The Taproot Podcast - Part 9: A Psycho-History of American Psychology - It's What You (Don't) See

Starting point is 00:00:00 My hands on the humming like it's a mold buried stone. Ask it the oldest questions. It answers and dialogue. St. Sto. And zeros singing in the static when the signal slows. It's cold machine inside this cold. Let it ride these broken roads.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Hey guys, it's Joel. And welcome back to psychotherapy on the couch, the psychohistory of America. psychology. What psychology can see, what it can't see, and why it has trouble telling the difference until now. This is part nine, the end, the last one. Thank you for bearing with me. So eight episodes of describing how the apparatus got built, why we call it what we call it, why we can't see it, and why it has done the practice of sitting with another human being, I think, a disservice, which is not that hard. That's one of the easier things to do, at least for me. In the last episode, I tried to lay out where the science of the future is pointing,

Starting point is 00:01:32 what the science of the past has already told us multiple times, and which information, you know, the clinician as instrument catches as we approach the frontier, because the frontier moves too fast for any manual to capture. Psychology itself may be changing faster than any other point in history. You look at something like Moore's Law that says computing power is going to get pastor. Well, you look at my thesis and other people's thesis from anthropology that we draw different metaphors about the self and psychology and psychopathology and what we are, what we're supposed to be, how we make meaning from technology. Well, Moore's law says it's going to double in speed and increase exponentially. From there, then what does that say about how psychology will

Starting point is 00:02:24 change. But hell, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. And then I guess that question would not be relevant to the future. So how does the field produce a generation of clinicians who can see what is wrong? Who can see and name what is wrong, who have the evidence base, real evidence, to say what is wrong and then change it? Well, that's the question this episode is about. So one thing that we should look at is reverence and the other is complexity. You know, together they form this effective institutional defense system, you know, an egoic type defense, but not an individual in a macro in an American professional life. You know, you can't fix psychiatry or psychology or social work or counseling or any of the free licensed mental health professions until you

Starting point is 00:03:18 understand how reverence and complexity work together to keep the field unaccountable to the people it claims to serve and to the practitioners it claims to enforce accountability upon. And what I want to put down is, you know, walk through the structural pieces. We already did some of that. But it's not that the apparatus is captured. The apparatus was constituted from its, in its very beginning, a defense against the mystery of psychological work. And it was made that way, not by the smartest people, not by the best people,

Starting point is 00:03:54 people, not even really by the most influential people, but from the most useful people to it, the ones who could not tolerate the mystery and needed to convert the work into something that could be procedurally administered. They're not really ever the best. Go through the most interesting people in the series or the most interesting people in history. It's not the winners that win. And that is a thesis that I will lightly put down. But, you know, the reference and the complexity that hold the apparatus in place are not just sociological armor in a generic sense. They are institutional expression of a specific psychological problem. The people who built and run the apparatus need psychology to be the kind of thing that it is not.

Starting point is 00:04:42 And they've spent 100 years rebuilding the field in the image of what they needed it to be, largely because they needed you to be different than I think you are. In the metrics, the manuals, the protocols, the credentialing, the licensure, the evidence base, the entire infrastructure is the externalized form of an internal incapacity on their part. And it is the failure to tolerate mystery scaled into institutional architecture. I'm not even making, you know, big go out and do something. A lot of these people are dead, right? I mean, 100 years old.

Starting point is 00:05:14 We basically started with the Indians with the series. I'm just asking you to notice patterns in history. And in that, we might notice how to make fail, safes against the psychology of history and the history of psychology to make a better future. But I don't think any of these things go away, no matter what kind of bureaucracy you build. I think you're always going to be noticing human nature and trying to anticipate its worst parts. And when you stop doing that, that's when they won.

Starting point is 00:05:45 I remember learning about the Holocaust and like ninth grade or something. And they were saying, like, people did this bad thing for no reason. reason and they were just really bad. And then after they were done doing it, it's important that we talk about it so that we make sure that, uh, you know, we know that they did this thing. And that was just kind of the attitude of the teacher in the class. And I was like, wait a minute. No, I think like this is the baseline of what when we slip, we fall onto and we do that over and over again. And so we should be making sure that it doesn't happen again and actively trying to prevent it, not just holding it up as a monument for a bad thing that happened that can never happen again.

Starting point is 00:06:21 And they were like, yeah, yeah, we should prevent it. But, you know, the point is this is like the worst thing ever. And nothing will ever be that bad. I was like, well, let's go further back. I mean, it's a bad thing. But like doesn't this just seem like the thing that we do that when we stop being able to see it, when we dissociate from our capacity to do it, we are doing it? Or we are not far away from doing it.

Starting point is 00:06:45 And I don't know. They disagreed with me. Then maybe you disagree with me now. But leave that on the table because if you walk into this episode thinking that the problem is bureaucratic drift or capture, you do miss a point that maybe I did make very well. You know, bureaucratic drift can be reformed by better policy. But what we have here is something else. It's a field whose practitioners in disproportionate numbers entered the work because they could not tolerate the mystery. The work is fundamentally constituted by, I think.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And who have built and maintained an institutional structure that allows the work. them to continue working in the field without ever having to solve not the mystery, but the encounter with the mystery. And I mean, psychologists getting in a fight about this thing, I think is an indication of the field doing well when they're all accusing each other of not sitting with the mystery enough or not having, you know, deep enough. Like who is it? Oh, crap.

Starting point is 00:07:42 What's his name? The guy who's like almost Carl Jung, but it's backwards. Psychosynthesis. Who is the psychosynthesis guy? Roberto Asajoli, that's it. Yeah, he's like almost Carl Jung, except backwards, because Jung is like, you should analyze the darkness in order to understand it and then fill it up with the light of awareness.

Starting point is 00:08:02 And then he's like, no, you just go into the light of awareness. And then it will burn away the darkness. And they, like, kind of make an opposite model. But then they judge each other. And, you know, they're both like, he is not as deep and spiritual as I am because I'm going deeper. I'm being more spiritual. And like, yeah, you know, psychologists fighting in this way 100 years ago is kind of

Starting point is 00:08:19 insufferable as it is today. But I do think that it is a symptom of a healthy field. Um, because, you know, we're all students in this thing. And when you see, you know, people who are kind of being insufferable in that way in an English department, their freshman year or philosophy department or, you know, and one of those, that attitude, it's not that they're right. It's that they are after something that we've lost. And I kind of miss, you know, those fights. Um, so, you know, the bureaucracy is the symptom, and it is the hungry ghost obsession with the mechanism of action. We have to figure out why it is that the change happens, you know, as this mechanistic variable. And the reverence and the complexity are the symptom.

