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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.998)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Jerome Veit, Senior Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Seattle University and Licensed Therapist. And so today we're gonna talk about his book, Godamer and the Transmission of History, but more so how for him that's an entry point that led to a longer journey into the practice of licensed therapy. So really interested in that journey from theory to practice.
Dr. Veit, wonderful to have you on today.
Jerome Veith (00:32.991)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (00:35.086)
So, Dr. Veit, starting with this book, why this book, but really what has that journey been like that led you from philosophy into practice?
Jerome Veith (00:47.552)
in some words, just a dream come true. I never could have envisioned this career working out or these careers working out in conjunction the way they have, but it's really been a deepening of philosophy to me to become a therapist. It's not like I left that behind and somehow practice versus theory. I really feel like I do philosophy every day with my clients.
and I get to be phenomenological in the way I was trained about phenomenology. It's just I'm maybe not using the terms I did at reduction with my clients. But yeah, it's been great. I'm just so grateful to get to do this work. I'm grateful for the philosophical training I got. It's just been a wonderful journey.
PJ Wehry (01:30.082)
Yeah.
Jerome Veith (01:46.232)
that might be clichΓ© thing to say, but yeah, it just continues to bear fruit and they feed each other as sort of professions. I feel like I get so much from the clinical work too then to bring to my students and to say, know, here's what it means to have a world. Here's what historicity means in a lived texture as opposed to simply as a concept.
PJ Wehry (02:14.956)
As you moved from philosophy to therapy, what were some gaps that you felt like you had to fill?
Jerome Veith (02:23.968)
Well, I really had to become acquainted with a whole different mode of dialogue. I was trained in academic speaking and writing and listening and reading. And there's just a different way of being present, of attending, that comes from being a therapist. It's one of the hardest things to teach. It's one of the things I try to teach because I train future therapists as well.
PJ Wehry (02:30.286)
Hmm.
Jerome Veith (02:53.696)
But it's not a theory, it's not a hermeneutic in the sense of a method of reading or in the sense of a lens. It's attunement to lenses. It's being aware that you're bringing something. It's being aware that someone else and their understanding might be fluctuating from day to day. And so you're trying to really hear the way someone might be interpreting something.
or the depth to which something might be resonating with someone.
So yeah, are things that we can talk more about what I think the humanities offer as a training for that as a kind of bulwark of having something to draw from. But at the end of the day, clients are our entire beings and worlds unto themselves. And yeah, there's just an exposure of vulnerability to meeting that. I think that's a really healthy thing. I think that's part of the power of therapy is.
the relating, the horizons in God-American terms. But that's not something one can just pick up or something one can read about and then know what that's like. I'd say it's an ongoing process of just developing the ear for that, the presence with it.
PJ Wehry (04:21.358)
So would one way well you kind of already answered this question that I was gonna follow up with as you started out, but I would love to see if There's some nuances here What's the difference because I think most people kind of immediately pick up on the difference between academic and therapeutic speech like I think that's Pretty firmly entrenched people's heads. What's the difference between academic and therapeutic listening?
Jerome Veith (04:48.746)
Hmm. Well, I kind of have to reach for some Goddomer here. When I was studying Goddomer, reading Truth and Method over and over again to try to chew on it with folks, what always got me and got me kind of agitated, frustrated somehow was his insistence on charitability. I couldn't figure out why this...
why this almost a priori need for him that he's saying, no, you've got to listen. You've got to really try to let the other challenge you. Try to let the text you're reading challenge you. Try to let another time challenge you. I think as the academic reading that text, I just thought, well, no, but if I can see the misplaced assumptions, I'm just going to go for them. I'm just going to...
call them out. it was kind of this, quite erasure of my own subjectivity, but a kind of setting aside or just pretending to be a naive reader or pretending that I could just look at something and in my gaze, just take it in and survey it and critique it. And it really, this might be embarrassing to say, but it really wasn't until I...
wrote my book on Gautam, or got my PhD, trained in therapy, began doing therapy, that that really, really sunk in as, as an axiom, I that might be too rigid to put it in Gautamarian terms, but just as an entry point, you have to be aware of your own horizon in your listening. That's, think, part of the immense challenge of
being a therapist and the gift one gives as a therapist is one isn't a receptive vessel for what the client is bringing. One is a responsive being, just like they are. And so these aren't subjectivities meeting across a gap or on a hierarchy, but this word relational gets thrown around a lot in...
