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Welcome to eavesdrop on a complicated story!
Every week, Johanne Schwensen, clinical psychologist and co-founder of It’s Complicated, sits down for a conversation with her co-founder and friend, Jungian analyst Jakob Lusensky.
Together, we share insights from our journey of building It’s Complicated, running our private practices, and navigating the real-time growth of the platform and therapist community.
Join us in creating the world’s most international and diverse therapist community by signing up here: https://www.complicated.life/for-therapists
I like the idea that a person's bookshelf can offer insights into their personality, values, and interests. A show me your books and I'll tell you who you are kind of thinking, highlighting how our bookshelves can act as a mirror of our inner lives and curiosity. In this conversation between Jakob and I, we speak about books and therapy, and how its complicated new therapist profiles have a resource section, giving better insight into the therapist's intellectual pursuits, passions, and even their aspirations.
I was thinking about books and therapy and, I know that you're a big reader and also writer, and I was curious about how you working , with books in therapy.
It's not an explicit focus. But I do have a very natural relationship to books and therapy. I make sure to read at least one book a month. This, by the way, I'm just going to turn the camera. , so the fact that I do read as regularly as I do and consume pop culture on a very regular basis means that it's, not possible to keep them out of the therapy room. When something, in the process, gives me an association to one of the, frames of references within my book world, then the therapy becomes a kind of bibliotherapy.
And I will definitely ask, Have you heard of this book? Or what's your relationship to books? Do you read as an act of self care or is that part of your regular practice? And if it is, then, I might give some book recommendations and it might, or I would say it often is. Novels as much as it's nonfiction, because I feel that novels have such a therapeutic effect on me, normalizing certain struggles, making me feel less alone in motherhood, for instance, less alone and yeah, different.
My, just my different, everyday and existential challenges. So knowing that about myself, I pay that forward. And you sometimes recommend books, sometimes clients recommend you books. Is there some specific book that, that, that stood out or that you can mention that is coming back into the room or, yeah, because I wrote my.
thesis on the therapeutic potential of friendships. I'm always reading the new books that, that come out on friendship, and, one of them is called Platonic by, Marisa Franco, and it's a book that studies friendships from an attachment theory perspective. And it's just so, it's such a great book.
It really both is, very enticing and with memorable cases and also practical. It is a handbook of how to make and maintain friendships in a sense. So I will recommend that quite often because. People, they, bring in, certain relational struggles quite often and display specific attachment styles and yeah so that's one that I bring in.
And other than that, it's just yeah, a huge diversity of different novels that I might recently have read. Thank you. What about you, actually? Do you ever bring in, or, books? Or would that be too suggestive? Because your approach is Quite different from mine. Yeah, a little bit different. I think I absolutely bring in books.
Last time was yesterday actually with someone I met and who was asking for it. So I think, sometimes spontaneously, . In some association to something someone said or something, someone dreamt and sometimes it's something I can hold on because I feel like.
With certain patients, it can be also distracting, I believe I try to keep the room with as little suggestions as possible. But having said that, it depends on the patient and where you're at in the process. I noticed also with people that I worked with for longer, , there's a different attitude, you develop a different type of relationship.
So I really, , often get, , this type of associations because I'm also, constantly reading. Although what I'm reading right now is not as much novice as I would have liked to. Although two days ago, I met a friend and he was recommending this A book by Dostoyevsky called Demons that I really would like to take on, but I just feel like I don't have the capacities for this, , bricks, this huge 800 pages Russian novel I would love to, and I feel like it would be so helpful for me or just nice to go into such a world.
But when I read these days, , I don't read novels, I read like short stories. Or I read more, , Jungian, more theoretical works but I, yeah, I do know from my own process how yeah, comforting and helpful to find to follow narratives of others and seeing how people, that suffered 150 years ago or suffered a bit differently, but some things are similar.
So I feel like, , books and therapy really belongs together. You know what would be cute? If we read the same book, if we tried that out. Yeah. Then I would want you to get your hands on the new Sally Rooney book. Intermezzo, because she has just a way of getting into her character's heads.
And in this case, it's about two brothers 10 years apart in age where One is a chess progeny and the other one is a lawyer and even the way that their chapters are written in a different kind of language gives you a sense of who they are. So she has this brilliant I don't know if I've ever seen it before, but whenever it's coming from one brother, the lawyer it's these really short sentences, like very logical.
And even though it's in the third person, you just understand immediately. Oh, now we've switched to his perspective. And then when it goes to the chess progeny, it's much more, flowery and speculative and sensitive, because that's how his brain works, but still with an enormous amount of analysis.
A new book. That's recent. Yeah. And it's like a psychological journey. It's really one of those books where I'm like, I'm really, I'm becoming a better therapist also by reading this book. . I'm I don't know if I would want you to read it, but I'm quite obsessively Absolutely. Deep into an essay that Jung wrote in 1957 it was named the undiscovered self. And I love this morning. Why, because I was wondering why did they call it the undiscovered self?
Because in German, it's the Gegenwart und Zukunft, like the present and the future, so it's like, why did it translate to that? And this morning, as I was reading the letters between Jung and other people in his last parts of his life, I found out in a letter that someone asked him, why was it called Undiscovered Self?
Anyway, and it was the American publisher who came up with this idea. It has nothing to do with the book, really. And you'll find it's a bad title. Typical. Yeah, typical. Clickbait. Clickbait. It was just a clickbait. But I was really I found out the detail. There's a lot to say about this book. But I'm also going to do lectures on it next year.
