Private Practice Podcast
by Dan Brown & James Hall
Just about sufficiently entertaining and somewhere on the path to fascinating information about the mind, Private Practice Podcast is tantalisingly close to being exactly what you need to improve your own conscious state of mind. This is your non-existent super-ego telling you to join Dan Brown and James Hall on a quest to explore how the ideas in psychotherapy can be considered outside of the therapy room, leading to a more complex and enjoyable life. Your negative thought patterns might be telling you right now that it's not worth your time, but my moderate ones are saying this is by no means inevitable. Go on, treat yourself.
Episodes
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It's Becoming to Look a Lot Like Christmas
It's that time of year again; summer in Australia. The kangaroo testicles are on the BBQ, Santa has pulled off his top to show you his beach body, and the Sack Game Down Under is complicated with everything falling out, since Australia is upside down. Releasing episodes out of sequence with a...
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Becoming Carl Rogers – Part Four
We jump back into Carl Rogers this week with a discussion of the idea of congruence between the internal and external worlds. Dan is back and recording from a hotel room in Hitchin because he is on a business trip; his small talk about this is so boring that it's an easy win for James with his...
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Adieu, Lacan
If all this Becoming of late is becoming overwhelming, we take a break from On Becoming a Person to talk about a new film from New York, called Adieu, Lacan, featuring an interview with the director, Richard Ledes. The film is fictional, but the main character of Seriema, played by Ismenia Mendes...
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Carry On Becoming – Part Three
This is the third of our episodes on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. The ultimate introduction to his big ideas, and just the beginning of our odyssey towards the light of a sun that can melt your hand off. Small Talk is lost in favour of James...
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Becoming Carl Rogers – Part Two
This is the second of a three-part mini-series on Carl Rogers' six fundamental life learnings, from his book On Becoming a Person. In friendship, war and family, Carl has something to say about how much your feelings matter, and whether or not they legitimise mass murder. If you like what we do…
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Becoming Carl Rogers – Part One
This is the first in our season of episodes swimming in the waters of Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person, and the first in a three-part mini-series on his six fundamental life learnings. It was first published in 1967 and we'll be seeing if it still outshines the millions of words people have...
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Oliver Sacks – A Way of Seeing
Oliver Sacks is known for his way of communicating ideas about neuroscience in the form of best-selling page-turners. He lived a life as interesting as his patients and he is also Dan's hero. We used this episode not so much to talk about the contents of his books, but the way he communicated how...
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The Nightmare Interpretation before Christmas
It's the biggest episode of Private Practice Podcast ever, stuffed with immature humour and games that illuminate the gargantuan fallacy of fairness like a brightly shining star. After last year's not-a-Christmas-Special, this year the fun and games with Dan and James are dialled up to induce...
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Psychoanalysis
What is psychoanalysis in the 2020s? An expensive exercise in self-centred indulgence? For the first time in the place we call the Private Practice we discuss in a bit more detail what it is. Dan is a fully qualified mental health practitioner and has over 20 years' experience of therapy, and…
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Distortion Part 4: Cognitive Bias
In the stunning conclusion to our overwhelmingly successful Distortion episodes, we brilliantly look at how framing some information can totally transform how it is perceived. What a stunning and overwhelmingly brilliant way to start the description of a podcast about bias… As well as framing...
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Distortion Part 3
Can we all Viktor Frankl our way to self actualisation, in spite of everything? This week we look at the fallacies, not to be confused with phalluses, that might get in the way. If you feel like life is not fair, we're about to take away your sweets. The fallacies of control, fairness, changing...
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Distortion Part 2
Don't follow your heart! But how do you know when your assumptions, your type-1 thinking, is distorted? James hasn't got a clue, so he asks Dan. This week we offer you a work out, comprised of jumping to all sorts of conclusions, stretching the truth until your feelings sound like facts, and...
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Distortion Part 1
Reclining on the sumptuous Freudian couch or answering a tsunami of incredibly similar questions about your interpretational distortions in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Just when your life is in chaotic meltdown, you have to evaluate this choice, as if you're informed and capable of making the...
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The Big Ten
Now that even Prince Harry has a podcast about mental health, it's time for us to up our game and get serious. Except it was a hot summer's afternoon in Marseille when this recording took place, and James decided to steer the conversation into the waters of relativism and the Big Five personality...
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Carl Rogers vs the Psychopaths, Part 2
Unconditional positive regard in the face of someone pointing a gun at your face? Or worse, a flatmate accusing you of making their mess in the kitchen. Isn't it time to face reality and bury Carl Rogers' cloud-cuckoo utopian ideas with him in his grave and dance robotically on it? This episode...
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Carl Rogers vs the Psychopaths, Part 1
Can you regard all humans positively? Carl Rogers was a humanist psychologist who believed so. He was one of the first ever researchers in psychotherapy since the emergence of the practice with the work of Freud, and this episode looks at the positive effects of his ideas, derived from pioneering...