Jerome Veith (07:11.208)
psychology and psychoanalysis, one way I catch that word out is just to say that therapy is an encounter of human beings and it's a listening encounter. I tend to be the one listening, but I'm also modeling what it means to listen. I'm also showing in that process, directly or indirectly, pausing and listening is something one can do and that it has an immense power.
and clients discover that through therapy that pausing and wondering can be something they do as well between sessions or beyond sessions, beyond the overt work of therapy. So yeah, to me, listening is in a way synonymous with the work of hermeneutic attention.
PJ Wehry (08:04.564)
and very closely tied to that shared ability.
Jerome Veith (08:07.092)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (08:10.286)
Versus like an academic like very I Maybe you know we could call it academic but also there's kind of an enlightenment ideal of the like a critique heavy Observer is that
Jerome Veith (08:27.058)
Right, yeah, and you know this goes into what at times is called sort of the hermeneutics of suspicion, right? This notion that I'm going to try to undermine or I already know how to undermine a claim someone makes or the whole background structure behind their claims. That can happen and you know, there's a great emphasis, joint emphasis on something like
suspicion and charitability. I think there's part of the challenge there within the listening is to know when to be suspicious or when to wield that and to say, I'm gonna be a little critical here. I think that's something too that therapists of a certain vein are taught not to ever do is to always treat the other with a sort of deference.
PJ Wehry (09:07.598)
You
Jerome Veith (09:24.896)
But that's where I would distinguish charitability from deference is just that, yeah, I really, want to hear, I want to understand. And to understand, I might have to say that that doesn't make sense or help me understand that. And then maybe once I do feel like I understand it, I might say, well, that seems to be really unhealthy or that seems to be part of the problem. So I think there's a real, you know, this is part of the...
The balance of that is to know when to apply which mode or when to inhabit one mode more than the other.
PJ Wehry (10:04.694)
You model pausing and wondering, pausing and listening, and do you see any parallels between, because a lot of times people, not always obviously, and I'm not asking for specific cases here, but people come into therapy because of specific hurt?
and because they can't get beyond that specific hurt. Do you see any parallels between getting stuck in the hermeneutics of suspicion philosophically and getting stuck in suspicion because you can't get past something that was actually that was done to you?
Jerome Veith (10:43.604)
Yeah, and that could be, we could be talking about a literal something done, a literal wound.
And not to say that future anxiety is not also literal, but I worked largely with anxiety and yeah, anxiety can be the result of something having happened. It can also be an intense worry that something will happen. And I engage that in all of its seriousness of the realism of that. But yes, it can also ratchet itself up into
PJ Wehry (11:11.425)
Mm.
Jerome Veith (11:22.93)
a mode that one doesn't get a pause from. If one's anxiety has hijacked one's attention about the past, the present, or the future, then yeah, one is in a sense in that operative mode of suspicion of thinking that the worst will happen or thinking that one has just made a mistake that'll never get repaired or something has happened to one that'll never be good again.
And yeah, I think there is something short of a direct confrontation with that or a direct arguing with that logic. There's something that can come from therapy just of a relaxed posture about these things in general, about how one relates to what has happened, how one allows that in these paradoxical terms of how the past can change.
PJ Wehry (12:22.52)
Hmm.
Jerome Veith (12:22.912)
having been can be lived differently, sort of using some some Heideggerian language there. But this is this is part of what animated my interest in historicity to begin with in Hermeneutics. It's just how the past as lived means that the past is also malleable. Our relationship to the past shifts all the time. And to me, that's just a really powerful avenue in therapy.
PJ Wehry (12:52.118)
Yes, absolutely. I'm looking at the book Memory, History and Forgetting by Paul Ricour and immediately I'm like, it's been a continuing thread in hermeneutics. And I think what you have here is kind of a logical outflow into practice, which I think is a beautiful thing because a lot of times hermeneutics gets locked into, know, well, how do we translate, right? When really that was a metaphor for doing hermeneutics.
Jerome Veith (13:19.562)
Right, that's right.
PJ Wehry (13:22.894)
So I had Dr. Ryan Holston on and he talked about democratic deliberation and for him he was talking about how hermeneutics can help us with the political process and by not looking just at a lot of times it's like we look at the dialogue but one of the things that Gottemoer gives us is looking at the preconditions for dialogue and how that those are things we have to look at which you need charitability to when
Jerome Veith (13:46.09)
Right.
PJ Wehry (13:51.448)
preconditions don't match up, which is basically our world as we know it. Yeah. And so as he talked about that for the political process, that definitely made me think of what you do in therapy. Do you find yourself both adjusting, but also maybe helping people find missing preconditions to work with the world? Is that one way to think about it?
