Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

A long time listeners know that we do a lot of different kinds of topics here on the podcast,

but there is a heavy dose of things like physics, biology, philosophy.

But if you think back, the very first episode was with a psychologist,

Carol Tavris. We've had a couple of psychologists on since then,

Lisa Feldman-Barritt, Scott Berry-Kalfman. What we haven't talked about on Mindscape is psychoanalysis.

Psychology is just a general study of how people think, how they behave, and so forth,

whereas psychoanalysis is the specific set of ideas, a school of thought, if you will,

founded by Sigmund Freud. It's actually weighed down by association with a lot of Freud's ideas,

let's just say, aren't fully baked. Freud was not right about everything. He was dramatically wrong

about some things. There's this caricature of psychoanalysis with things like

the edible complex that men want to sleep with their mothers, penis envy that women have,

and things like that, things that haven't held up over time. In fact, I think it's safe to say

that in psychology circles, there aren't a lot of psychology professors who are in the psychoanalytic

tradition these days. Psychoanalysis lives on in literary and certain philosophical corners of academia,

not as a way of necessarily being a clinical practice, although there is that, but as a way of thinking

about human beings and how they behave in a way to understand ourselves better. That's what we're

going to be talking about today. To make things worse, today's guest, Mari Ruti, is a professor

in the English department at the University of Toronto. She is the only person in the world who I

would trust to talk to you, my audience, about these topics we're going to be talking about today,

because it's not just psychoanalysis. It's the particular kinds of psychoanalysis that are

influenced and thought about by French theorists, most especially Jacques Lacan, a famous French

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