Psyche

In this episode, I reflect on Vereen M. Bell’s essay “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy” and use it as a way into one of the biggest questions that haunts McCarthy’s work: is McCarthy simply a nihilist, or is something more complicated happening?

I explore how McCarthy strips away easy meaning, cheap hope, and sentimental moral order, while still leaving us with beauty, attention, witness, mystery, and the fragile possibility of carrying something human through the darkness. This episode moves through McCarthy’s brutal landscapes, his refusal of easy answers, and the strange moral power of looking at the world without lying about it.

Ultimately, I think McCarthy does not give us nihilism as a final answer. He gives us a passage through nihilism, asking what remains when the old guarantees fall apart — and whether, even then, we can still carry the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on rereading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as a coming-of-age novel and bring it into conversation with one of my favorite books from high school, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I explore the tragic and beautiful passage into adulthood — the loss of innocence, the grief of seeing the world more clearly, and the difficult courage it takes to keep loving, working, and showing up anyway.

I also connect these themes to my work as a therapist with adolescents and young adults, where therapy can become a kind of initiation space — a place to grieve what is lost, discover what is gained, and learn how to care less about the crowd while caring more about the right people. Along the way, I bring in the idea of la lucha — the struggle, the fight, the refusal to let the bastards get you down — as part of what adulthood asks of us.

In this solo episode, I put Carl Jung and Cormac McCarthy into creative conversation around the idea that life is a battleground of opposites: good and evil, beauty and violence, devotion and despair.

I reflect on Jung’s quote from Man and His Symbols, Petra Mundik’s reading of McCarthy and “diverging equity,” my current rereading of All the Pretty Horses, and why I still have this fantasy of one day teaching a course on the gnostic spirituality of Cormac McCarthy from a depth psychological perspective.

I also bring in the series finale of Euphoria, which felt to me like a Cormac McCarthy short story in TV form: devastating, mythic, violent, and yet still holding onto a fragile glimmer of human goodness.

This episode is less about giving answers and more about staying with the tension: if evil may be greater, what does it mean that there is still possibly some good?

In this episode, I reflect on Matthew Potts’ Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, especially chapter 2, “Fate: Nietzsche against Holden.” Potts is quickly becoming one of my favorite readers of McCarthy because he brings a deeply theological imagination to the novels without reducing them to easy Christian answers.

I explore Potts’ reading of fate, Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and the fragile possibility of something beyond violence. At the center of the episode is Hannah Arendt’s powerful emphasis on forgiveness and promise: forgiveness as the answer to the irreversibility of the past, and promise as the answer to the uncertainty of the future.

This is an episode about McCarthy’s darkness, but also about the small signs that still matter: a wife’s hand, a stone trough, a father carrying fire, and the possibility that even in a world of blood and fate, human beings may still be capable of beginning again.

In this episode, I reflect on D. Marcel DeCoste’s Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment, but I’m not approaching McCarthy from a Catholic confessional perspective. Instead, I’m interested in DeCoste’s insight that McCarthy may raise all the right religious questions without necessarily giving us clear or easy answers.

I explore how McCarthy’s darkness, ambiguity, and moral seriousness connect to the crucible of therapy, where people often have to struggle with the question rather than have the answer handed to them too quickly. I also bring in a moment from Apple TV’s Shrinking, where Paul warns against meddling and solving clients’ problems for them, because doing so can rob them of the dignity of their own struggle and discovery.

In this episode, I reflect on the recent Vanity Fair article, “Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence,” and the complicated story of Augusta Britt, the woman who appears to have haunted and shaped parts of McCarthy’s fiction.

Rather than idealizing McCarthy or reducing the story to a simple moral category, I try to sit with the tension: art and exploitation, rescue and possession, genius and harm, the romance of the muse and the reality of a vulnerable young woman whose life became part of a literary mythology.

This is an episode about reading McCarthy without innocence, without worship, and without losing sight of the human being behind the myth.

In this episode, I reflect on Petra Mundik’s A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy and the way her reading has deeply shaped my understanding of McCarthy’s underlying philosophy and spirituality.

While McCarthy once described himself as a materialist, his fiction never feels flat or reductionistic. It feels charged, haunted, and almost sacramental in its attention to blood, fire, evil, mystery, and the strange persistence of goodness. I explore Mundik’s reading of McCarthy through Gnosticism, mysticism, Buddhism, and the Perennial Philosophy, while also being careful not to collapse McCarthy’s own beliefs into the voices of his fictional characters.

I also share how conversations with my own therapist — who brought together analytic psychology and religious studies — opened me up to a very different understanding of Gnosticism than the one I had received in seminary. Rather than seeing it only as heresy, I began to see it as a powerful imaginative response to suffering, alienation, evil, and the feeling that this world is not quite our home.

This episode is about McCarthy’s darkness, but also about the fire that remains inside it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s only published nonfiction essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves.

I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian depth psychological lens. From there, I explore why dreams may matter—not because they give us easy answers or mystical certainty, but because they can sometimes carry emotional realities that ordinary language has not yet found a way to hold.

I also think about this through my work with men in psychotherapy, especially men wrestling with anger, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the difficulty of naming what hurts. Sometimes a dream becomes a doorway. Sometimes an image arrives before the words do. And sometimes the unconscious may be trying to reconnect us with parts of ourselves we have lost contact with: joy, freedom, grief, longing, vitality, and the deeper life beneath our explanations.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s dark and haunting vision of the world through the lens of a recent Substack essay on his “gnostic conservatism.” Rather than treating McCarthy as a political writer in any simple sense, I explore his deeper existential concerns: violence, fate, evil, tenderness, and the fragile mystery of goodness in a fallen world.

I think about Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road as works that refuse easy optimism while still leaving room for something like hope. McCarthy’s world is often brutal, cold, and morally terrifying, but again and again there is also the image of fire: something fragile, humane, and sacred that must be carried even when there is no guarantee it will prevail.

This episode is about darkness without despair, hope without sentimentality, and what it means to keep carrying the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy’s novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional repression, and inherited versions of masculinity that have cut them off from tenderness, grief, intimacy, and their own inner lives.

Through No Country for Old Men and The Road, I think about masculinity not simply as something to condemn or defend, but as something that can mature or fail to mature. McCarthy gives us men who are brave, capable, haunted, violent, loving, terrified, and often unable to speak directly about what is destroying them. And in that world, “carrying the fire” becomes a powerful image for a different kind of strength: not domination, not invulnerability, not control, but the ability to protect something vulnerable without destroying it.

This episode is about fathers and sons, old myths and new possibilities, therapy as a different kind of initiation, and the hope that even in the dark, men can learn to become more fully human.