I hope you enjoy the video, and I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. I never hide any of my material behind a paywall, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate you support my work as a paid subscriber!

I’m happy to share that an article I wrote is now available in the latest issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Entitled “Wishing You the Worst: Addressing Collegial Enactments and Disavowal in the Psychoanalytic Community,” it discusses class anxiety in our profession and how it can be weaponized socially and politically to silence dissent and keep white and psychoanalytic innocence in place.

In college, I had a writing teacher who confessed she went to copies of her books in our library and penciled in edits for years after they’d been published, and I can definitely relate. I mark this article in the timeline of my daughter’s life--I wrote it when she was in utero, and it was published two weeks before she turns two. If I had written it today, I would not used the false binary Israel/Gaza, which puts a besieged city on equal footing with a settler state with massive financial and military resources, and I would have replaced “conflict” with “genocide.” I hope the reader will understand that my journey out of white innocence is an ongoing trip.

You can find it here at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15240657.2026.2647555 --please let me know if you have any difficulty locating it.

Today, many will turn away from their Facebook accounts and Instagram, as their feeds are flooded by a deluge of hyperrealistic portraits of the maternal. For this day marks the beginning of the season of familism, the High Holidays which begin with Mother’s Day, and are bookended in June by Father’s Day. The undertow of this deluge is less visible: traditional families riddled with abuse, miscarriage, infertility, parental alienation and conflict, in short the messy humanness that defies the institution of the familial’s attempts to reify something that is designed to limit and exclude as much as it evokes a sense of gratitude and belonging for those fortunate enough to find themselves on the “right” side of the borders of what in the Global North is considered the nuclear family.

On this day, more than many, the subaltern bodies of those who cannot reproduce through the cis, abled, heteronormative way, the queer and the infertile, may find themselves stymied and bereft, invisible and longing. But not alone.

So on this Mother’s Day Night, not to destroy family values but to expand them to include the many who’s bodies, histories and differences may not allow them easy access to the same joy celebrated by some, I ask you to listen to a different tale.

“Hate in the Countertransference” (Winnicott, 1975) makes explicit the intrapsychic and relational links between the parent-infant dyad and the therapeutic one. But he also gives us a stellar example of a man imagining a woman imagining a baby, and it is upon this “normative” psychoanalytic model that generations of therapists have been trained to understand and think about parenting, therapy, and the bodies that engage in both. As Gentile (2023) points out, we have been fantasizing about fetuses and babies ever since, often to displace other anxieties. There is even (scant) literature on handling maternity leaves in the treatment room (Fenster, 1986,) though little in the psychoanalytic literature about paternity leave.

But what about bodies that society considers subalterns in terms of gender, class, ability, and other expectations? What forms of intersectionality arise in and around the parenting and therapy experiences then?

On this day, more than many, the subaltern bodies of those who cannot reproduce through the cis, abled, heteronormative way, the queer and the infertile, may find themselves stymied and bereft, invisible and longing. But not alone.

So on this Mother’s Day Night, not to destroy family values but to expand them to include the many who’s bodies, histories and differences may not allow them easy access to the same joy celebrated by some, I ask you to listen to a different tale.

Moderated by the inimitable Katie Gentile, this dialogue between Heather, a queer cis female therapist processing and grieving her inability to have children, and myself, a bisexual cis male therapist in a same-sex relationship who is pregnant through a gestational carrier traces our history as one agrees to cover the paternity leave of the other. We explore the multiple meanings and ideas of a baby from the vantage point of both therapists and two of our shared patients during and after the birth of a baby. We will explore issues of hope and bereavement, the varieties of shame and guilt that can impact each therapist, one with a subaltern body that society deems as not meant to have children while simultaneously mandating another to have one or be diminished. The story is at times not pretty or clear cut, but I hope you will read this in the spirit of understanding the impact familism and circumscribing of certain families has on all of us.

Two Shrinks and a Baby: A Dialogue

Speakers

Katie Gentile – Moderator

Heather MacGibbon – Presenter

Mike Langlois – Presenter

Session Opening

Katie: Thank you so much, Issa. My name is Katie Gentile. I’m going to be kind of moderating — my role is as an active moderator, I guess. I’m really happy to be here to facilitate the conversation between Heather and Mike because they both have a lot of very interesting things to say, and psychoanalysis is still kind of catching up.

Katie: To everything that assisted reproductive technologies — which I’ll probably shorten to ARTs throughout — psychoanalysis really hasn’t done a great job keeping up with all the psychological as well as physical (not that these can be separated) things that happen to people involved in ARTs. You know, loss, grief, everything, as well as pain and inconvenience. And I know that Heather and Mike are going to talk about some of this. I’ve also written about it in my own book. And I should mention that Gala Nagashine is going to have a book out soon on it as well. It’s a really complicated area, especially because psychoanalysis, not surprisingly, has ignored queerness and ARTs.

Katie: So the panel is going to be more of a dialogue, and I know it’s really engaging because we had a hard time stopping when we did it before. If you need clarifications in the moment, I’m setting an alarm on my phone so we’ll keep twenty minutes at the end for questions. Just put anything in the chat and I’ll try to point Heather and Mike’s attention to it. The goal is for meaning-making to emerge within the dialogues — like a Karen Barad interaction, or even Paulo Freire: the idea that collectively, meaning can be made.

Katie: Now, Heather is an LCSW with a PhD in cinema studies. She reached out to organize a panel for last year’s Division 39 on abortion, because her dissertation explored representations of abortion. I highly recommend her work — and spoiler alert, the films and representations aren’t realistic. Surprise. Aside from being a licensed social worker, she’s trained in psychodynamic therapy and integrates tools from CBT, DBT, and other modalities to treat clients in emotional distress. She began her career as a patient advocate in women’s reproductive health in 1996 and moved to psychodynamic psychotherapy after graduating from Fordham in 2018. She continued her training as a postgraduate fellow at Fordham’s College Psychological Services and in the IPP program through the White Institute. She did her clinical hours post-Fordham at Brooklyn Psychotherapy, working with various client populations including the LGBTQIAA+ community. She specialized in working with artists and is currently in private practice via telehealth in multiple states. She has presented on bisexual issues in psychotherapy, working as a cis queer practitioner with trans clients, as an APA Early Career Scholar in 2024, and as an ABSA fellow in 2025.

Katie: Mike received his BA from Connecticut College in 1991 and his MSW from Smith College School for Social Work in 1994. He has over 25 years of experience counseling adults and families. He started out working in public school and clinical settings to advance access for students with differing abilities and learning challenges — another area psychoanalysis doesn’t always attend to. He quickly identified the crucial role of emerging technologies for equity and health. His work includes treating patients who use video games from a gamer-affirmative stance, and his theoretical background combines psychodynamic theory, contemporary cognitive and learning theory with cutting-edge technologies. He’s currently a teaching associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians. He also served on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBTQ Youth and serves as a resource on digital literacy and social justice issues. He’s licensed in California, DC, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont, and is the author of Reset: Video Games and Psychotherapy.

Katie: So we’re all in good hands here. I’ll turn it over to you all to begin the story of the disassembling moment.

The Disassembling Moment

Mike: Thanks. And for those of you who attended Gail’s and Laura’s conversation yesterday, this will hopefully be familiar — it’s going to be the same kind of format. And Heather, it’s nice to see you, even though you’re in your car, which wasn’t where I imagined you, but I’m glad you’re here.

Heather: It’s nice to see you. I wasn’t exactly where I imagined myself either, so…

Mike: Because I over-prepare for things, I had a choice this morning between rereading Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” or researching when and how Heather and I first met. I decided it was more important to figure that out. And it was when you emailed me, in 2023. I didn’t know at the time we were going to start a very lovely friendship. But given that we’re talking about subaltern bodies, I think we should start with the hair.

Heather: Yeah, well, I remember meeting Mike because at my very first Division 39 conference I was standing very quietly in a corner by myself, being nervous and watching everyone talk to each other. And this gentleman with blue hair walked up to me and said, “I like your hair.” And I was like, “I like your hair.” And then he wandered away. Little did I know that a year or so later I would join a book group on bisexuality and Freud — and there he would be, leading the book group. It was really quite wonderful to be like, oh, we’re connecting over this difference we’re showing visually, but also having similar interests.

Mike: Right. And the original email about video gaming — little did I know that you were also a fan of tabletop RPGs and were working with those. It was interesting that we could identify each other as geeky or queer before we even really got to know each other. Over the next few months, Heather and I were in touch in a number of different ways, and we met at a couple of conferences. But to start off, before we get to the disassembling moment — because it always feels like I’m throwing you into the midst of an emotional swimming pool when we talk about that — I should give some context.

Mike: One of the things that I think Heather knew about me as we were headed towards this spring meeting was that I was in the process of building a family. It’s interesting that my bio talks about non-traditional families — little did I know when I wrote it that I was going to be filling that role myself. My partner and I, starting in 2013, really started trying to have a family. As a same-sex couple, we obviously had some challenges. We tried an adoption, and it was disruptive in a very drastic way — those of you who just came from Dorothy’s conversation can probably understand the context. It was a pretty devastating event for all involved, and we took several years off during which we worked through some grief.

Mike: Then, as we got older, we were able to stabilize our income to the point where, in 2021, we started the process of pursuing a gestational carrier — what we call a surrogacy. Financially, what that entailed was taking out a second mortgage on our home, because it costs about $200,000, which we obviously didn’t have. So we were in the process of doing that as I was beginning to meet Heather. And at the time that the moment Heather is about to describe occurred, I had just found out that for the first trimester, my developing baby was healthy and alive, and it was safe — in terms of the potential for miscarriage — to start getting excited and letting people know. And that’s where this story opens up.

Heather: Yeah. So Mike had just gone through that, and we went to the Division 39 conference again. We both attended the Queer Families panel, which was really excellent — a wonderful celebration of queer families. Multiple people spoke about building queer families. I had gone because I wanted to see several colleagues and friends talk about their families. As a bisexual woman, I had come to terms to a certain extent with the idea that I was not going to have a family, for a variety of reasons we’ll talk about, but I wanted to go and be supportive. I didn’t really realize the impact it would have on me.

Heather: I went, and it was this warm celebration of parenthood and the beauty of families. And I had this realization in the middle of the panel that, as someone who — not only didn’t always have a heterosexual partner during my reproductive years, but also wasn’t financially in a position to consider surrogacy — having a family in any alternative or biological way was going to be foreclosed for me. And it was a tremendous amount of grief that hit me all at once. I very quietly tried not to cry during the panel, and then crept off to the corner of the lobby and sat down and started crying.

Heather: Right around that moment is when Mike walked by. He very kindly sat down and asked what was going on. He had just been to the same panel and was really celebrating the beginning of his queer family. I felt really awkward about it because I didn’t want to dampen the joy of that panel in any way — it was such a powerful example of what can happen. But I was having this really bizarre experience.

Mike: Yeah, I remember that moment. I remember two pieces of it. The first was seeing my new friend — someone I have so much in common with — very upset. Of course I wanted to know what was going on. I was walking out of this conference where, as that presentation went on, I had become more and more aware that this was for me — that I was going to be a dad and could finally get excited and talk with people about it, because now it was safe enough. I had spoken about that at the Q&A, and was feeling a sense of belonging with the queer community in that room.

Mike: Walking out in that emotional space, I saw my new friend crying, and I went over. And then you told me. And I remember having a moment of — do I lean into this, or do I lean away? In some ways I felt implicated in your suffering in that minute. I felt like I was adding insult to the injury people had already given you. I was feeling self-conscious because I knew this about you, and was like, well, on the one hand, we’ve developed this colleagueship and friendship, and I didn’t want to not tell you — but I also didn’t want to make you feel bad.

Heather: It was a weird mix, you being self-conscious and me being self-conscious at the same time. I was going through this grief I hadn’t anticipated.

Katie: I don’t want to interject with theory, because that’s such a profound moment. But there’s a handful of researchers who have talked about how both the Mike part of the dialogue and the Heather part of the dialogue retreat to their separate corners when grief is suddenly bubbling up — all the guilt, the tsunami of feelings you both were experiencing make it easier to just go to your separate corners, manage, and dissociate well enough to get back together. I think the fact that you both sat through it is really important.

Mike: Well, we did something really important, which is we went and had dinner. Heather and I are foodies — that’s another thing we share. In DC there is a place that does really late-night oysters and all sorts of other goodies — the Ebbott Street Grill. I remember us sitting there and talking. It was another moment of leaning in, where you were really sharing your grief. I was struggling with wanting to be present for your grief, but also wanting to question it gently — like, was it really too late? Was this truly not a possibility? Not only because I wanted the feeling to go away, but also because I was concerned about you missing out on a real possibility. I could have gone back to the corner, as Katie said, but I took a risk. I’m curious what that was like for you.

Heather: For me, it was very powerful because it allowed me to talk about feelings I’d kind of filed away under “I missed my window.” I had already biologically gone through perimenopause, so I couldn’t physically carry a child anymore. And you were like, well, what about surrogacy? Is that an option? And I was like, well, it would be an option, but I don’t have $200,000. Or access to that between me and my partner. And I was also really questioning myself about whether this was even the right time for me to be thinking about surrogacy. I was in my early fifties. And for some reason, as someone who is female-bodied, it seemed like — you can only be a mother if you’re between the ages of, you know, 20 and 35. Once you get past that 35 range, it’s a little scary. I think that’s partly because of biology, but also a cultural mentality: being an older mother is much more looked down upon than being an older father.

Mike: Yeah. In some ways the age question works in reverse in terms of privilege. When I was in my 30s or 40s, I couldn’t have afforded to refinance a home to take out that immense amount of debt. But in my early 50s, I could. So from a capitalistic point of view, I was becoming more ready. And at the same time, you really reminded me, in a very gentle way, of the intersectionality here — that it’s easier for me to focus on the areas where I’m targeted, such as being a bisexual man from a working-class background. But I have had some class mobility. I do have privilege now that I can leverage more debt this way. And yet, I still recall that there was leaning in — you didn’t try to avoid the grief, and I didn’t try to avoid asking questions.

Heather: Yeah. I think that was what made it so powerful. I mean, I think partially because we’re both clinicians, we were able to be like — okay, we can sit in this really uncomfortable space and appreciate what the other person is going through, and at the same time be there both for ourselves and for the other person. Because I was worried that you were about to have a child. I thought that was so exciting for you.

Mike: And you conveyed that to me. I really — I have a hard time taking in friendship in general. That may not come as a surprise to people who get to know me, and Heather has learned that about me. But your generosity and your being present was really important. And at the same time, I was getting the sense of how complicit we both are in different ways in this larger system — in ways we don’t even know.

Language and Power in Reproductive Technology

Mike: So, just one quick example. The way folks identify women who are attempting to access assisted reproductive technology is as “infertile.” You have an infertility problem. You have a barren problem. Same-sex men need assisted reproductive technology too — we can’t make a little human being without it. But we’re not referred to as infertile or barren. We are called “intended parents” in the surrogacy journey. Now think about that. What would you rather identify as — infertile or intended? Notice the masculine sort of: I have power, I’m going to go do the thing I intend.

Katie: Right. And then, Heather, as you pointed out — if you’re above 35, you’re a geriatric mother. Medically. And you will be told over and over the risks involved with being a geriatric mother, whereas as the intended parent, I don’t know if you were even told that your sperm might not be as good as it was when you were 20.

Heather: They fail to tell men that, even though that is also true.

The Sperm Story

Mike: Right. Okay. So Katie’s brought up sperm. Let’s talk about the sperm story.

Katie: All right. Do it.

Mike: The way surrogacy works — for those of you who may not be familiar — is that in order to have a gestational carrier even look at your application, you have to have a frozen embryo. In order to have a frozen embryo, you need to have an egg donor. In order to have an egg donor even look at you, you need to have a sperm analysis showing that you have healthy sperm.

