, therapy, religion, and the person when there is no longer any hidden remainder, no unborn dimension, no Cloud, no Real — nothing that escapes power? And what kind of listening might help us hear the unlocated sound that keeps the world from closing?
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.