Episode 52: ...The Self Is A Prison

Summary

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Podcast Summary: “The Self Is A Prison”

Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast, Episode 52
Date: June 11, 2025
Guests: John Totten (host), Eyal Rosmarin (psychoanalyst), others

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Overview

In this deeply reflective episode, psychotherapist John Totten engages again with psychoanalyst and writer Eyal Rosmarin to explore “the self as a prison”—how personal and collective belonging, subjectivity, and national and familial narratives can both anchor and imprison us. Through philosophical, clinical, and personal lenses, they discuss how subjectivity is shaped and bounded by social, political, and psychological forces, and what it might mean to “unself”—to loosen the rigid boundaries of self in favor of greater relationality and permeability.

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Core Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Cost and Fabric of Belonging

• Belonging vs. Dissent:
  Eyal and John reflect on how belonging to a group, nation, or identity often requires compliance, sometimes at a significant psychological or ethical cost. Dissent, especially in high-stakes environments like Israel or large corporations, is perilous and can threaten not just status but safety.
  • “The cost of dissenting is so high, socially, psychologically, that people almost without exception, do what's required of them.” (Eyal, 08:40)
• Nationalism and Identity:
  They discuss the parallels between nationalism and the formation of individual subjectivity, noting how the narratives that sustain nations also shape family roles and self-understanding.

2. Psychological and Social Disintegration

• Technological Trauma:
  Modern technology streams trauma constantly into our lives, creating a sense of “floor dropping” anxiety and collective dread as global crises become omnipresent.
  • “We have the technology now for trauma from across the globe to be beamed into our nervous system all day, every day.” (John/Eyal, 11:19)
• Cycle of Instability:
  They reflect on the expansion of crises—political, social, existential—acknowledging that though history cycles through instability, today’s connectivity profoundly impacts the subject.

3. Subjectivity as Threshold and Prison

• Theoretical Frameworks:
  • Foucault’s “Homo Nationalis” & Agamben’s “Homo Sacer”:
    Rosmarin draws on these concepts to illustrate the threshold status of the subject—constantly negotiating between collective belonging and exclusion.
    • “Eyal calls this model a specter of the subject as a social creature constituted on the borderline of collectivity and in abandonment, a shadow self.” (John, 17:07)
• Subjectivity as Political:
  There is no “natural” self outside social power—subjectivity is constituted by rules, laws, and language from birth.
  • “There's no subject that is not a subject of... You are defined by rules, by laws, by language. Don’t, can’t make sense of yourself [otherwise].” (Eyal, 22:00-22:30)
• Being “Unselfed”:
  Inspired by Naomi Klein and Iris Murdoch, Eyal introduces “unselfing”—lessening the grip of rigid identity in favor of a more diffuse, connected, and relational subjectivity.
  • “So we have it in the world this notion that it's better to be less yourself. But we don't have it quite in psychology or psychoanalysis… Can we move away from [the prison of subjectivity] a little less? And then this term comes up which I think is very useful — unselfing.” (Eyal, 25:25-26:45)

4. Clinical and Everyday Implications

• Parenting and Deprivation:
  The struggle between personal needs and the demands of parenting mirrors the deeper conflict of being trapped within the “subject”—and often repeats childhood deprivation.
  • “The pain is this conflict between wanting to get my needs met and the situation calling on me to give up what I want.” (John, 34:05)
• Psychedelics and Liberation:
  John shares how patients using psychedelics report feeling more liberated and less traumatized—yet sometimes become more difficult relationally, suggesting that “healing” the self is not always straightforwardly positive for relationships.
  • “He calls it healing... But also healing can also mean our relationships, right? Like if I am a liberated person who feels no shame and no trauma, there are many things that I can do to alienate people around me...” (John, 28:46)
• Reframing “Aggression”:
  The pair challenge the idea that civilization represses inherent human aggression, suggesting instead that belonging and social systems are themselves productive of violence, exclusion, and rivalry.
  • “It's not that civilization is saving us from our aggression. A civilization is creating these levels of aggression.” (Eyal, 31:57)

5. The Work of Mourning and Melancholia

• Unresolved Loss:
  Echoing Freud, Eyal describes how personal and collective melancholia arises when we cannot let go of unresolved deprivations, leading to chronic longing and inability to move forward.
  • “Those places and experiences and times in our lives and people that have not given us what we need, that we are still in struggle with, that we stay with. So it's your deprivation from childhood that you are unwilling to let go. You're unwilling to say, I didn't get what I needed. I will move on to what I can have now. No, I have to stay in this because maybe I can rework the past and get in the past what I didn't get, which of course is impossible. So you have to stay stuck in it. That's melancholia.” (Eyal, 39:00-40:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the psychic burden of belonging:
  “Belonging comes at a price for ourselves and those we punish in order to maintain it. We work hard to belong. It's the fabric of our very subjectivity.” — John Totten (06:44)
• On the nation state and projection:
  “Under the veneer of democracy, it's a very white supremacist discourse as well. The whole story in Israel, Israel in the Middle East plays into that and represents that. I think we don't understand how much we're peons projections of this American story.” — Eyal Rosmarin (15:31-16:17)
• On “unselfing”:
  “So we have it in the world, this notion that it's better to be less yourself. But we don't have it quite in psychology or psychoanalysis… Can we transcend it?” — Eyal Rosmarin (25:30-26:45)
• On identity fluidity:
  “I am 100% Jewish and I'm 100% not Jewish. That's how I like to think about it. I'm not half anything. I inhabit different categories.” — Eyal Rosmarin sharing a friend’s perspective (47:42)
• On the fiction of boundaries:
  “Our ideology comes from the society around, which is all about boundaries and separation and sovereignty and control and blah, blah, blah. So how about we adjust our ideology to our knowledge that we are all intertwined?” — Eyal Rosmarin (57:15-58:05)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• 00:14 — The “center will not hold”: Opening reference, themes of loss of order
• 03:07 — John contextualizes the episode within world and US turmoil
• 07:15–09:53 — Eyal on participation and the social cost of dissent in Israel
• 16:43 — Transition into philosophical concepts: Homo Sacer, Homo Nationalis
• 25:25–26:45 — “Unselfing” and the possibility of a more relational subjectivity
• 34:05–35:05 — Parenting, deprivation, and the pain of subjectivity
• 38:45–40:30 — Melancholia as refusal to move on from loss
• 47:42–48:16 — Fluid, plural identities and islands of self
• 54:02–55:51 — On the volatility and destructiveness of entrenched narratives
• 55:57–58:05 — Psychoanalysis beyond boundaries; call for a new ideology of permeability

