PZ's Podcast

An interesting new book from Germany has just been translated into English and a review of it in the Times Literary Supplement (August 21, 2026) concludes with a most consequential sentence.

The book is entitled Soul Magic: A Century of Psychotherapy, and the author is Steve Ayan. The consequential sentence at the end of the review, which was written by Jack Goulder, is this:

"Ayan finishes with some reflections on the notion that the various different forms of psychotherapy all seem to work as well as each other, and that most of this is due to the placebo effect of there being a kindly listener in the room".

Now there are at least two big ideas here, with strong practical effects:

The first is that in practice almost all forms of psychotherapy work the same.

(But hey, what about John and Yoko, and Carl Jung, and Brian Wilson, and ... PZ... and you? The author levels the playing field!) Moreover, he credits "kindly listening" to their shared (albeit flattened) success. That is a huge conclusion, with enormous possible consequences.

But second, Ayan believes that "kindly listening" is a placebo. That is to say, kindly listening is sort of a cover for nourishing peace of mind, but it is not a cure! So "psychotherapy", its 'success' rooted in simply the possibility of a troubled soul's being listened to, is not really about healing. It is sort of a cover, for a secondary effect rather than a primary one.

This podcast considers Ayan's rather stunning conclusion -- both its relativizing impact, and its diminishing of what actually goes on within a sufferer by means of "kindly listening".

PZ disagrees with the latter point. Based on a near lifetime of practical experience, he disagrees with the latter point. He'll wish to quote a classic song here: Roxy Music's "More Than This" (1982). You'll see.

(Oh, and didn't The Clash do a song once entitled "Kindly Listener" -- or was it Dave Mason? Or Talk Talk maybe?) LUV U.

'Love is the Answer' to almost all human problems; but more accurately stated, 'Belovedness' is the Answer. Love springs from belovedness, and almost every rock song that has ever been sung echoes this.

It's an important distinction, tho', between love and belovedness, because love is almost always a response to belovedness In other words, belovedness comes prior to love. You cannot tell someone to love. But if they feel they are loved,

then their love comes naturally. "All I Gotta Do Is/Act Naturally" (The Beatles, 1965).

Love always comes from outside yourself. That is not an overstatement. For love to "work", it has to come from outside yourself. You didn't make it happen. Love fell into your lap. Just look at your own experience: "(That's When) I Saw Her Standing There" (once again, The Beatles, 1963).

One more thing, tho', and it's important. You can pray for it to happen. Belovedness is not strictly quixotic. If there is not human belovedness in your life, ask God to send you some. I mean that. We know He loves each of us from the bottom of His Heart. I write that with "sure and certain hope" -- and based on long experience. It's a good and almost necessary thing to pray for belovedness to happen.

As in Psalm 116:

I love the Lord, because He hath heard my voice and my supplications.

Ask God to send you some (human) love -- or even more of what you already have. LUV U.

A special cross-posting of PZ's appearance on Directed by God, a podcast and YouTube show produced by and 'starring' Reagan Wells and Seth Farmer.

PZ was served as guest host for their episode on The Searchers, the 1956 film directed by John Ford. The episode was filmed in Cathedral Church of the Advent. Watch on YouTube here.

Reagan Wells is chief videographer for The Center in Birmingham, which majors in reaching out to men, of all ages, for the Christian Faith.

Here is the first time back after several months,and I couldn't be happier!

It took a new computer (and system), acute in-person IT aid from Mockingbird's own Will McDavid; and the moral support of Mockingbirder and friend Hewes Hull. But "I'm Flyin'" ('Peter Pan', 1952) -- again.

This brand new episode concerns personal belovedness (i.e., Grace) and its fruit (i.e., Christian compassion and all the dynamism of the Spirit of God). The metaphor -- and more than a metaphor as its magical story is actually true to life -- is from the classic musical "Brigadoon", the movie of which came out in 1955. "Brigadoon" is a wondrous and luminous work of popular art, but the heart of it is the power of belovedness to engender love back (!), the power of belovedness to produce spectacular altruism and other-directedness. The last line of "Brigadoon" is thus one of the two or three greatest endings in Broadway and Hollywood history.

_This episode of resurrection is dedicated to Will and Derrill McDavid.

Why does one love rock 'n roll so dearly? Well, of course, the quality of a given favorite song -- its bass line, the vocals, the guitar solo, etc. -- connects with you(r ears) and makes you love it. But there's more to it than that:

The real ground of one's love for a particular song is

The actual song itself -- superb as it may be -- is made a thousand times more powerful by where you were in experience -- and especially in emotional experience -- when you first heard it. The song itself, in other words, is secondary to the placement of your psycho-dynamic soul when it was first playing in the background of your life.

I cannot overstate this truth (of experience): It is not the song itself -- nor, for that matter, the play or the movie or the poem or the painting, even -- which carried "The Weight" (The Band, '68). It was, rather, the contact which the song made with your innermost person, whether you were being loved and accepted at the time, or repulsed and rejected. Therein lies the power of art. (Tell me if this isn't true.)

Amazing response recently to an excerpt I played on the cast of an ELO single. It just seemed to blow up one's audience with empathy and exclamatory rejoicings.

Note, finally, that there is an explicitly Christian anchorage here: The union we wish so much to feel with another person is the embodiment, in felt experience, of the union we need with God -- that belovedness I talk about so much. I can almost say that a memorable rock song is for many persons the bearer of Christ's One Way Love.

Oh, and for the record, the paragraph I read at the conclusion of this episode is from James Hilton's stirring novel from 1934, entitled "Without Armor". LUV U.

Always searching for the words to describe breakthrough -- opening doors -- divine intervention in our 'safe-rooms' of pain and loss. Always searching for words, and also actions. How can you and I, dear listener, become like Edwin Starr in 1965: our own "Agent Double-O-Soul" for the sake of ... the world?

