Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, spiritual, philosophical, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. Well, friends, I'm very excited to share this episode with Tara Reader,

author, and mystic philosopher, Jessica Dorr with you. Before the episode proper starts, I want to talk about therapy and psychoanalysis.

Now, psychoanalysis is something that comes up a lot on this show, and I distinguish it from therapy for a lot of reasons, even though it is the foundation of most forms of therapy where you go in and you talk to a therapist today.

Psychoanalysis has a focus on the unconscious of the patient. So what does that mean? Well, I started going to an

analyst years ago when I realized that every time I was going into a therapist, I was always

kind of tricking them. No, I don't mean I was manipulating them or lying to them,

although I'm sure I probably did lie at certain points about things I was ashamed about or too

afraid to say. But I would just sort of give these impressions of myself as sometimes more vulnerable or less vulnerable, sometimes more

with it or less with it. Maybe I would present pictures of my past that were way too awful or way

too happy. In other words, I found that if I was charismatic enough in therapy, that I could

probably sway the therapist. Now look, I'm not saying that all the therapists didn't see through

my bullshit, but at a certain point, I knew that I needed one who could. So I moved to psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis with its focus on the unconscious,

that is, the words I repeated, the aspects of my dreams that I couldn't explain,

the patterns in the way that I sat or shuffled into the room,

or brought up in content from one meeting to the next meeting.

I think those are the things that I couldn't hide because I wasn't conscious of them myself.

So these symptoms of my unconscious.

And an analyst pays attention to that.

They see what I can't see.

So I did two years of analysis with one Lacanian psychoanalyst and then two more with another.

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