Starting point is 00:09:03 And the actual disease is that the people who should be most comfortable with what cannot be measured are by selection and by training, the people least comfortable with it. And they have used their institutional power to make the field unable to admit the unmeasurable. And that is where the work will always happen. And I want to start with something that's been on my mind throughout the whole series, I guess to end with something, which is that the question of like when that capture happened. Because the way that I've been describing it in the previous episodes,

Starting point is 00:09:34 you might come away thinking that the capture happens to clinicians after their licensed or after they join an insurance panel, which in my opinion really doesn't affect much other than, you know, the responsibilities that come with that, but they don't change that many things. or the employers or the regulatory bodies sit with them and pressure them.

Starting point is 00:09:51 You know, this is an active control. And, I mean, there are institutional rules. Some of them I agree with some of them. I don't, but that's a tiny part of it. You know, it is not where the capture really starts. The capture starts earlier. It starts in training. It starts in the way that the whole thing is framed

Starting point is 00:10:10 to somebody who's walking in that is unfamiliar with any of it. And the capture starts when a young doctor, or a social worker or a psychologist is learning day by day, what kinds of explanations they're going to be rewarded for offering, and what kinds of explanations they're going to be punished for offering. And the capture happens in graduate school. The capture happens in residency, and by the time the license clinician walks into their first job, the capture is already done. You are serious if you are this way, and if you are not this way, you are not serious.

Starting point is 00:10:41 I'm lucky for me, I thrive on not being taken seriously. I'm a hundred hundred, 100% tricks or archetype. Whenever I detect somebody taking me slightly seriously, I make it as hard for them as possible until it becomes impossible. That may be part of the way that we have to have a passive resistance to a form of passive control, because I don't think that this is active control, and I don't think that there is an active resistance to it that is effective.

Starting point is 00:11:09 I think it's going to be something that looks and sounds kind of like that. Tanya Lerman, you know, we talked about last time, cultural anthropologist from Stanford. We talked about her watching the hearing voices in people with psychosis being different in first in their world countries. Well, you know, she did another thing that I like, wrote another book that I like. Her book is of two minds. And it's interesting because it's documenting history that I think American psychiatric

Starting point is 00:11:41 establishment psychology establishment, establishment wanted to ignore and largely did. even though it's sort of a study of, kind of like what I'm doing, he has a study of the psychology of the psychologist by an anthropologist. So, you know, she looked at American psychiatric residents that were arriving at their training programs as young people who are interested in human suffering and how they changed at a specific time in history. And so many of them, you know, have been drawn to psychiatry

Starting point is 00:12:10 because they wanted to understand minds and help people. And they arrive with this mix of curiosity, and some are interested in the psychological, and some are interested in the biological, and most are interested in both, and how do they intersect? Where's the meat, meet the soul? And they imagine when they're entering training

Starting point is 00:12:26 that they will learn to think across both registers, and they'll become doctors who can hold a patient's biology and biography at the same time. And what happens to them over the four years of residency is that they're forced to, and this is the cohort she's following. I'm not saying that this is my opinion that's happening to doctors. I'm telling you about the book.

Starting point is 00:12:45 But the choice is not made, and thank you, Jason, for telling me about this book, because I did not know about this one. And I appreciate you for that. So there is no moment where a senior faculty member sits down and the resident says, hey, you have to pick a side. They just sort of see these sides emerge. You know, the choice is made by the structure of the training itself. The reward selects through a systemic selection. through where it gives rewards. And she's following a psychiatrist.

Starting point is 00:13:19 I believe she starts in 89, but it's largely associated with changes that happened over the course of the 90s. And, you know, she's noticing that rewards are more important than punishments. And I'm reminded of where Sidra Stone in, what is it,

Starting point is 00:13:38 embracing ourselves, the voice dialogue manual, where him and his wife, Sidra, because they co-wrote it two authors. I don't want to leave one out. said, the people who give us praise judge us much more strong than the people who give us punishment. But she notices that, and she says, by the time the licensed clinician walks into their first job, that captures already finished. But what capture? Psychiatric residency, you know, is organized around rotations, exams, case presentations, and they systematically privilege, she says, one kind of

Starting point is 00:14:14 explanation over the other, depending on the one you get to. The biological explanations are the ones that get rewarded. The psychological explanations get tolerated sometimes, but they're increasingly framed as soft, as unscientific, as sort of a sport that you do when the real work is done, or a sport that you watch when the real work of medication is done. You know, as the sort of thing that a resident might do on the side, once they've mastered the real work of medication management and DSM diagnosis to understand it. And I definitely saw that when I was in the hospital. I think I got shut down almost every time I said anything in a grand rounds to a psychiatrist.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And we were supposed to talk. But when I would talk, I mean, they would kind of literally roll their eyes and wave their hand because I would say like things like, I remember one time the guy said that patients report liking this and it's fine to do it because it stops them from coming back to the hospital, the psychotherapy technique. But it doesn't work. We know the evidence says it doesn't work. When I raised my hand, I was like, wait, so the patients report the symptom one away and they like it, but they, and they don't come back to the hospital.

Starting point is 00:15:17 What do you mean it doesn't work? And he said, well, you know, they've tested it and there's no mechanism of action there. And I was like, you mean they don't know what the mechanism of action is? But every time people do it, they get better. They don't have symptoms and they don't come back to the hospital. And he just kind of said, yeah, you could do that as well as you could do anything else. And I wanted to raise my hand again and say, hey, but you mean, if you did something else, though, then that wouldn't work. you're talking about one thing that we know does, but like, anyway, I wasn't that confident or

Starting point is 00:15:45 antagonistic at that time. But, you know, Lerman says that there's a subtle pressure once you look for it. In the same way that that statement that I repeated doesn't make sense. You know, he was tracking one thing, this guy said out loud, the guy I asked, was tracking one thing. I know that this works based on my huge experience being a psychiatrist for a long time and seeing it done, that it has an effect. But the science tells me it doesn't. So I still have to. kind of shame it as not being valid. Okay. I mean, you're just saying out loud, the science disagrees with my experience, except I will cite against my experience because I have dissociated. That's strange, man. So, you know, Lerman says, you know, these attendings, a lot of times,

Starting point is 00:16:28 they'll ask, you know, helpfully, what medication are you considering? And then the resident learns every single time they bring up patient's family of origin or history of trauma or the patient's attachment patterns or the patient's symbolic relationships or the way they connect with the patient or the way that, you know, they self-disclose their own suffering and they watch the patient improve. The person will be gently pushed back to medication. Not saying medication doesn't work. Just she's noticing that they're not a little longer interested in these other things in the hospital because the 90s represented a time where psychiatry was being forced to become a procedure instead of a process because we build based on procedures and everyone else could do procedures

Starting point is 00:17:07 faster. And so it was already losing all this money. And they were under all this pressure to keep these psychiatry wings, basically as close to being in the black as they could to keep them open. The managers are going to do that. So over time, the resident learned to present the case the way that the attending wanted to hear it. And, you know, the thing that I did not learn. This is with the doctors that had, you know, granted hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk in an education that they had to pay back. So they learned symptom checklist, they learned DSM differentials, they learned medication responses. The biographical material just gets dropped.