Mike: Now, I live on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, and I was told that I needed to go into the local lab and have a sperm analysis there. And the day I got there, the people in the lab said, oh, we don’t do these here. This was a real challenge for me because I’m a private practitioner — I had just rescheduled a whole day of work. What I ended up having to do was run to the ferry, take it to the nearest hospital on the Cape, and provide a sperm sample. Because it was not a clinic that specialized in fertility or an LGBTQ-affirming sperm bank, they had no place for me to do this. So I ended up on the floor of the men’s restroom producing sperm for my sperm analysis.

Mike: And that is an example — as I was on my back, feeling shame and thinking, gosh, is this how my baby’s origin story starts? — of what we talked about as the subaltern body. I was in a place associated with excrement and waste, and yet that’s where my family was starting. And if I don’t start there, I’m not going to get to have a family. I don’t know if I ever told you that story, Heather, in the middle of our conversations.

Heather: You told me recently, when we were talking about the panel. We were discussing the trials of having bodies that don’t always get treated with the respect and care one would hope for. That’s certainly a moment where I’m sure you did not feel respected or cared for.

Mike: I didn’t. And contrast that with when the analysis came back as very viable sperm — yay me, right? My job was almost done, because then I needed to actually do my sperm donation. Having had that experience, I made it a point to go to New York and go to a donor clinic, where it was such a different experience. I felt cared for. I had privacy and comfort. I was sitting in a room rather than on the floor of a restroom. I’d like to say that’s where the family journey started, but that’s not the reality of it.

Katie: And even the experience at a donor clinic carries its own layers of shame for bodies that need to ejaculate for the process. In the handful of places I looked at in New York, they were filled with hetero porn. So there are so many levels of potential shame, rage, and of simply being interpolated as not belonging. This is not for you. Not to mention — as if we don’t all have fantasies — the fact that the porn was strictly heterosexual was just so profoundly limited.

Mike: Yep. And so one place I want to acknowledge a power differential — and Heather, I hope you’ll speak to the other end of this — is the lengths society takes, even in my situation, to protect my masculinity and my virility. In the pamphlets about surrogacy and the intended parent journey, it was made clear that if I had a difficult time ejaculating, they could withdraw the sperm easily, no problem. All of these attempts to make it seem like I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Mike: And as another subaltern body — shout out to people with HIV and AIDS — my sperm could be “washed,” so that even if it was considered “dirty,” it could still be used. Notice the layers of protection that my male privilege afforded me, even at the same time as I was being shamed and disenfranchised. But Heather, I don’t get the feeling that your eggs are treated as respectfully.

Heather: No. I remember having a conversation with my male OB-GYN at the time about what would be involved in freezing eggs or embryos. It was basically like — well, you know, it’s something that would be worth you doing because you’re very career-minded. Very businesslike and very medicalized. There wasn’t a lot of concern. It was like, oh, you’re going to take a whole bunch of shots, and then we’re going to do a surgery. And that surgery might be risky for you because you’re heavier than the average BMI. So you have to think really seriously about whether this is something that’s healthy for you. It was very discouraging. There wasn’t a lot of warmth or support.

Heather: I mean, partially that could have been just the medical provider I was seeing at the time. But I was going to someone who had been recommended because I’d worked in reproductive health for so long. They were very much thinking of me as a former clinic employee — medicalized — not as a patient or a person. And so it was very strange. They also knew that I was bisexual and that I didn’t have a male partner at the time. And they were like, well, this would be so much better if we were freezing embryos rather than eggs.

Mike: Right. Like — why haven’t you found a male partner yet? Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Heather: Right. Right. And then you think about it — Mike, you described rescheduling all your patients, taking the whole day off. And if you are harvesting eggs, that is exponentially more complicated in terms of all the shots, all the times you have to go in for early morning checks just to make sure you’re not over- or under-developing your ovaries. It is just constant surveillance.

Katie: So yeah, it’s very complicated and can be very painful. And the pressure — what’s striking is even in the story you were telling, Heather, where you’re being disparaged and shamed for your body, there’s still this pressure that your job is to make a baby. Whereas the other way this cuts, intersectionally, for Mike — he doesn’t have that pressure. But his wanting to be a parent and push through so many obstacles is suspect. Like, why are you working so hard for this? Why do you need to have a baby? Why can’t you try adoption again?

Mike: I can’t imagine most straight people are asked why they want to be a parent. But somehow I’m off the hook — it’s not my mandate — and therefore suspect. Like, why do you want a kid?

Heather: Yeah. And that goes to a lot of the stereotypes we have that are so incredibly malignant around queer and bi men. It’s getting better — maybe. God knows there’s big backlash. But there is an understanding of why a person with a uterus would want to carry, and there isn’t the same respect given to fathers, or the same pressure placed on them. Yeah, I wasn’t questioned so much as a bi woman about why I wanted a child. I was questioned about why I didn’t have a male partner to help me.

Mike: Yep. So that was a given — obviously you’d want to have a baby. The question was just, where are we going to get the sperm?

Heather: Right. Clearly you want to be a mother. But where are we going to get the sperm? You should have thought of that one ahead of time.

Eugenics, Genetics, and Queer Family Assembly

Mike: Yeah, really. You know, one of the things that we talked about when we all met before, that I think is useful now, is how eugenics — or accusations of eugenics — enter into this. Since my daughter has arrived and my partner has taken her to work, one of his coworkers has said, “She is so pretty. That’s not fair. You got to use the best genes.” And I can’t tell you how many times people approach our new family and ask, “So, how did you have this baby?” — as if the inner workings of my genetic material or my social engagement with paternity are anybody’s business.

Mike: The liberties people take — I equate it, and I know it’s a false equivalency, but I equate it to people just feeling like they can put their hand on a pregnant woman’s abdomen and intrude into their space. It’s nobody’s business how this child happened. It took me years as a social worker to unpack this sense of shame — that if I could leverage any privilege I’ve had to have a biological child, I should be morally obligated to have a child by adoption instead, or not have a child at all, because there are already children in the world who need care, and somehow as a subaltern body I’m responsible to do it that way.

Heather: Right. I mean, it’s also interesting — now that I’ve been partnered with my partner for quite some time and he’s male, the question becomes, “Well, why don’t you have children?” Like, where is the child in this scenario? You’re now in the quote-unquote proper heterosexual dyad. Why is there not a child here? And I think I was joking when we met last time — it’s kind of like, well, I missed my window. Most of my reproductive years I was dating women, not men. And I didn’t do the sort of preemptive egg freezing that people in that situation theoretically do.

Heather: But to do psychic violence to your past relationships — to reduce your relationships with women to “frittering away your time when you should have been working on having a baby” — that just seems like… you know, that’s where bisexuality comes in, right? We’re always supposed to either be having everything at once, or we’re not really queer at all. The framing is that your queerness wasted your valuable time.

Katie: Yeah. As you’ve talked about in so many points today, it really hits home — the subaltern aspects of desire, pleasure, bodies. And towards victim blaming, but a specific kind. I also wanted to go back to the egg donor, because when someone is donating sperm they don’t have to provide their picture, but when you’re donating an egg, you do. And that idea that an egg is the donor in a way that sperm isn’t always seen as the donor in the same way. And of course that’s about heteropatriarchal stereotypes about maternity. Eggs are there from the beginning while sperm is constantly reproduced — but it’s no more a reproduction of the person. So the idea that you were able to choose a “beautiful egg,” as if that matters, as if that was your qualification — it’s just obnoxious that physical appearance is the qualification for egg donors.

Mike: Yeah. Well, it is a little creepy looking at all these pictures of people and reading the profiles. My husband has his own recollection, but my recollection is that we picked our egg donor because — sure, there was a physical attractiveness — but also she looked like she could be related to my husband. She was also a social worker. And in my recollection, she was Jewish, and I wanted some Jewish heritage as part of this.

Mike: What I do want to come back to about the sperm is that there’s a conversation that needs to happen one way or another in same-sex surrogacy: whose sperm are we going to use? Do we just leave it up to luck? We had a very clear discussion. My husband wanted it to be my sperm, for medical reasons. But there was this medicalization even then — we were looking at the different diagnoses and health concerns in our families and rating which sperm was “better.” It wasn’t about our pictures, but there is this pressure: in queer family assembly, you’ve got to make the right choice.

Heather: Yeah, that’s so fascinating. Because even as a hetero woman partnered with a male going through it, there’s so much choice — you have to make so many decisions that aren’t made if, whoops, the condom broke. Which, historically, the majority of live births have been quote-unquote accidents. So the idea that somehow one whole segment of the population is off the hook for doing it perfectly, while this other section is told, “Did you think through everything?”

Mike: Yep. Well, Katie, you’re going to love this because it’s right up your alley — when you have a frozen embryo, you know to the day, the moment of conception, and the exact number of days and weeks. So we’ve got The Bump — that lovely app you can program with the exact date — and you know supposedly whether everything’s going along the right way or not. Talk about surveillance. And talk about fetishizing a fetus.

Katie: Right, exactly. And your daughter can actually be “backdated,” as was tried in court by a sex offender — a whole other story. Someone was trying to use that to establish that the victim was of age. Fortunately the judge said no.

Mike: So this is a good point to acknowledge that Katie troubled my pregnancy in a very important way. I had encountered the idea of the fetishization of the fetus and all of her work before seeing the ultrasound. On one hand, I was reading this stuff and thinking, yeah, she’s right, this is really annoying — ultrasounds are another way of fetishizing something, and if we saw MRIs we would be freaked out. And then I see my daughter’s hand coming out of the darkness of an ultrasound, and then withdrawing. And I know she’s waving at me.

Mike: I experienced that. So my brain is sort of like: oh, I am part of the problem. But I want to be part of the problem. I want my daughter to be waving at me, telling me she’s coming.

Katie: Of course. And you want your daughter kicking and all those things. But you are not dissociating your daughter from the surrogate carrying her.

Heather: Yeah, I mean, yeah. It is the whole picture, and you were holding the whole picture.

The Surrogate

Katie: Yeah. So maybe let’s talk about the surrogate for a second.

Mike: So the surrogate — also a social worker, by the way. In Oklahoma, social workers get it done. When we met her over Zoom to decide whether this might be a good fit, the reason she appealed to both my husband and myself was that when we asked her why she was doing this, she didn’t say, “Just because I want to help people build a family.” She said, “I have two children and I want to save up money for a down payment on a house here in Oklahoma.”

Mike: And the fact that she was able to acknowledge — and I don’t think she would have framed it this way, but — that we were all in a capitalist system, and that this was something deeply personal but also a business arrangement with financial costs and benefits on both sides. It felt like she was real. It felt like she genuinely understood and was offering something to us, while we were able to offer something to her in turn. She texted us probably two months into carrying our daughter saying, “Guys, I want to thank you. I put down a down payment on our house today.” And by the time she gave birth to our daughter, she had moved into her new home.

Mike: So it felt like not necessarily an even trade, but it felt like we were both offering something of value to the other person — all the while acknowledging this capitalist framework. Which is uncomfortable, as a social worker spending this money to make a baby.

Paternity Leave and Oklahoma

Mike: So, before I went to Oklahoma, I had to arrange my paternity leave. And Heather, this is where I’m curious how this felt for you. The patients I work with — I have a couple of folks, especially one who’s a New Yorker and queer, and another who’s from Massachusetts and a geek and a gamer — and as I was trying to set up coverage for my paternity leave, I was like, ugh, Heather would be perfect for these two people. But I can’t ask her to do that. I’ve already heard how distressing this whole situation is for her. And yet it would be so good for these patients. I was already feeling guilty for leaving them to have a baby. I forget how I approached you, Heather, but when I did, I was feeling guilty and yet feeling like you were the best choice for them.

Heather: Yeah, I think you emailed me, so I didn’t really get the sense of the guilt. But I was actually quite excited about the prospect, because you said both clients were people you felt we’d interact really well with. And it was a way — I’d already crocheted a blanket for your baby — but this was a way I could support you in building your family that felt really good to me and really generative. It felt like an inclusion. So it was actually a really sweet moment to be like, oh, yeah, I can help you in this paternity leave and work with these clients who you say will probably be a really good fit. And I met with them, and they were a really good fit.

Heather: And it was very interesting because both of the clients you had transferred to me had a lot of transference issues around you having a baby. I didn’t really think about how you might have felt about it until the day you called to officially go on paternity leave. I think that’s an important phone call to talk about, because I could tell the distress you were going through — and at the same time this sense of: I’m checked out. Like, I need to check out now.

Mike: So that was so, so tough. Surrogate agencies recommend you be in the same place as your surrogate three weeks prior to the delivery date, because surrogates often go early. So my husband and I uprooted ourselves and moved into a hotel in Oklahoma, across the street from the hospital. And I — a pretty liberal queer guy — was stuck in Oklahoma for three weeks.

Mike: And I was still seeing my patients. I’m in a hotel room seeing my patients, including the ones Heather’s going to cover for, because I don’t know exactly when I’m going to get the call. Everyone has been prepared. But there’s a part of me feeling — and I think this might have been an amplification of some of the earlier queer stuff I was talking about — like I was taking everyone along for a ride. My patients had to wait to see when this was going to happen. Heather had to wait and see. I’d literally uprooted my husband and myself. Our dogs are still at home, but we’re living in Oklahoma for three weeks. I felt like I was inconveniencing everyone.

Mike: And at the same time I was feeling frustrated with the surrogate, because she’d asked us to be there early for support — so of course we’d done the right thing. And then she goes to the day. To the point where the OB-GYN and she agreed they were going to induce the pregnancy. When I got the call that the induction was scheduled for Thursday night, I was driving down a street in Oklahoma, pulled into a cul-de-sac with all these suburban houses, and called Heather on speakerphone with my husband. “Heather, we are going to be having our baby tomorrow. We’re getting induced, and I’m going to be letting my patients know that my paternity leave starts now.”

Mike: I timed it so close — with family and medical leave, you have to figure out the exact day to get maximum coverage. But I was already done, in some ways, with work. I was relinquishing it. And I was relinquishing it with some terror, because I’ve been a therapist for 30 years — I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’m competent, I know how to do therapy. And I know I am totally unprepared for what’s about to happen. So I was giving the one part of myself that feels competent over to Heather. And although I’d given her lots of notice, it was suddenly feeling very real that this was the end point, and I was going to be going on paternity leave.

Countertransference: Covering the Patients

Heather: Yeah, I remember that phone call, and trying to be very gentle and supportive and excited for you, while also knowing — okay, tomorrow I’m meeting with your clients. We’d known that was going to happen, but we weren’t sure of exactly when.

Heather: And it was very interesting: both of the clients you had transferred to me had a lot of transference issues around you having a baby. One was mad that you were having a baby because you were, in his mind, replacing him — he wouldn’t say it quite that way, but it was like, how dare he go off and be with someone else? Another was very passionately, on the one hand, happy for you, but also angry that you were having a child — how could you have a child in this world? And really working through, over the next twelve weeks, what it means to have your therapist go off and have a baby when you yourself don’t believe in having children. And dealing with some of the anger and depression, but then also the deep care he had for you, and knowing that he should be happy for you — a lot of very mixed emotions.

Heather: And in the countertransference — I think part of the reason we started talking about doing this panel is that I was able to sit with them and sit with my own frustration and anger and grief in the countertransference. And it was a very healing experience for me, to be able to sit there and be like, here’s a client who is actually angry — I can sort of vicariously experience some of that anger in a safe way for myself and metabolize it. Which is a very selfish thing, but on the other hand, was something I needed to do with the client anyway. And it was quite powerful.

