In this episode, I explore Wittgenstein’s idea of forms of life and what he once called the “whole hurly-burly of human actions,” that living background of practices, relationships, gestures, expectations, and shared meanings within which anything we say or feel can make sense at all. I reflect on the temptation, in both philosophy and psychotherapy, to reduce reality to atomistic parts, hidden inner objects, or eternal foundations, and I make the case that human suffering cannot be understood apart from the swarm of life in which it takes shape.

Along the way, I bring this into a clinical register, thinking about anxiety, identity, autism, couples work, and the ways therapy can become less about isolating explanatory units and more about listening for the background against which a life becomes legible. I also weave in a line from Wittgenstein that has stayed with me deeply: “Perhaps what is inexpressible … is the background against which whatever could express has its meaning.” This is an episode about context, mystery, collaboration, and the living weave of human life where both suffering and change become possible.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my series on the philosophical foundations of solution-focused therapy by doing a close reading of Nick Drury’s essay “Wittgenstein and the Tikanga of Psychotherapy.” Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Drury challenges the Cartesian and medicalized picture of the person that has shaped so much of modern mental health discourse, and instead invites us into a vision of therapy rooted in language, relationship, ethical responsiveness, and forms of life. He also explicitly connects Wittgenstein’s idea of “disappearing” problems through a changed way of living to solution-focused therapy’s way of working.  

I use the episode to explore why solution-focused therapy is so often misunderstood as simplistic when, in fact, it rests on a deeply serious philosophical vision of human life. Along the way, I unpack Drury’s distinction between “know that” and “know how,” his critique of diagnosis-heavy and decontextualized models of care, and his account of therapy as a space where new language-games, new forms of relation, and new possibilities for living can emerge.  

I also bring these ideas down to the level of practice with vivid clinical examples, showing how a Wittgensteinian and solution-focused sensibility can shift the way we listen, the way we ask questions, and the way we understand change itself. This is an episode about clarity, humility, and the ethical depth of therapy when it becomes less a laboratory of explanation and more a living conversation in which people can begin to speak and live differently together.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my Philosophy & Solution-Focused Therapy series by turning to Steve de Shazer’s essay, “Don’t Think, But Observe: What Is the Importance of the Work of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy?” In it, I explore why Wittgenstein matters so deeply to Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, not because he gives it some hidden grand theory, but because he helps us see why the longing for that kind of theory can pull us away from the living reality of therapy itself. I reflect on de Shazer’s argument that meaning is rooted in use, in context, in forms of life, and I consider what that means for a therapeutic practice that refuses to get trapped in diagnostic abstraction and instead stays close to language, relationship, exception, and observable change. Along the way, I make the case that Solution-Focused Therapy is far more philosophically serious than its critics often assume, and that its restraint, its precision, and its attention to what is actually happening in a person’s life may be part of what makes it so radical.

In this episode of Psyche Podcast, I continue my series on the philosophy behind solution-focused therapy by taking up a fascinating and delicate question: can Ludwig Wittgenstein be understood as an autistic man, and if so, what might that help us see about his philosophy, about neurodivergence, and about therapy itself?

Drawing from Alan Griswold’s essay on Wittgenstein, along with broader reflections on Wittgenstein’s life and thought, I explore the limits of retrospective diagnosis while still taking seriously the possibility that his relationship to language, precision, social life, and meaning may have emerged from a distinctly neurodivergent form of experience.

From there, I connect Wittgenstein’s ideas about language-games, meaning, and forms of life to a more humane and expansive way of understanding autism. I also connect those ideas to the spirit of solution-focused therapy, with its deep attention to language, lived reality, and the creation of more workable futures.

This is an episode about philosophy, neurodivergence, and what becomes possible when we stop treating difference simply as defect and begin listening for a different grammar of being.

In this episode, I begin a loose new series exploring the philosophical influences behind Solution-Focused Therapy, especially the work of Steve de Shazer. Too often, Solution-Focused Therapy gets caricatured as simplistic, overly optimistic, or not serious enough about suffering. I argue that this misses something much deeper. Beneath its lightness of touch is a remarkably sophisticated way of thinking about language, change, and the construction of possibility.

I offer a biographical sketch of de Shazer and then trace some of the major intellectual currents that help illuminate his work, including Wittgenstein, pragmatism, Derrida, and Paul de Man. Along the way, I reflect on why Solution-Focused Therapy may be less about uncovering the hidden truth of a problem and more about helping create new descriptions that make different futures imaginable.