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Tone, Mood & Takeaways

The conversation is philosophical, searching, vulnerable, and at times tinged with anxiety, loss, and hope. Both speakers are open about their own struggles with identity and belonging, using personal anecdotes and patients’ stories to illuminate broader themes. The episode calls for humility, permeability, and a willingness to let go—not just of outdated narratives and boundaries, but also of the fantasy of a singular, stable self.
It closes with a tentative optimism: can we “adjust our ideology to our knowledge that we are all intertwined”? What would a psychotherapy of unselfing—and a politics beyond boundaries—look like?

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For Further Thought

• How does “unselfing” differ from traditional concepts of psychological growth?
• In what ways do technologies and national narratives shape—and limit—our subjective experience?
• How can psychotherapy help individuals explore more permeable, less rigid forms of identity?

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the psychological, philosophical, and political forces that construct our sense of self—and the costs and freedoms that come from questioning those very constructions.

Transcript

[Unidentified Participant A]

Hello.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Hi.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Hi.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

How you doing?

[Unidentified Participant A]

Good. How are you?

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Who knows? Who knows?

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Who knows? The center will not hold. You know, that's very famous.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

John did say the center will not hold.

[Daniel (fictional role in a dramatization)]

What do you want me to say? Daniel, you've come here and you've brought good and wealth, but you have also brought your bad habits as a backslider. You've lusted after women and you have abandoned your child. Your child that you raised, you have abandoned all because he was sick. And you have sinned. So say it now. I am a sinner. Say it louder. I am a sinner. I am a sinner. Louder, Daniel. I am a sinner. I am a sinner. I am sorry, Lord.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I am sorry, Lord.

[Daniel (fictional role in a dramatization)]

I want the blood. I want the blood. You have abandoned your child. I have abandoned my child. I will never backslide. I will never backslide. I was lost, but now I am found. I was lost, but now I'm found. I have abandoned my child. Beg for the blood. Just give me the blood, Eli.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Let me get out of here.

[Daniel (fictional role in a dramatization)]

Give me the blood, Lord, and let me get away. Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Yes, I do.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Say it. Say it.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Abandon my child.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Say it louder.

[Daniel (fictional role in a dramatization)]

Say it louder. I've abandoned my child. I've abandoned my child. I've abandoned my boy.

[John Totten]

I'm John Tottenham, and this is between us.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's interesting to talk to you today on a holiday. My brother wants to bring over matzah ball soup. And it had me thinking about our transubjectivity, the very subjective ways in which we try to connect with something that was lost. As in, our mother converted to Christianity and moved to the Southeast and married my father. And we were raised Presbyterian. With this knowledge and some family members who are still secular American Jews, and just the differing ways in which me and my brothers try. For me, it's. Martin Buber is more important than matzo ball soup.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Can't underestimate the matzo ball soup, though.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I'm looking forward to it. It's rainy here. I'm looking forward to it. But it just has me thinking about the different ways he has tried to, like, regain something that was lost about our subjectivity. It's a holiday. The war has escalated since I talked to you last. It's very scary.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's really. It's another level. It's gone to another level now.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I don't know. It feels really terrible. It feels really terrible.

[John Totten]

My first conversation with the psychoanalyst Al Rosmarin about belonging and the myriad of ways it works on us to do either amazing or horrible things got interrupted by my need to go pick up my kids from school. In a way, I pushed them out for a more integral responsibility to my own belonging. I had come off our fifth season feeling unresolved, and I didn't want that conversation to also go unresolved. So I asked for us to continue. And so we did, during Yom Kippur of 2024. As I add commentary, it is February of 2025 and and the conflict in Israel Palestine has reached a ceasefire. But the world has new terrible feelings to contend with. My patients come into my office every day and it seems like dread about other places in the world has itself immigrated here. They look at the news and they feel like the identity of the US is rapidly changing. Maybe in a way that is simply a continuation of our trends over the last decade, but in a way that nonetheless feels escalated and unstoppable. They contend with despair. They feel like they are helpless to change a country that is descending into something dark, as half of us feel the dread and the other half either feel mania or in some cases, the haze of denial. This is some of what belonging does to us. It calls us into compliance, because the alternative to belonging is in many ways literally dangerous. I talk with my patients and my friends about my orientation of defiant joy or joyful defiance, but that is as much a call to action for myself as it is for anyone else. Dread and despair sit at the door to my consciousness. Why my life is good, my kids are safe in a burning world. The Pacific Northwest continues to be beautiful even if we are in an automated electric car to hell. Why can we not eat, drink and be merciful? It's because of the very stuff we talked about in our last episode. Our belonging comes at a price for ourselves and those we punish in order to maintain it. We work hard to belong. It's the fabric of our very subjectivity. This is what Eyal and I will discuss today. In preparation for our second talk, he sent me his article the Subject as Threshold, where he goes beyond our need for belonging into how it constitutes our very subjectivity as we constantly negotiate our relations to self, other, community, and even nation. He draws on the work of Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to illustrate how our very being is a reflection of the political systems we are born into as we witness the rising tide of nationalism around us. How unsceptical are we of constant therapy speak about boundaries? These are the questions implicated in his work. So on a rainy day in the fall, we reconvened to discuss the world around us and how to unsettle our subjectivity in a world that feels more and more like everyone is always settling.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I'm curious about who you have in Israel. Are your parents still alive?