But it's also, that's again is it completely insane to be so focused on something like that seems so old, but I must say that it feels so present. It's so much speaks about our present situation. And I think also what's happening politically.
And in the sense what this book is dealing with is what is the role of internal work? What's the role of psychology? What's the role of psychotherapy in, in an abruptly changing world where we have, threats of, nuclear disaster or egomaniac disasters, or, Yeah, just when we have a world of turbulence and it was written in 1957, that was also when the world was standing on the brink between the East and the West and the Cold War was building up and the atom bomb had been, tested and also dropped.
I feel like there is something in that essay that is just needs to be rediscovered. Maybe there's something about that. Yeah. And also, again, this question about the psychological work, what's the necessity of all this work we do on ourselves when the world is looking as it does?
Is there a necessity for this work? And he has a very interesting response to that. Yeah. Maybe transition also to the bookshelf that we have now developed as a feature for the it's complicated platform.
And yeah, I'm quite excited about the feature and I know that you are as well. Yeah, because we call it the bookshelves and that's how therapists also see it named when we go to the dashboard to fill in that new information that is now part of the profile.
But the way that a therapy seeker or someone just looking at the new profiles. would see it is as Explore more so the idea here is that it's going to be much more easy to find yeah, a good fit of therapist if we go beyond just education and training and experience right and you know a little snippet about our therapy approaches But if we also have the opportunity to showcase the types of blog posts that we have written, you've published two books people, they are doing courses and they are publishing the courses in our community.
This can also be displayed in the Explore More section. Of course, Both of us do podcasts and I'm saying, of course but that's that's, of course, only a small section of therapists, but still quite a lot. It's a thing. It's a thing that we therapists like to do. We like to have little niche podcast, right?
So this here is a way for us to get a bit more, personal and explicit in what we're doing besides therapy. And I think this is so great that there is this opportunity now. Yeah. And I also think it connects to this idea of helping therapists to become who they are professionally,
, I think the idea came from that TV series Couples Therapy, can you try to present this image that our UX designer showed to us? Yeah. So this doc queue series. Couples Therapy is really great, by the way, I would highly recommend it, series where we follow a psychoanalytical couples therapist, Orna, based in New York, and the work she does with yeah a handful of couples per season, and an image that, or An angle that we as viewers see quite a lot is Orna sitting in her couch looking at the couple with her concentrated gaze and in the background you have her enormous bookshelf.
So you see all of the literature that she has consumed. Maybe also there will be books that she has written articles that she's gotten published. So what this speaks to And why this is so alluring to me actually brings me back to in the way beginning of my time in uni, where I don't remember it as an epiphany, more like something that slowly dawned on me that I saw it as so much more important work to do.
Be really just furiously consuming the world around me. Going to event parties as well. Reading books, having conversations with, fringe people rather than making sure that the curriculum had been studied properly. And I. I remember being very skeptical every time I met a straight A student at the University of Copenhagen.
I'd be like interesting. I don't think you're going to make for a very good therapist. Yeah. Especially in psychology. I completely agree. And I'm remember of this quote of Jung, which I can't even paraphrase so well, but he speaks about if you want to learn something about human psychology and the nature of the human being.
You should leave your scholarly gown aside and the academics and go out and visit the brothers and you should go to the parties. You should rather meet people and build your own experience as a person before you're trying to be there for someone else. So it seems like you had some wisdom there.
Yeah. And I guess also. I guess also, that's what I hope, maybe I should try to study a still of Orna's bookshelf, but I hope there are also novels and, surprising books, and not just, I hope there's a diversity amongst her books, that it's both a lot of psychoanalytical classic and, big existential breaks but I also hope that, there's some cookie stuff among the more, and also hope to see people using their bookshelves on it's complicated like that, maybe we'll see some cookie things and maybe see some strict academic things, but, and it's also interesting.
I had a friend over some weeks ago. And the first thing he did was just going to the bookshelf, you're starting to start with the bookshelf and I felt that's intimate. I realized like, Oh, this is a bit weird. I started to excuse myself for certain books.
, I think it would be helpful for people seeking therapy that they can get some sort of sense of what universe is this person feeding from. Yeah. Oh my gosh, it's actually interesting that you said that, yeah, that you used the word intimate because I would even say that I think I'd be able to.
like platonically crush on a person based on just their bookshelf, without having, maybe even if I had to choose one thing, it would be their book collection, if I couldn't meet the person, but I had to gauge whether it would be a Like a good matching friendship, then I'd choose their bookshelf.
It's going to be so interesting to see what type of value this this digital version of the bookshelf gets, for clients and for therapists alike. But I think we see already quite a few therapists on the platform really engaging and building really interesting bookshelves. So maybe we share some in the notes for this episode, even for people just to have a look at.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because also something that we forgot to mention is that it's also a way for us therapist colleagues to follow along in each other's journeys. When I was looking around the other day, I realized you had published an event. that I didn't know you were doing.
So it's also a way for me to just be up to date with what the different practitioners that I look up to are, yeah, busy with. And I really like that aspect as well. But we can use the bookshelf for the explore more section as a way to be inspired by our peers and follow along with their work and, start an exchange, a dialogue with them around a certain topic.
Yeah. I feel like that's really connects back to what we've discussed. I think last time about the therapist community, what is a therapist community and are we building and can we continue to build? This space where therapists, not only finding their patients, but also their peers. So yeah, important points.
Okay. To be continued.