Well, first, you need to be an object of love. Not the subject of love -- i.e., the lover. No, we need to be the object of love. Belovedness is the First Law of Physics when it comes to the human heart. All else is resistible exhortation. Being loved engenders love in return. That goes for about 99 % of the human race.

Second, we need to (ultimately) perceive that everything which happens is part of the Plan. I cannot say that to someone who is in the midst of overwhelming pain and loss.

Third, and finally, it turns out that God often needs us to take the first step. It's often a small step, even a tiny step -- but it is a step nevertheless. Can't quite yet integrate this with my Reformation theology, but it is true empirically. The mountain doesn't seem to move until and unless we have taken a step towards it -- i.e., from out of our inertia. This is just a fact. Maybe you, dear listener, can find a way to say it better.

Oh, and Podcast 409 is dedicated to Brad Knight, a minister to whom I feel warmly close, and closely linked. LUV U.

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day (Squeeze, 1996) and that fact forever touched him. He wrote three scripts for the original 'Twilight Zone' that have a Christmas context, as well as the mother of all Christmas screenplays (of his genre) entitled "The Messiah of Mott Street". The latter he wrote for the 1969 anthology 'Night Gallery'.

During the next two weeks I will be showing the two best of them (IMO) -- "The Changing of the Guard" (1962) and "The Messiah of Mott Street" -- on successive Thursday evenings at Cranmer House in Homewood, AL.

In each of these scripts Serling unfolds, out of imminent tragedy, rejection and loss, the possibility of Renewal, Redemption, and Hope. And each time in less than a half hour!

Personally, I believe life is like that. What I mean is, Christians are not nihilists. Nor is life always "complicated". We believe -- from personal experience and not just from "teaching" -- that God answers prayers.

Mary Zahl teaches this. Pastor Paula teaches this. And I have come to believe it.

Watch these Twilight Zone half-hours, and they will build you up (Buttercup).

To respond to the opening fundraising plea, click here.

How do you help someone who is being pummeled by a persisting circumstantial or psychodynamic problem? Do you "advise" them? (Don't Do It - The Band, '72) Do you try to talk them out of it? (Again, don't -- Talk Talk, '82-'84) Do you avoid them? (Again, don't -- Animotion, '84. They won't let you, anyway.)

What do you do? How do you actually help someone you love -- maybe it's you ("Baby It's You" -- The Beatles, '63)?

"Magic cancellation"! That's the thing. It's a phrase used by English novelist James Hilton in his first novel "Ill Wind" ('32). Hilton was describing the power of altruistic love on the part of a Soviet diplomat (of all people) on a French chambermaid (who is actually a Russian aristocrat on the run from people just like him). The diplomat's entirely genuine love for the chambermaid demolishes her "architecture of misery" -- again Hilton's phrase -- which had confined her 100% up to that moment.

"Magic" (i.e., outwardly interventionist, Holy Spirit-inspired) cancellation" is what it takes to "open the door to your heart" (Pete Townshend, '81). That's what it takes: one-way love from outside yourself. (And note, this is not antinomian. It is not rooted in denial. It is rooted in the Graceful determination of the one who loves. And in about four fifths of all cases, such "cancellation" opens the door to ... response, and -- here's the rub -- personal renewal and Hope.

Try it. Maybe it worked on you once.

(In the Fall of '72, all it took, in the case of yours truly, was someone offering a Sunday evening lift from 72 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge Mass down to -- hey it wasn't even far (geographically) -- Narragansett Bay. And it worked. I mean, forever.) LUV U.

I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate.

"Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but listening to an old Beach Boys song from 1973 brought it home so beautifully. You hear a number of "stanzas", and then (at least twice, maybe three times) a keyboard-driven bridge -- a melody that puts you right through the roof emotionally. It summons almost automatically the mood you'd want to have surrounding you when you are dying.

Moreover, the voiced imperative at the end, "Sail on, sail on, sailor", is exactly what I need. I don't need someone to help me find 'new purpose', something to plant me in the now again, when my spirits are low. I need, as Meister Eckhart wrote in 1312, to experience the following: "If you are looking for God, go back to where you lost Him."

To put that in slightly more horizontal terms -- tho' even its horizontal transcription is really Vertical -- "If you are looking for who you are meant to be, go back to where you really were yourself". Incidentally, that was probably not in connection with your career or your cause. It was more likely in connection with a certain someone.

People sometimes think I'm overdoing it when I underline the centrality of romantic connection in life. I don't believe I am. The main reason one underlines that dimension is, well, ... popular music. It's not news to anyone reading this, that 97.5% of all rock songs, from the very beginning (i.e., Elvis and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Link Wray and Joe Meek), concern romantic love. Not 65% or even 85%, but 97.5%. Think about that. I mean, really, let that sink in.

Anyway, if you want to find God (i.e., your way forward, as opposed to your way backward -- to inertia, bitterness, and cascading negativity as the years go on), go back to... the song you remember from that time you first came out of yourself. Whether the person you were with when you first heard that song is alive or dead, present or out there (Moody Blues, 1988), that moment is eternal. It is still present. It is still your empirical guide to...

Podcast 406 is dedicated to Sam Everette.

One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What?

I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison.

Then something else happened:

The Christian response to darkest tragedy is probably not explanation or interpretation, but rather superimposition. It's impossible to explain away a certain reality, let's say. And yet what happened is not the whole reality. There is another reality. You might almost say, there are two realities. But isn't this true of our life histories, even of our personalities? The Old Creation is alive and potent. The New Creation is eternal and more potent.

See what you think. Hope you'll maybe try it on.