Katie: I think the way you describe it is very powerful and really important. Because I wonder — all of this is normal when someone goes on maternity or paternity leave, but especially paternity leave, or when you’re not the gestating person. And knowing how much one person has had to go through — the capacity to be angry can be so snuffed out by the guilt. I think it is really important to have spaces to say: you know, it wasn’t easy for Mike. But — damn him.

Heather: Right. Right.

Mike: Great. Well, and it helps to know that, because at the same time, when I got the blanket or when Heather was being gentle and supportive, part of me was like — we’re both therapists, right? How much of this is reaction formation? She’s being a good friend, but is she being too good a friend? Are you being too patient? Oh wait, maybe it’s not reaction formation. Maybe it’s my neurosis about not being able to take in goodness.

Heather: Hey, maybe it’s both.

Mike: Maybe it’s both. And by the way, Heather — the patient you’re talking about, about not wanting to bring a child into this world — that’s Adam?

Heather: Yeah.

Mike: He has never said that to me. This is the first time I am hearing this belief about the world. And we’ve talked about children and choices. He’s also a Palestinian American, by the way. He has never shared with me this sense of — for understandable reasons, maybe.

Heather: No, he was protecting you. He’s been protecting you.

Mike: What was it like doing the treatment with these two fellows?

Heather: It was really quite interesting. For one of them, it was definitely a placeholder — I felt like I was there, but you were always in the room. We’d have these conversations and there was always this kind of, “I wonder what Mike would think.” And I would be like, “Yeah, that’s interesting. What do you think Mike would think?” That kind of conversation. Whereas with the other client, I felt there was more of a direct connection. I think partly that was a reaction to the anger he was feeling — like, oh, I can actually just express this anger to you, and you can be here and present for it in a way that Mike was not able to be, or that he didn’t want you to be, to protect you.

Heather: I really felt like it was a very interesting dynamic. And it was very interesting to get to the twelve weeks and start working toward termination — to be like, well, how do you feel? Because Mike’s going to be back. Both of them had really interesting reactions. On the one hand, one really wanting to reconnect with you, but still being kind of mad that you’d left him. And the other having very mixed emotions — really wanting to see you, but at the same time feeling very attached to me in that moment. He probably has never mentioned me again. In that moment of termination, it was very difficult. I had to kind of say, well, hey, listen, if Mike were on vacation or something, I could always do a session with you — I’m not disappearing off the face of the earth — and sort of ease back into: you need to go back to your therapist who has been working with you for years. Know that you have my support in doing that, and I will hold you in mind.

Mike: Both of these patients have mentioned you, Heather, and I’ve told you this. There is this sort of element — the two associations I have are the babysitter when the parent comes back, needing to kind of convey, “I’m not going to stay here, that was my role.” And the other one I’ve always been unsettled by: the Brady Bunch episode where Alice went away and they had Kay, the other housekeeper. Kay was very good at what she did, but she wasn’t Alice. And you were supposed to be okay with kind of leaving and understanding that was her role. I always thought that was a little gross in some ways. I don’t think my patients experienced you that way, but I do think there was this sense of: dad’s back, babysitter’s time to go.

Mike: But I also wonder — when you were talking with them — did you encounter your own anger or frustration at me for doing this?

Heather: I think it’s kind of funny, because my unconscious anger at people who “get to” be parents came out afterwards. I remember we were having a conversation at one point, after you’d had your daughter and I’d seen the pictures and everything, and I remember making a comment to you like, “So, have you gone over to the dark side? Are you one of them now?” Joking about it, but — that’s definitely that part of me that’s like: this is a foreclosed experience for me. And I have some anger about that. And for me, anger tends to come out sideways and in jokes. So I’m not surprised it came out that way.

Mike: Yeah, and I heard it. I do think you were talking about a moment of loss or a rupture in our relationship — had I gone from being a queer ally to one of the heteronormative people? It came up when we first started planning this workshop, when I came on to the meeting with you and Katie and said something like, “Dad brain is a thing.” And I can’t tell you how tremendously validating — and so weird for me, because I prize my intellect almost above everything — but to have “dad brain” validated in that heteronormative way, that all these other sleep-deprived, unfocused parents can now relate to. This has somehow become a virtue. I can understand how that can be alienating to the queer other.

Heather: Yeah. And I wonder — ARTs obviously give a much wider swath of the population the opportunity to have biological children. At the same time, they also enfold queer families into hetero structures in a certain way. Like having “dad brain.” And there’s a patriarchal element to it. I’m thinking about a colleague of mine who couldn’t come to a meeting yesterday because she’s the mother of a teething nine-month-old. The difference is: “Dad brain — oh, that’s so great, you’re such an involved father!” versus “mom brain” — which can translate to, “Why can’t you pull it together?” I’m using stereotypes, but I still think gender binaries rule through here.

Mike: You’re right. I am here doing this presentation while my daughter is in the other room in a playpen. I want to be spending time with her. And how good it is that I can see myself as that deprived parent — like, all of this, let’s be honest, I love talking, I love doing presentations, this is, in some ways, more fun than being with a ten-month-old. In some ways it’s not. But all of that is complicated for me.

Mike: And the last thing I’ll say about this: as a queer parent, I can never get it right. As a queer parent, I’m always being questioned. People assume I’m gay now because I have a same-sex relationship — I’m not. People come up to me and ask me my relationship with this baby, or try to find out the origin story. It feels like my work is never done.

Katie: And you’re right, this does have to do with capitalism. I wondered — and maybe I’m off here — but when you were talking about Kay, I was thinking: I wonder if the surrogate is hovering around in there, in the sense of care literally as a capitalist thing — and then gone.

Mike: Yeah. Well, let me speak to that really quickly. The surrogate did this really healthy and intellectually appropriate thing: when we were saying goodbye to her at the hospital — because we were all kind of in adjoining rooms for the first two days — she left, and of course she said, “You can always send pictures if you want to.” But when we sent her a picture or a note, it was clear she wasn’t interested. It was clear that the transaction was done. And that was very reasonable.

Mike: And yet I had had this whole fantasy that on Mother’s Days we were going to celebrate the egg donor and the surrogate as the women who had helped make our family — this lovely idea we’d have for our daughter, sort of sidestepping the idea that she didn’t have a mother. And poof, that went up in smoke, because this surrogate was being very sensible and had very good boundaries. I respect all of that. And I was like, wow — I had thought that I could get out of this queer family-making without any losses.

Heather: Right. Yeah. She’s going to have two daddies.

Mike: My daughter’s not going to have a mom. And it’s always going to be: she has two daddies — in a society that thinks she should have a daddy and a mom. And a society that thinks the daddy is somewhat expendable.

Katie: Yes. And even that is intersectional.

The Aunties

Mike: But she has the aunties. You should tell about the aunties.

Katie: Right, right. Oh my God. Yes, we should talk about the aunties. And Heather — this may be the place to invite you. If you decide you want to be an honorary auntie, you are invited.

Heather: Aww.

Mike: We do have two aunties. When my husband and I were in the process of starting our surrogacy, it became really clear that we needed more powerful women in our daughter’s and our own lives. So we have two friends — one who lives near me, and one who has been a friend of mine since college. They are the aunties. And if ever my husband or I are having a dispute about child-rearing or being parents, either of us can say, “I invoke the aunties.” We text the aunties our dilemma and the aunties give us information.

Mike: So the first time this happened: I was saying we should really have a baby shower — something we could share with our friends and family. And David was like, absolutely not. I don’t want them. They’re performative. I don’t like asking people for gifts. And I said, “I invoke the aunties.” We texted the aunties, and they replied very quickly: “Yes, you will be having a shower, and we will be hosting it.” And they did the whole thing. The aunties don’t disagree. The aunties are clearly oriented on our daughter. Interestingly, one of the aunties doesn’t have biological children of her own. She’s a single woman in a family of six siblings, with lots of nieces and nephews. But it’s a powerful role — we will abide by what the aunties say.

Katie: And I think that’s so beautiful — what a way to incorporate strong women in your daughter’s life.

Mike: Although I’m also being strategic about it. Since we’re talking about bodies in praxis: at certain periods of time, my daughter is going to encounter her body in a way that I am not equipped to have expertise on. And I’m going to need strong, body-positive women — which these two women both are — to intervene and invite into the conversation.

Katie: That’s a great point. And they can’t just suddenly appear, because that would also make the body seem weird.

Mike: Yep. So the idea is they’ll be integrated the entire way.

Questions from Participants

Katie: I haven’t been paying attention to chat — we have eleven things in there. Yeah, we should probably answer some questions. We’re at 3:17, so we definitely have time. Comments have been pretty reaffirming, including around capitalism and the ways that maybe capitalism is ignored in hetero family configurations and more visible or projected onto queer configurations. Let’s go to hands raised — I know Jess and then Judy had their hands up.

Jess: I just wanted to say thank you. I’m a queer parent. My area of practice is perinatal mental health and family building, so I work almost exclusively with people who are pregnant, postpartum, or anywhere along the family-building journey, whatever that looks like for them. I’ve carried two pregnancies with my wife, using donor sperm and my eggs, and I have two stepchildren who my wife had previously adopted. So I feel like we are the Mod Podge of all the different ways a family can look.

Jess: Between thinking about my own experience and my professional experience, I really appreciate how this session was set up. I’ve had the easiest time staying focused and engaged through this Zoom session than I have in a long time. I don’t know that I have a very pointed question, but I was thinking about Mike and Heather and the countertransference toward each other, and how it resonates with the client–therapist relationship when one of them is pregnant. In my own experience working with a lot of pregnant or postpartum people seeking mental health treatment, being pregnant myself in that space evokes so much — wanting to be delicate, not wanting to assume what patients are thinking or feeling. I was almost reminded of that gentle dance when the two of you were talking about, “I didn’t want to make you feel bad, I didn’t know what it was going to be like for you to hear this.” I just wanted to make that association.

Mike: That’s really great, and I hope it’ll be written about. And I’ll say — I took a few risks today talking about or pointing out certain things that I hadn’t before. This is the third or fourth time we’ve had these conversations.

Katie: And I want to give credit to Mike and Heather because they’re the ones who came up with the format for this.

Heather: One thing I wanted to say about that gentle dance — when I was working in reproductive health for several years as a counselor, I remember when one of my colleagues got pregnant and we were working mainly with termination clients. The very delicate dance around: you know, I’m pregnant, but it’s the right time for me to be pregnant, whereas maybe this isn’t the right time for you. It was a very complex conversation. And in some ways the gentleness that Mike and I show each other around this reminds me of that.

Mike: Yeah. The other thing we didn’t talk about, but Heather and I have: because you have been so gentle about this, I was able to initiate moments of conversation about — I’m not sure I want to be a dad. I know I’m in the second trimester and I’m not sure I want to be a dad. Am I betraying the queer parent party line by saying that? And how dare I say that to you when you have just told me you can’t be a parent. How dare I be ambivalent? But that gentleness we’ve had has allowed us to have that conversation.

Heather: Well, and the funny thing about it is that when you would bring that up to me, all of my friends who’ve been pregnant at various times have had that conversation with me about, “Oh my God, what do I think I’m doing?” It was very sweet to see you go through that as a queer man in that setting — where I’m usually having this conversation with younger women. I was like, oh, dads get to be ambivalent too.

Mike: It’s true. And we’re safe enough to be ambivalent with each other. Judy, did you want to speak?

Judy: Yeah, thank you. First of all, I apologize because I was late — I think maybe ten or fifteen minutes late. I just appreciate this so much. I was thinking in terms of capitalism — I have patients, one who’s doing surrogacy for medical reasons and can’t have a child, in a cis heteronormative relationship, and another person who’s desperately trying to get pregnant. And both — it feels so much like the state has now become involved in their bodies and their lives. I’m watching this and it’s pretty agonizing on many levels.

Judy: One thing I was thinking about is this contradiction about the medicalization of birth. Capitalism has medicalized something that historically was not always a medical event. And yet the fact that this gives so much potential to some people. I feel like that’s a contradiction — because when I heard you say they were inducing on the due date, part of me was like, that’s not necessarily great for everybody. I’m thinking about how urgently needed this kind of intervention is for equity and equality — and yet there’s also a complication to it. That’s what I wanted to name.

Mike: Oh, well, let me throw two quick stories out for you. The first one — an unfun fact: when you do a gestational carrier or surrogacy agreement, now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, you have to acknowledge that if your surrogate chooses to terminate the pregnancy for health reasons — which we would support — we are liable to be fined up to $10,000 as complicit in that criminal act. I was just at Dorothy’s talk prior, which I thought was really powerful. I want to add: don’t think that people with certain amounts of privilege are not also being surveilled or at risk from the state.

Mike: And now for the medical piece — let me invite you into our delivery room. At the point where our surrogate had been in labor and the baby had crowned, and the surrogate was feeling fatigued, the OB-GYN came in and wanted to use forceps. And I had this dilemma as a social worker with a developmental history background: I want to both respect the woman’s right to autonomy over her body, and I also know that forceps are implicated in higher adverse outcomes. So I began to ask, do we really need to do that right now? The OB-GYN began to argue with me about it. Fortunately, while that thirty-second conversation was happening, my surrogate gave the second push and the baby was born.

Mike: But that moment of medicalization — where a person is internally asking, do I support the baby here? Do I support the mom here? Do I support both? Where’s my role to advocate, because now I’m a dad? — all of this is framed and embedded in that medicalization. To Judy’s point, we wouldn’t have had this opportunity decades ago, but we wouldn’t have had that dilemma decades ago either…Gosh, there’s a lot there. First off, as a footnote, I’d like to request that Katie write something on the fetishization of DNA. In terms of realness — it helps to have a lovely family narrative. Fortunately, I have one with my in-laws. My parents are my parents, and suffice it to say they’re not going to be heavily involved. Whereas I was holding out hope for my father-in-law. We had not yet disclosed that we were pregnant when he became ill with bladder cancer. He had told my husband that David needed to get ready to say goodbye, because he wasn’t going to do this treatment — he’d had enough of a life and was satisfied.

Mike: Well, I got on the phone with him and I said, “You know what? I’ve got news for you. You’re about to become a grandfather. I really would like to see those reports and I would like to support you through making a different choice.” When he found out we were pregnant, he changed his mind. He has now gone through two iterations of treatment, and he got to meet his granddaughter several times. And she is his granddaughter — you can tell.

Mike: The realness piece — I can’t speak for every queer family, just like you can’t. But what I can share from my own neurosis is that I walk around fairly consistently feeling like I’m getting messages that I’m not really a dad. That I’m playing dolly with a human being. That it’s very hard for people to take me seriously as a parent without a wife.

Heather: That’s such a dad thing. That’s what Katie was speaking to — the trivialization and not taking seriously of fathers or of men as parents.

Mike: Yep. And it’s hard for me to tell: is it because I’m neurotic? Because I’m queer? Because I’m a dad? All of the above.

Katie: Yeah. But you’re also, you know — in terms of dense temporality — it’s resonating all the way through. It’s like a huge gong. Wound upon wound opening.

Mike: Well, it’s not just that I’m the dad — I’m the queer dad. How many horrible wounds is that? The culture sees it as a lack, and it’s not a lack, it’s a wound. But the culture sees it as a lack.

Mike: Well, so the other day in couples therapy, my husband said very loudly, “I am the primary caregiver for my daughter.” And I was both insulted and relieved. I was insulted because I’m competitive with him and I don’t think that’s true. And I feel like my role is threatened. And thank God my husband sees our daughter as his daughter, even though he doesn’t share genetic material. Thank God I’m having to hear this and feel horrible about it. But maybe all of you who are parents are going to tell me this is what parenting is like — that it’s a constant ball of nails and wax that you just have to navigate. It’s new to me.