Jerome Veith (13:56.992)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (14:17.866)
I know I'm talking in academic language here, sorry I'm coming from the...
Jerome Veith (14:22.554)
I mean, yeah, there's never phrasing that has to stick, but yeah, this notion of precondition sort of makes me think of what Gadamer talks about in terms of situatedness and context and his notion of horizons, which to me is just endlessly fascinating. It's always been such a rich concept and metaphor.
And so yes, in therapeutic terms, what we might say can happen or often does happen is a shifting of horizons. If we take that metaphor as almost like a circular, concentric circle centered on the subjects, that can widen. And it widens as our view expands.
maybe elevate in our perspective, however you want to put that in an image. But one way to cash out what's happening there is that someone is understanding their situatedness in a deeper way. And that might be their literal personal biographical situatedness that could be recognizing things in their upbringing that they had ignored or
that deeply affected them, but that had become dissociated. So this can become highly clinical in sort of traditional models of what even stereotypically has been known as therapy or psychoanalysis, right? This, we're gonna talk about your childhood. But in hermeneutic terms, it sort of gains this new texture because once again, this is all happening in the present and it's about...
what that's doing for the present and it arises in the present. So I think to bring these themes as a hermeneutic therapist means I'm not coming in with a question in the first session or two going, so I need a full narrative of your life and everything that happened in your childhood, the sort of standard kind of questionnaire mode. I'm gonna let that arise over the course of maybe dozens of sessions.
Jerome Veith (16:50.058)
there are clients with whom we don't get to talking about those things until well into an understanding of what's going on for them. And it becomes a question because it arises as a question for them. They find themselves feeling something and saying, this is a familiar feeling and here's how long back this goes. So that's a sort of biographical site where one can really find
horizons that are opaque, but that can be made a little more translucent. They're never going to be transparent.
but we can expand them, can shift them and see what happens when that new understanding forms. That's gonna change someone's present outlook. It might change their motive relating to themselves or to others or their families. But the really powerful insight that originally set me on this path of studying Goddermere was the insight that we more broadly historically situated than just our individual bio.
So there's this way in which we inherit traditions, right? This was one of the reasons he got mislabeled as conservative is that he was saying no tradition is unavoidable. But he didn't mean tradition with a capital T of saying like you must obey the tradition or how you were raised, but rather just be aware that you've inherited something.
sort of to your point about these preconditions, one might even say today this is harder because we don't have a tradition we're inheriting. We're inheriting a jumbled mess of broken narratives, semi-structured narratives, imperatives to return to certain traditions, and then other imperatives to leave those traditions behind at all costs, because they're awful and toxic.
Jerome Veith (18:59.1)
And so we're kind of unmoored with relation to our historicity. And some people have bought into the narrative that we just, we can just excise that wholesale and just be our own individuals. And that's exactly the Robinson Crusoe dream that that Goddomer critiques. He just says that will always fail. You even in your attempts to eradicate these, your
in a sense, repeating traditional patterns or your repeating moves that modernity has told you are possible, but that aren't possible. So yeah, one of the richest dimensions for me of therapy is when it becomes this wider engagement with culture and cultural inheritance, not again on this broader academic plane that's still interesting to me.
But on this highly individuated plane of this particular client has inherited these particular frustrations or narratives or practices and hears how they are wrestling with those in their day to day. That just becomes so crystallized in the individual form and we can hear these, like you're saying, these larger tensions playing out.
And I think therapy is one of the few spaces we have to really try to understand those in, like you're saying, in this space of charitability where it's not a debate, where it's not me challenging a client on something just to challenge them. I'm challenging them for their own growth. And I will only ever challenge them in a way that I hope helps them to see something that helps.
and helps them grow. So that trust, there's a kind of hermeneutics, and back to the hermeneutics of trust, right? There's a trust I'm trying to build in that dynamic, and it's a trust that allows someone to explore something critically and expose beliefs or assumptions they have without worrying that someone's gonna pounce on them and say, you think what? And...
Jerome Veith (21:23.848)
So that's, I think, it does echo what you're saying, I think could be really powerful on a larger political level of listening to someone, having a genuine trust between people that they can explore these things and recognize them because that's the precondition to doing anything with those assumptions.
PJ Wehry (21:50.136)
Thank you. You talked about Hermeneutics giving more texture to psychoanalysis. One thing that I picked up on is that some of that texture comes from the wider cultural engagement rather than a narrow personal history. Do you also feel that the extra texture comes from the kind of privileged role Gottemir gives to judgment or practical wisdom? I think it's phrenesis or phrenesis.
