14 Psychoanalytical Concepts To Understand Yourself - Dr Jonathan Shedler - #567

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Shedler. He's a psychologist, author, master clinician, and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California. We do not understand ourselves. Almost all of what is inside of our minds is obscured from us. We don't need to exclusively despair though, with a little work and some good insights from psychoanalysis, the view can be made a little clearer. Expect to learn why people believe that their suffering makes them more moral than others, how you can create a identity without realizing it, the ruthless danger of projective identification, how come it's easier for us to see people as only either good or bad, how extreme envy can be manifested, the manipulative strategies we all enact without thinking, and much more. Dr. Shedler's stuff is really cool. I'm not super familiar, or I wasn't super familiar with psychoanalysis before this. I kind of thought it was this old and worldy, kind of forgotten, doesn't really make sense anymore insight. But the fundamental lesson is that we do not know ourselves and the subconscious mind is largely in control. The only way that we can become aware of that is by doing work like this. So I actually really, really appreciated it today. And I hope that you take tons away from this one. We are approaching Christmas and given that, I thought it might be an appropriate time to ask for a Christmas present. If you are listening on Apple podcasts or on Spotify, just pick your favorite episode from the last year and share it with a friend. That is the best thing that you could do for me. The only way that this show grows is from people like you sharing it with people like you. And if you've had one that's particularly been great or interesting or useful or emotionally supportive this year, just send it to someone or throw it in a group chat and induct them into the cult of Modern Wisdom as well. I thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Jonathan Shedler.
For the people who aren't familiar with you, what's your background? Who are you and what do you do?

**Jonathan Shedler** (2:24)
I'm a psychologist. I'm a professor of psychology at University of California, San Francisco. I practice psychoanalytic psychology, which for people who may not know, is based on the understanding that we don't fully know ourselves, that there's such a thing as unconscious mental life, and that we can explore it and understand it and be better for it.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
What is unique about that compared with other approaches for psychology?

**Jonathan Shedler** (2:52)
Yeah, that's a good question. There's been a trend. So first of all, I mean, there's just mind-boggling psychological illiteracy in the culture. And it's not the fault of, you know, it's not the fault of anyone. It's what they're teaching in universities. I mean, even people who, you know, even people who take university level courses in psychology are going to miss something really important. And the important thing is that over the last 25 to 30 years, the entire field of psychotherapy has really been getting very, very shallow. And there's been a focus on increasingly brief, increasingly superficial, and increasingly cheap interventions. And they get sold to the public by academic researchers. And I'm not taking, I am an academic researcher. I'm not trying to trash anyone, but they get sold to the public as, you know, these are scientific, you know, scientific forms of treatment. They're evidence-based, they're the gold standard. But actually they've been getting increasingly superficial. And what I mean by superficial is, there's an assumption that it can happen very quickly, that we can deal with what's on the surface of consciousness, right? So your conscious beliefs and thoughts. So the focus is very much on managing symptoms and dealing with thoughts and behaviors that are very much on the surface of things, rather than the underlying psychology that gives rise to them.
The entire tradition that I'm part of is based on the understanding that we don't fully know our own hearts and minds. Nobody does. It's the nature of the human condition. It's rooted in the structure of the brain. We don't fully know ourselves. And because we don't fully know ourselves, we find ourselves repeating the same kinds of patterns and getting into the same kinds of difficulties over and over again in life.
And the idea is that by coming to know the parts of ourselves that were previously unknown, that gives us some freedom to be able to do things differently. So that we're not doomed to repeating the same patterns over and over.