This is an episode about language, suffering, restraint, and the quiet radicalism of asking a different kind of question.

In this episode, I explore a question that has followed Richard Rorty for years and feels especially urgent now: did his pragmatism, and his rejection of universal foundations for truth, help create the post-truth culture we are living in? Drawing from Eduardo Mendieta’s article “Rorty and Post-Post-Truth” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I argue that this is ultimately a caricature of Rorty. What Rorty challenged was not facts, evidence, or public accountability, but the fantasy that truth requires a metaphysical guarantee outside human history, language, and democratic life. Rather than leading to cynicism or political manipulation, his work points us back to the communal labor of justification and to the fragile social conditions that make truthfulness possible at all.

I also make the case that what has far more plausibly given rise to our post-truth moment is the erosion of social trust, the collapse of social capital, and the polarizing effects of algorithmic media environments that reward outrage, identity, and reaction over shared inquiry. So this becomes not just an episode about Rorty, but about what democratic culture needs in order for truth to have public life at all.

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s essay “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy” from Essays on Heidegger and Others and think through one of the tensions that has been staying with me lately: how to honor private self-creation without letting it collapse into a form of individualism that forgets public responsibility. I reflect on Rorty’s reading of Foucault, his idea of the “knight of autonomy,” and why I find myself deeply resonating with that figure through my own sense of being an otrovert — someone drawn to autonomy, inward authority, and the refusal of borrowed foundations.

At the same time, I wrestle with my fear that the private/public distinction can leave democratic life too thin, even as I remain deeply doubtful that a return to shared religious, philosophical, or universal foundations would actually produce the solidarity people imagine. From there, I explore Rorty’s provocative suggestion that people can be humane without being universalists, and I consider how art and culture — including the imperfect but moving example of Apple TV's Shrinking — may help create a shared public vocabulary through empathy, grief, failure, and recognition rather than through doctrine or theory.

This is an episode about autonomy, democracy, suffering, self-creation, and the difficult task of trying to remain faithful to one’s own vocabulary while still taking part in the shared work of making the world more decent for others.

In this episode, I explore Richard Rorty’s chapter “Freud and Moral Reflection,” a reading of Freud that has really stayed with me as I’ve been getting more into Rorty lately. I make it clear that I’m not claiming this is simply the definitive or orthodox way to understand Freud, and that many people in psychoanalysis would likely push back on Rorty’s interpretation, but I do find his perspective deeply suggestive and very alive for thinking about therapy.

Moving through Rorty’s contrast between self-purification and self-enlargement, I reflect on what it might mean to approach the psyche not as a battleground between the noble and the beastly, but as a complex inner world populated by voices, parts, and what Rorty calls "inner peers".

Along the way, I think about how this chapter can help us imagine therapy less as a moral washing and more as a place of curiosity, interpretation, and greater internal hospitality.

If the philosopher is a poet, what does that make the therapist?

In this episode, I work through insights from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry and begin to trace their implications for psychotherapy, arriving at a shift that feels both subtle and profound—therapy not as a process of uncovering truth, but as a collaborative act of creation.

Moving away from the idea of a fixed self waiting to be discovered, I explore a Rortyan approach where identity is continuously constructed through language, relationship, and imagination, and where the therapist is no longer the one who knows, but a curious partner in the process of redescription.

What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it opens up new ways of living.

This is a conversation about agency, experimentation, and the quiet but radical idea that therapy is not about finding yourself…

…but about helping to write what comes next.

In this episode, I reflect on Adam Phillips' essay “On Getting the Life You Want,” the first chapter of his new book Getting the Life You Want, and use it as a way of thinking through some questions that have been deeply alive for me lately. Starting from my growing obsession with American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty, I explore why Phillips feels so striking to me at this moment, as someone who seems able to bring Freud, psychoanalysis, and a kind of pragmatist pluralism into the same conversation.

This is also my first real attempt to seriously read Phillips, even though my friend Barry Taylor has been suggesting him to me for years, and part of what makes this encounter feel so timely is how much his work resonates with my own sense that neither psychoanalysis nor philosophy gives us final truths so much as powerful descriptions, usable fictions, and ways of opening a life.

Along the way, I explore Phillips’ contrast between pragmatism’s question — what life do you want? — and psychoanalysis’s more difficult question — why might you not want to know what you want? What follows is a meditation on desire, authority, self-creation, ambivalence, and the strange difficulty of living a life that actually feels like your own.