A short solo episode of The Speaking Body Podcast, building on a previous discussion of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice that does not take up the patient’s supposition that the analyst knows the patient’s unconscious, instead offering curiosity and a position of lack of knowledge.

• Neil argues this stance is unusual in the U.S. psychotherapeutic marketplace, where many therapies emphasize teaching skills, tools, and expert knowledge, but that the underlying ethic is not unique to psychoanalysis.
• He compares psychoanalysis to science, where experiments are driven by unanswered questions and results generate further questions, and to ethnography, where researchers enter unfamiliar settings with nonjudgmental curiosity to learn how people live.
• He references Chris Arnade’s “thick culture/thin culture” distinction and restates it psychoanalytically as unconscious plot versus conscious stage settings, and invites listeners to respond via speakingbody.substack.com.

00:00 Welcome and Setup

00:27 Recap Key Claims

01:50 Lacan and Curiosity

03:00 Beyond Psychoanalysis

05:08 Science as Not Knowing

05:57 Experiments and Replication

08:44 Ethnography Explained

11:45 Shared Ethic Across Fields

12:53 Chris Arnade Example

14:41 Thick vs Thin Culture

15:19 Closing and Support

In this short solo episode of The Speaking Body Podcast, I (Neil Gorman) try a new format and invite listeners to email feedback about whether they like it.

I explain a key difference between how psychoanalysis is practiced versus many forms of psychotherapy, coaching, or other helping relationships: when someone seeks help, they often engage in transference by supposing the helper has knowledge, authority, and power. In many cases, the helper accepts this supposition and provides advice, tools, or a treatment plan, which can be helpful.

By contrast, I argue that psychoanalysts do not take up this supposition of knowledge; instead, they adopt a position of not knowing and respond with curiosity, offering hypotheses and questions rather than prescriptions. I close by noting this stance is essential to psychoanalytic work and share where to learn more at speakingbody.substack.com.

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Table of contents

00:00 Welcome and Format

00:37 Big Idea Setup

02:02 Psychotherapy Side Explained

03:34 Transference and Authority

05:32 Helper Model Benefits

06:46 Switch to Psychoanalysis

07:58 Not Taking Transference

09:19 Curiosity Over Knowing

11:41 Interpretations as Hypotheses

13:02 Continuum Not Binary

13:54 Key Takeaway and Wrap

15:17 Thanks and Where to Find

In this episode, I announce that I’m rebranding and relaunching my podcast, previously called the Informed Podcast, as Speaking Body. I explain that Speaking Body will be both a podcast and a website (speakingbody.com) that will archive my writing, offer a newsletter, and sometimes include video episodes on YouTube, while keeping the same RSS feed for subscribers.

Going forward, I will focus less on applying psychoanalytic theory and focus more on psychoanalysis and on how psychoanalytic work leaves the consulting room and affects everyday life and subjectivity. While I will sometimes use specialized Lacanian terms (e.g., jouissance, discourse of the master, object a, imaginary/symbolic/real, drive), I aim to restate key ideas in more commonplace language whenever possible.

In this episode of the InForm: Podcast, I speak with Peter Rollins, the man behind pyro-theology, the Wake festival, the Spark retreat, Atheism for Lent, and many more things that can provoke all sorts of interesting experiences and elaborations. I first became aware of Pete's work many years back as I was attempting to build up my own understanding of Lacan. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I found a video of him discussing Lacanian ideas, in which he explained them in ways I found intelligible and useful. This led me to watch more of his videos, listen to his podcast, and then read his books.

Today, what interests me about Pete's work is the way that he goes about building engaged communities that work and struggle together to acknowledge, experience, and communicate about the lacks and antagonisms that are at the center of human subjectivity (or the human condition if you prefer that language), which is the main thing I speak with him about in this informal but hopefully informative conversation.

We do, of course, go in other directions as well; we even tell a few jokes, which I hope you all find amusing.

One last thing: near the end of the interview.

REFERENCED:
1. Pete's Patreon & his Website
2. Todd McGowan's YouTube
3. Analysis Laid Bear
3. The Aims of Analysis

On this episode of InForm:Podcast, I speak with practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst Isolda Alverez about the way the aims of the psychoanalytic clinic have changed from Freud's time through Lacans and into the present day.

Recommendations:
1. Band: Yo La Tango (Spotify, Apple Music) Album: "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" (Spotify, Apple Music)
2. Lucifer (TV Show on Netflix, Comic)
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Amazon)

On this episode of InForm: Podcast, Neil talks with Nathan Gorelick about psychoanalysis, psychedelics, psychosis, delusions, science, & mysticism.

The result is a long, hopefully informative conversation.

Nathan is Term Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College in New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he has completed the six-year cycle of the Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, Canada. He has published widely on the theoretical and historical intersections of psychoanalysis with diverse topics including ecocide and catastrophe fetishism, psychedelic drugs, Continental philosophy, the Haitian Revolution, Islam and Islamophobia, and the theory of the novel. His first book, The Unwritten Enlightenment, sets out a new theory of the relation between literature, ideology, and the unconscious, and is forthcoming early in 2024 from Northwestern University Press.

REFERENCED DURING THE EPISODE:
1. Žizek video on ideology
2. Freud's -- Future of an Illisuion, Civilization & its Discontents, Moses & Monotheism, Analysis Terminable & Interminable.
3. Otto Rank -- The Trauma of Birth
4. Éric Laurent -- Guiding Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act
5. The Lacanian Review #7 "Get Real"

In this episode of Inform: Podcast

I interview Why Theory's Ryan Engley about psychoanalysis in the classroom. (Tod McGowan, the other half of Why theory was interviewed about this same topic on an earlier episode of InForm.)

Our conversation ranges all over the place, but one of the consistent themes is the idea of sustaining the analysand's/student's desire/curiosity.

Some of our references include:

• Lacan's Seminar 17
• T.R. Johnson's book The Other Side of Pedagogy
• The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• The TV Show: Peep Show, and (of course) Mad Men

InForm Podcast: 052

The episode you're about to listen to is a conversation with Peter Rollins, a thinker, writer, podcaster, and community organizer who works at the intersections of psychoanalysis, theology, and philosophy.

Before getting started I'd like to say the following: Getting to do this was something that was very exciting for me because I've been reading Pete's books, listening to his podcast, and watching his YouTube videos for many years, and his work has had a significant influence on me.

The conversation was long and we talked about lots of different things including,

• Pete's own analysis
• Attempts to hysteriasize liturgical structures
• Productively mal-adaptive symptoms (or sinthomes)
• The importance of lack or absence
• The impact of Hegel on philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis
• Community organizing
• Psychoanalytic schools
• The pass
• And much more