Jerome Veith (22:18.649)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (22:19.842)
been a while since I looked at the Greek. And do think that helps with some of the texture where you at the beginning you're talking about the questionnaire mode of like, well, let's find out like your standard childhood narratives and let's find where you fit listening and giving that kind of paying attention to the texture and which is only possible through privileging judgment, good judgment and kind of that capacity.
Jerome Veith (22:49.524)
Yeah, there's so much to say, and for whatever reason, I've latched onto this metaphor of texture quite a bit recently in all sorts of facets. I think part of what comes up in therapy is the lived world of the client.
that really contrasts with this notion that there is a kind of inner life that I'm trying to get at, Some, some either neurological dimension or some kind of internal self. I think part of the richness of the whole hermeneutic tradition is to say these things are out there. We are in the world. We're not transparent fully, but
we show up and we bring our worlds with us. So one place where this texture shows up is language.
the cultural manifestations of language or the ways in which someone expresses themselves is going to be not purely subjective, if it were, we wouldn't understand them, but it's going to be an attempt to share and share a world together, a linguistic world, a cultural world.
And that's the side of texture to me because I'm going to hear things a certain way. And that's something I have to be aware of I'm doing. I have to say at some point maybe to a client, when I hear that word, this is what it makes me think of. Or when I hear about that experience, that makes me bristle with frustration. Or I get vicariously angered.
Jerome Veith (24:50.8)
angry hearing what has happened to you. Those are all ways we might register the texture of someone's lived experience to show that that texture is public, so to speak, not necessarily being waved about, but it's audible. It's palpable. And that's a way of showing someone that they impact others.
They are in the world. They're not isolated. That might be one of their deepest feelings is that they're self-enclosed and unknowable even to themselves. And for someone else to say there's a texture there that I can pick up on and let's look at that together.
That, I think, a way of, back to this theme of attention, I think it's a way of cultivating joint attention on life, on the texture of one's life and our world. And yes, to circle back to the point about Phrenesis,
That attention is a practice in Aristotle's ethical sense of practice. In other words, it's not a means to an end. We're not attending to the texture of life because that's going to solve all the problems. But it means we're going to see those problems differently if we cultivate a sense of, how do I look at this? How do I listen for this? How do I share this? How do I invite others to see this?
That's gonna change the carrying of it, the holding of it. And yeah, the mode in which we can judge and assess it and chew on it, take it apart. None of that's possible if we are living in such a way that either denies it or objectifies it.
Jerome Veith (26:53.408)
or somehow makes it seem like it's purely internal and can never be shared.
PJ Wehry (27:01.646)
Thank you. Yeah, no, it's really good. if you don't mind, I'd love to go in a slightly different direction now, because we've talked a lot about therapy, part of your journey is not just that your use of hermeneutics in therapy, it's also your use of hermeneutics in pedagogy. And I'm interested, how has hermeneutics, what do you find shared between those two things? What is how has hermeneutics helped you?
Jerome Veith (27:02.09)
There was a lot there, so.
PJ Wehry (27:27.375)
what's similar in therapy and in pedagogy and what's different.
Jerome Veith (27:32.264)
Yeah, great question. That's actually really sparking some insight on my part because yeah, I'd say where I started with hermeneutics was in part in an academic setting.
But it also allowed me to hear myself in an academic lineage, for lack of better word. And I don't mean that in a distinctly linear sense of one line. But it made me understand my own cultural situatedness and my own inheritances and made me really interested in those. I grew up in Germany with a very humanistic education. I came to a liberal arts school wanting to continue that liberal.
PJ Wehry (28:19.662)
you
Jerome Veith (28:21.758)
and humanistic education. But it wasn't really until I encountered hermeneutics and the sort of self-description of why we're doing that, that it even became clear that it was a tradition. This is one of Gadamer's points, that it's often not until we interrogate that tradition that we see that we've had it, that it isn't it. And that was what set me on my path of really wanting to...
explore that concept and the importance of that concept because part of what I maybe hubristically or yeah naively thought I could do was use hermeneutics to defend the humanities and the teaching of the humanities to say these aren't just in this classical sense this typical phrasing great books or great ideas
Part of what Gadamer reminds us is that these ideas aren't great because they started great. They're great because they've become known as great ideas. And anything could potentially become known as classical, could become classical by our attention to it. So classical isn't a property of the text or the idea. Classical is a property of our engagement with it. And that...