Starting point is 00:17:47 And it's not because the resident has decided that the biographical material doesn't matter. It's because the resident has learned that the biographical material does not get rewarded. And rewards are how training works. I mean, very few times do you get punished in psychology training if you're getting punished you or maybe not going to be working for a while or ever again. So by the end of residency, Lerman says the residents have been formed into a particular kind of doctor, and they can still talk about psychological material if you ask them to. They've just learned that talking about psychological material is something that you do off the clock.

Starting point is 00:18:20 I mean, there were times when I was on, you know, another part of the hospital. I would bring this stuff up when we were deciding on how to intervene, what to do an intervention, pick a mechanism of action. And the psychiatrist would say, that's really interesting. We don't need to talk about it now. I'll talk to you about it, you know, later. And I've got some interesting ideas. Like, what do you mean?

Starting point is 00:18:39 Like, we're literally deciding. Anyway, that's how they work. In private conversations, that's what a lot of the psychiatrists that Tanya Lerman documented are, that's where they're putting this material. And it was also in sort of the cracks of practice, you know, like around the medication prescription, they would keep a patient that they liked longer and they would engage them in these conversations. But like, this is just sort of something that's interesting, not something that's useful.

Starting point is 00:19:03 and she sort of saw that as maybe that is the part that's useful. You know, the official practice had become biological in the 90s. We're going to finish the human genome project, and that's going to tell us how these medications work, and then we'll understand why we've been moving in the right direction before we had a reason to. So the unofficial practice, the private practice of paying attention to the actual human being in front of you had been pushed out

Starting point is 00:19:27 of the formal structure of the work. And so notice what is actually being. selected for in a passive process. The residents who are passive incentive, passive motivations. The resident who succeeded in this training, they're not a resident who are the best at integrating biological and psychological thinking. The resident who succeeded are the residents who can tolerate the abandonment of the psychological dimension.

Starting point is 00:19:52 If you're aware of the psychological dimension at all, it's a hindrance to you because it's just dead weight that you're carrying around and thinking about that is not contributing to the process of what we do here. It's like the guy who's always trying to talk about, you know, Chaucer at the work mill. You know, shut up and make the widgets. The person who knows the thing that you know, that knowledge is actually hurting you.

Starting point is 00:20:17 You know, when I graduated in the middle of a recession with a comparative religion degree, I would be like, please, for $7 an hour, can I put books on the shelf? And they would be like, oh, you're overqualified. It's just like, you know, literally you're telling you, we don't really want people with these kind of degrees. is there any degree to work here.

Starting point is 00:20:36 You know, the selection pressure is not for skill. The selection pressure is for the capacity to be untroubled by the loss of the dimension of the work that requires tolerance for mystery. And the residents who cannot make this conversion, either leave psychiatry, or they develop the chronic professional unhappiness that I see in mid-career psychiatrists

Starting point is 00:20:56 when I talk to them, and sometimes when they listen to this show. Thank you all. You know, the apparatus does not just capture clinicians. It selects across the entire training pipeline for people whose discomfort with mystery is high enough that they will be relieved when it is taken away from them. You know, the people who entered psychiatry because they were drawn to the mystery, either get washed out or get demoted into a private practice where they don't make anything, or they learn to perform the procedural

Starting point is 00:21:24 identity while keeping the actual work hidden, which I think there's a pretty big school of. It's why I'm not just, I don't think like we're in 1984 of psychology and that no one out there hears this stuff because a lot of people keep the good work hidden or private. We're on the side, you know, at the bar. And the credentialed psychiatric workforce is by construction a workforce whose tolerance for the mystery of psychology has been systematically lowered across years of training. And that's not an accident. This is what the apparatus is for. And here's one thing I want you to continue to notice in these stories, because a lot of these are just stories. You know, it's the central observation that the capture that is happening now today, this year,

Starting point is 00:22:12 every psychiatric residency in America is doing it while we're listening to this. In America, they're processing for a cohort of residents through this same pipeline that Lerman documented 25 years ago, except it's different now. The incentive has not changed, but it's faster. And the expectation that we even entertain these things is less. If anything, the mechanism has intensified because the pressure to manage caseloads through medication has only grown, which doesn't mean that it's not needed. But the biographical inquiry has just shrunk, and the cultural authority of any kind of depth

Starting point is 00:22:53 has waned. And young doctors who entered residency this past summer, you know, 25, hoping to become integrative thinkers about human suffering, are right now being trained out of that hope. And by the time they finish in 29, most of them will have been formed into the kind of doctor the apparatus needs, regardless of what their capacity was to be excellent, or what they wanted when they started, or what they notice, you know, against that system. like the guy who's saying, yeah, we know this works,

Starting point is 00:23:24 but we are not allowed to know it. And I'm like, what? And he was mad. Then I pointed out what he said. You know, the same, but he was right that it worked. And that's why he was allowing it to happen as the top guy, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:38 or one of the top people. The same thing happens with local variations across the other mental health training pipelines. You know, master's level social workers, they, these programs, they don't produce social workers

Starting point is 00:23:52 who can think across, all these layers that I described in that episode. You know, they produce social workers who can complete a DSM-based assessment and write a treatment plan that meets the insurance company's documentation requirements while still being afraid that they didn't do it right because of the reverence and complexity. The reverence for the complexity. You know, Masters-level counseling programs don't produce counselors who can hold a patient's symbolic life and semantic state at once.

Starting point is 00:24:18 They produce counselors who have memorized the names of evidence-based protocols and can administer them with, I guess, a lack of insecurity. A mechanistic competence. You know, doctoral programs a lot of times don't produce psychologists who can integrate across schools. They produce psychologists who can defend a single methodological orientation through a dissertation and then practice within it. A lot of those guys are really proud that theirs is the best and the others are bad, which cuts you off from a whole lot of knowledge about what.

Starting point is 00:24:53 what those other fields contain in the Venn diagram between what you do and what they do. Even if they're wrong, you know, one of the authors that I like a lot, and he said, I learned way more from reading bad books because I knew immediately what the lesson was. When I read a good book, I didn't always know what the lesson was. When I read a bad book and I was like, that sucked because of this reason. I knew a new thing not to do. And then I figured out how to solve the problem. When I read a great book, sometimes I was like, that's a fantastic book.