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes, my parents are there and I have two sisters. They have children. One of my sister's sons is about to turn 18 and go to the army, so he might be in harm's way. Yeah, so something that's hard to compute, especially for me also because I made a lot of effort not to go to the army and I managed because already there I was objected. There's far less to objective then. I mean, there was a lot, but it's gotten much worse since. Since 1980, December 1980s, the year that I. I enlisted. But I got out quickly. I couldn't. I didn't manage to get out before, but I got out after three months. I was out, but.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And a lot of cost to your mental health.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes, we spoke about it. I know that it's possible to get out, but most people don't. And they might be not very different ideologically than I was there then or I am now. The more happens and the worse it gets, the more I am bewildered and trying to figure out what it is that makes people keep participating, even as what they're asked to participate in becomes matter and matter and they know it.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And. And they object to it. You know, I know a lot of people who are object to what this government is doing and who have children in the army. Either they do their service, you know, you know, older men go to their reserve service and there are a lot of reserve soldiers now that have been enlisted or soldiers, you know, 18, 19, 20 who are in their compulsory service. There is a minor call to refuse, but most people don't, you know, the cost is very high. You know, it's the only way for me to understand it that the cost of dissenting is so high, socially, psychologically, that people almost without exception, do what's required of them. Yeah, I heard from a father of a son who is now in Gaza, who object to his government objects to the war in Gaza, has such severe panic attacks. He has gone three times to the hospital in the last few weeks and still when you ask him what's what, I don't know what to do. That's the answer. I don't know what. Right, yeah. So sort of paralysis or resignation.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I think about having worked with someone who's in an abusive relationship, this notion that many people have that is, I think, inconsiderate or lacks a bit of nuance that, like, why don't they get out?

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's a very good analogy, I think. Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

They don't get out because of the costs.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's somehow also inconceivable for them. Yeah. You are locked in the system somehow, and you can't conceive being out of it. You don't know who you are outside of it.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But I think on another note that there's something happening in the last decade maybe, where we are all losing our grip a little bit because the social structure, the social organization is fraying. I've been thinking about it, too, for a while, thinking about the American political system, how it's tittering on the verge of another Trump administration after there was already one. I don't know if it's your impression as a clinician, but people are losing it, as if the floor is dropping. There's a sense of deep disorientation and anxiety that is permeating more and more. The core of objectivity these days. It's a mirror image of the social order, as flawed as it was, is falling apart in a new way.

[Unidentified Participant E]

When these things happened in the past, you maybe see some headlines and then you go about your life. We have the technology now for trauma from across the globe to be beamed into our nervous system all day, every day.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And the algorithm.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yes.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Works. Yeah, he's on it.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I do believe that society has cycled through these times of great instability and fascism and more violence and. But I don't know if it has affected the subject in a way that it does now. I think Mitchell wrote about this in hope and dread when he talked about the problems that were showing up in Freud's office versus the problems that were showing up in contemporary offices.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes. Then that was, what, 40 years ago that he wrote this, or 35 years ago.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Think about how many more cycles we went through.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

There was no social media. There was no smartphones. There was. Right. I know for me that to just detach from the stream of news of the various.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Coming on Instagram and on Twitter, and it's just everything.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I don't know if you are on endless WhatsApp groups. I have not been. The war started and now I'm dozens of WhatsApp groups that keep feeding you with arguments and fights. And.

[Unidentified Participant E]

You know, the kids have a saying.

[Unidentified Participant A]

They.

[Unidentified Participant E]

They say, go out and touch grass.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

They do, yeah.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's kind of inspiring. I mean, I think it's. It's meant to be sarcastic, but it's. It relates to something that we talked about last time, like the earth, you know, the. The soma of our surroundings. You know, they mean it as like a mental health thing. They say you're too online, go out and touch grass.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Totally.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But then you feel also. It's not a version of being a traitor. Everybody's dying and you're not paying attention.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Well, that feels like a neoliberalism, like something I encounter a lot in my patients. They say it's unethical not to stay informed, and I say you will be. If you put your phone away for a day, you somehow find out still what happened. People feel on the verge of disintegration. This is very much related to your work. It feels reflective of the state, of our society, of our government.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Right.

[Unidentified Participant E]

If the neoliberal regime continues, people will breathe this big sigh of relief, myself included. I'm not immune to that, where they'll say, I don't have to think about it, I don't have to worry about it, you know, as though everything's solved. And if the opposite happens, it'll be this, like, disintegration where we feel like democracy is falling apart. As though democracy has ever been healthy.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Maybe there is more uncontrolled disintegration, let's say, on the right in the United States than on the left. There's no left, but on the center, let's say.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It does feel more orderly somehow when your president doesn't just talk nonsense or talks about people eating cats. Right. Because.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And threat all kinds of crazy, like deportation of millions of people. I mean, the Democrats don't threaten deportation of millions of people.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Incitement is not.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I mean, that's their pitch is status quo.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And admittedly, that's what I have enjoyed about the last four years is I haven't done any therapy sessions where we talked about the president. Out of sight, out of mind as far as therapy goes. And admittedly, it's been a nice little bliss of ignorance.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Right.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Yeah, it'll be. It'll be over by the time anyone hears this conversation.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

You mean we will know? We will know.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Well, no.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Well, no, it won't be over, but this cycle will be over.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Maybe we'll be in full on war with Iran also.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Well, yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

You know, they attacked Yemen today.

