Speaker 1: Our brains are so flawed. Sometimes you really just need
Speaker 1: a mind back. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time.
Speaker 1: Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 1: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Casey Schwartz,
Speaker 1: a graduate of Brown University with a master's degree in
Speaker 1: psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. Casey has worked as
Speaker 1: a staff writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where
Speaker 1: she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also
Speaker 1: appeared in the New York Times and The New York Sun.
Speaker 1: Her first book is called in the mine Fields Exploring
Speaker 1: the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. I've got great news. Many
Speaker 1: of you have asked whether you could get a T
Speaker 1: shirt with the logo on it, and the answer is
Speaker 1: finally yes. So if you're looking for some clothing to
Speaker 1: help you feed your good wolf on the go, check
Speaker 1: out our website One you Feed dot Net slash Shirt.
Speaker 1: They were handmade here in Columbus with a special edition
Speaker 1: line drawing of the one you Feed Wolf logo. The
Speaker 1: shirts are very comfortable well. I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time being very picky on exactly what they felt like
Speaker 1: to get the type of shirt that I wanted. So
Speaker 1: you can visit One you Feed dot Net slash Shirt
Speaker 1: to order one, and if you're interested, I would recommend
Speaker 1: doing it soon because we only had a certain number
Speaker 1: made in this first round and they seem to be
Speaker 1: going pretty quickly, so I hope you enjoy. And here's
Speaker 1: the interview with Casey Schwartz. Hi, Casey, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, thank you for taking the time to
Speaker 1: come on. I read your new book, UH in the
Speaker 1: Mind Fields Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, which is
Speaker 1: a fascinating title. And we will get into all the
Speaker 1: things in that book here in a minute, but let's
Speaker 1: start like we always do, with the parable. There's a
Speaker 1: grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather
Speaker 1: and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. I
Speaker 1: like that parable a lot. I've heard it before, um,
Speaker 1: and to me, it's it's meaning, it's sort of it
Speaker 1: seems clear, which is that what you pay attention to
Speaker 1: and what you engage in is what becomes real. And
Speaker 1: I apply it to the writing process because this was
Speaker 1: my first book, and it was a very panicky, uncertain
Speaker 1: experience trying to figure out how to write it. Um.
Speaker 1: And there were so many days where the issue of
Speaker 1: sort of self doubt could have become the thing that
Speaker 1: I gave into Um, but um, it was. It was
Speaker 1: a constant battle not to I think that's a great
Speaker 1: way to frame it, because I think any of us
Speaker 1: involved in trying to do something outside of the order
Speaker 1: ary self doubt is a very frequent companion. How is
Speaker 1: it that you deal with self doubt? What were the
Speaker 1: things that you did that made you able to keep working?
Speaker 1: I mean they varied widely. Um. Sometimes it was um
Speaker 1: quitting work ridiculously early and slipping out and going to
Speaker 1: the movies. Um. Sometimes it was meeting my brother and
Speaker 1: watching a baseball game. I mean, sometimes it was gone
Speaker 1: for a run. Um. I mean most of these, Most
Speaker 1: of these tactics involved sort of being with someone someone
Speaker 1: in my life was sort of sympathetic and could um
Speaker 1: talk to me and let me basically just air my fears. Um.
Speaker 1: And then you know, the next day you sort of
Speaker 1: wake up and you get back to it. Yea. That
Speaker 1: idea of involving other people is such a can be
Speaker 1: such a valuable one, and and it's something that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of us tend to, at least I
Speaker 1: am am prone to overlook I'll figure this, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll deal with it myself, for you know, I'll just
Speaker 1: all I'll sort it out in my head exactly. And
Speaker 1: we're not all. I happen to have a wonderful brother
Speaker 1: who was so good at um just sort of reminding
Speaker 1: me how to how to keep keep focus. Um. But
Speaker 1: I do think going to the movies is a wonderful
Speaker 1: trick as well. That's what Don Draper always suggests on
Speaker 1: mad ment if you remember he was onto something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well just yet, changing the mental channel for a while
Speaker 1: can be really helpful. Uh. I find sometimes when I'm
Speaker 1: stuck in that negative thinking, there's no sort of just like, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just not I'll think positive and it just is
Speaker 1: more powerful than the negative. Sometimes it's just like I've
Speaker 1: got to change the channel from thinking completely. Our brains
Speaker 1: are so flawed. So sometimes you really you just you
Speaker 1: really just need a mind bath. That's a great word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what led you to write this book? What was
Speaker 1: your path to becoming interested in this and then writing
Speaker 1: the book. It is not a subject I would have
Speaker 1: ever predicted. I would sort of begin my my career
Speaker 1: as a writer um with but um in my early twenties.