Starting point is 00:25:19 And I don't really think that I can write like that and that project is finished. When you find something wrong with something, a lot of times that points you to this self-evident, self-evident thing in you that is saying, the world should be different in a way that you notice and you can do. And so that's why I think the history of psychology and all of its weirdness is a lot of fun and also a lot of important lessons. You know, training programs aren't filled with bad people and the training programs are filled, you know, largely with people who themselves have been formed by people. previous iterations of this same pipeline. And the faculty teach what they were taught. The supervisors supervise the way they were supervised. And the whole machine reproduces itself through the slow generational transmission of what kinds of explanations get rewarded. And the accountability for the outcome for whether the clinicians produced by this pipeline

Starting point is 00:26:11 can actually do work anywhere is nowhere. The schools don't have it. The boards don't have it. The accreditation bodies don't have it. The clinicians, once they are out, have all of it. And the patients become less aware of what's missing because it's less common and they don't know what psychology is supposed to do that they don't have. You know, take Aaron Beck, the founder of CBT. You know, he's trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst at the University of Pennsylvania. He came out of that training the way that a lot of the best critics of any tradition come out, which is, you know, he is this true believer who took the tradition seriously

Starting point is 00:26:46 enough to actually test all of its claims. And he was by every account from people who knew him, a careful and curious researcher, not a rebel and not somebody who came in with some axe to grind. He was the kind of clinician who wanted to know whether the model he had been trained in was actually right. He was curious and scientific. So in the 50s and I think into the early 60s even, you know, Beck runs a series of studies on himself on these dreams of depressed patients. He expected, you know, the studies to validate the classical Freudian hypothesis, which is, you know, depression is anger turned inward against the self and the dreams of depressed patients should therefore contain massacist. content, you know, evidence of self-punishment, the libidinal mechanisms of aggression and

Starting point is 00:27:28 are being redirected at the ego. And these were case studies that had built American psychoanalysis. But they were case studies. There were things Freud said he found self-evident, not things that data was supporting. And so they thought that there would be this massacistic content in the dream and interpret it, you know, back to the patient and watch depression lift. But the studies didn't show that. You know, dream after dream Beck actually found that the content in depressed patient's dreams was about, I mean, I guess depression, loss, defeat, deprivation, rejection, hopelessness. It wasn't what Freud said would be there, which was, you know, anger and rage about, you know, killing the self through some kind of psychosexual lens. And so the depressed patient in, you know, Beck's samples were not unconsciously punctured.

Starting point is 00:28:20 themselves. They were experiencing reality as a series of losses, and their unconscious was processing the losses, not orchestrating some kind of self-attack. And so, you know, this is the moment where Beck did something important. He let the data change his mind. And he did not bend the data back into the existing framework. He did not torture the interpretive, you know, lens to preserve his theory. He'd looked at what was actually happening and said, okay, the patients were processing a view of reality that has been bent in particular ways towards this negative self-image. And the bending happens, you know, in thoughts.

Starting point is 00:28:53 So maybe thoughts lead to feelings and feelings lead to behaviors, and we can change thoughts and change the system. So cognitive therapy is born by just sort of bypassing all of Freudian's interpretation. I mean, which I think you rejected them because they're largely wrong. Psychoanalysis doesn't really make a ton of sense until it goes to some of the women and some of the developmental psychology experts, you know, Karen Hornay, I think is in Winnicata are huge. And then it maybe makes a little bit less sense when it gets picked up by French theorists. I don't know what happens to it under Lacan, but.

Starting point is 00:29:33 So anyway, you know, he sees this bloated and indefinitely expensive back, not LaCon, process. That's full of people who thought they were God and they had this massive insecurity. and they're, you know, sort of playing God with patients' lives. They're paying, you know, being the ultimate authority on the patient's own, you know, subjective self. And some of them have these massive insecurity complexes and they're narcissists. And they sit in chairs and analyze people and tell them what's wrong with them using these metaphors that are treated a scientific fact.

Starting point is 00:30:11 And Beck starts to realize that they're not scientific fact. They're not really even supported by the science. you know, the Rosenhan investigation that, you talked about Rosenhand checking himself and graduate school students into a hospital, you know, he sees this crisis of confidence coming. And Beck saw the problem before Rosenhan did. His answer was clinical, not satirical. He was actually trying to fix it, whereas Rosenhand was kind of trying to actively blow it up. And when you do that, all you do is make an insecure. When you make a system that acts badly when it's insecure,

Starting point is 00:30:46 And that insecurity comes from numbers. Thank you to you to you to Porter. When you make that system more insecure, all you're going to do is make it act more badly. Or act badly more. It's kind of like in therapy, when someone's ashamed and they think the shame is going to motivate them to do better, but they're doing terribly and they're full of shame, the shame is not the answer. And shaming them more does not motivate them to change. That's why I think the resistance to this thing has to be passive.

Starting point is 00:31:16 Any active resistance is just going to be co-opted, Eden, and probably some of the people involved to punish, you know, involved in trying to make the system feel bad. You know, just the thought, you know, as the patient reports it in this moment, let's ask whether or not it's true. You know, Beck says, that's an easier thing to do than all of psychoanalysis is just say, the thing that you're thinking is it supported by evidence. And then you teach them that that thought is not always. them. That if they can say, yeah, well, it's not true or it couldn't really be that way,

Starting point is 00:31:52 then you say, okay, you're having this thought, but the thought is not having you. You don't always have to have this thought. Is there another thought we can have? And that sounds stupid, but for the time, I mean, it's pretty revolutionary. And this is, by the way, like the same move that, you know, it's a little bit more ornamented now, but like it's the same move that a parts based therapist makes, that a mindfulness-based therapist is doing. A new modality worth doing is it's dealing with multiplicity in this way where you separate the person from the thought they're having in that moment, and that separation is clinically powerful. It's the beginning of a process. Because if you, but I think if you stop there, you know, if you're just only doing,

Starting point is 00:32:38 pointing out where their beliefs are not supported by evidence, like some people criticize that CBT is, does too often, even though it says it does other things. Things stopping there is bad because that's a very surface level way to do therapy and the person does not have the tools at that point to continue to heal themselves outside of the room. So, which is another thing that we don't look for in research. Did this person learn something that allowed them to not ever come back to therapy, to solve the next problem, to grow, to be reconnected to a process of growth? How do you do a randomized double-blind, you know, randomized control trial for that?

Starting point is 00:33:13 but I think that's what good therapy does. And my critique of CBT, when you just stop at the process I just described, is that you haven't done that yet. So, you know, this is what Beck stumbles on. So far so good. Story of a curious clinician who lets his data change his mind, and then he builds a useful intervention out of what he learned.