[Unidentified Participant E]

US See, when I put my phone away, the news still finds me. This was always going to happen right before the American election.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes, totally. Totally.

[Unidentified Participant E]

This is going to get crazy right before the Election.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, crazier. I think it's also tied here with this whole, you know, notion of American exceptionalism and being the, you know, the western city on the hill, the savior of Western civilization, which is against all these terrorists and also against all these immigrants and against all those woke people. It's a kind of a. Under the veneer of democracy, it's a very white supremacist discourse as well.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

The whole story in Israel, Israel in the Middle east plays into that and represents that. I think we don't understand how much we're peons projections of this American story. I think.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It'S a lot to wrestle with. And this idea that our well being and our like, cohesiveness reflects the well being and cohesiveness of our democracy or our nation is very much related to your writing and thinking about subjectivity.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And belonging. And I read your piece on subjectivity as the threshold this week and I'm very interested in many of the ideas, especially this idea of homo sacer.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, homo sacer.

[John Totten]

There are several concepts I find useful that Eyal explores in his article the subject as Threshold. Most notably for this discussion, Foucault's concept of homo nationalis, or the subject as a nation. But also the philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes Foucault's ideas a step further as he explores the concept of homo sacer, the subject who has been excluded and is outside the law, but in a way that has no value. Non persons, basically. Agamben called this bare life. And in modern history we see it in the migrant who has crossed borders or. Or in the concentration camp detainee. In Roman law, it was actually the father's sovereign right to cast out the sun. We also find shades of Oedipus in this concept. E all calls this model a specter of the subject as a social creature constituted on the borderline of collectivity and in abandonment, a shadow self. Eyal goes on to suggest that subjectivity, who we are, is more of a permeable border than it is something intrinsic. For me, his thoughts on Homo sakyar got me thinking all kinds of thoughts on my own subjectivity as a father. Maybe my ideal fatherhood is one that flips this sovereignty, where the father becomes the castaway or the migrant and subjects himself to abandonment. But the main point for Eyal is that as subjects, we are constantly in negotiation between abandonment and collective. I think about my patients who are working in the corporate world, their very personhood tied into the need to belong and earn the approval of their company.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And.

[John Totten]

And their bosses. But they find that they are on the border of abandonment when they close their laptops. At the end of the day, certainly capitalism is a force that seeks to reduce us to bare life. So who we are is not one thing, or even a consistent set of many things. It is always traversing. Our vice president converted to Catholicism. Our president became a Republican. Our tech CEOs are shifting their identities constantly in service of something.

[Unidentified Participant E]

We know this to be true.

[John Totten]

We are also always negotiating which thresholds we might cross.

[Unidentified Participant E]

In reading your writing on that particular section, there was something for you, a familiarity with that concept. It's very meaningful writing to me, as I have been wrestling with my own ideas and wanting to write something over the last few years. It always revolves around fatherhood. There's this part of me that says, well, nobody wants to hear about fatherhood right now.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, I don't think that's true, actually.

[Unidentified Participant E]

You're probably right. It touches back on something we talked about in our first conversation, which is the abandonment of the father as a driver for so much.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, yeah. And a gunman takes this and goes all the way to. The essence of Roman law is built, as he argues, on the notion that the father has complete right over his family, patre. Family, and over the sons. So the sons, the daughters, the wives, the slaves, everybody has the same status. And the authority of the father is the father has the right to kill the sons. And if you think about it, that sort of echoes all the way to the Oedipus complex, by the way.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

That there's a struggle between the father and the son. And where does that put the son? What is the emergent subjectivity of the son? Also the daughter. But let's say the son, who knows he can be killed. He can rightfully be killed. And this is also, as Agamben makes the point, since this is the basis of the law, this is the basis of society, the power of society over its subjects.

[Unidentified Participant E]

That made me think of Cain and Abel, and I don't know if that's accurate, but this kind of wandering the.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Earth, right, there's a line of fathers and sons and siblings, and one sibling is elevated and the other is cast away. That's another level in the Bible. Abel and Cain, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob. And so there's one that's selected and one that's rejected. Terrifying sibling rivalry element.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And that this specter of almost sacre.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Is constituting for Agamben. The way I understand his ideas, at least it. It connects for him with the notion of calls bare life. There is the subject, there is the human being as subject, and the subject is already political. There's already an entity, you, me, that emerges under social, political definition. There's no subjectivity. There's no subject that is not a subject of. You are defined by rules, by laws, by language. Don't, can't make sense of yourself. You have no identity. You are not a member of the world of human beings unless there are already all kinds of agreements about what a human being is, what is that? Membership in the community and so on. But a government tries to capture is there something that's before that? And that's what he defines as bare life. So there is some form of life that is prior to social power. It is not legible, it does not have existence in social order. But there is biological life, allegedly before. So he tries to capture that in order to sort of try to make sense of what societies do to us and how much power they have on us and how much we actually do not exist except for as mass of life, conceptual category of something that actually doesn't exist. Because the moment we're born, we're born into society where we're made like in the Mafia. This subjectivity is a prison. Being yourself. And we know it's psychologically too, when we feel ourselves and we. We are locked inside ourselves. We're stuck in our patterns, in our identities. I think a lot of what people want and what we want is to just have more freedom, more looseness, more ability to be all kinds of things, not just the rigid selves that we have, you know, within our field, there's this concrete discourse of ways of loosening up of, you know, learning a wider repertoire of behaviors or experiences. You know, when you study this or become friends with that kind of person or allow yourself a wider range of emotions. If you think from the point of view of the, let's say, social theory and philosophy of the 20th century, it's not about repertoire. It's about the fact that subjectivity is a kind of ontological prison. And then the question becomes, can we conceive of ourselves not just as different kinds of subjects, but less subjects and more connected and more diffuse and more part of than discrete units. This is where my whole thinking there about the nation state and the homo nationalis and the idea that we're all structured like little states. I'm going to do a little detour now. I've listening recently to Naomi Klein's doppelganger. Did you read that book?

