Jessica Benjamin joins host John Totten for our season finale. In a wide-ranging conversation [outlined below], the renowned psychoanalyst and theorist reflects on her radical upbringing, the development of recognition theory, and the feminist lens through which she examines our persistent social dilemmas. Why does more civilization seem to generate more problems? Dr. Benjamin’s answer diverges from Freud’s, and her concept of repair exposes how often conformity is entangled with domination. From mundane conventions like parenting roles to the horrors of war and genocide, her concepts illuminate pathways of transformation through multiplicity, challenging the belief that “only one can live.” She proposes that feminism offers a way forward in the clinic and society: a chance to move beyond rigid binaries into “The Third”- a space of mutual recognition, but only if we are first willing to confront the ways we’ve been getting it wrong.

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1. Biography and Early Curiosities - 13:21

2. Formation of Recognition Theory- 20:25

3. Feminism and Family Roles- 27:30

4. Oedipus and Gender Binaries- 30:54

5. Reversal and Bourgeois Feminism- 37:42

6. Response to Critiques-42:44

7. Clinical Vignettes of Recognition- 48:35

8. Crossing the Bridge of Difference-54:25

9. The Third, Breakdown, and Repair- 56:05

10. Survivalism and Conflict Resolution- 66:30

11. Infant Studies and Acknowledgement- 74:14

12. Destruction and Play-79:30

13. Escalation and Unconscious Guilt- 86:54

14. Capitalism and Supremacy- 91:00

16. Hope- 99:30

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Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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Lara Sheehi was doing her job as a professor of clinical psychology when her criticism of Israel catapulted her into uninvited infamy. Bad faith accusations of antisemitism, reliant on obfuscating political dissent with bigotry led to her investigation while reports from news outlets led to her being disinvited from speaking engagements, stalked, and protested. Despite a letter of support from Jewish colleagues that included giants in the field of psychoanalysis, the controversy split the field in two- those who knew her compassionate work on behalf of the oppressed and those who scapegoated her as a danger to psychoanalytic innocence. It is this myth of purity that shapes Lara’s theory and resistance to the veil of mutuality and dialogue, which she contends too often obstructs the very nature of our unequal material realities. Sheehi challenges us to be vigilant towards misrecognition, the not-so-unconscious ways in which we commit to logics of oppression, especially those of us who identify as healers.

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Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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Sue Grand joins us for a conversation about hatred and totalitarianism. A psychoanalyst who has spent decades studying trauma and the ways evil reproduces across history, Grand is interested in how introspection might protect us and others from our own perpetrator fragments. She challenges the assumption that traumatized people victimize others—most do not. The regeneration of harm, she argues, arises from a complex interplay between psychological defenses and social structures such as gender binaries and racialization. But how do everyday people get caught up in the fevered swell of fascist times? Can psychotherapy be antifascist? Grand examines the erotic lure of fascism, while John and Mason explore Deleuze and Guattari’s provocative claim that, on some level, we all desire it.

|| Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

|| Music by Mason Neely

|| Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

|| Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

|| Contact: [email protected]

