Today, learn how to channel your own wounds to bring a deeper empathy to your therapeutic work.

Welcome to the Carlatte Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Krasaken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Psychiatry Report.

I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

When we started this series, we did so with some hesitation over the title, Wounded

healers. But we were reminded by one of our listeners, Dan Roberts from New York University, that this term has a long history.

It was one of Carl Jung's archetypes.

Young described a type of healer who drew from their own wounds or inadequacies to engage patients with a deeper empathy.

These are not just past wounds that Young was talking about,

long recovered and sealed over, but active wounds. For Carl Young, the physician's vulnerability

brought energy to the therapeutic encounter, it kept the doctor humble,

warding off the megalomaniac tendencies

that can be a side effect of our healing roles.

Carl Jung was one of the first psychiatrists

to recommend that analysts undergo their own psychoanalysis.

Therapists, he wrote,

can exert no influence if they are not susceptible to influence.

Young may have been talking about psychotherapy, but the sensitivity and self-awareness he called for is just as important for the psychopharmacologist.

Today we're going to hear from clinicians who practice modern psychiatry with that archetypal touch.

If you want to be a healer and not just a psychopharmacologist, that it takes more than just sitting there listening and prescribing it.

It takes you really being present, attuned, and really seeing the other person.

And if you're so consumed with your own darkness, for instance, then you're not going to be

...