Speaker 1: I went off to graduate school thinking that I was
Speaker 1: going to be a psychologist. I had this idea, UM
Speaker 1: that that's sort it was a momentary idea that that's
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do, and I I picked UM
Speaker 1: a very unusual program UM for training. It was brand new,
Speaker 1: This particular course had never existed before. It was two
Speaker 1: years long. First year was in London at the Anna
Speaker 1: Freud Center UM in North London, which was it's just
Speaker 1: sort of the like. It was this throwback fashion of
Speaker 1: of classical psychoanalytic thinking, actually funded founded by UM by
Speaker 1: Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter in the nineteen forties. UM
Speaker 1: and UM just full of these these old school ideas
Speaker 1: about the mind, the ideas like the ego, the id, repression,
Speaker 1: the unconscious. UM. I mean really I was there in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, but I often had this like
Speaker 1: utterly beguiling feeling like it could be any year, it
Speaker 1: could be n But what what made this program unusual
Speaker 1: it was that the second year of it, we there
Speaker 1: were only nine of us, and the nine of us
Speaker 1: returned to the United States to study the brain at Yale.
Speaker 1: And so the premise of this thing was can something
Speaker 1: come of studying these two very very dissimilar disciplines kind
Speaker 1: of side by side. So it was in the course
Speaker 1: of this schooling that, you know, a I realized, Okay, wow,
Speaker 1: there's an incredible culture clash going on here between how
Speaker 1: we think about the mind, how we think about the brain,
Speaker 1: what what we think is going to get us insight? Um,
Speaker 1: and that's interesting and be Um. It was because I
Speaker 1: was in in this program that I wound up meeting, um,
Speaker 1: the man who would become actually my main character, a
Speaker 1: man named Mark Solms. In the book, I thought you
Speaker 1: you phrased up sort of what you were after in
Speaker 1: in Um a sentence which you said, with their starkly
Speaker 1: different goals methods and cultures, psychoanalysis and neuroscience can appear
Speaker 1: to be two different species, mutually alienated, as if preoccupied
Speaker 1: with two altogether different pursuits. And so what you were
Speaker 1: trying to do, what this program did, and what Mark
Speaker 1: Psalms did, was to try and find a way to
Speaker 1: integrate these two very different approaches to the mind slash
Speaker 1: the brain. Right, You use those terms differently depending which
Speaker 1: discipline you're coming from exactly, and the differences extend so
Speaker 1: so far. I mean, it's impossible to overstate this because
Speaker 1: it's not only that, you know, psychoanalysis is all about well,
Speaker 1: it's all about subjectivity. It's all about subjective experience. How
Speaker 1: does it feel to be any particular person? I mean,
Speaker 1: what what what does a person going and discuss to
Speaker 1: their psychoanalysts. It's it's what they're talking about, is what
Speaker 1: it feels like to be to be them. But neuroscience,
Speaker 1: the perspective is so different. It's it's like looking at
Speaker 1: a person from the outside in, like, um, what can
Speaker 1: we see when we look at your brain in an
Speaker 1: fMRI machine? And um? You know, so those basic building
Speaker 1: blocks and ingredients are in of themselves radically different. But also,
Speaker 1: I would say, and what I've observed is that there's
Speaker 1: such a difference in culture and in personality type between
Speaker 1: the two disciplines. Like who wants to become a psychoanalyst
Speaker 1: is a very very different temperament than who wants to
Speaker 1: become a neuroscientist. So when you imagine how could a
Speaker 1: conversation begin in a meaningful way between these two fields,
Speaker 1: you know, it gives you pause. You're not quite sure, right, Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I thought was interesting was
Speaker 1: and I thought about as I was reading the book,
Speaker 1: was psychoanalysis on one hand, you know, on one end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum, neuroscience on the far other end of
Speaker 1: the spec drum. Where are the places in between that
Speaker 1: that exists, um, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, UM, some
Speaker 1: things that seem to me to be a a little
Speaker 1: bit more in the middle of those two. Is that
Speaker 1: A Is that a reasonable way to think about those things? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, and you bring up cognitive behavioral therapy. I
Speaker 1: don't really get into that in the book, but UM,
Speaker 1: I think that's a good example because it's always been
Speaker 1: a version of psychotherapy that looks towards scientific evidence UM
Speaker 1: kind of more UM more regularly or sort of it
Speaker 1: shapes itself with proof of what works and what doesn't UM.