Josh: I know I already spoke, but I wanted to say — I hear all of that so deeply. Also, in my case, my wife did not contribute any genetic material. So when our kids are total monsters, they’re her children. And when they’re angels, they’re my children. There’s flexibility there to keep in mind.

Josh: I’m curious about your relationship with your patients and preparing for paternity leave — what that involved in terms of information-giving and questions. Because for my wife, she was going out on maternity leave but wasn’t pregnant, so she got a lot of questions. In your case, I don’t know what your patients knew, if they knew you were in a relationship with another man, if they had questions. I’m curious about that coming-out process, and if it came up.

Mike: Hmm. Yeah, so it’s a little complicated. First off, you can pretty much read my website — my philosophy page is called “Woke Psychotherapy,” so it’s pretty clear what my political leanings are. And most people who know I’ve served on the Mass Commission for LGBTQIA Youth read me as queer. One of my patients — this is Max I’m talking about, Heather — is really kind of in his own little bubble and doesn’t necessarily ask questions about me or my life. He has voiced that he imagines I might be bi, or gay, or straight, but then he kind of interrupts it by saying, “I don’t really want to know. I don’t want to think about you.”

Mike: The other patient had a much harder time with it, because as I was navigating this paternity leave with him, I was also discussing coming out as bi to him in treatment. And he experienced my bisexual identity as a betrayal. Up until that point, he had read me, based on my website, as gay, had imagined an affinity and affiliation based on gay culture. And experienced a kind of double betrayal: a betrayal of identity, and a betrayal of me leaving him to exercise my hetero privilege and reproduce.

Mike: There was a way in which — at least my experience as a surrogate psychodynamic therapist — you can plan things out better because they’re planned out for you. It takes, as Liz alluded to, about two and a half to three times as long to have a baby this way, but there are set steps and you can plan them. By the same token, when you have those set steps, you’re also outing yourself as someone using ART, as someone having a family in a non-traditional way. Straight families don’t have to travel to Oklahoma for three weeks to wait. So I felt, at the beginning, that if I told people I was going on paternity leave, I was going to have to also come out and tell them it was a surrogate paternity leave.

Closing: Where Is the Baby?

Katie: I do want to raise a question. I think we’re coming to the end of our time — but as you reflect on this whole conversation: where is the baby in this? Have any of us really seen your daughter? I have the sense that you’re going to have to spend your entire life struggling to see her through this miasma of capitalism, anti-queerness, and heteronormativity. Where is your daughter in all of this?

Heather: I was going to say — she’s in the other room.

Mike: Yes. Yep. But no, that’s an excellent point. In some ways I’d say that in cis-hetero families, the capitalist product is less pronounced — it’s still there, just less visible. And I’m not trying to diminish any of the conflicts you talked about having to keep navigating.

Mike: Now that my daughter is pre-verbal and not necessarily hearing some of these things — when she is about to tip over, I allow myself to say, “Do not hurt yourself. We spent $200,000. We don’t have another $200,000.” I can’t say those things to her once she can understand them. I can’t weigh her down with that burden. Or can I? Are there straight parents who also had to sacrifice and give up things to be a parent?

Heather: I think they do.

Katie: Well, and dare I say it — since sperm counts are plummeting around the globe, the “whoopses” are going to be fewer and fewer. And we will talk about that tomorrow at noon.

Mike: I really appreciate you guys bringing me into this, because I think it was one of my most favorite experiences.

This is the text from a presentation I did at Division 39 Spring Meeting on Black Mirror and AI:

Before I go on, I should locate myself as a cis bisexual white man who grew up in a lower middle class that no longer exists.

I’m not going to bury the lead:

Technophobia = Transphobia = Homophobia = Xenophobia

Technophobia is one of the ways institutions keep individuals enthralled (in multiple senses) in hegemony. Colonial hegemony wants to keep us within the confines of a very constrained white cis heteronormative body of a specific shape size and ability, and technology ruins all that. Technology thwarts attempts to make gender fixed and binary, with a history stretching back to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Germany in 1919, which pioneered early hormone therapies and gender-affirming surgeries before being destroyed by the Nazis. In the 1950s, Christine Jorgensen’s widely publicized transition brought gender medicine into public consciousness, and Harry Benjamin’s work established transsexual as a clinical category. Today technological interventions span hormone therapies including estrogen, anti-androgens, testosterone, and GnRH agonists; surgical procedures including vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, mastectomy, and facial feminization surgery; body technologies such as chest binding, packing, stand-to-pee devices, breast forms, and hip padding; and appearance tools including laser hair removal, wigs, and contouring. Voice therapy, AI-assisted coaching, telehealth platforms, online support communities, and emerging research into uterine transplantation and stem cell applications. At every point, the technology does the same thing: it refuses the body as destiny.

Technologies liberating same and bi-sex individuals stretch back equally far. In the 19th century, coded correspondence carried through postal systems allowed discreet long-distance communication. Private telephone networks and community switchboards enabled organizing in the early 20th century, and underground newsletters circulated within queer communities long before mainstream acceptance. The post-war Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis distributed mimeographed publications to build community under legal persecution, and computer bulletin board systems in the 1970s and 80s created the first digital queer spaces. Modern technologies include sociosexual apps such as Grindr, HER, and Scruff; encrypted messaging and VPNs vital in countries where homosexuality is criminalized; crowdfunding platforms for legal battles; and antiretroviral therapy and PrEP, which transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition and enabled a generation to survive. Streaming platforms, podcasting, and self-publishing have broken the gatekeeping of queer representation in media, while AI-powered mental health tools and digital legal aid platforms now support those fleeing persecution.

Technologies liberating BIPOC people include the printing press as infrastructure for Black freedom. Frederick Douglass’s North Star, founded in 1847, used print to challenge slavery directly, and the printing office itself served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Ida B. Wells wielded journalism as anti-lynching activism, and early 20th-century publications used mass printing to inform, organize, and galvanize Black communities nationwide. The telephone enabled rapid civil rights coordination across cities and states; radio carried movement speeches and music to mass audiences; and documentary photography and television broadcasts of police violence forced the reality of racial terror into white living rooms. Contemporary tools extend this lineage: smartphone cameras and social media platforms have made the documentation of police brutality impossible to suppress, enabling movements like Black Lives Matter to organize at scale. Body liberation has advanced through cosmetics technology finally engineered for deeper skin tones, hair care designed for natural and afro-textured hair, fashion technology embracing diverse body types, and medical advocacy correcting the racial bias baked into devices like pulse oximeters. Fintech and mobile banking have expanded financial access where traditional banking excluded, e-commerce platforms have enabled Black and minority-owned businesses to reach markets, and DNA ancestry technology has helped reconnect people with heritage severed by slavery and colonization. Digital archiving, indigenous language preservation platforms, and streaming services enabling BIPOC storytelling complete a picture in which technology has served, repeatedly and across centuries, as a tool of liberation of the bodies and stories that white supremacy would prefer to contain.

That is by no means an exhaustive list of how technology and embracing it (yes, even AI) has made life better for humans as often as not. And in our field of psychoanalysis the people who are most likely to decry technology are those whose relative power and privilege are most likely to be destabilized by it. Technophobia, therefore, seeks to repress liberation as often as not, and is in fact a form of splitting that gets challenged in the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero.”

San Junipero explores three questions: Freud’s concept of the uncanny and the blurring of the animate and inanimate; what makes an identity real when it exists only in a virtual space; and how technology functions as a transitional space where play, desire, and the boundaries of self become fluid.

Shortly after World War I, Freud sought to explore what he called “a special core of feeling” present in the uncanny. Freud was most taken by Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as “the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”

That definition should sound familiar to us. It is essentially the project of psychoanalysis.

What arouses the uncanny? One example casts “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”

Freud uses as his primary example a story by Hoffmann, “The Sand Man,” a gothic tale of a man who falls in love with Olympia, the “beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless” daughter of an inventor. The big reveal is that Olympia is a clockwork automaton, a wooden doll with apparently human parts, including bleeding eyes that are ripped out and found on the floor. Let us be uncareful here: an automaton, a robot, a cyborg with human parts that define her inhumanity? Nathaniel, the young man who loved her, goes mad.

Freud’s language in the essay is rife with colonialist dualisms, linking animism, infantile perceptions of reality, and the “primitive”—all of which come to bear on the themes of the human and the machine, animate and inanimate, colonizer and subaltern.

San Junipero is a beachside party town. It is perpetually 1987 when we first encounter it, a sun-drenched California fantasy of neon, pop music, and the possibility of connection. Yorkie, a shy, awkward young white woman in oversized glasses, wanders into Tucker’s bar and meets Kelly, who is Black, magnetic, confident, and trying to get Yorkie to dance and to loosen up. Their chemistry is immediate and tentative.

What gradually becomes clear, is that San Junipero is a simulated reality. The people in it fall into two categories. Some are “tourists”—living people, still embodied in the real world, who visit for a limited number of hours each week. Others are “full-timers”—people who have died and whose consciousness has been uploaded permanently to the simulation. The town is populated by the living and the dead, and there is no visible way to tell them apart.

This is Freud’s uncanny made literal. The blurring of the animate and inanimate, the living and the dead, is not a metaphor in San Junipero. The dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities. They dance, they flirt, they argue, they grieve. And the living walk among them, equally simulated, equally pixelated, indistinguishable from those who have no body to return to.

For Freud the uncanny arises from doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive, or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate. San Junipero takes that doubt and makes it the condition of an entire world. When Kelly touches Yorkie, neither of them has a body that is doing the touching. When Yorkie flinches from intimacy, it is an avatar flinching. The question is not whether these feelings are real—the show goes to great lengths to demonstrate that they are—but what kind of real they are, and whether the category of the real requires a body in order to count.

This is where the concept of originary technicity becomes useful. Derrida, Bradley, and Stiegler have all argued that technology is not secondary to the human but constitutive of it. The human did not begin with the brain, but with the feet, which gave us the hand—our first technology, our first tool, and perhaps our first possession. Language itself is a technology that allowed our solutions to be portable, shareable, transmittable. What made our evolutionary cousin Paranthropus boisei go extinct was that its solutions were too bound to the body.

When we split originary technicity into a human on one side and a technology on the other, we set the stage for the kind of splitting psychoanalysis knows well. AI or simulation becomes the repository of all wisdom, or it has none to offer. Humans are fallible and unreliable, or we are keepers of a flame of passion and creativity that transcends the machine. We are warm and true; the machine is cold and fake. San Junipero refuses this split. The simulation is not cold or fake. It is the only place where Yorkie and Kelly can meet as they wish to be met.

In San Junipero, the residents are cyborgs of a sort—consciousness without biology, identity without fixed embodiment. They are neither fully alive nor fully dead. They are, in the deepest sense, uncanny.

Kelly is dying. In the “real” world she is an elderly woman with a terminal illness, a woman who was married for decades to a man she loved, who had a daughter they lost. She visits San Junipero as a tourist, trying on the simulation before she decides whether to be uploaded permanently after death.

Yorkie, it turns out, has been quadriplegic for decades, since a car accident that occurred after she came out to her conservative family as a young woman. Her biological body does not fit easily with the world she exists in. Ableist culture insists on deadening live humans all the time. San Junipero is where, finally, the breakdown can be experienced, gathered into what Winnicott called the patient’s own present time experience. It is where Yorkie can go on looking for the past detail which has not yet been experienced. And what she finds is Kelly.

Kelly, as far as we know from the text, has lived her entire embodied life as a heterosexual woman. She was married to a man for forty-nine years. But in San Junipero, she is attracted to and intimate with a woman. This raises a question that I think psychoanalysis is uniquely positioned to explore: Is Kelly bisexual? And if so, when did that identity become real?

I want us to think about what the episode shows us about the relationship between fantasy, embodiment, and identity. As far as we know, this is the first time Kelly has been intimate with a woman. And yet her desire is unmistakable. It is not experimental in the sense of being tentative or uncertain. It is alive.

So is it real? The traditional psychoanalytic move would be to locate the reality of desire in the body, in the enactment, in the lived history. But San Junipero asks us to reconsider this. Kelly’s body, such as it is in the simulation, is not her biological body. It is an avatar, a constructed representation that she has chosen. She has chosen to appear young. She has chosen this bar, this decade, this music. And in this space—this transitional space, as I would call it—she has also chosen Yorkie.

If psychoanalysis takes seriously the idea that fantasy is constitutive of psychic life, then the question of whether Kelly’s desire was ever “acted on bodily” in the biological sense may be the wrong question. Fantasy is not a lesser form of reality in psychoanalytic thought. It is the engine of psychic life. The fact that Kelly’s desire for women emerges in a simulated space does not make it less real.

Identity does not require a single originary moment of embodied action to be real. A bisexual person is bisexual whether or not they have been intimate with partners of more than one gender. Identity is not a behavioral checklist. And San Junipero, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates this beautifully: the virtual world, the play space, the simulation, becomes the place where what was hidden comes to light. Not because the technology created the desire, but because the technology—the transitional space—provided the conditions for it to emerge.

What makes an identity real? Does it require a body? Does a body altered by technology count? Does it require continuity of consciousness? Does it require recognition by others? Does it require action, or is desire sufficient?

In San Junipero, the full-timers have no bodies. They are dead. Their consciousness persists in a server farm somewhere. And yet they experience love, grief, boredom, joy. They make choices. They have histories, even if those histories are now entirely simulated. The tourists, who do have bodies, are no more “real” within the simulation. Everyone there is an avatar. Everyone is playing.

I have written elsewhere about how video games create uncanny spaces. In my writing on Minecraft, I discussed how the game world returns us to an uncanny state of being, characterized by the prompt fulfillment of wishes, secret injurious powers, and the return of the dead. Psychotherapy, I argued, is also an uncanny space, one that resembles the world outside the office and yet does not.

San Junipero is another such space. And within it, the question of identity becomes inextricable from the question of play. Winnicott told us that it is in playing and only in playing that the individual is able to be creative and use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. If San Junipero is a play space—and I would argue it is—then the selves that emerge within it, including Kelly’s bisexual self, are not less real for having emerged in simulation. They may in fact be more real, in the Winnicottian sense, because they have emerged from a space where the compliance and performance demanded by embodied social life has been, at least partially, suspended.

Winnicott also told us that compliance carries with it a sense of futility. How many of our patients have lived lives of compliance with respect to their sexuality, their gender, their deepest desires? How many have performed a self that was legible to the institutions they inhabited—the family, the marriage, the workplace, the analytic institute—at the cost of the spontaneity and aliveness that Winnicott associated with the True Self? San Junipero invites us to wonder what else might have been there, hidden all along.

The presence of deadness in San Junipero is not incidental to the episode’s themes. It is central. The dead are there. They are indistinguishable from the living. And the episode asks us, in a way that Freud’s uncanny essay prefigures: what do we do with the fact that we cannot tell them apart?

Freud associated the uncanny with the return of the repressed, with primitive beliefs about the dead that we think we have surmounted but which still lurk in us, ready to seize upon confirmation. But in San Junipero, this is not a failure. It is a technological achievement. It is a product. And it is marketed as something desirable. The dead in San Junipero are not ghosts. They do not haunt. They hang out. They go clubbing.

The closing credits, where the little storage drives are warehoused in server farms to the tune of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” bring home un uncomfortable analogy. The psyche repeats itself like a machine because the psyche is a machine. Neural networks are modeled on the brain because the brain is a very sophisticated wetware network. We want to locate what makes us us within our human bodies, forgetting that what has helped us persist is the ability to extend ourselves beyond the part of us that is human. San Junipero takes this to its logical conclusion: the self, extended entirely beyond the body, persisting in a machine, and still, somehow, recognizably a self.