Something in that just really energized me to say, then I both want to study more of these ideas to see what else might be worthy of being called classical. What have we forgotten? What have we left aside? What has never been translated? What could never be translated at all? And what have we lost from the possibility of relating to it classically? That's when I really hit upon this notion that
History contains these opacities, these kind of places, sites. I call them hauntings at times, too. That's not my own coinage. But borrowing this notion from the sort of spectralities discourse to say there are ways in which we culturally and individually are haunted by things that we'll never know. They're unknowable. We can't relate to them. And yet that not relating isn't.
Jerome Veith (30:43.706)
pure absence. It's a nothing in Heidegger's sense that nothing's... it does something to us to know that we can't know all of Heraclitus. There's a texture to that impossibility and it might make us appreciate more what we have inherited and how we might translate those works differently and
hear different things in them, put things, juxtapose things differently in our histories to learn more about our own cultures or about other cultures. So you can kind of hear in this, right? All of this made me really interested in becoming a certain kind of teacher too, becoming a certain kind of philosophy teacher that isn't just saying, all right, we're doing the march through history and we're starting with the pre-Socratics and we're just doing the lineage, capital L.
I wanted to challenge my own sense of tradition or traditions and invite students into this broader humanistic practice of exploration, juxtaposition, learning about ourselves via learning from others. And I'd like to think I got fairly decent at that in my pedagogy.
But that's where all of that also culminated in the sense of, okay, there's a lot to be done here beyond the academic, too, because this is...
Jerome Veith (32:23.552)
How does one teach about these opacities? I had to design my own course basically to say, okay, we're gonna look at these now because this is not a philosophy course. We're not reading texts. We're listening for absences and discourses, or we are interrogating what I call the politics of memory in one of my courses. It was just all about memorialization and how it struggles or fails.
So it really widened my sort of disciplinary footing to say, okay, I'm not just situated in philosophy. I'm not just even working with literature or historical texts. But yeah, thinking about political history and political ideas, political events, anthropology and sort of the challenges of
bringing into our own discourses what seems to be outside of them.
PJ Wehry (33:33.208)
So, and I think there's an immediate application when you talk about specters and hauntings, that discourse, that makes sense in a therapeutic context as well. Like the absence, like listening for absences immediately. Is the difference between...
Jerome Veith (33:44.734)
Yes.
Jerome Veith (33:49.898)
Yes, yes.
PJ Wehry (33:56.51)
When you talk about the pedagogical side, you're talking about the lineage and listening for the absences in the lineage, whereas it's a very, is the difference between pedagogy and therapy partly in scale?
Jerome Veith (34:13.242)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (34:13.856)
Or is there another difference as well?
Jerome Veith (34:18.496)
I think this is really just where, I mean, this sounds like a hedge, it really is the difference of when you're teaching, as much as in Jesuit education, we might say we're teaching the whole person. In my experience, we're teaching a room full of whole persons. And so we're going to be focused way more on the material we're focused on together and way less on each individual.
PJ Wehry (34:44.302)
Mmm.
Jerome Veith (34:47.85)
depth of each learner's mind. I think there are openings there that, given more time and resources, yeah, we could absolutely teach the whole person. I think the shift of emphasis in therapy is this whole person, the client, is there for all sorts of reasons, maybe only one of which is something that we might.
overtly called learning. They're wrestling with all sorts of current and past experiences, future worries.
Jerome Veith (35:29.822)
And so the material, so to speak, of what we're talking about to an outsider might sound really mundane and concrete. I would say though that there's way more to that than what might be heard or overheard. Whereas in a class, we might very overtly be saying, okay, we're trying to hear this and this dimension of this text.
or let's juxtapose this idea and that idea and see what we can make of them. There are moments like that in therapy, but they're rare in that kind of, in the overtness of the conceptual space. But I think that's what I love about therapy is that those things come up in their lived way. So someone will arrive at,
powerful question like I discussed the other day with someone of just what what change is and how how we Sit with change and and what do we do about change? Are we supposed to like change or despise change? We just got to really rich philosophical territory, but this was all via Someone talking about their work and their relationship to their job role. So it
It's not planned in the sense that I come to therapy saying, today I'm going to ask this person about the concept of change. They're going to find that question through their own exploration of their present lived experience. And that to me is one of the differences between teaching and therapy is with teaching. am preparing a class. I'm hoping it goes a certain way. I am pre-structuring via assignments and readings and prompts.
Whereas with therapy, I'm bringing a recollection of how this person has talked and what they've talked about. I'm bringing my sense of the larger world and current events. But apart from that, I'm really attuning to the moment as it unfolds and have far, far less of a pre-planned agenda.