Speaker 1: And I think you know that that's not traditionally been
Speaker 1: how psychoanalysis functions. So yeah, and that it probably is
Speaker 1: in between. Thanks, and now back to the interview with
Speaker 1: Casey Schortz. Psychoanalysis has always struck me as much more
Speaker 1: you're going into the past, you're unearthing the past, You're
Speaker 1: dealing with things like the unconscious and UM, cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker 1: You're working much more with the thoughts that you have
Speaker 1: right now. What can I you know, I've got a thought?
Speaker 1: How can I work with it more skillfully? And do
Speaker 1: you think that cognitive behavioral therapy lends itself better to
Speaker 1: being studied scientifically or do you think that psychoanalysis does too?
Speaker 1: But the culture of it and the people that are
Speaker 1: in it are the reason that there's not more of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably a combination of those things. But
Speaker 1: that said, actually there's been this this huge growth in
Speaker 1: the amount of evidence that now exists showing that psychoanalysis
Speaker 1: is effective. Um. But that started sort of late, that
Speaker 1: only started about fifteen years ago or so. Um. Yet
Speaker 1: there is now actually a significant amount of research showing yes,
Speaker 1: this thing works. One of the things that I thought
Speaker 1: was interested and I didn't see it in the book,
Speaker 1: but I did read it in an article you wrote
Speaker 1: for a major publication I can't remember which, where you
Speaker 1: were talking about some people who are starting to be
Speaker 1: able to explore what parts of the brain, um come
Speaker 1: to life when transference kicks in. Oh yeah, so this
Speaker 1: is a piece I did over the summer for the
Speaker 1: New York Times. Magazine, UM and UM it is related
Speaker 1: to the book, but UM, I focus on UM a
Speaker 1: man that I don't really explore in the book. His
Speaker 1: name is Andrew Gerber, very interesting psychiatrist who UM basically
Speaker 1: is taking this very old school of Freudian idea transference.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is an idea Freud came up within
Speaker 1: about nineteen hundred when he realized, UM, you know what,
Speaker 1: we bring our histories into every encounter that we have
Speaker 1: in the present, every relationship we have in the present, Um,
Speaker 1: every new person we meet in the present is informed
Speaker 1: by our past experience. And that actually was one of
Speaker 1: some people think that's the boldest and most original idea
Speaker 1: he came up with of all. And so Andrew Gerberg thought, UM,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be interesting to figure out, um, where in
Speaker 1: the brain these functions that go into transference actually occur?
Speaker 1: So he UM, he's been working on that for almost
Speaker 1: a decade now. I'm kind of on the side sticking
Speaker 1: sticking people into an fMRI machine, giving them all these
Speaker 1: tasks that supposedly activate their transference patterns, and trying to
Speaker 1: see what can you pinpoint it to here? Can you
Speaker 1: pinpointed to that one of the other ideas that Freud
Speaker 1: is well known for is this idea of the unconscious. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting that there's a lot of science starting
Speaker 1: to show up these days that seems to be talking
Speaker 1: about the unconscious, although UM, I don't think it's really
Speaker 1: referred to that way. But UM, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's
Speaker 1: Blink or or Thinking Fast and Slow, those books are
Speaker 1: talking about how there's something happening underneath our conscious brain
Speaker 1: that is driving what we're doing. How did those sort
Speaker 1: of newer ideas tie in at all with what the
Speaker 1: unconscious idea was in psychoanalysis. It's true the unconscious is
Speaker 1: suddenly everywhere. And what's so funny is that, Um, until
Speaker 1: about that, that wasn't the case at all. Until that
Speaker 1: eight science kind of didn't believe in the unconscious. The
Speaker 1: unconscious was sort of a fairy tale. UM. That was
Speaker 1: you know, not really believable, not really provable. It was
Speaker 1: seen and sort of not true. Um. It was seen,
Speaker 1: as you know, very much in the purview of the freudiance. UM.