[Unidentified Participant E]

I know about it. She is the journalist who gets mistaken for the alt right lady.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes, it's a remarkable book. I really recommend you read it. She goes into the whole phenomena of doubling and in our language would be splitting and projection the way we have shadow selves and societies of shadowlands and goes into many, many aspects of it. Her thought is always and she's written some really good books is how how do we promote a more traditionally socialist left agenda that is more equitable, more just where there's less exploitation in the world and so on. And she borrows there a concept that I believe Iris Murdoch coined or at least used and it is unselfing. Oh, that's kind of the Zen Buddhist generally the Buddha idea just become less of a self. So we have it in the world this notion that it's better to be less yourself. But we don't have it quite in psychology or psychoanalysis. So I try to get to that place from that angle. From the angle of subjectivity is a prison is very constraining and can we transcend it? Can we move away from it or a little less. And then this term comes up which I think is very useful unselfing to be able to be in a place where you less anchored in yourself more related and relating to other life forms so that our idea of freedom is not I should be able to do more of what I want, but I should release a little bit this I and allow myself to be a little less. Little more we us.

[Unidentified Participant E]

When I think about that, I think about my experience of anxiety and how my work around anxiety over decades has been to change my experience of myself. As in I have a self and then I have an experience of myself. Yeah, and my experience of myself is where a lot of change can happen.

[John Totten]

I told Eyol about a patient who was coming to mind who had been experimenting a lot with psychedelics as part of his healing from trauma. I told him my experience that when the patient had recently used psychedelics he reported a more liberated experience of himself. He felt free and empowered and less traumatized. And to me he was more difficult. He said more provocative comments and had more edgy, hot takes on things in the world. I told him that I was both happy for the patient and also found him to be more annoying. He has wild ideas and sounds a.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Bit like a troll.

[John Totten]

I don't like that I think this about him because I like him a lot. But I found him to be kind of obnoxious.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

What he has sort of split and repressed as inappropriate let's say, or undesirable parts of himself is. Are now. Yeah, those parts are coming and it's not the nicer ones.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And so it brings to mind for me all these versions of what is the self. He calls it healing. And I truly believe he feels more healed. But also healing can also mean our relationships, right? Like if I am a liberated person who feels no shame and no trauma, there are many things that I can do to alienate people around me which would bring pain back into my life.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

You know, even the Freudian idea of civilization is the idea that you have to put aside certain aspects of your nature to get along with other people. You know, we can argue with the details of that, but the basic idea is that our nature is such that we would just run around getting what we want if there were no limitations. And so we have to accept those limitations. And not only that, we have to internalize them so that we are internally censored, so that we're not in eternal conflict of I want to kill you now, but I'm not going to because I can't actually shouldn't feel that I want to kill you all the time, for example. Yeah, that's repression. So on that note, if you reintegrate your unconscious desires, you're integrating a lot of counter social tendencies, let's say asocial tendencies. I'm not sure it's true, though. That's the classical psychoanalytic conflict model. The idea that I've been trying to pursue for a long time now, and it's in the belonging paper too, and others, is that it is not true, or at least to a certain degree, it is not true that our aggressive, hostile, murderous parts are kind of biological, inherent, and therefore civilization must. Social order must repress them. But rather that it is a function of the social order to make us killers. Connects people who want to kill and want to die. It connects to what we spoke about just a few minutes before. It is because belonging has on the horizon, always on the margin the prospect of abandonment and sacrifice, that we are violent, that we engaged in pushing other people out. And in that we are in a war for survival in remaining inside at the expense of other people, at the expense of our own, our parts of ourselves, that actually this civilization that creates the levels of aggression and destruction that you see in human beings. And you don't mean any other creature, right? Other creature runs around destroying so many others.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right?

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's us. It's not that civilization is saving us from our aggression. It's A civilization is creating these levels of aggression.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's why the idea of nation taken to its extreme is nationalism.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes.