PJ Wehry (37:51.4)
As I'm listening, I think there's, I know I've read about this and I can't remember where, but there's some disagreement about Socratic dialogue if the goal was always to take you somewhere, or if it was just to play more the role of midwife, because of course Plato loves to dwell in the ironic, so it's hard to tell what he means. And so a little bit what I'm hearing is the sometimes difference in Socratic dialogue between
Jerome Veith (38:11.648)
Thank
PJ Wehry (38:20.846)
am I the midwife that is going to bear something we don't even know, something that's coming out of the individual versus, here, let me ask you questions that will direct you this way. And of course, some of that's just the difference in interpretation in play-doh. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Jerome Veith (38:36.448)
It is, and I like it because it's playful and not determinative one way or the other. And maybe that's one of the fruitful ambiguities that Plato left us with. Who knows if that itself is intentional, right? It just goes on and on. And this, yeah, this too is another hinge or crux of what distinguishes, I think, hermeneutically-based therapy from
PJ Wehry (38:49.518)
You
Jerome Veith (39:05.659)
so many other modalities or methods is that those modalities are often taught rigidly, they're wielded rigidly, and they're taught as more of a kind of set of guiding questions to have, right? There's an approach called motivational interviewing, which is basically just, you're going to...
PJ Wehry (39:31.31)
Mm.
Jerome Veith (39:33.18)
motivate someone by asking them questions and they won't notice they're being motivated by your proddings or hopefully they won't or if they do they'll thank you for it. So it is it's a technique and this is just where you know in the Gautamarian hermeneutic traditions what's so continually so powerful is the resistance of method.
Truth and method is so unappedly named, it's not even funny. It should be truth and play or truth beyond method or something that, yeah, that takes the method out of the forefront of it. Because it really is this attention to the edge of what's happening and not knowing what's gonna happen. there's a great hermeneutic therapist who uses this.
phrase courting surprise, we're courting surprise, we're hoping to be surprised, we're hoping that the client surprises themselves and surprises us perhaps. Something will happen, that's not predictable. I might have pockets of methodical intervention, so I might use CBT, but I'll be very overt that I'm using CBT at a given moment and say,
Okay, well, let me put my CBT hat on and challenge that line of thinking. Or if I were a more rigid CBT therapist, here's what I would ask about what you just said. It's a kind of way of saying, okay, we're gonna play for a minute, but we're gonna play with this different mode and see what happens to signal to the client this isn't the mode of therapy, or this isn't...
challenging ideas is not something I'm constantly doing. It's something I can choose to do and thus can invite someone else to choose to do, but they don't need to become surveyors of their own thoughts constantly. That's not going to help an anxious person all that much. But if they can learn that they can pause and do that and then re-enter the flow of life or conversation.
Jerome Veith (42:00.512)
Those are going to be pockets of what I would say, method or technique. But yeah, think that's the relationship there of these are part of a larger flow and don't determine the shape of the conversation as whole.
PJ Wehry (42:24.79)
And I understand that we've been talking a lot about not, you know, creating these boxes, but you just mentioned like it's good to have the techniques, just understanding how they fit. How do you see your role as a teacher and a therapist in regards? And forgive me, I've had someone on about it. I've read quite a bit about it. I can never say it right. But Bildung, am I? I don't think I get enough of the German like, you know,
Jerome Veith (42:46.612)
Yeah, that's all.
PJ Wehry (42:53.454)
been there, but it's alright. How does the role of that kind of self formation within that cultural context, how do you see that? Does that form a major part of your goal? Is that kind of a way of talking about everything we've been talking about? How does that concept show up? Because obviously that's really big for Godemer and it makes perfect sense as a teacher and a therapist.
Jerome Veith (43:16.808)
Yes, and that's the, you're coming back to the tingle that I felt before when you were sort of asking me to compare those two. So thanks for bringing it back to that. Because yes, the concept of Bildung, this notion of formation, which ultimately is intended to become a self formation and a practice in that Aristotelian sense of practical wisdom too.
the thrust of that traditional discourse is humanistically based. And that's where I'm finding the, one of the misunderstandings or one of the problematic foldings of that tradition is to think that by humanism, we mean what, let's say humanistic psychology has meant in America since the 1950s. That's a very,
constrained notion of what humanism is. And one might say a very neoliberal notion of what a subject is. If we go back to the Romantic movement in Germany where this concept really flourished and found deep, deep roots, it's more of a sense of humanism that says we will always come up short of knowing what humanity is.