Speaker 1: But now um, it is completely axiomatic throughout neuroscience that
Speaker 1: most of what happens in our brains happens outside of
Speaker 1: our awareness. UM. So this is this is very gladwell Ian.
Speaker 1: You know, UM that UM, we have these sort of
Speaker 1: processes of ways of assessing the world around us. We're
Speaker 1: not even aware of um yet. You know, we sort
Speaker 1: of we sort of arrived at conclusions all the time
Speaker 1: without exactly knowing why. UM. And by the way, Eric,
Speaker 1: thank god, because we'd be so overwhelmed by the details
Speaker 1: of our lives if we had to be aware of
Speaker 1: every single one. UM. But the big difference between between
Speaker 1: that version of the unconscious and what Freud meant by
Speaker 1: the unconscious is is basically repression. You know, Freud thought
Speaker 1: that things are unconscious because they're unbearable. UM. And UM.
Speaker 1: Neuroscience kind of hasn't touched that yet. It hasn't quite
Speaker 1: gotten into why certain things would be outside of awareness
Speaker 1: and why certain things would be in awareness. One of
Speaker 1: the questions that I've had is I've had people on
Speaker 1: and we've talked about this idea of there being this
Speaker 1: unconscious that's happening, and and you know the studies. You know,
Speaker 1: flip open any science magazine. You're going to read something
Speaker 1: about how some part of your brain is doing something
Speaker 1: that you don't know. How do you work with that.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you can do with that sort of information?
Speaker 1: And does psychoanalysis provide a method of using that unconscious differently?
Speaker 1: Is that part of what it can bring to the table.
Speaker 1: Psychoanalysis has never like sort of lent itself to these
Speaker 1: easy kind of takeaways, UM, and these kind of news
Speaker 1: you can use um sound bites. I mean, in fact,
Speaker 1: that's its whole culture sort of slow, slow, slow insight,
Speaker 1: slow gradual process. So it's very much it sort of
Speaker 1: cuts against our moment of you know, help me by
Speaker 1: five pm, UM, But that's the very three pm please
Speaker 1: too late, I know, actually five pms way to it.
Speaker 1: But I think the very fact of being aware of
Speaker 1: how much exactly is outside of our awareness, UM, is
Speaker 1: in and of itself helpful. And so psychoanalysis, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: is a is a much longer process. You you talk
Speaker 1: about the book, you end the book really in sort
Speaker 1: of a place of complete uncertainty, and you you know,
Speaker 1: you thought back to the beginning of the book and
Speaker 1: about that sort of the word the phrase you used
Speaker 1: was sacred unknowability, UM, and that you were perfectly able
Speaker 1: to end this book with uncertainty because you believe in uncertainty,
Speaker 1: and it seems like that is much more the realm
Speaker 1: of psychoanalysis, that there is a that there's a mystery here. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean I think what actually one of the impetus
Speaker 1: is for for doing this book, UM, was when I
Speaker 1: was studying neuroscience at Yale. UM, I was sort of
Speaker 1: secretly horrified by UM this field wanted to do, which
Speaker 1: was sort of to reduce us down to these very
Speaker 1: very generic little like schemas and these generic UM formulas
Speaker 1: for explaining all of human behaviors, grand grand questions like
Speaker 1: creativity and how we make decisions and how we and
Speaker 1: how we fall in love and with whom, and you know,
Speaker 1: neuroscience purported to be trying to answer these questions and
Speaker 1: with very simplified in my mind orally simplified UM answers.