[Unidentified Participant E]

The stronger and more identified we are with a nation, the more we become dangerous and violent. And so the idea would be that unselfing to go back to that idea would be counter to that.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes. So the idea is that the person you're mentioning as they are becoming freer, becoming more obnoxious. It's not because that's the true nature of human being in principle, but because what comes out is that this entire apparatus of, let's say, aggression or hate or hostility that is instilled socially, it doesn't make it more that your true self as a human, it's your true self as a social subject.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's a challenge to his own kind of statement of his own experience. But I would agree that it's not the deepest layer of truth.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

No.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It is hard to understand how we can use it or think about it on the general social level, but also clinically, how do we help people become freer? In a sense, that's what they're coming to us for. Free are from something whether it's anxiety or depression or certain ways of thinking about themselves, you know, the many layers of it without making them more, you know, self absorbed and egoistic. Not just because of ethical thinking, because it doesn't work like that. You don't become here by becoming more yourself somehow. I know it sounds like an oxymoron and we are saying, I want to be more myself. And I do. I actually do want to be more myself and you want to be more yourself. But it doesn't mean to be more, I think, more sort of settled and entrenched. It's tricky to understand what we mean when we say that.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's very true to how I feel about my life. When I think of the kind of emotional pain that I have in my life, the kind of deprivation that come along with parenting. The pain is this conflict between wanting to get my needs met and the situation calling on me to give up what I want.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

For example.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Well, everything from time to focus, to effort to connection. The situation is, and I talk about this with many of my clients, how they say, I always thought that I would have kids and me and my spouse would prioritize each other over the kids. And I had that same thought too. It's literally not possible. This is a creature that can't wipe its ass or put food into its mouth successfully. And so the conflict is a conflict that creates a Lot of emotional pain. And without the imprisonment of the subject, it would not be such a conflict.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Mm.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But the emotional pain is also, I'm guessing, because it's a repetition.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Say more.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

A lot of the times to just say it in a simplistic way. What you're describing sounds like sibling rivalry, for example. Sounds like your children are like your siblings and everybody's vying for the. The constellations are very complicated, and we don't. We're getting enough now because we didn't get it originally. So the deficit that's arising in the present, it has a PTSD element. The original not getting the original. No attention. The original deprivation is relived now with your own children. Because I think most of us run around deprived. We didn't get enough or it wasn't quite exactly what we needed or not enough what we needed. There is a lack at the heart of things. Sometimes when children come, it retriggers the whole thing. First of all, you see through them, and then you. With yourself, you have less for yourself. Your spouse has less for you. You're in the refracted and mirrored parenting and lack of parenting and lack of. I think we re experience something often. Recently I stumbled again on Freud's mourning and melancholia and started thinking, trying to understand again this distinction and realizing again, I guess, how powerful it is. And I'm going to try to tie it to everything else now. The basic idea is that when you lose something important, and it could be a person or it could be an idea or an ideology or a group or a belonging or whatever, you have two options. One is to recognize, I lost it, I don't have it anymore, and move on. And it's a hard realization. It's painful. But if you allow yourself to go through it and to mourn, you can move on to whatever else is possible. That's the mourning part. Melancholia is the state of a person who refuses to do that for whatever reason. We can get into the. That is. And refuses or an able to actually give up what has been lost, what is gone, and so remains in this twilight zone, this threshold experience of not moving on. Because they cannot let go of what is lost. So it keeps staying in the loss, in what you don't have, what you didn't have, how much you miss it. But always ambivalently, because usually, according to Floyd, what you're refusing to lose is something that you're still having issues with or ambivalent about.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's what's unresolved to be very simplistic. If you lose a parent that you had a very good relationship with, easier to move on than if there's something unresolved. You cannot let go of what has not been resolved.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

It's actually, if you think about it, those places and experiences and times in our lives and people that have not given us what we need, that we are still in struggle with, that we stay with. So it's your deprivation from childhood that you are unwilling to let go. You're unwilling to say, I didn't get what I needed. I will move on to what I can have now. No, I have to stay in this because maybe I can rework the past and get in the past what I didn't get, which of course is impossible. So you have to stay stuck in it. That's melancholia. And so much of our lives are spent loudly or quietly in melancholic places where we are refusing to let go of something that's unresolved and keep experiencing new stuff as pertaining to the old stuff. So when a child comes, you relive what your parents didn't give you, and it makes it much harder to just do it with your own child, because all of this is activated too. And you can think about it as I always do in the political realm, for example, in Israel, Palestine, of two collectivities or many collectivities among these collectivities who are busy not accepting that they will not have what they didn't have, they're still trying to get something that they didn't have or had and lost or half had or had, imperfectly perpetuating a wish to return to something that was actually not quite there. So we do it personally, we do it on the political level, you know, make America great again. Was it ever great? No. But maybe we can rewrite the past to make it great. So recently I've really started thinking about melancholia as a huge, huge force in our personal lives, in our political, social lives, and the ability to say, okay, we don't have it. Don't have it. Let's see what we can do now. Very hard to do. Really, really hard to do. And we waste our lives, waste our lives longing for what we could have had, perhaps if the world was a better world.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It makes me think about transubjectivity, all the things that we might be looking for as someone who comes from a mother, who changed religions and regions and identities and accents.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And then as someone who didn't totally not do those things, you know, although My change in religions was more of a becoming apostate and becoming disillusioned more than it was looking for something. But it seems to relate to transubjectivity.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

If I may, how was it for you to be along her transition?

[Unidentified Participant E]

Our transition started before I was around, but I was aware of it, right, as in her Southern accent now was not like it was when I was a child.

[John Totten]

It's stronger.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It continued after I showed up. So I grew up thinking that we were Christians and that having someone convert from being a secular Jew in the Midwest to a evangelical Christian in the Southeast was normal, because that's how I happened. And then as I grew up and became more critical and aware and then did some traveling and interacted with others that found that strange, began to realize just how unique it was and in many ways, how it didn't work. I mean, I think of it as a bit of a transgenerational trauma. Like, I think it comes from that deprivation. And I think she didn't get a lot of things she needed and was looking to recapture. So I think of it as a very melancholic shift.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

She transitioned from one. It sounds like from one identity to another, not to hybrid. She didn't transition from one identity to less identity.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Yeah, I think she would claim hybrid, but me and my brothers would disagree. I mean, it was not like we grew up biculturally. It was a homogenous upbringing that we had. You know, maybe there was a Hanukkah card in the mail, but very nominal.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

She didn't completely reject the past, but she abandoned it.