|| Instagram: www.instagram.com/betweenuspod

|| Facebook: www.facebook.com/betweenuspodcast

|| YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC4pPUTf_wRjNxHcCsFJoSSQ

Tony Bass is less concerned with building psychological metatheories than with how theory comes alive in the consulting room. From the earliest days of the Relational movement, he worked alongside Stephen Mitchell and others to shape a vision of treatment grounded in mutual influence, drawing inspiration from Ferenczi’s dialogue of unconsciouses—an approach Bass experiences as intuitive and “not so meta.” But whose unconscious is it, anyway? For Tony, the analytic encounter always points to interplay: between patient and analyst, healer and healed. In his view, psychotherapy is not the application of a fixed model but an ongoing improvisation, in which each subjectivity becomes instrumental to the unfolding of new meanings and unexpected revelations of both similarity and difference.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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Roy Barsness returns to the show to discuss his new book, which establishes a psychodynamic model of clinical supervision. Steeped in relational psychoanalytic values, this approach offers not only a new way of thinking about supervision, but also a recapitulation of how this theory informs practice in the treatment room—and life in general. By considering each case a muse for both therapist and supervisor, Barsness invites emergent subjectivities into each relationship. Supervision becomes the framework for a path of encounter, with contemporary figures such as Mitchell and Benjamin lighting the way. Roy emphasizes the personal journey of the therapist as crucial to this modality, while Mason reflects with John on his own journey home and the persistent question of to whom we truly belong.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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Jay Bakker joins us live from the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. As the child of the famous televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jay has always been surrounded by persistent narratives—even among therapists of every stripe. The pressures of life in the limelight from an early age led him to cope through addiction, especially after his parents faced a very public downfall. But when the Oscar-winning film The Eyes of Tammy Faye was released, Jay sought treatment once again—this time with a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In a vulnerable conversation, in front of an audience of therapists, Jay shares how this treatment helped him better understand what his unconscious was doing to him, and how psychoanalysis has shaped his efforts to build a more hospitable theology as he strives to disagree well with those across ideologies.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Engineering by Ian Knippel

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

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Lynne Layton joins us for our most political conversation to date. Layton’s concept of the normative unconscious, which addresses the myriad of ways we all strive to maintain the status quo, has been influential to those who believe that the mind is shaped by social forces beyond the family. Racism and sexism play a central role, but these bigotries, that work to separate us and dominate some, also work in tandem with economic and political forces that seek to make us all subservient. Layton discusses the influence Erich Fromm had on her work, her critique of the neoliberal regime through a psychoanalytic lens, and how the controversies produced by such inquiries, are very much alive and well in a field that is capable of crying in terror at straw men like “wokeism” and “identity politics.”

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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As a child of Palestinian parents displaced to Beirut, Karim Dajani became interested in psychoanalysis at a young age. These days, he’s justifiably interested in the field’s own exiles, particularly Trigant Burrow, who theorized as early as the 1920’s that the unconscious is structured in concordance with the social world, only to be expelled from the APA shortly thereafter. Dajani explains how the field has time and time again, invested in the erasure of the social unconscious, in a misguided effort to keep psychoanalysis pure. His disillusionment with the institution lies in the contradiction- that as a business of scholarship and truth-making, its leaders strive to suppress the understanding that culture is an antecedent force that was working hard on us back when we were simply fantasies.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

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This week, we continue our conversation with Eyal Rozmarin. If belonging is a powerful force compelling us to identify with groups, it follows that our collectives must imprint themselves on the foundation of our very subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Rozmarin paints a portrait of personhood that is always in conflict between the warm acceptance of the State, and the terror of being cast out into the wilderness as bare life. But what if we were to transcend the Self? What does a liberated Subject look like? An ideology that positions the Self as always in transition would only echo what we should already know as therapists- that identity is transient, the Self is expansive, and that our borders, no matter how much we build walls, are permeable.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: www.instagram.com/betweenuspod

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In the premiere of season six, psychoanalyst Eyal Rozmarin joins our host John Totten to discuss the constitutive power of belonging. A native of Israel-Palestine, and an objector to his compulsory military service, Eyal has a unique take on the respective costs of belonging and its counterpart abandonment. From Oedipus to the superego, Freud is subverted here; Rozmarin posits it is not that society protects us from our own nature, but that belonging turns us into killers. Is it possible that our collectives are antithetical to the goals of psychotherapy and what is the implication for the treatment room? This and more is discussed in the first of a two-part conversation.

Produced by John Totten and Mason Neely

Music by Mason Neely

Research Assistant: Rose Bergdoll

Website: www.betweenuspodcast.com

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: www.instagram.com/betweenuspod

Facebook: www.facebook.com/betweenuspodcast

YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC4pPUTf_wRjNxHcCsFJoSSQ