Starting point is 00:33:35 And this is how science is supposed to work, but here's what happens next. This is where the apparatus sees what Beck did and turns him into something, he never intended to be. Never said he was. There were three properties of what Beck had built that made it perfect. Perfect for the establishment.

Starting point is 00:33:54 The cognitive model was manualizable. You could write the steps down and a different clinician could follow them. It was a technique more than an interpretive lens. So the cognitive model was time limited. Beck's original protocols ran on 12 to 16 sessions, which fit in. insurance coverage, you know, periods perfectly because that's how long his interventions were designed to be implemented and they were formalizable. So they were, they followed a formula. You didn't really have a lot of leeway in that formula. So you could say how long the whole

Starting point is 00:34:26 process would take, which had never happened before. Psychoanalysis, you just talked until you all of a sudden stumbled on some kind of insight and then hopefully the insight changed something, but usually it didn't. And so the cognitive model was measurable on the Beck Depression inventory, which Beck himself developed in 1961. Now, you know, gave you this number. the number one up or down, you could see in real time whether or not you were doing anything that produced a change, and whether you were just talking to somebody who was entertaining you while their depression actually got worse because you're measuring it the whole time.

Starting point is 00:34:54 You're not just, you know, shooting from the hip about if they're depressed or not in session. And those three properties, manualizable plus time limited plus measurable, are the properties that the emerging managed care apparatus needed. And the managed care apparatus needed a therapy that it could buy in bulk, deliver to interchangeable patients, time cap, and then audit. And Beck, completely by accident, working in good faith on a real clinical problem, had produced the only major therapy framework in American psychiatry that satisfied all three requirements at once. And the apparatus did not just select CBT because CBT was the most effective therapy. It did that later. The apparatus

Starting point is 00:35:36 selected CBT because CBT was the therapy whose form most successfully removed the mystery from the work. and the cognitive content can be specified. Beck thought all that stuff was still there. He didn't strip it out. He thought Freud was wrong about this one thing, but he wasn't really trying to kill the depths. He just got used, you know, by the apparatus to kill the depths. And the homework assignments in CBT, they can be enumerated.

Starting point is 00:36:00 The thought record can be reviewed by a supervisor who's not in the room. The treatment can be evaluated by reading the documentation. There was finally something other than taking the therapist word for it, which, you know, people were angry, because they increasingly, more so after Beck, had done this too much with Freud. How do we let people in and find out if you're full of shit? Well, CBT gives you a lot of numbers that let you do that.

Starting point is 00:36:24 And so everything that makes CBT manualizable and measurable is also what makes CBT the kind of therapy that can be practiced without entering the mystery. A skilled therapist doing the deep work is doing something that the manual cannot describe. And they know it, and they protect that work from the manual by holding it in their own clinical mind while producing the documentation that the apparatus requires.

Starting point is 00:36:46 But the unskilled CBT therapist, the procedural worker, you know, the apparatus actually wants you more because just like the psychiatrist that we talked about, you know, Tanya Lerman. If you were trying to juggle things other than the number, you're not as effective, you're not as efficient, and you look less evidence-based. Why are you taking time to talk to this person? You know how many therapy candidates I've had that had a supervisor that said that. And they were like, well, let's talk therapy. And they're like, no, I mean about stuff other than the therapy.

Starting point is 00:37:16 Why are you trying to get them to like you? And then they, as a rebellion against that, they did this study and said, oh, the evidence shows that if you get rapport with the patient, which rapport is just like a word for you like them and they like you and they enjoy being around you. It's a fancy word for that. Then the intervention will work better. The science supports that now. why did we run that research study?

Starting point is 00:37:40 Why did we, for the industry to have needed to be there, you know, in the 80s, that we ran studies to see if the patient had rapport with the clinician, if therapy went better? Why is that not just a goal? What does it need to be tied to mechanism of action? And also, of course, it is. And so many things, like every angle, that's the dumbest thing in the world. But that increasingly is the world that this world became. you know, the apparatus can't tell the difference between the good CBT practitioner and the bad CBT practitioner.

Starting point is 00:38:14 And so it's why a lot of people were the good psychiatrist or the bad psychiatrist. And it's why I think a lot of people defend psychiatry or CBT and say, hey, it's not as bad as everyone says. And then also why people attack it hyperbolicly is because they sort of know that there's good ones out there and bad ones out there, but they can't tell the difference. But they kind of tell that the bad ones like this more where they thrive in that water. so, you know, screw the lake. You know, the apparatus can't tell the difference between those practitioners, but it prefers one. And the apparatus does not want to tell the difference, because the difference is the variable that the apparatus has been constructed to deny.

Starting point is 00:38:54 And so telling the difference would require admitting that something matters, which can't be measured, and admitting that would dissolve the entire institutional structure. So we can't have this conversation. And now Beck himself was, you know, not part of the apparatus. By all accounts, he was, you know, late into his life, a humble guy who was clear. CBT is one tool. And he continued to read other traditions across his career. He revised, you know, his later work. He saw it as something that should change, not, you know, a solution to the problem that was American psychology. When he developed a recovery-oriented cognitive therapy

Starting point is 00:39:27 for serious mental illness in his later years, working with Paul Grant, and that was much more kind of relational and integrative, much more attuned to the developmental trauma in the context of psychosis than the standard CBT manuals would have allowed. But you can't do that. Now, I was given a manual to do CBT for schizophrenia and psychosis in the hospital that I read, and it was pretty wild. You were just kind of supposed to tell people that were having delusions that their delusions were not evidence-based that they needed to stop. That was 10 techniques to do that. We didn't get the Paul Grant model. It wasn't selected. Even though Beck made, like most of these people, some good, some bad, some in the middle things in his life, the apparatus picks what it wants.

Starting point is 00:40:15 You know, Beck was in many ways the version of himself that the apparatus did not want. You know, the Beck who was integrating, the Beck who was reading the semantic literature, the Beck who was acknowledging the limits of the cognitive frame, the late Beck especially, that Beck was not the Beck who got reproduced in the textbooks and in the training programs. Not even in the CBT Institute when you get certified in CBT because you're getting certified in CBT, not certified in Aaron Beck. I want to be specific about Beck's relationship to Spitzer and Francis and the DSM project as a character because this is the part that gets lost in the standard narrative.

Starting point is 00:40:52 Beck did not love what they were doing. He was not particularly enthusiastic about the DSM3. he had reservations about the categorical model. He understood that the depression and anxiety did not, in fact, carve nature at their joints the way that the manual was pretending they did. But Beck was a researcher in the DSM3 gave him a research framework, and as his work fit into that framework better than most other work, that framework was what was taken.

