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. 

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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This is the first in our season of episodes swimming in the waters of Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person, and the first in a three-part mini-series on his six fundamental life learnings. It was first published in 1967 and we'll be seeing if it still outshines the millions of words people have cobbled together since, to essentially describe what it is to grow as a person.

Carl Rogers "baffled and annoyed" psychiatrists in his day, as he refused to accept Freud's analytical approach to therapy; he didn't like being told what to think. In this episode, Dan and James will happily baffle and annoy you, taking you through the first three of the six life learnings Rogers considered to be his most significant; being honest with emotions, accepting himself, and understanding other people's interpretations. With examples of the desire to murder grandmas in the supermarket and express rage in a job interview, we're bringing you a discussion about dilemmas that often remain as unclear as ever, half a century after the book's publication. 

If you want to read along with us, we thoroughly recommend the book, but if you just want the nonsense then you've come to the right place.

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Oliver Sacks is known for his way of communicating ideas about neuroscience in the form of best-selling page-turners. He lived a life as interesting as his patients and he is also Dan's hero. We used this episode not so much to talk about the contents of his books, but the way he communicated how he saw people who were outliers in their neurological perceptions.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat, trying to pick up her head and put it on his own as if it were a totally different object, is the most famous of Oliver Sacks' patients. He represents how human perception is not as black and white as to be thought right or wrong, it's more of a range. Yet the woman's head is a fact of physics; it's not a hat, and nor is it a social construct of the patriarchy, no matter what the American media tells you! We discuss how Oliver Sacks found a balance between objectivity and interpretation, studied interpretations scientifically, and simultaneously managed to treat his patients more like a psychotherapist than a research scientist.

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It's the biggest episode of Private Practice Podcast ever, stuffed with immature humour and games that illuminate the gargantuan fallacy of fairness like a brightly shining star. After last year's not-a-Christmas-Special, this year the fun and games with Dan and James are dialled up to induce tinnitus, as we bring you four new festive features, including Pigs in Blankety Blankets and Freud's Psychoanalytic Christmas Quiz. For Dan, the worst thing about this Christmas is the nightmare that James offers for some Freudian interpretation, closely followed by the twisted Oliver Sacks remix of the traditional Sack Game. For James, it's tidings of complexity and enjoyment all the way, because he knows how to pull up his Christmas socks and Flow. So pop on your furry antlers and take off everything else, get yourself into a warm bath for an indulgent time with the Private Practice Podcast Christmas Special, and let Dan and James drizzle their brandy sauce all over your moist pudding. 

Music credits: all from Archive.org 

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What is psychoanalysis in the 2020s? An expensive exercise in self-centred indulgence? For the first time in the place we call the Private Practice we discuss in a bit more detail what it is. Dan is a fully qualified mental health practitioner and has over 20 years' experience of therapy, and James is/has neither of those things, and so asks the questions to learn about a practice than can often seem mystical when rather the word is mysterious. Psychoanalysis was famously invented by Freud, but is not all about him and his penis obsession, at least not all of the time. Increasingly, however, people are ditching his field of thought and relying on CBT to solve their problems. Despite our deep-dive into this hall of distorted mirrors in our recent mini-series, we still think it's often just wallpapering over the cracks. And by "crack" I mean anything you want me to mean…

Grab a cigar, suck on it like you mean it, and come with us behind the closed door of the Private Practice to have a more purposeful idea of why you would want to explore your unconscious.

Mentioned in this episode:

This Jungian Life podcast https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-184-does-analysis-work-a-conversation-with-jonathan-shedler-phd/

The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy by Jonathan Shedler https://jonathanshedler.com/PDFs/Shedler%20%282010%29%20Efficacy%20of%20Psychodynamic%20Psychotherapy.pdf

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In the stunning conclusion to our overwhelmingly successful Distortion episodes, we brilliantly look at how framing some information can totally transform how it is perceived. What a stunning and overwhelmingly brilliant way to start the description of a podcast about bias… 

As well as framing topics to limit the overall field of discussion (or James' lack of ability to do so in conversation), we also use confirmation bias to assert our views, hindsight to see James in a better light than Dan, and affinity bias to prove our devotion to the Jungian Gods. This week Small Talk is back, and Dan is really impressed with the progress James is making to be free and spontaneous in this skill, and for once, instead of concluding that you should pull up your socks and flow, James wonders if we should all scapegoat cats in order to manage the problem of bias in humankind. I could continue to ensure you're fully prepared for everything in the episode, but I've already done enough framing and indeed provided sufficient context, so it's time to stop feeding your cat and press play. 

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