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(Not the) Christmas Special 2020
Conspiracy, the breakdown of trust, murder in the street, the Sack Game; the Private Practice Podcast Christmas Special has it all. And it's two thirds longer than last year! It's like all your Christmases have come at once. It's the time of year when people are inclined to believe in any old…
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2020 Summer Special
We could have made a breezy 'Top 10 Tips to Improve your Mental Health' summer special. But of course we didn't. We instead came up with our Top 10 psychoanalytical questions for 2020, because a totally neutral, satisfactory state of consciousness is necessarily hard work to achieve against the...
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Unconscious: Part Four – The Dream Boat
Did you just say "sausage"? This week, every word counts in our concluding adventure in the unconscious forest of terrible things. You wanted some dream talk, and as the great philosopher Gabrielle noted, dreams can come true. Before exploring what seems like the utterly feral subjectivity of…
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Unconscious: Part Three – Ministry of Defence
This is the greatest podcast episode ever recorded, and if you don't think so then you're a discreditable source and we'll destroy you. This week in the forest of terrible things, we dig up some truly horrific defence mechanisms. And we examine them in more detail than we expected, which means…
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Unconscious: Part Two – The Dark Arts
It's time to stop living your best life. Nothing can be said to be truly conscious, the mycelial-like network of unconscious knowledge stretches so deep that your logical left brain needs to take a minute's silence to consider the one thing it can know about the unconscious forest of terrible...
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Unconscious: Part One – Your Brain is Hot
Unconscious: Part One – Your Brain is Hot This is the first part of our mini-series exploring ideas of the unconscious mind, in which we compare the conscious, subconscious and unconscious states, using Carl Jung's theory of psychodynamics from 'On the Nature of the Psyche' to allude to functions...
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Unconscious Mini-Series Trailer
A taste of what's brewing in the darkness before it enters your conscious experience. Our new mini-series on the unconscious mind starts next week. Ludicrous epic music credit: Legends by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com...
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Utopia
As the great philosopher Belinda Carlisle said so profoundly, Heaven is a Place on Earth. This week we question how you can create that state for the entire duration of your life, instead of living in suffering, hopeful of the pearly gates that come with the divine release of death. It's the…
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Antifragile
You shout at us, we listen! It's already time for excellent, complex critique from the sophisticated listener. Although when life gives you lemons, you just have to pull your socks up and let the lemonade flow, so in the absence of a sophisticated voice we navigate merely what is within our...
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Meditation
How do you cope with external chaos? Just be like James, he's doing fine with his divinely ordered consciousness in the current situation. Is that not helpful? You want better advice, you want more words? Well we have a treat for you! If you don't give a pack of fudge about the indulgent,...
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The Discovered Self
Describe yourself. Things I couldn't guess from averages of humanity or that "outfit" you're wearing. Are you the kind of person who says, "I hate filling out the 'About Me' box on dating apps?" Well I've heard that one before. It seems you need to turn to the grandfather of self discovery. Carl...
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Ego
Mental health and self-development amounts to ineffectual, vulgar, bourgeois fluff. Political action is what makes a real improvement to the lives of the many? Well… not exactly. Anxiety is a contagious oppression. Anxiety is inevitable without individual action. You are no help to your community...
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We Have a Problem
What is a mental health problem and why do you need more of them? Like the Flow activities discussed in the previous season, any state of improved mental health requires a verb; practicing, questioning, paying attention, maintaining. There is no completion to the process, besides climbing into a...
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Flow, Episode 10 – Free Will
You'll never find the enjoyment of a complex and meaningful life without listening to this climactic epi-Flow-de. Quitting at last week's penultimate one will take you plummeting right back into the anxiety zone. It's Mihaly's bombshell at the 11th hour; enjoying isolated Flow activities in your...
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Flow, Episode 9 – Chaos
James Hall, ego extraordinaire, "privileged white man", enjoyed Flow in the paradise of Montpellier a year ago, and is now here to symbolically remind you that you don't stand a chance in hell of improving your life with Flow thinking, because you can't be James Hall. You've got so much on your...
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Flow, Episode 8 – Other (Part Two)
Have you ever meditated while your neighbours were having noisy sex? Which of your friends provide you with the most complexity? How can you become more popular with friends AND win a sexy legs competition? Continuing from last week's introduction to this chapter of the book of Flow, we take a…
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Flow, Episode 8 – Self (Part One)
Which is worse, having nothing but your own company, or putting up with other people? The next chapter is divided into two episodes, and in this one we focus on solitude, before turning our attention to the ordeal of other people next time. If only we had an only child who spent the whole of last...
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Flow, Episode 7 – Work Flow
Enough of all this daydreaming and walking, it's time to do some work. But does this mean Flow is put on pause while you surrender yourself to the tyranny of oppression? Of course not, the Flow has only just be-go! This week cultural relativism is washed away by the currents of Csikszentmihalyi's...
