About

A show about the interior life

Close inquiry across psychology, philosophy, and the fields next door. One question at a time, in a collection that keeps growing.

Each conversation takes one region of interior experience, like waiting, envy, being watched, homesickness, the hour before sleep, the wish to be found out, and stays inside it for as long as it takes. The whole architecture is that single question, opened and followed. One conversation, allowed to go where it goes.

My guests have spent years with something and can afford to think out loud about it in public. They arrive to think, and they leave with the thinking on the record.

The interesting material keeps its own schedule. It turns up at minute fifty, sideways, while someone is talking about something else.

What holds an hour together is an attention rather than a theme. I am a Jungian analyst, and the discipline I trained in is the discipline of staying with something until it opens. This show is that discipline, turned toward a question and toward a mind trained in another school.

Four Criteria

i

The whole hour

A conversation ends when it is finished. Most run between eighty and a hundred minutes. Length follows the material, and the material gets whatever it takes.

ii

A phenomenon behind the concept

"Narcissism" is a swamp and both of us can talk in it for an hour. The general concept permits both speakers to remain abstract; the particular instance does not. Every episode names someone doing something.

iii

A guest from another school

The point of an hour is what a second training makes visible. A Lacanian, a somatic practitioner, a relational analyst, a scholar of myth: each sees something in the same material that my own training would have walked past. I bring the Jungian ear and say so plainly, which frees my guest to bring theirs.

iv

Two readings, left standing

Two accounts of the same experience are allowed to sit beside each other, and the listener leaves holding both. A conversation that resolves neatly means I chose a question that was answered before we started.

The shape of it

~60
Minutes per conversation
Regular
schedule announced at launch
One
Interlocutor per conversation
Two
Traditions in every Hour

Podcast Audience

Clinicians, and people who read. Those are usually treated as two audiences and served badly by splitting the difference. They overlap precisely here, on the experience of hearing two intelligent people arrive at different answers about something you have felt.

An episode is followable from ordinary curiosity. Terms get explained in the room as they arise, in a sentence, and the conversation continues at full depth. That constraint improves an hour, since a definition spoken aloud tends to expose whatever was vague in it.

Credits

Host
Elaine Sedelnikova, LP, NCPsyA, SCPsyA
Produced by
To be confirmed
Music
To be confirmed
Artwork
Public domain works

Subscribe

The newsletter

A letter between conversations, on the reading and the questions behind them.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Two emails a month.

Hosted by Elaine Sedelnikova, Jungian analyst, New York. Any clinical material referred to in an episode is composite or drawn from published sources.