But let's not let that stop us from getting to know humanity as widely as possible. And that's the inspiration that I really have felt through this work of history and historicity is as an invitation. It's an ongoing invitation to know and not know in that surveying gaze kind of knowing of, okay, I'm gonna look at this other culture and take from it what I think is good, but.
I'm going to let it confront me and I hope I can find the translations that speak to me and I hope I can find those who convey and teach those things in ways that obfuscate them as little as possible so that they can challenge me.
Jerome Veith (45:28.06)
And yes, that's something I do, and I hope pedagogically that by modeling that, I'm also showing students that to study history isn't to learn some historiographical techniques, to study philosophy isn't to memorize a bunch of isms and how they can be debated against each other, but yeah, really to learn that there's an infinity in what humans have already generated.
to be explored and we're continuing to generate more and to interact more.
That is just such fertile and inspiring territory. Why wouldn't one be interested in that?
PJ Wehry (46:15.02)
Yeah, and I just want to make sure I'm the same track with you, but I think if we go back to our discussion of tradition and, you know, Goddamer's use of it, what he's pushing back against is kind of maybe he's saying tradition is organic rather than sedimentary, or another way of thinking about it.
As you're talking about looking at another culture, the goal is to kind of encapsulate, is to box it in. And so of course the response to that is you want to break the boxes. And the point is if we're recording Surprise is that other people aren't meant to be boxed in, but we're not meant to destroy our view or understanding of them. We're supposed to take that and it's supposed to be generative.
Jerome Veith (46:42.88)
Mm-hmm.
Jerome Veith (46:57.108)
Yes, yeah, yeah, that's right.
PJ Wehry (46:59.822)
I mean, I do a lot of cooking, so I think of this a lot of like there's a and I've seen people push back against this and I think that's good, but there's a hunt for authenticity in cooking. And so you'll see people get San Marzano tomatoes from Italy and they'll get all the and it's like, that's that's not why they were using that stuff, because that's what they had over there. Right. And taking inspiration from them and allowing it to inform your own cooking.
to think that you are recreating what they have. As an example, we had too many chickpeas. I'd bought too many. And I made two different TikTok recipes that were supposed to be copycat stuff for the kids, and they hated them. It was not working at all. It's what I should have known. I never do that, but I wanted to make it fun for them. I hated them. They were terrible.
Jerome Veith (47:46.058)
You
PJ Wehry (47:55.936)
And so what I did is I just had a bunch. was like, I have a bunch of, carrots, celery and onion, which is just basic French cooking, Italian cooking. Right. And I just threw it in there with a bunch of white wine. And then I put chickpeas in it with some chicken stock and they that's been their favorite meal for the last three or four. Four months. And all I did is I just, I was like, they're like, what is this? And I was like, it's peasant stew.
That's what it is. It's like this is what I add on end. I use kind of classic like this is I just know that these things go together. I didn't like look up a recipe or I didn't measure anything and it was something that they liked. Sorry, I don't know if that's to me. That's like really stuck in my brain is like this is what we're talking about. It's like that feels more authentic to Italian French cooking than man, I spent.
Jerome Veith (48:29.855)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (48:52.066)
you know, eight hours following, you know, a Julia Child's recipe and ordering canned food from, from France or making sure I get all the exact right heirloom things. anyways, that's enough. That's a long example.
Jerome Veith (49:02.528)
Yeah.
No, it's a great, palpable, tasteable example of, yeah, and you named authenticity there. That, think, is another fraught ingredient of what gets called humanism in the present, or in humanistic psychology especially, that, just be your authentic self and only you can know what that is. There are so many...
layers of falsity to that, right? That it isn't true that only you can know who you are. And also it's not true that you can be true to yourself by containing yourself. There's gonna be more authenticity, you expand that term, to becoming situated and understanding that situatedness as an ongoing process than to try to remain self-enclosed and sort of unassailable.
But yeah, that's what passes as authenticity these days is that unassailability, that way of being opaque to others or just assuming that there's an unbridgeable gap between us. I think that's so much of what the humanistic tradition in the wider sense is trying to show isn't the case.
And also what hermeneutic philosophy and therapy are saying are the ways we risk then beginning in isolation and remaining in isolation when the whole practice of dialogue is a way to show, not instruct, but really to show that we're together in something. We share a world, we share a language. We don't share the exact understandings of that world and language, but
Jerome Veith (51:02.43)
We share a lot of understandings and the interesting interplays of where we don't share understandings. Those are fruitful places that, again, back to that notion of texture, that's a site to really lean into and explore. yeah, there's just so much to be found there. There's something so sad when I think about that notion of authenticity of just how much people burden themselves with.
the task of being a human and being that by themselves, only for themselves, and thinking they have to do it all themselves. When, yeah, there's a whole history of humans attempting this that we can learn from.
