Heraclitus & Psychotherapy

In this episode, I explore Heraclitus through James Hillman’s beautiful foreword to Heraclitus’ Fragments, especially the idea that the psyche is not something fixed, stable, or easily explained, but something always in motion, always in tension, always touched by contradiction.Heraclitus gives us a way to think about psychotherapy beyond neat explanations and rigid identities. The self is not a finished object. It is a river. It is fire. It is the strange truth that “I am as I am not.”I also bring in Borges’ short story “The Other” as a way of thinking about the divided self across time—the younger self, the older self, the wounded self, the becoming self—all meeting beside the river without ever fully resolving into one simple identity.This episode is about therapy as a place where contradiction can be held, where symptoms can be listened to as signs, where dreams and fragments matter, and where change is not just something we seek, but something we already are.