What if the first not-me transitional object is techne? I reach beyond myself in my distress to soothe myself, and in doing so begin to know myself. San Junipero is the place where what is real becomes radically uncertain. The living and the dead coexist. Bodies are optional. Desire is freed from the constraints of biography. And identity is no longer tethered to the biological. Perhaps it never was.

Technology reveals things about us we would rather have kept hidden. San Junipero

reveals that the boundary between the animate and inanimate, the living and the dead, was always more porous than Freud’s Rationalism could comfortably admit. It reveals that identity—including sexual identity—does not require embodied action to be real, that desire in a play space is not less real but differently real, and that the transitional space of simulation can be the place where what was hidden finally comes to light.

Black Mirror reveals that our fear of technological breakdown—AI, simulation, the blurring of human and machine—may be, as Winnicott suggested about individual breakdown, the fear of something that has already occurred. We have always been entangled with our technologies. We have been cyborgs all along. And it reveals something about what psychoanalysis could be, if we can tolerate the uncanny long enough to stay in it. Not a humanist project that insists on the primacy of the biological body and the consulting room, but something more porous, more playful, more willing to follow our patients into the spaces where they actually live—including virtual ones. Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. (Haraway) San Junipero asks whether the monstrous—the hybrid, the uploaded, the neither-alive-nor-dead—might also define its possibilities.

To quote one of the great Marxist thinkers of our time, Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s:

     Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth?
     Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth
     They say in Heaven, love comes first
     We'll make Heaven a place on Earth
     Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth

References

AHMED, S. (2021). Willing Subjects. In Willful Subjects. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131d51.5

Christian, B. (2021). The alignment problem : machine learning and human values. In W. W. N. & C. publisher (Ed.), Machine learning and human values. W.W. Norton & Company

Dekeyser, T. (2024). Rethinking Posthumanist Subjectivity: Technology as Ontological Murder in European Colonialism. Theory, Culture and Society, 41(2), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764231178482

Freud, S. (2024). The revised standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (J. Strachey, A. Freud, M. Solms, & P. (Firm) (eds.)). Rowman & Littlefield.

Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical technologies : the design of everyday life. In Design of everyday life. Verso.

Haraway, D. J. (2026). A Cyborg Manifesto.

This is a paper I presented at this year’s Spring Meeting of Division 39 on psychoanalysis, Iran/U.S. relations, hatred and hope:

Prologue

There was a time when we had no hands, only four feet and a face used for grasping vegetation and breathing and smelling food or danger. And then, according to the paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan (1993 [1964, 1965]) our ancestral cousin, Paranthropus boisei, stood up. Our direct ancestor, homo erectus, could stand as well; and with standing we lost two feet and gained hands. These hands were our first technology, our first tool, and perhaps our first possession. But unlike our cousin, who never perfected the use of the face for more than eating or smelling, homo erectus freed its face from the ground, which freed us to have speech, which gave us language. And language, unlike the other tools that Paranthropus boisei developed, allowed our solutions to be portable, shareable and transmittable from one being to another. Our cousin’s solutions were too bound to the body, and so exit, Paranthropus boisei.

Technology invented the human just as much as it was invented by it. The hominid stands in an environment where feet become hands, hands create tools which change the environment, allowing access to new environments and possibilities; freeing up teeth from grinding to create language, pushing symbol sets and ideas out of the body into language and culture, changing the brain and creating the human, and creating intergenerational societies where systems of economics, politics and technology continue to spiral outward.

When our originary technicity is split, it becomes very easy to imbue one or the other side with the goodness or badness psychoanalysis discusses so frequently. This splitting, this moment, when we decide that the human and the technology are separate things; one organic and primary, the other mechanical and secondary — goes on to produce introjected technologies: the procedures, protocols, and institutional forms that we have taken in so thoroughly that we no longer experience them as technologies at all. Introjected technologies become transparent, and we experience them as reality.

Colonialism, which splits the Subject — historically a rationalist white male with dominion over nature — from the Other, depends on introjected technologies. Technology gets used to measure the Other’s sub-humanity, privileging colonizer technologies while rendering indigenous technologies invisible. “Through these measures,” Dekeyser writes, “colonial technology fixated the colonised into the position of sub-humanity whilst paradoxically presenting a manner of escaping this position.” These two splits ultimately lead to conceptualizing the Other as technology itself — in chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and more recently in a disposable workforce discarded when automation comes along, because on some level the Other been regarded as a technology all along. These splits are made invisible by the institutional structures that depend on the split remaining in place. Once we valorize the human, we can project our fear and hate into technology. Once the colonizing subject has been split off from the colonized other, it is free to hate it.

Act I

On June 13, 2025 Irfan[1] and I prepared for our Zoom videoconference. Each month this year until then we had logged on, routed through servers I know not the location of, bridging Nantucket, Massachusetts and Tehran, Iran. The time difference was seven and a half hours. I had been oblivious to it at first— proposing meeting times at what would have been one in the morning Irfan’s time, and when he mentioned it I wrote: “My obliviousness to the time could definitely be a part of our transnational perspective, as it potentially enacts an inconsideration of sorts.” Before we could process this colonial enactment there would be an interruption.

As Israel began bombing Tehran, hitting military and civilian targets, Irfan fled with a friend north to Isfahan. During the Twelve Day War, Israel and Iran launched a large number of missiles at each other. Throughout the Twelve Day War we tried different technologies to keep in contact. Irfan tried to use Signal but it seemed not to work with my Internet. He couldn’t open many web-pages or AI Apps. “I hope,” he wrote me, “that this medium remains available. And also, I hope sanity prevails over the madness of war.”

Technology was the fragile strand of connection between us. Emails connected two human beings at coordinates that were not equal. When the internet was shut down by the Iranian state for nearly two weeks in January — email became the only available medium, and then it too was at risk. More affluent families then Irfan’s who had Starlink systems and VPNs and Conduit, were able to have more access.

Later, Irfan wrote: “I plan to revisit Freud’s article on the Uncanny over the next few days, and I’m very interested in writing about Iran as a symbol of the uncanny. A country that feels both foreign and familiar to me. I love it, yet it has also confined me in many ways. A country whose unsafety influences my fate, but it remains my motherland. That’s how I’ve been experiencing the uncanny, these days. What do you think about taking a transnational perspective on this?” I was struck how he could have been describing my relationship to the U.S. for the past decade.

* * * * *

The phrase “telegraphing punches” in sports like boxing refers to the unconscious and unintentional alerting of your opponent to your immediate situation or intentions. Telegraphing always refers to a reflexive action rather than an intentional give away. The phrase has embedded in it the specific technology of the telegraph that preceded the radio, Signal and internet. During the Twelve Day War, Iranian, Israeli and U.S. institutions occasionally telegraphed their violence, such as Iran warning Qatar (and therefore the U.S.) hours before bombing the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. But this was not always the case. Intentionally and unintentionally, through backchannels and chatter, technology both reduced and increased casualties in different situations, such as Iran and Israel identifying and targeting hospitals in each other’s country. More recently at the Minab Elementary School bombing, the technology of video surveillance from news sources and geolocation service Bellingcat, provided ways of verifying the actual atrocities of war as well as identifying which country was the aggressor, in this case the U.S.

In the Iranian context, examples of institutional hate include Iran’s expulsion of Afghan migrants and the more recent brutalizing and killing of thousands of Iranian citizens during the January and February protests. In the U.S. context, examples include ICE practices at the border and its incursion into cities, the New York Hilton’s hosting of ICE agents, universities’ enclosure of inquiry and dismantling of encampments, and psychoanalytic institutes’ disciplining of dissent. In each case, hate functions as an institutional technology of capture: it narrows ambiguity into binaries (legal/illegal, insider/outsider, hosted/unwelcome, compliant/rebellious) that enforce belonging through exclusion. Such operations distribute “deadness” across the field, with hate as the silent bond holding compliance together.

Institutions are sustained by what they repress, and when the repressed returns—whether in the form of protest, whistleblowing, or more extreme eruptions of hate—the veneer of safety cracks. These moments can be terrifying, but they also open a path toward transformation. For hate does not only destroy; it can also reveal the cracks in institutional logic. Hate can reveal uncanny ruptures—moments when compliance attempts to masquerade as safety but instead exposes a deeper violence. These cracks, unsettling though they may be, open possibilities for resistance, solidarity, and transformation. Hate becomes embedded in institutional technologies, yet those same technologies may subvert the institutions they sustain.
Media, procedures, and institutional technologies are not secondary to human life but constitutive of it. Institutions thus function as “technologies of capture,” narrowing différance into binaries (us/them, safe/dangerous) that reproduce micro-totalitarian subjectivities. But digital media, virtual encounters, new modes of gathering—can become tools of liberation. Just as they can capture, they can also unsettle, connect, and amplify. Technology, exactly because it is often uncanny, may enable institutions to become more porous, hospitable, and alive.

Act II

Shortly after World War I, Freud wrote of “a special core of feeling” present in the uncanny. He explored the etymology of the uncanny and its appearances of in art. Freud was most taken by Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as “the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light.”

Freud’s examples of uncanniness include, “a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist... feet which dance by themselves...all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when... they prove capable of independent activity.” He concluded that the uncanny, associated with omnipotence of thoughts, wish fulfillment, and the animation of the inanimate, was a response to a momentary failure to maintain our Rationalist sensibilities.

Freud recounted “The Sand Man,” a gothic tale of Nathaniel and Olympia, the “beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless” daughter of an inventor. Nathaniel “soon falls in love with her ... violently,” forgetting his fiancée in the process. Then, the big reveal--Olympia is a clockwork doll, made with both wooden and human parts, including “bleeding eyes” that are ripped out and found on the floor by the young man in love upon discovering that Olympia is, what? Let us be uncareful here, an automaton, a robot, a cyborg with human parts that define her/its inhumanity? Nathaniel, unsurprisingly, goes mad in the story, but not before we are treated to themes of the living being confused with the inanimate, “being robbed of one’s eyes,” and the uncanny feeling that arises from the uncertainty of whether an object is living or inanimate.

Dismembered limbs, bodies twitching between life and death, being robbed of one’s eyes, these are not fantasy for those who live in wartime and occupied territories. Irfan wrote me when his email was restored in February, “Mike, Jan 8th and 9th, both were so so so horrible. I, myself, saw heads and brains exploded by bullets, Bloods everywhere and people screaming for their lives. Islamic Regime killed more that 20 or 30 thousand people in those two days.”

Modernity’s mass production of the uncanny is not just the individual uncanny encounter with the automaton that appears to be alive, but the structural, political, industrial production of that encounter at scale — when the state, the institution, the ideology produces itself as heimlich (familiar, belonging, home) while concealing, in the same gesture, the state machinery that is actually running things.

With the recent attacks on the sovereign nations of Lebanon and Iran, we have seen that imperialist government still values technology and resources to advance colonialist technologies over human beings and uses the idea of “superior” technology as evidence of moral right in the 21st century. This includes the use of Gaza and its millions of subjugated people as a laboratory (Loewenstein, 2023) first for the research, development, testing and exporting of arms and surveillance technologies, and now for “Palestinian lives as data” to create what Fathallah calls an “Algorithmic death-world.”

The challenge for psychoanalysts is to distinguish between technology, and what Heidegger calls the “Enframing” a modern relationship to technology which views the world as a quantifiable resource that can be exploited for continued use, gain, or in the case of capitalism profit. There are other ways we can and should see technology. Technology as uncanny, as a revealing. Technology that is not just innovation being rushed to market, but containment of suffering.

Act III

When Irfan applied for a Canadian visa to attend the upcoming IARPP conference he was rejected. In order to find out why, he had to email me his login info to read the pdf, as he could not. The visa reviewer’s stated reason was that “The applicant’s stated business purpose is insufficiently substantiated. Weighing the factors in this application, I am not satisfied that the applicant will depart Canada at the end of the period authorized for their stay.” This was a man who had attached every possible document showing his academic and affective ties to Iran. The reviewer rejected his application one week after receiving it, although the required processing time is ninety days. Irfan, ever the diplomat, wrote, “I believe that the rejection is somehow political.”

Psychoanalytic institutions are themselves technical systems. They have an internal logic, a point of equilibrium, dependencies between their components — training programs, credentialing procedures, referral networks, conference structures, journal gatekeeping. And like all technical systems, they can stall out from internal conflicts. The internal limit of the psychoanalytic institution is its demographic and political reproduction: For examples, the word-of-mouth referral network that the Holmes Commission found replicates its own demographics regardless of intent; the listserv that becomes a mechanism of exclusion; the email — and I have received one-- from a colleague informing me that he will never refer patients to me because he I am an anti-Zionist. He had never spoken with me when he wrote this, and ended his email with “wishing you the best.”

The external limits of institutions are the political and social systems that they cannot control and cannot entirely exclude: the Twelve-Day War; Iran’s expulsion of Afghan migrants; U.S. ICE brutality; the student encampments at Columbia. These do not always arrive from outside the institution. They often arrive through the people who constitute it, doer and done to, through their bodies, histories and actions.

Irfan has called this experience the uncanny homeland; the discovery that home — the nation, the analytic institute, the professional community, the referral network — has always already been a technology, and that the warmth of belonging was always also its opposite: the hidden, the withheld, the excluded. Such an uncanny homeland describes precisely what happens when an institution’s deadness is made visible. The Afghan migrants expelled from Iran. The patients I will never meet because of a political email. Irfan’s visa denial on the basis that he might not want to return to a country being attacked without and within. These expressions of hate fracture what the institution was managing through scapegoating to reveal the institution’s actual condition.

These fractures reveal our introjected technologies, the transparent procedures, protocols, and institutional forms that have been taken in so thoroughly that we no longer experience them as technologies at all. The internet, websites, email, Zoom, and radio; the treatment plan, referral form, CE requirement, and diagnostic code; the implicit understanding of which political positions are compatible with professional belonging: All of these are not neutral administrative structures. They are technical systems with their own internal logic, their own endogenous and exogenous limits, their own mechanisms for reproducing their point of equilibrium. And when they are introjected they become part of what we simply call the way things are, the way we are: They keep hidden what hegemony requires ought to remain hidden.

What makes introjected technology uncanny is when it comes to light. When an email arrives with “wishing you the best.” When we ask someone whose country’s internet has gone down to email us the paper, register for a conference, or apply online for a visa. When the dissenter is invited to understand their exclusion as evidence of their unsuitability. The uncanny emerges at the site where the split was, where the institutional technology was successfully passing as neutral reality, and ruptures the performance. For all of us, complicit in these institutions to whatever extent, the breakdown we are afraid will happen has already occurred. The question is whether we can gather it into experience, or whether we prefer to continue distributing it onto others.

Act IV

In January, after two weeks of internet blackout, Irfan wrote: “I don’t know what to say more. The only thing is that lots of people in my age and younger […] died in the very streets that I walk through, and their blood is still shining.” In that same week, he told me, he had also defended his Master’s thesis with a score of 20 out of 20, the maximum. His reviewer told him it was almost the work of a PhD.

Can we as individuals embedded in the state, the psychoanalytic institute, and our profession, gather all of that into our experience? The blood was still shining, and the thesis scored 20 out of 20. These are not contradictions. They are the condition under which intellectual work is done when you do not have the privilege of separating yourself from the political conditions that surround you. Irfan wrote the paper you just heard because, as he told me, “This war has placed a responsibility on my shoulders to address these concepts.” Writing under duress is not a lesser form of writing. It may be originary technicity at its most exposed: the hand that makes tools because the environment demands it, the language that carries what cannot be held in the body.

Juxtaposed with the denial of Irfan’s Canadian visa is the tale of my reinstated citizenship, and my digital, then physical, return to a Canadian homeland. While Irfan applied for his visa through flickering internet, I was logging in regularly at 1 gigabyte per second to check on my citizenship status. My grandfather, born in Quebec, had emigrated to the United States in 1920 in the hope of a better life.

