It's that time of year again; summer in Australia. The kangaroo testicles are on the BBQ, Santa has pulled off his top to show you his beach body, and the Sack Game Down Under is complicated with everything falling out, since Australia is upside down. Releasing episodes out of sequence with a last-minute switcharoo, we present the Private Practice Podcast Christmas Special, full of existential philosophy that's tediously related to our ongoing saga into the work of Carl Rogers. If you want to hear about James leaving Casablanca and arriving in Melbourne, you'll have to wait for the next episode, which he incorrectly insists was just recently released before this one.

Due to the phenomenal success of last year, everything is kept the same for this year, including Pigs in Blankety Blankets and The Nightmare Interpretation Before Christmas. The Christmas Quiz is loftier and more abstract than before, and yet with the intellectual cop-out of multiple choice answers, Dan manages to win points and will surely impress half of the listener. As you would expect, Unconditional Positive Regard is plentiful from Santa like it is from Carl Rogers, except when it comes to the ludicrous Sack Game, which will unnecessarily leave a taste in your mouth sourer than a rancid sprout that's gone mouldy in Dan's highly contaminated living environment. 

You haven't got much time to listen to this before Christmas is over, so cancel everything now and play it loud enough to drown out the sound of Meghan and Harry more effectively than Her Majesty ever managed. 

We jump back into Carl Rogers this week with a discussion of the idea of congruence between the internal and external worlds. Dan is back and recording from a hotel room in Hitchin because he is on a business trip; his small talk about this is so boring that it's an easy win for James with his witty and concise tale of a night out in Casablanca. But small talk is not a competition and so there are no prizes. 

How fortified is your inner world? Do you pride yourself on being able to scream with mean, defenestrating laughter at someone on the inside, but slap on a façade of faux compassion to get away with it? If so then you are objectively wrong and Carl says so. This is followed by skipping over Carl's introduction to Unconditional Positive Regard (because we have made whole episodes on this subject in the past) to ask the question, what is empathy? Baby don't hurt me. James refuses to stop judging Dan and Dan just wants to understand why.

If all this Becoming of late is becoming overwhelming, we take a break from On Becoming a Person to talk about a new film from New York, called Adieu, Lacan, featuring an interview with the director, Richard Ledes. The film is fictional, but the main character of Seriema, played by Ismenia Mendes (Orange is the New Black), is based on the real life of Betty Milan, a Brazilian woman who traveled to Paris for a series of analytic sessions back in the 1970s with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, played by David Patrick Kelly (Twin Peaks). 

Dan was ill with no voice for the recording of this episode, so in lieu, as English-speakers like to say, is a French person, Sammy, who has many opinions—quelle surprise—on both Lacan and the film.

The episode starts with an interview with the director, followed by a review of the film, a discussion of Lacan and his views on politics and relationships, and then a conversation about psychoanalysis around the world, the language of existentialism (and K-pop group BTS), and Freud becoming a totem in France. 

To watch the film, it's available now on many streaming platforms from www.adieulacan.com

“Freud thought a film could never transmit what happens in an analysis... but I am quite sure if Freud saw this film he would fall in love with it... at last, psychoanalysis has reached the cinema”

— Marco Antonio Cortinho Jorge, Corpo Freudiano do Rio de Janeiro