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Flow, Episode 6 – Brain Flow
How much enjoyment can you get out of absolutely nothing? If you assign some time to close off those sensory inputs we looked at last time and leave the brain to stimulate all content, just how high can you get? Wordplay, daydreams and memory are all "looked at" this week (whatever that means).…
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Let it Flow
Happy Czikszentmihalmas, or if not happy then Private Practice Podcast wishes you a complex yet accessible Christmas this year. Mid-Flow through the season, we decided to increase the complexity of our traditional Christmas Special by challenging ourselves with more critical listener feedback…
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Flow, Episode 5 – Flowing Sex
We're going to ask some of life's biggest questions in this girthy episode. What sex toys does Dan use? Does pain exist? Can lavender cure PTSD? The Body in Flow is the subject as we examine the senses, particularly sight and touch, to explore sex, art and walking as Flow activities. We look at...
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Flow, Episode 4 – A Doing Word
The Conditions of Flow, Chapter 4 in the book, looks at society and environment to see which external circumstances clear the Flow runway for take-off, and which ice it over to leave your flight, complete with all that emotional baggage, grounded at the airport. But it also looks at the…
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Flow, Episode 3 – Enjoy
No pleasure. No happiness. Only enjoyment. Creating new order in consciousness is the subject of this episode, in which we reject the symbolic goal of happiness, pushed by the publishers of 'Flow'. We look at cancelling activities which provide only pleasure, most of which are found guilty of...
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Flow, Episode 2 – Conscious
The conditions of consciousness and self-identity are the subject of Part 2 in our series on the book of Flow. While consciousness is an enduring mystery to neuroscientists, there are certain patterns of decision-making, free will (or lack thereof), and core beliefs which can be understood to…
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Flow, Episode 1 – What's this all about?
We're starting a new season of the podcast with an introduction to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea of 'Flow' as a process of ordering consciousness. Having looked at a different idea in psychoanalysis in each episode of the previous season, this time we're taking more time to discuss one idea in...
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Escape
Wheels up in 5 mins, welcome aboard this internal flight to your ego, where the weather is currently calm and sunny, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. It's the Private Practice Podcast Summer Special, loaded with all your emotional baggage and featuring another shambolic edition of the...
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Allotment
Attention Autistes! This episode was recorded a year ago in Dan's allotment, at the end of season two. If you're new to this podcast, don't start here. But instead of chucking it on the compost we decided to release it, since it highlights a number of changes in James pre- and post-France....
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Perversion
You're into what now? What on earth would your father think of you?! This week we look at perversion as deviation from a biological or societal predominance, and how this informs personal development, opening up the very deep hole into which harmless but also abusive deviations fall equally. We...
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Phobia
There's a tarantula crawling over your face and you need to murder it now. Do something cathartic and that malicious monster will never breathe again! It's a juicy one this week; if every ten minutes were a leg, this would have eight, plus five minutes to count the numerous evil eyes. Should you...
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Phantasy
This week we share our phantasies, and the bad news for anyone craving something salacious is that once the F is replaced with a Ph, the result is James reliving his megalomaniac childhood. Think about all the times you have had an entire conversation or argument with someone, entirely in your...
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CBT and Freud
Jon Ronson mildly irritated James a couple of weeks ago, with an interview in which he expressed an opinion of psychoanalysis wasting his time and CBT coming to save him, pants outside tights, quicker than lightning. Or something like that. Well Dan has plenty of experience in CBT and wasn't…
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Core Beliefs
'James Hall, My Life in Words' – This week Dan asks James to try and work out from where exactly his beliefs about himself come. Some would call this an unwise move, as the answer is likely to be comprehensive merely in the first act. But this episode offers a starting point for how jumbled...
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Trauma
Your friend goes to war and sees their comrade having their legs blown off. Meanwhile, you've just returned from a traumatic experience at the supermarket, where they'd run out of your favourite type of quinoa. On top of that, you've spent your whole life dealing with your parents' attitude that...
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Hysteria
A woman as stiff as a plank, held by the neck and ankles between two chairs while her uterus is assumed to prowl around her body like a wild animal, and a drag queen, delivering a slick and formatted performance on TV, show the subject of Hysteria has always been fascinating to audiences. But...
About this show
Just about sufficiently entertaining and somewhere on the path to fascinating information about the mind, Private Practice Podcast is tantalisingly close to being exactly what you need to improve your own conscious state of mind. This is your non-existent super-ego telling you to join Dan Brown and James Hall on a quest to explore how the ideas in psychotherapy can be considered outside of the therapy room, leading to a more complex and enjoyable life. Your negative thought patterns might be telling you right now that it's not worth your time, but my moderate ones are saying this is by no means inevitable. Go on, treat yourself.
Hosted by
Dan Brown & James Hall