[Unidentified Participant E]

We were very often told that we were Jewish and we would tell others. It was like, identity, I think, was something to put on as, like, accessory. It was a party trick.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right?

[Unidentified Participant E]

It was something that made you interesting at a party. I did see, like, what we now call code switching. Like, I did see going to Chicago and hearing an accent come back. But being in East Tennessee, the accent was different.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But do you feel that there's something deep and organic missing for you because.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Of that, A sense of, like, understanding? You know, in my Christian private school, we were the Jewish kids, and my Jewish family were the Christian ones, kind of understanding how we fit into the collective?

[John Totten]

I gave Eyal a quick answer here about maybe an understanding about my place in the world. But in a way, that is what he's challenging. I think what it did for my brothers and I was to dispute, dismantle some of our constructs for us from the beginning. So there was a loss, but also a sort of Gain. I've always had a kind of nomadic understanding of my place in the world when it comes to religion and ethnicity. And in many ways I'm proud of that. Maybe it's why I'm so drawn to this kind of work. In some ways, it's confirming a bias I have. I don't believe that that was the intention of my parents. In fact, I think they would hope that I cling to a certain framework.

[Unidentified Participant E]

About my identity pretty tightly.

[John Totten]

But they also contradict that hope with their very existence. In many ways. Ethnicity, religion, class, and in my case, ideology, these are subjective categories that we have traversed.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

On the one hand, I'm thinking about the freedom in potentially not only moving away, but expanding your sense of self and your belonging. For example, I think that if there's any way to conceive of better future for us in Israel, Palestine, it's that we will all be less tied to our original identities, that we will allow a different sense of collectivity.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Which doesn't mean, let's say, that I will become less Jewish, but that my Jewishness will not be based on excluding or antagonizing or being antagonistic to, say, Palestinian.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And so my struggle is with other Jews who pull me into the more strict identity.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But at the same time, if you float away from your belonging, you're lost. You don't know who you are. That's the tension that I'm trying to think about all the time, of how we can be ourselves, which has very strongly these elements of, let's say, belonging to it. But how can we belong more in more complicated ways and in new ways? I have a friend who's English.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And his father is from an English Danish background and his mother is Jewish, East European Jewish. And when I met him a long time ago and he reminded it to me, just I met him two weeks ago or something, I said, oh, so you're half Jewish? And he said, no, I am 100% Jewish and I'm 100% not Jewish.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

That's how I like to think about it. I'm not half anything. I inhabit different categories.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I very much identify with that.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

There's something to that.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's more out of that Stephen Mitchell version of, you know, self states or islands of self. You know, I wake up one day and I feel Christian. And I wake up another day and I feel Jewish. And I wake up another day and I feel like diagnostic. And I wake up another day and I feel something totally different that I haven't felt Before.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Does this give you vertigo or does expansive sense of yourself?

[Unidentified Participant E]

I think I'm more practiced at that than many people. You know, one thought that comes to mind when you ask it that way is my transgender clients. There are some clients who need a transgender, as in a binary view of their identity. They were assigned one gender at birth and they need to identify as the other gender. And then I have clients who say, I was assigned this thing at birth.

[John Totten]

But I'm not quite that thing.

[Unidentified Participant E]

And I'm not quite this other thing either. It's fluid. It goes back and forth, whatever. And it's not that one way is better than the other. It's that one way seems much more comfortable with having it be islands of self, state. There are a hundred islands as opposed to two.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And you can travel.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Really Right. Or relative between them.

[Unidentified Participant E]

They don't need it to be settled.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I think that's the desirable. That's state. That's desirable.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It is to me too. It doesn't have to be for everyone, but maybe that's what I get in, like reading your writing that I identify so much with is the search is very countercultural. It's not popular. You know, what I'm searching for is diffuse. And I'm. I'm actually wanting it to be unsettled. And I'm aware of the. As I say that the double entendre there to bring it back to Israel, Palestine, or a sentence from one of Orna's writings. Was our diasporic identity better? You know, that wandering, that question.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's a lot to ask of someone.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But then, you know, there's always. But then what are we settled in? We're settled in narratives. We are settled in stories, in fiction. The identity stories that we have are, you know, invented, like a border invented. Yes. So maybe we can settle in other kinds of narratives. I mean, who said we have to settle in originary, ethnocentric, territorial narratives?

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I was just reading an interview with Ta Nahasi Coates about Israel and his statement, which I think is provocative, but was, you know, it's true that the Holocaust was much suffering, but does much suffering at the hands of the state entitled one to a state? His idea being. No, but then that led me to.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

The question, but what does nothing entitle you to a state? States always establish themselves by violence and maintenance of violence. That's the situation, Right. That nobody's entitled.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I am just so hyper conscious of this conversation. How there are tributaries. There are infinite tributaries.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yes.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's very Powerful stuff. And it's very expansive.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Do you see a way that it could be pulled together or should we just go swimming, you know?