PJ Wehry (51:41.144)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (51:47.404)
Hmm. So I want to be respectful of your time, but if I could ask one more question before I have a final question. What are some resources for that help bridge hermeneutics and psychology? there certain books or people that you would point to besides yourself, obviously, and, you know, this podcast and we, course, everyone should buy and read your book as an entry point to this, Godemer and the Transmission of History. I don't want to miss that opportunity, but
What are some other resources that you have found along the way to help bridge hermeneutics and psychology?
Jerome Veith (52:25.18)
Yeah, there's some really great theoreticians or practitioners who are grounded in the theory of hermeneutics. One of the most prolific of them is Donald Stern. He writes a lot about language. He has a book called The Infinity of the Unsaid that is just really provocative in its claim that there's an infinity to
to be said, right? That language is, back to your point, is generative. We're not self-enclosed in our discourses. So that's one figure, a dear friend that, or several dear friends that have passed in recent years who inspired me on this, at this intersection are Donna Orange and Phil Cushman, both of whom were deeply steeped in
sort of phenomenology of the middle of 20th century, but then took that and really made it their own in terms of their writings, in terms of their practice. Actually, someone you had on the podcast a while back, Carolyn Colbertson, her book, Words Under Way, I used that in my therapy course, simply because it's so attuned to
PJ Wehry (53:48.59)
Hmm.
Jerome Veith (53:52.892)
the depth of language. think she touches on therapeutic issues, but is also just so portable into the realm of clinical practice. And then lastly, I would name Kevin Aho, who has a book, Context of Suffering Among Others. That's another one I use pretty regularly in teaching future clinicians about the power of hermeneutic phenomenology.
And there more, but yeah.
PJ Wehry (54:24.75)
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. That's really helpful because that's a really one that's part of what I want to accomplish here is interdisciplinary, which is part of the reason I'm so I've been so excited to have you on as a guest. But also it's it's it's sometimes hard to find these little pockets because they don't fit into their disciplinary niches. And so that's that's very helpful. Thank you.
Jerome Veith (54:49.44)
Great. That's right. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (54:54.71)
So to conclude, my final question for you, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should do, what is something that you would say to someone who has listened for the last hour to either meditate on or do in response to the last hour?
Jerome Veith (55:11.744)
Hmm.
Yeah, well this is on my mind because I'm currently putting together a piece on it.
therapy as an attentional practice. I've sort of peppered the word attention through our conversation. I've been reading a lot by this group called the Friends of Attention. I don't know if you've heard of them. They're part of what's called the Attention Liberation Movement. And they have a manifesto and it's very overtly activist. But what I realized is...
in reading those things and wondering what could I do or what do I do to sort of rescue attention from its fracking, as they say. And I realized that, yeah, therapy is an attentional practice. It's a way in which I bring attention to clients. I invite their attention on their own lives and their own experiences.
And attention really is a gift in that sense, that we can bestow it on others and that changes them. It also changes us to pay attention and to hear or see things that we wouldn't have otherwise picked up on. So that's something I'm trying to do a lot just in everyday life and I'm realizing where all that can show up. It might be cliche to say and sort of the...
Jerome Veith (56:51.264)
We've already lived through the the Mick Mindfulness era, and I think the the Attention Liberation Movement is trying to to say, okay, this isn't just another neolibe ral subjective practice for you to undertake to feel good. But it's something that that changes the world. It doesn't just change you to pay attention to the bird song or the music. It changes maybe
who you pay attention to. It changes how willing you are to give your attention to different things. And so that's something I feel like leaving with just to say that so much of what can change doesn't have to change through these institutionalized avenues of learning in academia or through therapy. But I believe that a lot can change just by directing our attentions.
PJ Wehry (57:33.389)
Hmm.
Jerome Veith (57:50.388)
paying attention to what we listen to, paying attention to film and the nuances of cinema and various art forms. I think that's what art ultimately is, is asking us to pay attention to something. So yeah, that's where I am right now. So I'll leave that.
PJ Wehry (57:56.045)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (58:10.286)
It's beautiful answer. Yes, thank you. really appreciate it. Dr. Veit, can I just say thank you? It's been an absolute joy talking to you today.
Jerome Veith (58:18.378)
Well, likewise, and thanks for the invitation.