Speaker 1: And I secretly rooted against that ever happening UM because
Speaker 1: UM to me that that shrinks us all down to
Speaker 1: a very unappealingly small size UM. And so in that spirit, UM,
Speaker 1: I embarked on this book, which UM, as you know,
Speaker 1: kind of follows this one character in particular Mark psalms Um,
Speaker 1: who I think you know who advocates for uniting the
Speaker 1: two fields and never losing sight of individual complexity, very
Speaker 1: much like all of our sacks beforehand. UM. And so
Speaker 1: when I got that ending, when I got the idea
Speaker 1: for that ending, um, it just felt so right because
Speaker 1: it brought me back to the root feeling that had
Speaker 1: inspired the book to begin with years before. That idea
Speaker 1: of the reductionism of neuroscience reminds me of there's you know,
Speaker 1: they're starting to be more conversation around from a nutritional perspective,
Speaker 1: like all these studies that boiled down you know, this
Speaker 1: thing to isolated vitamin c um. You know, you extract
Speaker 1: this thing out of the whole and then you study
Speaker 1: just that little thing, but you sort of lose the
Speaker 1: whole picture that like you know that an apple is
Speaker 1: good for us in ways that go far beyond the
Speaker 1: the the individual vitamins that you extract from it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now I think that's really true. I think, um, it's
Speaker 1: very hard to keep the whole picture in mine. And
Speaker 1: it's sort of it's funny that you know, that whole
Speaker 1: holistic thing is sort of not that American or something.
Speaker 1: I've noticed that and if other doctors have sort of
Speaker 1: said that to me too. Um. But yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that is true. I wonder why. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's it's we we we all have a fantasy of, oh,
Speaker 1: there will be you know, a trick, a silver bullet,
Speaker 1: a simple fix. Um, we'd like, we'd like there to be,
Speaker 1: but there never really is. Yep. It's that magical thinking
Speaker 1: idea that that's one of the things this show sort
Speaker 1: of goes on and on about, is that that doesn't
Speaker 1: really exist, and that chasing that is usually a poor
Speaker 1: idea because it's likely to distract you from things that
Speaker 1: might actually be useful. Yeah, I mean exactly right, right right,
Speaker 1: And we're we're capable of so much more than than
Speaker 1: one tiny solution. And one of the other things that
Speaker 1: you wrote about recently which I thought was interesting was
Speaker 1: the scientist Joseph lad Did I say that right? And
Speaker 1: he's widely known as the person who came up with
Speaker 1: the popularizing the amygdala as sort of the point of
Speaker 1: flight or fight of that fear response. And um, I
Speaker 1: mean and that you talked about another you know, the
Speaker 1: amygdala might be the most popular neuroscience thing to write.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's come up on this show
Speaker 1: three or four times, and and so but he is
Speaker 1: now saying, Hey, I think it's a little bit more
Speaker 1: complicated than that. Yeah. No, Joe, he's such a great
Speaker 1: character in the field of narrow science. UM. So I
Speaker 1: always wanted to write about him, And when his new book,
Speaker 1: Anxious came out in July, I just thought, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is this is this is the perfect opportunity because his
Speaker 1: his new argument UM is really interesting, which is that
Speaker 1: you know, UM, for years, there's been this kind of
Speaker 1: assumption that because the amygdala, which is one of the
Speaker 1: brains sort of most central fear of threat detectors, it does,
Speaker 1: it detects threats, it detects danger and helps to kick
Speaker 1: off the brain's defense responses. UM. But but there's been
Speaker 1: this sort of extrapolation from that UM and and this
Speaker 1: assumption that the amigoda is also what makes us feel afraid. UM.
Speaker 1: So Joe is arguing now that, UM, that's that's not true,
Speaker 1: that the actual feeling of fear, which is UM. He says, well,
Speaker 1: the whole question of animal consciousness is separate from this.