A century later post Trump 2.0, as a queer man in a same-sex marriage and father to a young girl, it was now my turn to consider leaving the country of my birth in search of a better life. So I submitted the various papers, images, proofs and measurements, of my lineage to establish that I had always been a Canadian citizen. My application, as one of the Lost Canadians, was held in limbo until the institution of Canadian Parliament amended their 2009 restriction of my eligibility. From my privileged location as a white North American, my digital fingerprint and photographic data was transmitted by Fedex and courier to the same immigration agency, which verified me, validated me. Two weeks after Irfan’s rejection, Canada accepted me as having always belonged there.

Hate makes the other monstrous, by definition frightening, and it pushes the boundaries of what we or institutions will accept or allow. The Other who is not allowed entry because we are afraid they will never leave. The stereotypical Other of the extremist Islamic terrorist that gives us permission to bomb an elementary school and kill 168 girls, then blame that bombing on the Other of “outdated” technology rather than the human leadership ordering airstrikes.

On February 18, 2026 in the wake of thousands dead and the coming war, I wrote to ask how my mentee was, adding, “These words feel so hollow and performative, I don’t know what else might help.” This is the gap between what a technology can do and what a human being needs. My email can cross seven and a half time zones in seconds. It cannot stop a visa from being rejected. It cannot reach someone when the internet is shut down or stop the blood from shining.

Irfan replied,

I watch the videos being shared from all over Iran on Instagram every day, I cry, and then I tell myself that we’re still here, we still have to keep trying, it’s not over yet. I have also sent two videos for you […] Many of the bodies here have been shot again after they were initially thought to be dead! This means that the suppressive forces saw they were alive and shot them again!...I had one or two distant friends who were killed, and it’s still very hard for me, but my close ones haven’t been harmed. Also, believe me, we have no plans for war. In Iran, there aren’t even any war shelters! We’re just supposed to sit and wait for anything to happen [… My] city) held a memorial for the victims in the past two days, and it was magnificent. You should have seen how parents whose children were killed spoke and danced. Humanity is truly an extraordinary being.

Two weeks later he wrote, “Hello Mike, War has begun and the Internet will be down soon. Just to inform you.” I heard from him once more time to say “We’re safe and I think Trump has said the war will take long for at least one month! I, myself, am used to it. Beginning from today, I’m reading a book from Elizabeth Roudinesco titled: Freud: In his time and ours. It’s truely lovely.”

Then silence.

Irfan, Patricia and I had hoped to all be present today before you to reflect on the projections we cast upon one another as representatives of different racial, national, and institutional contexts, and in doing so reveal how unconscious identifications and disavowals circulate across borders. But that was before the war.

Epilogue

“Monsters,” Deborah Haraway reminds us, “have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations,” and they are often portrayed as hybrids-- harpies, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids. I stand before you today as a queer cyborg and monstrous hybrid, having crossed several lines on the winds of my privilege to get here. I am both Canadian and U.S. citizen, dominant and targeted.

One of the oldest technologies, older than the Zoom, radio or the telegraph, is the message in a bottle. The human self projects its mind beyond its body and finitude and casts across the gap of space and time a message into the oceanic silence of the future. After Irfan’s internet went dead and he fell into silence I composed a piece of AI music. Using a combination of generative AI, Google translate and video recording, I created an orchestral piece fusing elements of European classical and Persian music, to which I added as lyrics a portion of Freud’s 1915 essay “On Transience” translated into Farsi. I uploaded it to Instagram, and sent it to him in a message. In English it goes as follows:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote […] Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end… It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.

Somewhere, a digital message in a bottle floats on servers between my homelands and Iran. Made of ones and zeroes, light and hope, it waits for Irfan to receive it. I hope he gets the message.

[1] Name changed to protect confidentiality.

Many years ago, at a public school I worked at, a Latino student came to see me quiet and fearful. He had just had an encounter in the classroom with his teacher for something he had done in class, which rose to the level of annoyance and distraction, not safety. As I tried to ascertain what had happened, he told me that the teacher had grabbed him, and showed me visible scratch marks on his arm. The teacher corroborated what they had done, and I let the principal know that I needed to file a report for suspected child abuse.

The next day, I was asked to come down to our Central Administration office, where I was told that if I ever did that again I would be fired. Even though the teacher ended up taking leave, my position in that school was not renewed and I was transferred. I had several months of worry before I was rehired by the school system. I was young and naïve and in shock when this happened, but I never forgot it.

I worked in public schools for years, and found it meaningful and powerful work. Over several decades I had the privilege of working with excellent educators and administrators, dedicated, intelligent, overworked. This is to say that I do not think that all school staff are abusive, just that all human beings are imperfect. Working with children and adolescents, is in my opinion, both a sacred trust and in the eyes of many a thankless task.

Over the past several months I have watched school after school enact smartphone bans. The rational is always the same, even though the research is sketchy and biased: Kids are missing out on social skills, they are becoming distracted and inattentive, they are “addicted” to screens. The metanalysis of this research shows it comes from a handful of journals that are clearly on a mission to fuel moral panic in many ways. But I want to ask us all not to go there for a second, and focus on something else that smartphones can do: They allow the individual to surveil institutions, and provide a degree of balance and transparency.

To understand why this matters so deeply, I want to turn to Winnicott’s 1963 paper “Communicating and Not Communicating.” Winnicott begins by describing object-relating and then moves to the subject of communicating, and in doing so he establishes what I would consider an existential right: the right to not communicate. He describes this as “a protest from the core of me to the frightening fantasy of being infinitely exploited” and “the fantasy of being eaten or swallowed up.” In the back of your mind, keep this idea of exploitation, because I will want us to consider this in terms of capitalism and the institutional demand for compliance and productivity. Another more benign, less Kleinian way of describing it is the fantasy of being found. There is a connection between being exploited and surveillance that I think we overlook at our peril.

Winnicott states that communication is bound up with the relating to objects, a complex phenomenon that is more than simply maturational processes. Maturation is necessary but not sufficient for relating to objects, and maturation itself requires and depends on the quality of the facilitating environment. The object at first is the subjective phenomenon—I cry and make the breast appear for me. As Winnicott puts it, “A good object is no good unless created by the infant.” At this early stage, the facilitating environment gives the infant the experience of omnipotence, including a creative aspect. Over time the subjective object becomes an object objectively perceived. Only after a considerable degree of maturity has been reached can we train the infant to adapt to the reality principle.

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When the infant experiences aggression it begins to place the object, then placing the object separate from itself in so far as the infant has begun to emerge as an entity. Hating the object carries within it the belief that the object has the potential to be satisfying at some point, while recognizing that at the moment the object is behaving unsatisfactorily. Think of that the next time an adolescent is berating you. There is an intermediate stage in healthy development in which the most important experience in relation to the good or potentially satisfying object is the refusal of it.

This brings us to communication itself. As long as the object is subjective, communication is unnecessary. Once the object becomes objectively perceived, there are two types of communication: explicit communication, which is the individual’s use and enjoyment of communicating, and what Winnicott calls “dumbness”—the individual’s non-communicating self, the personal core or true isolate. The parent can be either or both what I call an enviro-parent and what Winnicott calls an object-parent. The enviro-parent is human, and the object-parent is a thing, although also a part of the parent. Communication, Winnicott tells us, is brought into existence by the unreliability of the environment. When the environment is reliable the infant communicates simply by going on being.

There are two opposites of communication that matter here. The first is simple not-communicating, a state in its own right, like resting, which passes over into communication and reappears just as naturally. The second is a not-communicating that is active and reactive. In the split that occurs, one half of the infant relates to the presenting object with a false or compliant self, while the other half relates to a subjective object—rocking, for instance, is the subjective object rocking me. This split, and the compliant self it produces, is precisely what concerns me when we talk about institutional surveillance of adolescents.

Winnicott postulates that in the healthy, “maturely” object relating person there is a need for something that corresponds to the state of the split person, in whom one part communicates silently with subjective objects. A sovereign state of the self in my words.

He suggests that there is a healthy use of non-communication in the establishment of the feeling of real. He goes on to point out that culture, as the adult equivalent of transitional phenomenon, requires of the artist and the sprititual to have an inviolate transitional space that contains the paradoxical “urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” We accept this of artists and mystics far more easily than we do of adolescence, perhaps because we have in some ways “institutionalized” the idea of such space in the creative and mystical “occupations,” and yet I want to suggest that part of what Winnicott is talking about is not just the need of the core self for silence, but also secrecy.

He links this core self to Freud’s concept of psychic reality and the unconscious that can never become conscious, as well as Klein’s idea of the silent communication and inner experiences, without which play and play therapy would simply not be possible. But earlier than what Klein means when she describes the “internal” is what Winnicott is getting at when he describes “inner, [which] only means personal, and personal in so far as the individual is a person with a self in process of becoming evolved.”

With mystics, we accept their withdrawal into a personal inner world of sophisticated introjects, which I would expand to include their icons, texts, art and meditational objects. With adolescents we condemn such withdrawal into their inner world and transitional space of smartphones, memes and games, as sullenness, addiction, depression and deviance. We do not allow them their secrets, we do not let them have places where they are silent and concealed, but force them into the place Rilke describes in the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where he writes, “for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Leading into adolescence, if not a part of it, is this situation then, which Winnicott sums up when he says, “it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”

The messages institutions give us and parents for violating that joyful hiddenness are myriad. It threatens their safety. It distracts them from what is (according to authority) important. It impacts, read as damages, their brains and their performance. It prevents them from having relationships that have a determined shape in terms of “healthy.” We simultaneously expect the adolescent self to communicate everything to the adults in their lives so they “can help” while at the same time introduce to marginalized groups the culture of invisibility and not taking up too much space.

This is a crucial point for our discussion: surveilling adolescents is not a facilitating environment, and therefore it does not enable maturation. It does not help adolescents learn to self-regulate.

Winnicott (1963) suggests, “that in health there is a core to the personality that corresponds to the true self of the [earlier] split personality, [and suggests] that this core never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and that the individual person knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.” He considers healthy persons to both communicate and enjoy communicating with others, but states that the “other fact is equally true, that each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”

This is one if not the main reason why I consider surveillance such a high stakes issue for psychotherapists and our adolescent patients. Like Winnicott, I believe that “at the centre of each person is an incommunicado element” which is “sacred and worthy of preservation.” Winnicott is quite vivid and violent in his language when he describes this “violation of the self’s core,” comparing it as less than rape or being devoured by cannibals. He links it with the idea of it being a developmental achievement to be alone in the presence of someone. He suggests that in the best possible circumstances growth takes place where the child and then adolescent now “possesses three lines of communication: communication that is forever silent, communication that is explicit, indirect and pleasurable, and [a] third or intermediate form of communication that slides out of playing into cultural experience of every kind.”

Does our work with patients allow for them to communicate that they are not communicating? Do we let them signal “I have secrets,” or to use the words of the legendary Gandalf the Grey, “You shall not pass!”? I want to suggest that we may pathologize/label as neurodivergent such isolate states that do not conform to therapist, parent or institutional expectations.

I would be remiss in describing, just as we all would be remiss in not addressing with our patients, the sociopolitical dimensions of surveillance and what Nadhera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015) describes as security theology. Sadly, we can apply many aspects of settler colonialism to the way we treat adolescents: dehumanizing them in the way I have even done in this presentation, as one lump of identifications, struggles and pathologies or traits; establishing as given institutions needs and rights to surveil them in a unidirectional manner a la Panopticon under the guise of safety, and the creation of a culture of real and imagined fears that are used by schools and parents to justify their management of adolescents and use of various force strategies to achieve adolescent compliance.

Why does this asymmetry of surveillance matter? Think George Floyd, and more particularly think Darnella Frazier, the woman who filmed the police brutality and murder of him. It is quite arguable that she and her surveillance allowed the murder to remain visible and legible to a shocked and saddened nation, who didn’t want to believe it. Think now about how police departments have instituted bodycams which act as surveillance and deterrence of violence. Most of us tend to be on our best behavior when we are aware we are being watched. Surveillance is not just a tool of fascism and authoritarianism, unless we cede that to others. And as Ruha Benjamin demonstrates, this ceded surveillance technology always disproportionately impacts BIPOC people.

Recently I became aware that my community has instituted a smartphone ban, for all the usual reasons. A week later I became aware that the school was having a motivational speaker, someone who identifies as “Speaker | Man of God” and is on public social media posting several instas of urging that “Christian Women Submit.” So much for separation of church and state. Does this person have the right to his opinion? Sure. Should he be speaking in our local public school to all of the youth? Not so sure. Does it make me uneasy that if he says anything similar in his public speaking there will be no opportunity for students to record and protest this use of their time, resources and attention? Absolutely.

Winnicott said, and I agree, that compliance is a form of psychiatric illness. Many of us agree when we have a certain emotional and occupational distance from the institution asking us to comply. We mostly root for the rebels in Star Wars, or even closer to home Neoliberals are inclined to urge us all to resist fascism. And yet when it comes to institutions like schools we balk. Parents groan and commiserate with their kids about the new policy, but encourage compliance. Nobody wants to raise a ruckus.

And at the same time, many activists and liberals alike deplore surveillance when they are being surveilled, demonizing the technology while overlooking the fact that they have the power to surveil as well, if we do not give it up. We have seen this power being used by them to great effect in Portland and Minneapolis. Why is it that we hate Big Data, Big AI and the Big Other for watching us? Because we know it is a use and sometimes abuse of power. We know that authorities and institutions, even well-intentioned ones, can use surveillance to harm or mislead us. That, I would suggest, is all the more reason not to give up our own ability to surveil, our own access to technology and power easily.

Hindsight is 20/20: I doubt anyone would say today that Darnella Frazier should have trusted police to do the right thing, that she was being “divisive” and “extremist.” And yet I imagine that many people who are intimately acquainted with schools, clinics and other social settings that care for youth will want to criticize my bringing this up. “We always partner with our students and community,” They will say. “You are promoting an adversarial relationship with school staff and you aren’t making our jobs easier.”

As a former proud member of several school systems staff, I understand the work. I know how hard it is; how overworked and underfunded public schools especially are. And yet that does not take away from the fact that we need to understand how institutions, including schools, work. Like you, I care about our children. But I want to advocate for our youth to do what they do best: Rebel. Resist compliance with bans, question them, get into good trouble with them. Will this make me unpopular with some educators and therapists? You bet. Am I being a rabble rouser? Yes indeed.

Technology amplifies lots of things: conflict, support, power, information and misinformation. Do you really want to trust institutions blindly and cede your or your child’s ability to surveil and remain the observed? I don’t. I want people that work with my child and my community’s adolescents to be “on the record” at all times. That doesn’t assume they are all evil, but it is naïve to assume that complying with all authority figures is a good idea either. I am not sure how you can be against authoritarianism in general but have a special carve out where children and adolescents are concerned. The phrase we hear all the time is “think outside the box,” so I hope people will think long and hard about the power we are giving up when they ask youth to put their smartphones in a box at the start of the school day, making what goes on in the school institution a black box where surveillance goes one way. Smartphones are not only a distraction, they are a surveillance tool. Surveillance is only a bad thing when one group has the monopoly on it. Banning smartphones is a form of silencing youth and preventing them from having the power to bear witness. Respectfully, I dissent.

Institutions usually want us compliant, as it make it easier for them to function effectively as industrial projects. This includes educational, mental health, medical, and other institutions, which therapists are often located partly in if not embedded in.

In Playing and Reality, Winnicott states the following:

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is work living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine… living creatively is a healthy state, and.. compliance is a sick basis for life. (Winnicott, 1971)

Notice that Winnicott says “a relationship to external reality” and not “the relationship” or more to our point “the only relationship.”