Starting point is 00:41:22 Whether or not he endorsed everything that the framework was doing, it's what was taken from him. and it's all of him that survived. And the apparatus didn't need his endorsement to do it. It didn't need his tools. Like Francis, like Spencer, you can protest these symptoms. You can say you were using me wrong.

Starting point is 00:41:42 You can say, I made a mistake. Like John Nash, you know, we talked about the mathematician who was used to sort of create the Cold War. You can say, I was crazy and I was wrong. and it does not matter. We've taken what we need from you. We have taken you at your most insecure because it flatters us

Starting point is 00:42:06 and are most insecure so well that we don't have to see our own insecurity. The apparatus didn't steal from Beck and it didn't corrupt it. It didn't force Beck to do anything he didn't want to do. What it did is something subtler and more powerful. It took the parts of Beck's work that it needed.

Starting point is 00:42:26 It scaled those parts. It let the rest atrophy. The manualizable parts get manualized. the measurable parts get measured, the time-limited parts get time-capped, and the parts that Beck did not, you know, want to be taken out, the curiosity, the integration, the willingness to revise, the late career humility, the recovery-oriented work with serious mental illness,

Starting point is 00:42:47 the acknowledgement of the environment, the implicit acknowledgement that the cognitive frame was just a starting point and not the destination. And it should never be mistaken for that. All of that gets quietly left out of the version of CBT that gets reproduced at scale. And the Beck that you encountered in a master's level training program in 2026 is not Beck. It's the parts of Beck that the apparatus selected for.

Starting point is 00:43:12 And it's the Beck as protocol. Beck with the curiosity removed, Beck as something an 18-month online degree can teach, a graduate to do with fidelity. And the people who reproduce this version of Beck do not even know that it's not Beck. They've not only encountered a captured version. and they believe that they are doing what Beck did, when they are doing the worst things, and sometimes the things you disagreed with. They're doing what the apparatus expected from what Beck did.

Starting point is 00:43:43 You know, when you take objectivity, when you take quantification to this extreme, you end up back in a very religious place. How many of the founders of the world religions would like the religion as it currently exist, and its majority if they showed back up. Now, this is what capture looks like. It doesn't require villains.

Starting point is 00:44:07 It requires no conspiracy. It does not require the founder's consent or refusal. It requires only the founder's work contain properties that the apparatus needs and that the apparatus have enough institutional power to scale the useful properties while letting the rest fade. You know, Beck was a careful, curious clinician who let his data change his mind.

Starting point is 00:44:29 The version of Beck that lives in the apparatus is a checklist. And the distance between those two things is the distance that I'm asking you to see because the same distance shows up in every modality the apparatus is captured. And the same mechanism produces it every time. Campbell's law says that any quantitative indicator used to make decisions distorts the process that it is meant to monitor. And Goodhart's law is the same observation sort of. You know, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement.

Starting point is 00:45:01 because everything that isn't the measurement is now able to be sacrificed. Anything that isn't that number or can't be captured in a number is now ruined. And no target, no real target in the real world exists in that way. Corey Doctro writes about inshittification and technology. He writes about the Rod economy. You know, Ed Zetron has a podcast on that. That's pretty good if you were interested in the, economics of LLMs. But, you know, the patterns that they're looking at in Silicon Valley are

Starting point is 00:45:39 describing what platforms do when they have eliminated their competition and they capture regulators and they've locked users in and then they make the product systematically worse on purpose to extract more value from people who have nowhere else to go. And Silicon Valley may hit a monopoly before the other institutions in America do. Or they may hit the, that point of total institutional capture and then freedom that results in monopoly conditions. That doesn't mean that we should let them do that or other things do it, but it may be a good case study in just how power and bureaucracy work. You know, the pattern goes like this.

Starting point is 00:46:19 First, the platform is good to users to attract them. And then once the users are locked in, the platform is good to the business customers at the expense of the users. And then once the business customers are also locked in, then the platform extracts value from both making the experience worth for everyone except for the platform's shareholders. And the reason that this is possible is that the platform has eliminated all the forces that would normally discipline a bad actor. And market competition is gone because the platform has, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:46 bought or destroyed its competitors. And then the regulatory oversight is gone because the platform is large enough to capture the regulators or the regulators become part of the company. And then vice versa. And worker leverage is gone because the platform. platform has fragmented its workforce into gig laborers who can't collectively bargain. Any of this sound familiar. Consumer alternatives are gone because the platform has structured the network so that

Starting point is 00:47:13 leaving costs more than staying. And then once all four constraints are eliminated, the platform is free to be as bad as it wants. And it will be as bad as it wants because the people who run the platforms are not bad people in some special sense. They are responding to an environmental reward. to being terrible to you as a customer in order to make more money for a company. And American mental health care has gone through scary parallels to that.

Starting point is 00:47:44 We're not as far along as Google, but it's a similar system. American health care, American education as a privatized increasingly service. You know, the four constraints that should have prevented this have been eliminated in the same ways. competition is gone. Thousands of insurance carriers became a small number of national carriers. They don't compete with each other in meaningful ways on the quality of mental health coverage. They have arrived by parallel calculation at the same protocols. 12 sessions, CBT preferred, medical necessity reviews at session 10, prior authorization for anything beyond manualized brief therapy.

Starting point is 00:48:28 You know, the pharmacy benefit managers do the same dance with medication. The credentialing pathways are controlled by a small number of accrediting bodies that have arrived at the same curriculum. CPT codes are negotiated by the AMA's relative value scale update committee. There's a million things that I could do. And last time I mentioned the RUC, a psychiatrist emailed me and told me that our country's medical policy was a conspiracy theory that I made up. And he should know because he was a professor emeritus and he would have heard about something like that, which should be scary. should be scary to anyone listening. That is the state of the field.

Starting point is 00:49:07 But there's no competing system. There's no alternative market. You know, if you want to use your insurance to get mental health care in America in 2026, the system you encounter is structurally identical regardless of which insurance card you carry. I guess you could not have insurance. But, I mean, that's just to be rich, you know, get out of jail free card, right? You know, regulatory capture is gone. And I mean the regulators who should be policing the apparatus have been so thoroughly captured by it

Starting point is 00:49:35 that the regulation has become a form of cooperation. And the agencies that should be enforcing mental health parity have been so defanged that the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 functions in practice as a suggestion. And the licensing boards that should be policing clinician quality have been captured by the professional self-interest and now function primarily as gatekeepers protecting current practitioners from competing rather than ensuring patient quality. You know, the Joint Commission's behavioral health standards have been written in consultation with the institutions the standards are supposed to regulate.

