Having decided to “give Dan a go”, James arrives to his first proper session on the lips sofa with a burning question; was he a megalomaniac child? When it turns out this was meant to be a rhetorical question, the extent to which James will require many further sessions becomes all too clear.

Warning: Contains material about complex subjects which some listeners may find problematically simplistic.

Episode 2: Megalomania

Just about sufficiently entertaining and somewhere on the path to fascinating information about the mind, Private Practice Podcast is tantalisingly close to being exactly what you need to improve your own conscious state of mind. This is your non-existent super-ego telling you to join Dan Brown and James Hall on a quest to explore how the ideas in psychotherapy can be considered outside of the therapy room, leading to a more complex and enjoyable life. Your negative thought patterns might be telling you right now that it's not worth your time, but my moderate ones are saying this is by no means inevitable. Go on, treat yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It's that time of year again; summer in Australia. The kangaroo testicles are on the BBQ, Santa has pulled off his top to show you his beach body, and the Sack Game Down Under is complicated with everything falling out, since Australia is upside down. Releasing episodes out of sequence with a last-minute switcharoo, we present the Private Practice Podcast Christmas Special, full of existential philosophy that's tediously related to our ongoing saga into the work of Carl Rogers. If you want to hear about James leaving Casablanca and arriving in Melbourne, you'll have to wait for the next episode, which he incorrectly insists was just recently released before this one.Due to the phenomenal success of last year, everything is kept the same for this year, including Pigs in Blankety Blankets and The Nightmare Interpretation Before Christmas. The Christmas Quiz is loftier and more abstract than before, and yet with the intellectual cop-out of multiple choice answers, Dan manages to win points and will surely impress half of the listener. As you would expect, Unconditional Positive Regard is plentiful from Santa like it is from Carl Rogers, except when it comes to the ludicrous Sack Game, which will unnecessarily leave a taste in your mouth sourer than a rancid sprout that's gone mouldy in Dan's highly contaminated living environment. You haven't got much time to listen to this before Christmas is over, so cancel everything now and play it loud enough to drown out the sound of Meghan and Harry more effectively than Her Majesty ever managed.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Becoming to Look a Lot Like Christmas

We jump back into Carl Rogers this week with a discussion of the idea of congruence between the internal and external worlds. Dan is back and recording from a hotel room in Hitchin because he is on a business trip; his small talk about this is so boring that it's an easy win for James with his witty and concise tale of a night out in Casablanca. But small talk is not a competition and so there are no prizes. How fortified is your inner world? Do you pride yourself on being able to scream with mean, defenestrating laughter at someone on the inside, but slap on a façade of faux compassion to get away with it? If so then you are objectively wrong and Carl says so. This is followed by skipping over Carl's introduction to Unconditional Positive Regard (because we have made whole episodes on this subject in the past) to ask the question, what is empathy? Baby don't hurt me. James refuses to stop judging Dan and Dan just wants to understand why. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Becoming Carl Rogers – Part Four

If all this Becoming of late is becoming overwhelming, we take a break from On Becoming a Person to talk about a new film from New York, called Adieu, Lacan, featuring an interview with the director, Richard Ledes. The film is fictional, but the main character of Seriema, played by Ismenia Mendes (Orange is the New Black), is based on the real life of Betty Milan, a Brazilian woman who traveled to Paris for a series of analytic sessions back in the 1970s with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, played by David Patrick Kelly (Twin Peaks). Dan was ill with no voice for the recording of this episode, so in lieu, as English-speakers like to say, is a French person, Sammy, who has many opinions—quelle surprise—on both Lacan and the film.The episode starts with an interview with the director, followed by a review of the film, a discussion of Lacan and his views on politics and relationships, and then a conversation about psychoanalysis around the world, the language of existentialism (and K-pop group BTS), and Freud becoming a totem in France. To watch the film, it's available now on many streaming platforms from www.adieulacan.com“Freud thought a film could never transmit what happens in an analysis... but I am quite sure if Freud saw this film he would fall in love with it... at last, psychoanalysis has reached the cinema”— Marco Antonio Cortinho Jorge, Corpo Freudiano do Rio de Janeiro Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adieu, Lacan

This is the third of our episodes on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. The ultimate introduction to his big ideas, and just the beginning of our odyssey towards the light of a sun that can melt your hand off. Small Talk is lost in favour of James having a production meeting with himself, before getting right into the topic suspiciously quickly. This incorporates the weighing up of right- and left-hemisphere interpretations of experience, allowing facts to flow, and remembering that the only child is not, in actual flowing fact, special. Fans of Flow will fondly remember that Flow is a verb, a doing word, and you'll be delighted to discover that the Flow activity of Becoming is a right Carry On. This concludes Part One of the book, and we'll be back for plenty more as long as we don't flow too close to the sun. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carry On Becoming – Part Three

This is the second of a three-part mini-series on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. In friendship, war and family, Carl has something to say about how much your feelings matter, and whether or not they legitimise mass murder. If you like what we do on this podcast, you're in for a treat. Small Talk is back to forward your life clock, as James adjusts to a double time zone shift and leaves out not a single minute from the story (although he still gets the details wrong if you pay attention), while Dan has to deal with a decapitated rat. The life learnings this week involve the allowance of others to overshare, accepting others despite everything, and resisting jumping into other people's lives to fix them. It's hard to tell if this is a conversation about the megalomaniac child's rites of passage, or foreign policy and international diplomacy with psychopaths at very long tables. Either way, the nuclear reactor has some warm water for you to bathe in. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 2: Megalomania

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