If It’s Hysterical, It’s Historical: The Liberating Power of Understanding Your Past | Dr. Orna Guralnik
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On psychoanalysis, which we haven’t talked about much on this show.
Dr. Orna Guralnik is a psychoanalyst and writer. Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation, and cultural studies. She has completed the filming of several seasons of the docu-series Couples Therapy.
In this episode we talk about:
- The relationship between happiness and truth
- How to cultivate love from within
- Practices to support us in being more open-minded (to avoid what she calls a “splitting” mindset)
- Trans-generational history, and how it impacts our personal lives and relationships (in other words, how the ghosts of your ancestors operate in you now)
- One single, powerful question to ask yourself when you get annoyed
- The overlap between Buddhism and psychoanalysis
Related Episodes:
- Why Your Brain Turns The Miraculous Into The Mundane—And How To Fix It | Maria Popova
- George Saunders on: “Holy Befuddlement” and How to Be Less of a “Turd”
- The Profound Upside of Self-Diminishment | George Saunders
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing? |
| 0:21.5 | A lot of people come into therapy with all sorts of resistance. |
| 0:25.4 | Isn't this just self-indulgent? |
| 0:27.4 | Don't other people have it way worse than I do? |
| 0:29.9 | Are you going to ask me about my mom? |
| 0:31.4 | What does she have to do with anything? |
| 0:32.7 | Why are we dredging all that stuff up? |
| 0:35.0 | I'm not a therapist, personally, but in my understanding, the reason |
| 0:38.1 | therapists go deep on our past is that if we don't understand our stories, they own us. |
| 0:44.8 | For reasons that remain opaque to us, we can react disproportionately to seemingly innocuous |
| 0:51.0 | triggers. There's an expression I love that really captures it. If it's |
| 0:55.0 | hysterical, it's historical. Today I'm talking about all of this with Dr. Orna Gralnik, who you may know |
| 1:01.9 | from her Showtime docu-series couples therapy, where she works with real couples on camera. It's |
| 1:07.9 | quite extraordinary and very, very popular. Off camera, Orna does way more than |
| 1:13.1 | couples therapy. She's got a bunch of impressive academic credits. She serves on the faculty of |
| 1:18.5 | NYU Postdoc National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchell Center, and |
| 1:24.5 | the editorial boards of psychoanalytic dialogues and studies in gender and sexuality. |
| 1:30.0 | She also co-founded the center for the study of dissociation and depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School. |
| 1:37.0 | Sounds like a super fun place. |
| 1:39.3 | But kidding aside, for the purposes of this episode, here is the most salient detail from her resume. |
| 1:45.1 | Dr. Guralnik practices a kind of intensive therapy called psychoanalysis, which you may have heard about, but not here on this show because we've never really covered psychoanalysis. |
... |
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