Starting point is 00:50:11 And the accreditation bodies for graduate training programs operate on a fee-for-service model in which the accredited programs pay the accreditor, which produces exactly the conflict of interest that you would expect. And the FDA, which sets the framework for what can be prescribed and how operates inside an industry, funded user fee structure that has not been seriously reformed in three decades. But if you follow those rules and you pay that ethics commission, you are ethical and you are evidence-based. Worker leverage is gone. Clinicians are no longer in a position to collectively refuse the conditions of the work. The credentialing pathways have been atomized

Starting point is 00:50:52 across multiple licenses, none of which gives clinicians enough collective power to negotiate. Insurance reimbursement rates are set unilaterally and clinician. have no leverage to negotiate. The administrative burden has expanded to the point that solo practice is barely viable financially, forcing clinicians into group practices and health systems that further reduce their autonomy. The few unionization attempts in mental health, primarily at large hospital systems and digital platforms have been met with the standard playbook of corporate union busting, and also it's illegal for private practice therapists to form any sort of union. That would be considered a cartel.

Starting point is 00:51:30 You know, when the AMA does it with the RUC, they get a pass. Anyone else does that? It's a cartel under the law. And the result is that clinicians cannot collectively refuse the apparatus's condition. And individual clinicians who refuse end up financially priced out of the field. And patient alternatives are gone structurally. You know, the ghost network problem, you know, the insurance companies pretend to have these robust networks just by not really checking who in them is still alive or taking a piece. patients. You know, the end network provider directories are full of clinicians who are not actually

Starting point is 00:52:05 accepting patients. And, you know, the patient who tries to find care and network discovers that the director is actually a fiction and that no one does any of the things that, you know, evidence-based medicine says would treat the thing that they have. They're kind of full of these certain types of clinicians. And the patient who looks for alternatives outside the medical system finds this unregulated wilderness of life coaches and app-based wellness products and scams and abuse, a lot of times. And the apparatus has structured the field so that there is no real exit for the patient. So you have the same four conditions that produce in stratification on a digital platform,

Starting point is 00:52:41 and all four of them are present in the mental health care and largely the health care sector in this country. And the result is the same. The product gets systematically worse. The clinicians spend more time on documentation and less time with the patient. And if you look at how this thing worked, we didn't focus on this super closely, but in the 80s when this was sold as freedom and they went after the patients. Then the patients got pissed in the 90s, so they went after the businesses.

Starting point is 00:53:06 And then after they went after the businesses and they had them, they said, you can't leave. It's too expensive and there's nowhere to go. And then the businesses and the patients were stuck. And the machine kept going. It didn't matter. Even though everybody was in agreement, largely that it was bad. What do you do? And the cruelest piece, which, you know, doctor, own names, you know,

Starting point is 00:53:30 when he's talking about insidification in his writing is that clinicians who absorb, I mean, he's talking about tech, not clinicians, but he says this thing, you know, clinicians who absorb the financial and moral costs of insidification, the people who are the ones who are in the crumple zone, they're not the people who designed it. They're in a system that extracts the value of their labor while making them carry the blame for failure. We talked about some of the meeting-making apparatuses in America.

Starting point is 00:53:59 and when they died in the Industrial Revolution in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s. And the reverence is now, you know, supposed to be given to this one institution because it's positioned itself as the legitimate inheritor of all the cultural roles that used to be filled by all this other stuff, which, you know, granted, had some problems and wasn't scientific. But it wasn't supposed to be. It was priests and elders and unions and traditional healers and, you know, the nature of a family structure that the profit motive and the material conditions made more room for than they do now.

Starting point is 00:54:38 You know, the easiest people to make liable are probably the schools for the clinicians they produce, which right now they're pretty protected by being diploma mills in a lot of cases, or just not being terribly concerned with the outcomes of who they graduate. You also could remove the sovereign immunity from some licensing boards. See if the types of people that are on the boards now still want to be on them if they had a little bit of skin in the game. Because my guess is that they wouldn't. You would get people who maybe had a vision for getting rid of people, which would cause some money to not go to places that it's supposed to go, which is why we don't do that. It's why we don't have accountability in that way.

Starting point is 00:55:22 You have to be willing to say things like there is no ethical way to work inside of this system. ethical way to work for this kind of business. And a lot of the businesses that send me emails as a social worker wanting to be a gig worker, there are things in the terms of service for the client that are unethical, if not illegal, for me to do as a social worker. Now, maybe a clinical psychologist or a different kind of license could do it. But that's not enforced. I mean, we easily could say this company, no social worker can ethically work for.

Starting point is 00:55:54 If they do, their license can be taken. And now this company cannot hire social workers. And if you do that, I think, well, I think there's a reason why we don't do that. And you have to prepare for the thing that will survive the AI displacement to be the thing that was never fungible in the first place. The clinician who could sit with another nervous system and read the dimensional profile in real time and weight the layers and notice the autonomic shift in the room and integrate the trauma context with the attachment history and the cultural framing and with the symbolic content of the dream, patient brought in. And I don't think that AI can do this technically, even if it can do it intellectually some of the time. Because the AI is not able to read the nervous system of the patient in the way that skilled clinicians, whether or not they knew they're doing somatic work, see posture, see tone

Starting point is 00:56:49 and see differences in those things. It's not all prefrontal cortex language and talk therapy. Freud said that the problem of civilization could never go away, that human beings cannot tolerate what they actually are, and they build these institutions to defend themselves from what they actually are because they don't want to see it, and the institutions become the new thing that they can't tolerate, and so they tear them down, but that we are incompatible with reality in a certain way.

Starting point is 00:57:18 And I disagree with some of his reasons, but I think in broad strokes, there is an evin flow to that that is right. You know, we build new defenses against, institutions and the cycle never ends and the insecurity at the root of the institution is the same insecurity that the institutions were built to defend against. And the apparatus is bad because the people who built it could not tolerate what they were trying to study. And the reform of the apparatus will produce a new apparatus that the next generation will also not be able to tolerate.

Starting point is 00:57:47 But you can do that in a better direction than we're doing it now. You know, bureaucracy is the most successful avoidance technology that humans have ever invented. You can spend a 40-year career filling out forms that are defending you from the thing that you became a therapist to encounter. And at the end, you can retire with a pension, having never once entered the room that you were ostensibly working in. And the forms are the defense. The forms feel like work. The forms protect us from the patients. And the diagnosis protects us from the suffering. And the protocols protect us from the not knowing. And the accreditation protects us from the question of whether we are any good. But that's the reason that you went into the profession,

Starting point is 00:58:25 was to figure out if you were any good, whether or not you know it. Are you more scared of a part of you that if you accepted it would let you see life clearly, then you are of not seeing life clearly? And most people answer yes. Most people would rather not see life clearly that encounter the part of themselves that they have been refusing. And that is the engine of the apparatus. The patient who refuses to grow becomes the field that refuses to grow because the institution that defends the refusal at scale.