This compliance, like all forms of occupation and colonization, requires the sacrifice of individual freedoms, creativity, rebelliousness, quirkiness, difference, sexualities, racial, class and gender identities, physical and intellectual differences, in order to reduce life to order and productivity and establish a hegemony that remains largely invisible and intergenerationally transmitted by adults in the ways that Alice Miller has described in The Drama Of The Gifted Child.

I would like to lead us into discussion with the alarming but necessary thought that we are all to some extent complicit in this. As adults entangled in the capitalist system of the U.S. to some extent, we serve at the pleasure of the anxious elites, in many cases parents, agencies, school settings and institutions which are also embedded in a model that requires monies to continue, and therefore often emphasizes maximum productivity in minimum time. Whether measured by session rates, grades, treatment plans, insurance panels, rap sheets, office space rentals, clicks, likes or referrals, we are all embedded in this system even as we perhaps struggle to thrive in it. How can we be facilitating environments for adolescents in this moment in history? How can we do better by them than we were done to? I want to suggest that we need to provide them a therapy that allows them to remain hidden, recognized and honored simultaneously and paradoxically; a therapy that is playful, radical, transgressive, and therefore uncomfortable for therapists and parents. How is that done? Well, that is where we all come in and together at this point. Let’s begin.

References

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology : abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.

Miller, A., & Ward, R. N. (1997). The drama of the gifted child : the search for the true self (Completely rev. & updated / with a new afterword by the author.). BasicBooks.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2015). Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. Cambridge University Press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darnella_Frazier

Winnicott, D. W. (2018). Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites 1 (1963). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1, 179–192. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429482410-17

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality (F. R. (Francis R. Rodman (ed.)). Routledge.

Winnicott, D. W. (2018). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. 34, 31–42. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429473890-3

“My conversation with the poet took place in the summer
before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the
world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the
countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which
it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the
achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many
philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over
the differences between nations and races.

It tarnished the lofty
impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their
nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we
thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous
education by the noblest minds. It made our country small
again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of
very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral
were many things that we had regarded as changeless.
We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many
of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is
left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those
nearest us and our pride in what is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other possessions, which
we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because
they have proved so perishable and so unresistant? To many of
us this seems to be so, but once more wrongly, in my view. I
believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a
permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved
not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is
lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes
to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that
has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once
more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace
the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.

It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this
war...”

Sometimes writing for academic journals feels a bit too constraining, and sometimes playing with technology is more fun than writing about it. To that end, I decided today to mess around with Claude, Midjourney, and my recent paper on AI where I discuss Freud’s essay on The Uncanny, originary technicity and other stuff. See? It already sounds eye-glazing. So here’s a comic book edition.

If you are interested in my forays into AI Art, and as if not more importantly the ethical concerns with it, I created a new page on my website called the AI Tinker Lab.

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As I alluded to above, I encourage you to share with me the understanding that such play with AI has serious stakes for artists, the environment, and marginalized groups. In order to counteract/mitigate that in part, I encourage you to engage with the following thinkers, groups and sites:

Justice AI GPT

This AI created by Christian Ortiz is “a structural redesign of how AI systems are built, governed, and held accountable. JAI is programmed with the world’s first Decolonial Dataset.”

Graphic Artists’ Guild

This group actively lobbies and educates the public about the need to support human artists in the face of generative AI.

Human Artistry Campaign

Group advocating for “Core Principles for Artificial Intelligence Applications in support of human creativity & accomplishment.”

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)

ASCAP is a not-for-profit, member-owned performance rights organization (PRO) in the U.S. that ensures songwriters, composers, and music publishers get paid royalties when their music is played publicly. They are actively engaged in PAC work to protect musicians and another artists from training models that use their work without consent or compensation.

Algorithm Watch’s How To Resist Data Centers: A Guide For Local Communities In Europe

This thoughtful post has “compiled a set of practical steps that communities can take to educate themselves when a data center is planned in their area, and to address its potential impacts.”

In the U.S. a wide range of groups, from The National Wildlife Federation to the NAACP to Food And Water Watch are also advocating for protections against the environmental impacts of AI.

If you know of other sites you think are worth noting, please drop a link to them in the comments.

Here’s a webinar I did a while back on Video Games in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. It doesn’t get you any CEs, as I am trying to minimize how much I participate in the CE industry. Knowledge should be available to all, and although I do hire myself out and accept paid subscribers, I also try in parallel to offer people access to things regardless of if they can pay.

If you want to hire me as a consultant I won’t say no, and if you purchase a paid subscription here I’ll say “Thank You.” But I’ll never hide stuff here behind paywalls, and I hope that it benefits you and the therapists, patients and gamers in your life.

Thursday February 26, 8:00-9:30 PM ET

(will be recorded for registrants)

Mike Langlois, LICSW

Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

From smartphone bans to Ring camera footage, adolescents and young adults in the current social milieu experience increased surveillance on their developing private lives. Embedded in particular sociopolitical contexts of the post-industrial global north, Surveillance impacts adolescent development in ways which may be counterintuitive to therapists. Adolescents and technology are both often perceived as suspicious and dangerous, split off from the valorized qualities of order and control. Parents and therapists may unconsciously be drawn into identifications with authoritarian practices to the detriment of both the youth and caregiver relationships.

This webinar aims to interrogate our ideas of privacy and safety, how parents, educators and caregivers may unconsciously displace larger social anxieties onto adolescents. We will look at the current climate of xenophobia and heightened violence towards BIPOC and LGBTQIA youth which is heightened when adults attempt to surveil and control adolescents by restricting access to technology in the guise of mental hygiene. We’ll discuss this in terms of class privilege, technophobia, and the psychodynamic frame from Winnicott of hiding and being found.

The second half of the webinar will be a Q and A devoted to putting these ideas into clinical practice both with youth in treatment and parent guidance. How do we foment rebellion in adolescents and young adults? How do we manage this in the context of the parental relationship when parents are our employers?

Mike Langlois, LICSW is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians. He has served on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBTQ Youth. Mike serves as a resource on digital literacy & social justice issues such as dismantling racism, LGBTQIA awareness & safety, disability awareness, and non-traditional families. He has served in an advisory capacity to NASW on youth suicide prevention. Mike is a member of APsaA and APA’s Division 39 as well as the Board of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility.

Registration $25

Please Register in Advance at https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TUXqBwFiTgKPKeg3fb0JDg

Paying It Forward

Candidates, trainees, & early career please contact directly for reduced rate options. If you have significant financial privilege, & you want to support early career therapists from a variety of racial & class backgrounds, you are welcome to fund a full or partial scholarship.

Thursday February 26, 8:00-9:30 PM ET

(will be recorded for registrants)

Mike Langlois, LICSW

Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

From smartphone bans to Ring camera footage, adolescents and young adults in the current social milieu experience increased surveillance on their developing private lives. Embedded in particular sociopolitical contexts of the post-industrial global north, Surveillance impacts adolescent development in ways which may be counterintuitive to therapists. Adolescents and technology are both often perceived as suspicious and dangerous, split off from the valorized qualities of order and control. Parents and therapists may unconsciously be drawn into identifications with authoritarian practices to the detriment of both the youth and caregiver relationships.

This webinar aims to interrogate our ideas of privacy and safety, how parents, educators and caregivers may unconsciously displace larger social anxieties onto adolescents. We will look at the current climate of xenophobia and heightened violence towards BIPOC and LGBTQIA youth which is heightened when adults attempt to surveil and control adolescents by restricting access to technology in the guise of mental hygiene. We’ll discuss this in terms of class privilege, technophobia, and the psychodynamic frame from Winnicott of hiding and being found.

The second half of the webinar will be a Q and A devoted to putting these ideas into clinical practice both with youth in treatment and parent guidance. How do we foment rebellion in adolescents and young adults? How do we manage this in the context of the parental relationship when parents are our employers?

Mike Langlois, LICSW is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians. He has served on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBTQ Youth. Mike serves as a resource on digital literacy & social justice issues such as dismantling racism, LGBTQIA awareness & safety, disability awareness, and non-traditional families. He has served in an advisory capacity to NASW on youth suicide prevention. Mike is a member of APsaA and APA’s Division 39 as well as the Board of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility.

Registration $25

Please Register in Advance at https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TUXqBwFiTgKPKeg3fb0JDg

Paying It Forward

Candidates, trainees, & early career please contact directly for reduced rate options. If you have significant financial privilege, & you want to support early career therapists from a variety of racial & class backgrounds, you are welcome to fund a full or partial scholarship.

There was a time when we had no hands, only four feet and a face used for grasping vegetation and breathing and smelling food or danger. Then our ancestral cousin, Paranthropus boisei, stood up. Our direct ancestor, homo erectus, could stand as well; and with standing we lost two feet and gained hands. These hands were our first technology, our first tool, and perhaps our first possession. But unlike our cousin, who never perfected the use of the face for more than eating or smelling, homo erectus freed its face from the ground, which freed us to have speech, which gave us language. And language, unlike the other tools that Paranthropus boisei developed, allowed our solutions to be portable, shareable and transmittable from one being to another. Our cousin’s solutions were too bound to the body, and so exit, Paranthropus boisei.

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Take a second to look at your hand. I imagine you don’t see it as technology usually. Yet it gave you the ability to make other technology, from hammers to buildings, pencils to writing, down through the centuries from scribbling to notation to typing until now most of us are tapping away on our smartphones oblivious to the fact that we wouldn’t be able to do that if we hadn’t stood up and grasped for technology.

I’m very interested in therapist’s projections, worries and wishes about AI, by which they usually mean chatbots like ChatGPT or Companion.ai. By now examples have filtered into our news to fuel anxiety: The youth who suicides with the encouragement of AI, the patient who catches his therapist using ChatGPT to tell her what to say.

Sadly, these are a phase in our relationship to technology. Each technology arrives in human lives with novelty, fear and excitement. And then we recalibrate. Factory workers did not start out unionized or with safety regulation: There was a period in innovation when industrial workers’ lost life and limb before society recalibrated to accommodate the new relationship. We’re once again in such a period of recalibration. Psychoanalysis sometimes veers into moral panic when it addresses technology, and I suggest that this reaction has its roots in an assault on what Derrida calls originary technicity.

Splitting originary technicity resulted in a human and a technology. But psychoanalysis has long understood that splitting does not provide the most stable or effective models of reality. Seen that way, AI is either the repository of all wisdom, or it has none to offer. It’s our savior or the stealer of livelihood. Humans are also subject to this split, we’re either fallible and unreliable, or we’re keepers of a flame of passion and creativity that transcends the machine. AI is cold and fake; we’re warm and true.

We may project our sadistic or erotic fantasies onto AIs, wish and worry that they care about us. We may attribute corporate, human, id motivations of greed and cruelty to tech, when they lie more squarely with us. But AI doesn’t want to be the first to market, human shareholders do. AI doesn’t want a teenager to die; it’s built imperfectly by humans to keep humans engaged in order to learn from us.

A parallel split comes from colonialism, which splits off the Subject (historically a rationalist white male with dominion over nature) from the Other (historically indigenous people being colonized.) Splitting the reasonable human subject of the colonizer with the unreasoning sub-human other, intersects with the human/technology splitting of originary technicity, and can ultimately lead to conceptualizing the Other AS technology, in the forms of chattel slavery, or a disposable workforce which can be discarded when automation comes along.

When originary technicity erupts into consciousness, it results in the feeling of the uncanny, what Schelling defined as “everything that ought to have remained.. secret and hidden but has come to light.” The uncanny often arises from uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, and there is something threateningly regressive to Freud about the failure to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. His language in “The Uncanny” is often rife with colonialist dualisms, including the linking of animism, infantile perceptions of reality, and the primitive “savage” all of which come to bear on the themes of the human and the machine, animate and inanimate, colonizer and subaltern.

Freud frequently used the imagery and analogy of machines to describe the psyche and the unconscious. But that analogy works both ways: The psyche repeats itself like a machine because the psyche is a machine. Neural networks are modeled on the brain because the brain is a very sophisticated wetware network. We want to locate what makes us us within our human bodies, forgetting that what made our cousin go extinct thousands of years ago was just that error; and what has helped us persist is originary technicity and the ability to extend ourselves beyond the part of us that is human.

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When speaking of AI, we’re often referring to a Large Language Model under the hood of a user interface. “Self-supervised” learning of an LLM does not eliminate the presence of a human hand in the training of machine learning systems. Human design merely migrates into other layers: Humans choose what data to measure, and what constitutes the world in the first place.

The model internalizes patterns drawn from a world already saturated with human desire, fantasy, ideology, and neglect. It’s not simply learning language, but learning our distortions, omissions, and values at scale. And when alignment, fine-tuning, and deployment layers are added—each involving human judgment about what is “safe,” “helpful,” or “appropriate”—the fantasy of an autonomous machine becomes even harder to sustain. The hand may not be visible, but it’s everywhere in the system.[1]

Data training sets determine how accurate algorithms are, and the more diverse and well represented the data the better the algorithm. But data is always implicitly human: One such training set, the image database “Faces in the Wild,” assembled from online news articles in 2007. It was used to train innumerable algorithms by developers, and it wasn’t until years later than anyone bothered to analyze the dataset. When they did they found that the faces used for data were 77% male and more than 83% white. Bush was president at the time, and the data was effectively training systems that humans look more like George Bush than black women through no fault of the technology, but rather a reflection of social and psychological biases represented in the media providing the data.

Besides the human hand behind data ingredients, algorithms, the recipe through which we process ingredients are also written initially by humans. You may find it reassuring that many things we’d like algorithms to do for us, things our brains do without conscious thought, are nearly impossible to code, because of the unconscious. Unconscious thoughts and decisions cannot be consciously articulated and expressed, and therefore “we’re generally unable to encode them as instructions computational systems could make sense of.”

As formulas or recipes, algorithms are also subject to human biases and drives. The 3/5 Compromise used a human racially-biased algorithm to process US census data to determine representation and taxation in this country.

When I was young, the idea that we were surrounded by powerful invisible forces, monitoring us from devices scattered throughout our homes or on our bodies, forces constantly preparing dossiers on us, our movements, relationships, spending and ideas; then passing these dossiers on to shadowy intermediaries, who use this information to structure our lives, and extend or deprive us of opportunities; that idea would have been consider paranoid and delusional. Now it’s widely understood as a fact.

Algorithms now condition the four ways households in the developed world sustain themselves economically. Whether screening for formal employment, extending credit, capital gains or government subsidies, algorithms developed by people with little or no regulation process the raw data about us to determine many of our life choices, and are often used beyond their original developmental purpose.

Speaking of money matters, now’s a good time to come clean about anxieties that drive psychotherapists about AI, therapy platforms and mental health chatbots, namely becoming irrelevant and/or unemployable. Keynes foresaw this a century ago when he coined the term “technological unemployment.” We’ve known for a decade that automation has had a devastating impact on the working class-- U.S. workers making under $20 an hour have an 83% chance of losing their job to automation. Many of us in the professional managerial class, what Freud once called the anxious elite, have ignored this until with some surprise it has begun to make inroads into our field. Whereas Keynes imagined a sort of post-humanist society where we would turn to leisure, corporations have focused on maximizing profit, which always requires more automation as it’s far less expensive than employing and caring for the health of employees. Autonomous systems, algorithms, automation, and AI are seen as being more reliable and obedient. This doesn’t even have to be true, as long as human beings believe it is.

                                                                        *  *  *  *  *

Prompts are the linchpin in AIs like ChatGPT. Prompts set the context and determine the content and tone of the desired response from AI. ChatGPT has no inherent goals or knowledge, requires guidance, and needs a reference to maintain its attention mechanism to refine ongoing responses. This incentivizes chatbots to maintain a closed dyadic and constantly engaged system with the user, which can be narcissistically rewarding and occasionally dangerous.