Speaker 1: But he says that UM, the you that that the
Speaker 1: amigula is responsible for the feeling of fear is not
Speaker 1: is not right, and that it actually takes all kinds
Speaker 1: of um parts of the brain working working in concert
Speaker 1: to produce that feeling, that conscious feeling, and so the
Speaker 1: the amigula detects the threat, but then there are other
Speaker 1: parts of the brain that take that information and interpret it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so the you know, he's he's sort of caused
Speaker 1: disturb among among many people for what he writes about
Speaker 1: this question of can we study animals and hope to
Speaker 1: understand human emotion um, Because you know, when Joe himself
Speaker 1: studies this all this stuff in rats and these big
Speaker 1: white rats at n y u um, and he basically
Speaker 1: is now arguing that he doesn't know whether animals have consciousness,
Speaker 1: but science cannot prove that they do, and therefore it's
Speaker 1: really not useful to act like they do. If we
Speaker 1: want to understand human emotions, we need more than the
Speaker 1: animal research. Right. Well, there's this assumption that you know,
Speaker 1: you hear people talk about the different layers of the brain.
Speaker 1: There's the lizard brain, and then as if these are
Speaker 1: just you know, stacked on top of each other, and
Speaker 1: there's been no change between what that part of my
Speaker 1: brain and a lizard's brain, um, which strikes me as
Speaker 1: being probably some truth to it, but probably a vast oversimplification. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say that, like that it does resonate,
Speaker 1: but that I would have a little lizard brain in
Speaker 1: my brain. But exactly, it's just it's an it's an oversimplification.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time on in the book was that some of the
Speaker 1: places that this UM new neuropsychoanalysis was happening was in
Speaker 1: people who had brain damage and using that as an
Speaker 1: entry point to sort of see how these two things
Speaker 1: could mix. And you tell a story about a man
Speaker 1: who UM, he's a phasic. Did I say that right?
Speaker 1: He has a phase where he sort of lost the
Speaker 1: ability to form meaningful sentences, to to communicate with the
Speaker 1: outside world, and yet he enters into psychoanalysis. Can you
Speaker 1: share that a little bit? Yeah? Sure so. Mark Psalm's
Speaker 1: UM my protagonist started UM a group in New York
Speaker 1: in about two thousands of psychoanalysts who UM are dedicated
Speaker 1: to psychoanalyzing blain damaged patients. And this is this is
Speaker 1: so unorthodox because UM traditionally we think of brain damage
Speaker 1: patients is as not really needing or even as not
Speaker 1: being qualified to receive psychological intervention. Well, so Psalm says,
Speaker 1: that's absurd. No one could possibly need it more, And
Speaker 1: he recruited this group. UM and UM they all have
Speaker 1: such interesting cases. I sat in on this group, as
Speaker 1: I described in the book, for about two years, listening
Speaker 1: to them UM on a month to month basis report
Speaker 1: on their patient's progress. And one of the members of
Speaker 1: this group was an absolutely wonderful man named named David Silvers,
Speaker 1: who had taken on this unbelievably difficult task in UM
Speaker 1: psychoanalyzing a young patient named Harry who had had a
Speaker 1: stroke very young in his late thirties and basically lost
Speaker 1: the ability to speak. UM. I mean he had a
Speaker 1: scattering of words like UM. He could sort of sketch
Speaker 1: a couple of things on paper, but he really couldn't
Speaker 1: get meaning out. He had a phasia. UM. Yet they
Speaker 1: spent seven years UM in this in this treatment together
Speaker 1: and UM it gave this patient such a profound lifeline.
Speaker 1: UM that that he had someone who was willing to
Speaker 1: pay such close attention and make such a heroic effort
Speaker 1: to understand his experience. Yeah, I was struck by that.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty profound and moving thing. And I was
Speaker 1: struck by what you just said a minute ago, where
Speaker 1: you know where Mark Psalm said there might not be
Speaker 1: anybody who's more in need of it. Like, once I
Speaker 1: read that, I was like, how obvious is that we
Speaker 1: take these people that have had these horrible things happened
Speaker 1: to them, who are confused and don't know how to relate,
Speaker 1: and and just sort of go, well, let's see if
Speaker 1: we can fix it. But if we can't fix it,
Speaker 1: good luck. Yeah, exactly, Um, you know it was. I
Speaker 1: was actually so last week and I was in Boulder, Colorado, UM,
Speaker 1: talking about this exact thing, um, and this part of
Speaker 1: the book, and this woman in the audience raised her
Speaker 1: hand and said, you know, four years ago, I had
Speaker 1: a brain tumor. They removed it, and I became a phasic,
Speaker 1: I lost the ability to speak. And then she said,
Speaker 1: I was so devastated that none of the neurologists who
Speaker 1: treated me cared at all about what the actual experience
Speaker 1: was like. They never asked me a single thing about
Speaker 1: what I was going through. And then she said that
Speaker 1: it was the first time that she had spoken aloud
Speaker 1: in public and four wow, yeah, well that must be
Speaker 1: a good feeling for you. To know that those people,
Speaker 1: You know that that the book is reaching some of
Speaker 1: those people. Yeah, it is very much though so one
Speaker 1: of the other areas that you talk about it is
Speaker 1: not in the book, Um, but I thought it was
Speaker 1: really interested. Back to Gerber, you know, he's done a
Speaker 1: lot of study on psychoanalysis and and using neuroscience. But
Speaker 1: he said he saw a pattern in the patients who
Speaker 1: progressed the most. They didn't move in a linear way
Speaker 1: from worse to better, from neurotic to not neurotic. However,
Speaker 1: rather they were sort of in the middle of their treatment.