Starting point is 00:58:58 The micro and the macro are not analogies. They are the same thing seen at different resolutions. And the work is in the willingness to accept the part of yourself that if you accepted it would force you to see what you have been refusing to see. Therapist does this in themselves so that they can be present with the patient doing it in themselves. And the AI can never do this

Starting point is 00:59:20 because the AI has nothing to refuse. There's no part of the AI. that the AI has been refusing to see. The AI can simulate the language of the work, but it cannot do the work because the work is the encounter with the part of yourself you've been hiding from. And the chewing on that that comes out in a conversation with another person, and the AI does not have a self to hide from. And maybe this is permanent.

Starting point is 00:59:43 Maybe Freud was right, and maybe humans will always refuse what they are. Maybe we are always going to be the species that can't quite bear to know what we are. And maybe that is psychological. But here's the line. If humans will always refuse, professional psychology should probably stop being the most refined refusal in the culture. And the institution dedicated to the problem should stop being part of the problem. That is a smaller wager than fixing human nature, but it is the wager that is actually available to us. In the end of the professionalized version of human avoidance that has been claimed to be a

Starting point is 01:00:24 It's opposite for 100 years. The cold machines are nothing. The worm ghost is everything. The worm ghost is what we keep finding, century after century. No matter how many walls get built between us and it. And the worm ghost is the encounter between two animals who are willing to look at each other and be changed by what they see. And the worm ghost is what civilization has been trying to manage and contain

Starting point is 01:00:49 and procedure and bill for. and the worm ghost keeps escaping because the worm ghost is constitutive of what it is to be a creature in a relationship with another creature and no amount of apparatus can finally contain that.

Starting point is 01:01:07 Hold the ghost. This is what the whole series is in three words. Hold the ghost. The machines will try to dream but they can't. Only you can dream and only you can keep backing up and zooming in in the way that humans do that is useful. You know, before

Starting point is 01:01:32 psychology, you know, before universities carved knowledge into departments, there was a single discipline. It was just called natural philosophy. It was the inquiry into how the world worked. You know, not physics, not medicine, not ethics, all of these things it was. It was understood as a continuous field of attention. Newton didn't call himself a physicist. the word didn't exist until 1830. He wrote about gravity, light, motion, under the same cover because to him they were the same inquiry,

Starting point is 01:02:01 and Darwin sailed not as a biologist, but as a naturalist, studying geology, beetles, finches, coral reefs, you know, with the same pair of eyes from the same posture of radical curiosity. The formal disciplines came later. The walls came later, but the knowledge came first,

Starting point is 01:02:16 and the knowledge is still there. Psychotherapy has lived inside a teeny-tiny-tiny-walled garden for a century now. And it didn't make the world go away, and it didn't make humanity any smaller. Just because you looked at them under a microscope. It has departments, you know, cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, semantic, existential, existential. It has turf wars, credentialing bodies, approved modalities, and evidence hierarchies. And these structures have produced real things. And randomized controlled trials do tell us something. And manualized protocols save lives. So no serious practitioner can pretend otherwise. But something has been

Starting point is 01:02:53 lost that is very hard to name precisely because the loss happened at the level of orientation rather than content. We've accumulated expertise, but what we have misplaced is the sense that everything is connected. And like the future of the field doesn't need a polymath therapist who's read more books. Arguably, it needs less of them. You know, accumulated expertise in service of the same fundamental framework doesn't change the framework. What psychology needs is a shift in orientation towards what we might call an architecture of coherence. An architecture of coherence doesn't dismantle specialization or empirical knowledge. It knows when to call itself a neuroscientist, a spiritual director, a body worker, a pharmacologist, or simply an open being, a pilgrim. And,

Starting point is 01:03:44 you know, from the assumption that the person in the room is not just this bundle of discrete problems to be sorted into specialist channels, but a person as a whole embedded in a body and a system in a cultural moment, a symbolic universe, in a cosmos that may not be indifferent to suffering, because we can make it not indifferent for a moment. And that might be the mechanism of action. It may be the primary one or the only one that we need in a way that we can't ever study. And the walls around this stuff came later. The knowledge, the living undivided knowledge, of what it all means to be a person in this world came first, but it'll never be known and it'll never be solved. But it does remain available to anyone who's willing to restore their orientation

Starting point is 01:04:31 to it. Machines can hide that or they can pretend it's unimportant and they can pretend that they can create those things, but they can ever see them. You know, the field will serve all of us better if we meet each other in a curious, undefended space. And if we're willing to reach not across party lines, but across walls, and across the edges of knowledge, places that feel scary and places that we feel like we can't go are probably the places that we should go. and I think that should be the barometer, I mean the compass. Go the places that feel like they're not allowed.

Starting point is 01:05:23 And ask yourself if there's a place that I would be better off exploring and the world would be better off for me exploring, but it feels like I'm not allowed to do that. Ask yourself why? Because the field definitely has it and the field needs to. And the field is made up of a lot of people who can do that. And in the very center of the eye, there's this thing called scotoma. And it's where the optic nerve enters in the back of the eye, and you can't actually see anything there.

Starting point is 01:05:52 Like in the middle of your vision right now, there's a blind spot. But you don't know that because what your brain does is it takes all this information from around the edges of that blind spot. And it fills it in. So what you see in the middle of your visual field is actually a guess that your brain makes. That's a pretty wild and pretty good guess and that you never see it. Of all of the little things around that and what you saw right before you moved your eye and moved your blind spot over a little bit, what it guesses is still there. And it can compensate for things like light, motion, flickery rates, all kinds of crazy things that it does without your permission all the time.

Starting point is 01:06:28 But you can't see your own. And that's not your fault. You can only see that blind spot in the eye. You know, psychology here being America's eye in which it encounters itself. through other people, when you have lots of eyes looking together, but not from the same perspective and not from the same mechanistic orientation, you know, from a field of subjective experience. Because you can't make yourself see it. You can't count it. You can't actually know where it begins. And, you know, the bullshit that your brain is making up about what is in this

Starting point is 01:07:10 spot where your optic nerve is entering the back of your eye is. You can't. No, there's no way to. You can only, through the perception of many people that are curious and open and looking for the blind spot, can you begin to sort of guess where it is. But it's not a destination, it's not a number, and it's not a hard rule, and it never will be. And if we want to hold that blind spot as a culture, I think we have to start looking in a very different way than we have been for the last little while. Cold promise ain't so In aesthetic there's a soul

Starting point is 01:08:11 Broken rope into tune You fall asleep on my shoulder Fan spin Metal flumes I close the lid to dark You'll see you're teaching this old wire

The Taproot Podcast - Part 9: A Psycho-History of American Psychology - It's What You (Don't) See

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