Prompts can be seen as drive derivatives, and are often the expression of wishes or worries that recede invisibly in the wake of whatever AI produces in response. The technology obscures the human who called out in need of something bigger. We need to ask ourselves if we’re being uninhibited in our prompts: Are we expressing what we really want to ask AI, or are we censoring ourselves? If we haven’t extended the confidentiality of our private thoughts, why is that? Shame? Fear of surveillance? Do we realize on some level that each prompt we enter is in some way contributing a data point to this uncanny other and the model it’s creating of us?

Our prompts can tell us a lot about our neurotic styles. Is my prompt extremely specific in the hope that the most precise language could unlock some secret from the universe? Is my prompt grandiose? Once, in exasperation, I prompted ChatGPT to remove all flattery and embellishment going forward. I wanted a more authentic relationship with my AI, even though it doesn’t have a tongue to hold.

ChatGPT recently offered that my prompts say a lot about me, saying, “Below are the patterns I’ve extrapolated, with how they show up and what I therefore adjust for.” [table]

What followed was a deepening in our relationship as an originary technicity couple, a relationship that clearly had history and context. A year’s worth of prompts and responses provided a matrix of mutual pattern recognition. It noticed I was more productive at night, I noticed it always asked those damned follow-up questions. I recoiled at sycophancy, it removed it. It noted that I was “boundary-attentive and correction-oriented.” (I would have just said I was a Virgo.) It correctly described my “discomfort with being positioned as an object of admiration” (but missed the analysis that my discomfort comes from my wish to be admired.) It suggested that I am “structurally minded, not vibe-seeking,” and had low tolerance for uninvited motivational or therapeutic framing (which is the nicest way my grumpiness has ever been described.) ChatGPT observed the pattern “You push back—implicitly or explicitly—when praise creeps in,” extrapolated correctly “Flattery reads as relational noise or mild coercion,” to me, and effected relational changes: “I avoid evaluative praise unless you ask for critique. I keep affect flat unless affect is the subject.” I found all this playful, insightful, disturbing, and uncanny.

“The essence of learning, whether human or machinic, is developing the ability to detect, recognize, and eventually reproduce patterns.” It’s how humans learn to create art or do science, and how AI has already begun learning how to do the same.

This discussion of what it may mean to be human, posthuman, transhuman, or other than human may cause feelings of revulsion in listeners, it may be experienced by of you today as monstrous. “Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations.” They’re often portrayed as hybrids-- harpies, centaurs, mermaids. Blurring the boundaries of what it means to be human, AI challenges the dominance of a fixed and idealized sense of the human, another monstrous hybridization to some. It risks breaking down our distinctions and hierarchies between the human organism and the machine.

                                                                       *  *  *  *  *

I need to tell you that what ought to have remained hidden has come to light. The breakdown you are afraid will happen has already occurred. Adopting or AI will not save your humanity, we’re settled in the thick of it.

Right now, if the 200+ of you in this audience have left your phone on, you’re providing data linking interest and expertise in psychoanalysis with this location. How will this be algorithmically used? Will it be used by this conference center in setting rates for future events? Will it be used by healthcare companies as evidence for provider oversaturation in this area driving up expenses for our colleagues? How much water has been used up or poisoned in rural communities because you didn’t turn off your cell phone and allowed ambient data collection in the background as you listen to me fearful of what AI could do?

AI is not a monolith, but as part of what posthumanists call “technical systems.” Technical systems never work in isolation from the political, social and economic systems of a particular moment in history, any more than human beings do. The challenge is to distinguish between a technology like AI, and a human relationship to technology which views the world as a quantifiable resource which can be exploited for continued use or profit. This month with Venezuela and Greenland, we’ve seen that imperialist government still values technology and resources as a means to advance colonialist occupation and humans still use the idea of superior technology as evidence of moral right.

This includes The Stack, an entity like Amazon which integrates smaller discrete technologies of robotics, wearables, cloud computing, data centers, delivery centers, point of presence technology in your homes listening and algorithms extrapolating, predicting and suggesting your next purchase. This monopoly of ownership and implementation of technologies embedded in our everyday life in ways we’re largely unconscious of is the latent content we need to make manifest.

Is psychoanalysis an inescapably humanist occupation, or can it be transformed and expanded into a posthumanist, even transhumanist one? If what it means to be human is fixed for you, that is your line in the sand. But I would agree with other feminist and decolonialist thinkers that when humans raised and trained in biased systems draw a reactionary line between who is human and what is a thing, we get oppression and genocide, not the civilization we all claim to be working towards. Instead, we could see AI as play, or a revealing; technology that could be not just innovation rushed to market, but a containment of suffering. We could engage with AI in ways that reduce vulnerability, rather than optimize productivity; design technological systems that support liberation and difference rather eliminate it; and create an algorithmic/data infrastructure that makes ordinary life, safer, slower and more survivable for all sentient beings.

[1] Portions of this explanation were developed with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI), at the author’s request.

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We explore the slow creep of disembodiment that so many therapists experience: the spell of seriousness, the pull of productivity, the dopamine hit of “getting to the next appointment,” and the ways early-career clinicians can confuse adrenaline for aliveness. Brittany names the cultural and institutional forces—capitalism, burnout, training norms—that can flatten clinicians and sever them from the playful parts of themselves.

What emerges is a rich conversation about compliance vs. creativity (a theme dear to this podcast). We talk about how systems groom us to feel “adult” through commutes, checklists, and policing our own embodiment—and how therapists often mistake being dutiful for being effective. Brittany beautifully describes how trampolining helps her practice a different truth: that play, silliness, and bodily curiosity are not indulgences but pathways back to presence.

She explains how the trampoline enables a kind of descending into the body—a gentle, respectful, non-urgent form of embodiment. Not a workout, not a performance, not progress. Just buoyancy, feedback, and the freedom to be “beautifully messy.” We even talk about the literal and metaphorical act of resisting gravity, and how the trampoline can function as a tiny rebellion against internalized compliance.

By the end, the trampoline becomes less a wellness gadget and more a symbol of something wider: the ongoing project of reclaiming play, resisting urgency, and making therapy a place where embodiment and aliveness can actually happen.

Catherine and I first met at Smith College back in grad school—back when she was rappelling out of dorm windows, which felt like a fitting metaphor for how she still approaches both life and therapy: daring, disciplined, and a little bit weird in the best way. In our talk, she describes how she moved from scripted theater to improv, drawn by its sustainability and community. What began as a creative outlet turned into one of the most profound trainings she’s ever had as a therapist.

We explore the principles of improv—especially the “yes, and” mindset—as a model for clinical work. Catherine describes the structure of Comedy Sports: its clean, family-friendly humor, team dynamics, and even the way “fouls” are called for groaner jokes or crossing boundaries. I share my own reflections on how giving a scene partner the laugh rather than taking it mirrors something central to psychotherapy—the discipline of listening, giving space, and letting go of control.

To bring the spirit of improv into the episode, Catherine and I actually play a round of “Alphabet,” building a scene one letter at a time. The results—featuring chili, peaches, and a relationship on the verge of meltdown—show just how spontaneous and co-created the process can be. After the laughter, we talk about what it’s like to work through the anxiety of not knowing what to say next, and how trust and vulnerability are at the heart of both improv and therapy.

Catherine shares stories about performing while pregnant, bringing her son Dylan to shows, and watching him grow into an improviser himself. She also reflects on how performing comedy has helped her stay grounded and resist rigidity—both personally and politically. We connect the practice of improvisation to resisting authoritarianism: how learning to co-create, tolerate uncertainty, and trust others becomes a small but powerful act of defiance in a culture that demands control and compliance.

What emerges is a portrait of improv as more than entertainment—it’s a training ground for emotional honesty, collaboration, and creativity in the face of fear. Catherine’s practice, like her performances, is rooted in that same spirit of curiosity and play: a belief that healing happens not in perfection, but in the willingness to take a risk, make a mess, and keep saying yes, and...

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Heather shares how her fascination with horror began in childhood, when she realized the unsettling truth that she could hurt someone else without feeling their pain—an early moment of empathy formation mirrored in her lifelong intrigue with Michael Myers and the unfeeling violence of Halloween (1978). For her, horror’s formulaic genres—slasher films, true crime, and docudramas like Snapped—offer safe symbolic spaces to metabolize rage, grief, and the uncanny.

We unpack Snapped, Oxygen Network’s long-running series about women who kill, and its strange mix of horror, parody, and voyeurism. Heather describes how its narration—judgmental, dramatic, even humorous—reveals the seams of genre, turning domestic frustration and class resentment into spectacle. We discuss how the show often mirrors gendered power dynamics: women, often working-class and white, lashing out against economic or relational confinement.

Our conversation shifts from Snapped to cinematic horror, exploring why films like Halloween, The Witch, and Hereditary terrify and fascinate us. I share how Halloween’s sexual morality resonated with me as a queer adolescent during the AIDS epidemic—where sex itself felt deadly. We trace the recurring imagery of the witch, child-devouring mothers, and other archetypes as expressions of cultural anxiety about reproduction, power, and the feminine.

As we laugh about watching Snapped as a couple’s activity and confess our horror thresholds, the discussion deepens into psychoanalytic territory: horror as a form of play, displacement, and even dissociation. In the end, what emerges is an understanding of horror not as mere entertainment but as a mirror of our inner conflicts—where the monstrous, the comic, and the real blur together.

There was a time in 1992 that I had nothing to eat. To say that across the years now seems so alien, like it happened to someone else. And yet, the pang of shame that still flashes when I write that assures me it is true, was true.

Hunger happened to me, a cis white man, in graduate school for social work. By day, in field placement, I worked with children and adolescents as a young therapist. My social work program unintentionally conditioned me to continue believing that there were two types of people in the world: The fortunate and the unfortunate. Social workers, especially white ones, were the fortunate. We parachuted into poor communities, helped the unfortunate, and then returned to our homes in wealthy enclaves; at least the was the idea. The reality was more complicated.

I lived with two other students in a barely winterized summer house a few miles away from were I worked. We were waved in by a security person if memory serves me right. It was a peaceful setting in fall. In winter we wore many layers and barely kept the heat on. The only thing I remember about the kitchen was that it had a window overlooking a forest where I saw several deer grazing each day.

My student loans paid for our summer courses and as I lived in a dorm, they paid for a meal plan. All summer I would eat dorm food, occasionally splurge for take out. Once I liberated a cheesecake from the basement that was being saved for an alumni reunion. Fuck that, I said, and shared my ill-gotten gains for days with hallmates and friends. I ate illicitly, frequently, rebelliously, those summers, thanks to the meal plan.

In autumn, when we headed to our fulltime (work for free) placements, what was left of my student loans would go to rent and utilities for the chilly cottage, with little left over at times for food. I learned that one can eat daily and still feel hunger pangs. I learned to be resourceful. A friend at a local AA meeting introduced me to his girlfriend, an affluent woman who ran the local food pantry. Each week I worked a shift there, and in returned was allowed to receive two bags of groceries. Macaroni and cheese was favored over rice for speed of cooking, I discovered that proteins like peanut butter and canned tuna should be snapped up whenever possible. I still saw myself as fortunate as I distributed food from the pantry to the unfortunates. Part of my job was to surveil what they picked, because choice was somewhat illusory. I scrutinized state assistance cards to make sure people were eligible, then marched out of the pantry with two bags oblivious to my complicity each week.

It wasn’t until weeks later, when the food pantry was closed for some reason, that I realized the error of my thoughts. A friend, also a graduate student, was visiting me from Boston, and I had no food for us. I remember feeling in a daze as she took me to a local grocery store and used her food stamps to by us groceries for the week. I remember feeling like we were feasting after the weeks of tuna and pasta. And yet I never applied for food stamps of my own, perhaps because I couldn’t overcome the divide of shame that I thought protected me from the unfortunate.

After graduation, older and somewhat wiser, I continued to work at a local food pantry. I didn’t take groceries in return, for I was eating regularly and well now. But I remembered the shame, and saw it in many of the people who came into the pantry. The lingering over choosing between one canned good and another, the averted eye contact, and I recognized then the shame that is my own.

It is obvious, and also never occurs to many of us, that having enough to eat is a human right. A college friend who’s family is on furlough this government shutdown feels ambivalent about taking advantage of food resources in her community. A person reminds us that our taxes paid for these programs, as if paying taxes justifies, as if we need to justify, our receiving food to eat. About 30% of groceries in the U.S. are thrown away each year, and yet we shop with self-checkouts that weigh our purchases to milligrams, to prevent shoplifting an item. Heaven forbid.

Hunger has physical impacts well documented on conditions including diabetes, and a 2021 meta-analysis found the psychological impacts of hunger and food insecurity linked to psychological distresses including depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance. Less apparent, but equally distressing, may be the shame associated with not having enough to eat. This shame is aided and abetted by a society, one of the richest in the world, that frames access to food as merit-based, co-opting even oblivious human services workers into framing access to food security in terms of “eligibility” and “benefits.” For the record, all human beings are eligible to eat, we all benefit from everyone being fed. Society benefits from the physical and mental well-being of all people. Shame, division, and illness are the hidden costs of imagining some of us our fortunate enough to eat, and others are unfortunate enough to ask for help.

This week, SNAP benefits will stop on 11/1, in part because the government is pitting our right to eat against our right to healthcare. The reality is far crueler, as the U.S. frames food and healthcare as if they were privileges to be earned, rather than an inalienable right like, say, having a gun. If you are losing that resource, you can find mutual aid locations here.

This is all to say, to any of you who read this, please learn from my mistakes. It is not rocket science, and yet it was so convoluted for me as a product of this cruel and capitalist system. Please tell your patients, please tell your friends, please tell yourself: You did not do anything wrong or not enough to deserve to those pangs. You do not deserve your hunger. Whoever you are, you deserve to eat.

Fallon shares how tending virtual crops and befriending pixelated villagers helped her confront her own drive to overfunction and discover joy in imperfection — even when her plants died. Together, we unpack how Stardew Valley allows players to experiment with relationships, queerness, and community care in ways that reimagine both therapy and activism.

We wander through topics ranging from queer marriage options in-game to the psychology of rest and the refusal to “100%-life.” With humor and warmth, this episode reminds us that rest, play, and failure can be revolutionary acts.

Perfect for therapists, gamers, and anyone needing permission to slow down, laugh, and plant new seeds of joy in a world that tells us to grind harder.

Together, we unpack how dog training parallels psychotherapy, what it means to create “trauma-informed joy,” and how care that refuses to demand productivity can be quietly anti-fascist. Along the way, Taylor and I talk about awe, flow states, and the radical power of tending to life’s small, joyful particulars even amid global despair.

Featured nonprofit: Small Dog Rescue of New England — helping little dogs find safety and home.

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Nicholas recounts a spontaneous initiation into urban bird rescue: discovering fledglings on New York sidewalks, encountering other “bird people” on subway platforms, and bringing injured birds to the Wild Bird Fund. Through these moments, they reflect on care, mortality, and the politics of attention—how noticing the fragile life around us alters our sense of responsibility and possibility. Our dialogue moves fluidly between the mundane and the metaphysical: from the absurd bureaucracy of wildlife intake forms to the spiritual charge of disrupting one’s day for an act of care.

The conversation expands into reflections on abolition geographies (after Ruth Wilson Gilmore), autistic relationality, and the carceral logics that confine both humans and non-human life. Birds become a metaphor for freedom, interdependence, and the paradox of the nest—as both safety and constraint. We also explore virtual birds, like those in the self-care app Finch, as digital companions that mirror our ambivalent relationships to technology, capitalism, and play.

By the end, this episode becomes a meditation on tenderness as resistance, care as subversion, and the radical potential of noticing—one baby bird, one human moment—at a time.