Speaker 1: They would go through a period of intense flux and
Speaker 1: then sort of come out the other side and improve.
Speaker 1: Can you share a little bit about that and what
Speaker 1: he learned there? Yeah, I loved I loved when, um,
Speaker 1: when Gerber told me about this observation of his, because
Speaker 1: it's it's so interesting that you know, he he this
Speaker 1: was his um, this was his dissertation. He did this
Speaker 1: when he was in psychoanalytic training in his twenties and
Speaker 1: actually at the same place that I went to, at
Speaker 1: the Anna Freud Center, and he was trying to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 1: why do people get better in psychoanalysis? Like what actually
Speaker 1: accounts for this? And so he had these psychoanalysts UM
Speaker 1: fill out weekly detailed detailed reports on everything going on
Speaker 1: with their patients, every aspect of behavior, relationship, everything, UM
Speaker 1: and what he finally knows. It took him like nine
Speaker 1: years to finish. But the patients who really made progress
Speaker 1: in psychoanalysis went through this middle period of being basically
Speaker 1: a total mess Um. They their lives would get messy,
Speaker 1: they would become erratic, they would become slightly even in
Speaker 1: some cases unhinged. UM and and he he thought of
Speaker 1: this as their their molecules that you sort of throw
Speaker 1: them up in the air and they sort of danced
Speaker 1: around and rearrange themselves. And that has to happen before
Speaker 1: the real improvement can set in. Yeah, that's a really
Speaker 1: interesting concept. That idea that healing doesn't progress linear is
Speaker 1: certainly an experience of mind that's interesting. I mean, even
Speaker 1: just if you look at like, you know, dealing with grief,
Speaker 1: it's like you feel better for a few days, like
Speaker 1: oh I finally accepted this, and you wake up the
Speaker 1: next day and you just feel as bad as you
Speaker 1: ever felt, and you're like, wait, what's going on? I
Speaker 1: thought this is supposed to be progressively getting better, and
Speaker 1: I've just noticed that doesn't seem to be the pattern
Speaker 1: that it's better, It gets a little bit worse. The
Speaker 1: other thing that I've noticed, Um, is a tendency to
Speaker 1: swing to you know, to be at one extreme, swing
Speaker 1: over to the other extreme for a period of time,
Speaker 1: and then over an extended period of time, finally find
Speaker 1: the middle between those two things. I think that's there's
Speaker 1: a huge amount of truth. I think that's that is
Speaker 1: what Gerber would say he had observed those those kinds
Speaker 1: of patterns exactly. Well, thank you so much for taking
Speaker 1: the time. The book is really fascinating and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: interested to see it. It really sounds like a field
Speaker 1: that is very much in its infancy, and so it's
Speaker 1: really interesting to see where that will go and how
Speaker 1: these two, if an approach is to trying to make
Speaker 1: people mentally better, can work together and inform each other. Oh,
Speaker 1: the fact that it's inventing itself is what drew it
Speaker 1: drew me to it, um, And Eric has been such
Speaker 1: a pleasure talking to you. Yeah, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: coming on, Casey. Thank you, Okay, bye bye. You can
Speaker 1: learn more about Casey Schwartz and this podcast at one,
Speaker 1: new feed dot Net, slash Casey