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I mean, it could be a whole podcast unto itself. You know, belonging and subjectivity. It's every. It's everything. It's the fabric of modern human. Even in talking before about the ubiquity of our trauma, I mentioned in our last conversation this idea that George Floyd debilitated my white clients. This murder in Minnesota transmitted over the technology to some white Seattleite who's middle class and whose life is not in any way affected and confident, concrete ways, but who feels this debilitating experience about it and then colonizes that experience to make it their own pain. We are more interconnected than any time in history. That's not to say that we're lacking in loneliness. We're more lonely than ever.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah. And also very hostile still.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Yes.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

So one of the many, many awful things that happened in the last few days is that the Israeli Air Force bombed a town in the west bank that is on the border of the west bank and Israel proper, where they allegedly identified the leader of Hamas in that place, and they bombed it with a jet. Now, this is proper territory. It's occupied territories. It's not Lebanon. And they killed, apparently the number is something between 20 and 25 people, including a whole family and children. They bombed the cafe those people were meeting, but there were other people there, and they bombed it from the air. The town is called Tulkarem. It is 10 miles from where I grew up. It's 4 miles from when where one of my sisters and her family lives. And I saw a journalist on Facebook making reference to that bombing and saying, oh, it's the Putinization of Israel, because, you know, Putin bombed the Chechens. Of course, Assad bombed his own citizens in Syria. And Hezbollah helped a lot in the cascade of unprecedented atrocity. It was another one. The Israeli Air Force is bombing Israeli territory. And I've been following the Facebook thread, the hundreds and hundreds of comments to that journalist post. I just did it before we came on here. And seeing how most of the reactions are supportive of the bombing from people who live around, it is scary for people to live close by to Palestinian territories where they're thought of, that there are hostile Hamas presence after Gaza. So it's scary to think they're planning that, too. They may be planning to come in here and get a stew like they did from Gaza. It's scary. But it's also crazy to bomb here.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

And these are Neighbors. These are people who would take their car to be fixed in Tulkar because the workshops there are very good and cheaper than in Israel proper. And we'd go shopping there and we'd go to do a dog rescue there to get the dog. So it's. It's very intertwined. And so people who are intertwined are agreeing to bombing each other.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Not only agreeing, celebrating, you know, the speeches. They're all terrorists, you know, that kind of stuff. How fickle all of this is. The narratives are so strong and so changeable that you are willing to give your neighbor, bomb your neighbor, and. And you're willing to give your child. We're really talking about what narratives we're anchoring in which narratives are selling in.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Right.

[Unidentified Participant E]

But what you're saying is something about, like moving past the era of nationalism.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I hope we can do it as a civilization, although the world is organized now as nations and people have national aspects, confederations. We don't have nations, including the Palestinians.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

So I think for us there, the good scenario is two states that become a confederation and maybe merge at some point.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

But, you know, if you look at it, even Europe that did not have a war for, what, 70 years and has the EU, the countries have not given up being their own countries. The Germans and the French do not decide. There's no French and there's no German, which all one people, they're not doing it right. So I don't know if we can expect of us there to do it.

[Unidentified Participant E]

First, what does psychoanalysis look like? Past nationalism, past these narratives that we're.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Settled in, we have the insight and the tools across different psychoanalytic schools for really understanding how the boundaries between people are fictional. We understand identification, internalization, projection, projective identification. And that's all in the old language. If you think about self psychology, the notion of self, object, if you think about relational psychoanalysis, the whole idea of the third and self states and how we play together, that we're not separate, that when we sit together, we begin to feel each other, we begin to feel through each other. We pass stuff from one to another. Right. We understand that the notion of the boundary between two people is loose and that everything passes through. We understand that this is how we become people. This is development. We understand rule up, launch the idea of the enigmatic. Everything goes in and out. We're in and out, in and out. But our value system is such that all of this should lead to separation and individuation, to boundaries, to a clear sense of yourself. Why, if we know so well that we are so mutually infused and related and permeated. So there's a disconnect between what we know about people and what we aspire for people. Because I think our ideology comes from the society around, which is all about boundaries and separation and sovereignty and control and blah, blah, blah. So how about we adjust our ideology to our knowledge that we are all intertwined? There's osmosis between people that. I sit in front of you and I can feel you. I can feel you and you can feel me. We work with that all the time. So why don't we build an ideology that aligns with that, that suggests to people not to individuate and become more themselves, separate from everyone else and, you know, this whole new thing with boundaries, every boundary. Forget about boundaries, okay? It's important, but let's have less boundaries. Let's try to build ourselves as more permeable, more sensitive, more accommodating. Let's make this our ideology, not just our knowledge. And I think if we do that in the room and we think that's how people should be with each other, then in our little way, we're spreading this spirit. We're making ourselves more. You'll find the adjectives. But we have to adjust our ideology to our. The understanding of human nature.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Actually, even our therapy culture is not there. Boundaries, self actualization, selfing, you know, it's all about selfing.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Exactly. And we need some unselfing.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Participant E]

It's very profound to me, and I want. I want to, like, bottle it up and give it to people. It feels very easy to talk to you. I could.

[Unidentified Participant A]

I could.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I could do this podcast and, like, I'm really in.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

I'm really enjoying our conversation.

[Unidentified Participant E]

I really am talking to Karim next week.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Oh, good.

[Unidentified Participant A]

Good.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, good.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Thank you so much for talking to me. I'll be in touch.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Yeah, let's. Let's be in touch. Let's. I don't know, let's figure out something. We'll figure out another way of talking.

[Unidentified Participant E]

Absolutely, absolutely. Take care.

[Eyal Rosmarin]

Pleasure talking with you. Be well.

[Unidentified Participant E]

You as well.

[John Totten]

This has been between us. Our thanks to our guest, Eyal Rosmari. Between Us is produced by myself, John Totten, and Mason Nene, who also composes art musing. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl. Find Between Us. Wherever you find podcasts and subscribe.

[Unidentified Participant E]

If you like the show, leave a review.

[John Totten]

And until next time, take care.