 So, welcome Peter, and this is the first time we have the chance to have a conversation at all, but today we'll speak of course about philosophical counseling, which is not only our common interest, but also our common practice. And of course, you have much more experience than I do, and you've written also a sort of now classic, I would say, about philosophical counseling, the title of which is Philosophical Counseling, and which sort of, that was a few years ago, but it's still very useful because it sort of gives a good panorama of this new movement, what are the different approaches, debates. I found it also very respectful of the different points of view that are possible. But tell me, how did it start for you? How did you become a philosophical counselor? Well, it was quite by accident actually. I was working on my master's, I think I just finished my master's degree. At the University of British Columbia, and I was speaking with a colleague, a student of mine, a fellow student. I was in my 40s at that point, I went back to university quite late in life, and which is a totally different story as to why that happened. But the colleague of mine was asking me what I was doing during the summer. And I said over the summer, I volunteered at a group home for men who are recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. And what I was requested to do was to teach them critical thinking skills so that they would make better decisions in their lives. And I said, and sometimes the men approached me personally and asked me to help them with personal problems, family issues, relationship issues, something like that. And I said, so that's what I did. And I taught critical thinking, and then occasionally I would help people, the men overcome individual problems. And she said to me, well, that sounds like philosophical counseling to me. And I said, what's that? I never heard of it before. And she said, oh, well, there was just a conference here at UBC on that topic. And I said, I didn't know that. And she said, I think there's a book out about it. So I looked and it was Rand Layhub's and Tillman's book. And it was philosophical counseling when I started reading the essays and that I said to myself, this is what I have been doing. And I was in between my masters and my PhD at that point. Like I said, I was sort of coasting over the summer trying to figure out what to do from my doctoral thesis. And I thought, well, I'm going to put together a proposition, a proposal to my advisor that I'd like to do my PhD on a justification of philosophical counseling being a legitimate form of therapy. And so that's what it was. And when I finished my dissertation, I offered it to a publisher and they accepted and it became the first book. Right. So you started quite early, I would say. And when did you start really practicing with the awareness that you were doing philosophical counseling? Right. Because as I understand carefully, you sort of were like Monsieur Jardin doing prose without knowing that he was doing prose just by talking, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I had no idea I was doing philosophical counseling. And reading the Tillman's and Lehab book, it clarified as to what I was doing and of course helped me in what I was doing as well because I could see what other counselors, what they were doing, their approach. And it was quite diverse. The essays in that are quite diverse between practice and counseling and I think if I'm not mistaken, essays on corporate advising and so on and so forth. There was quite a range of things offered in the book. But the philosophical counseling part certainly applied to me and I was quite happy to read about it. Now I may be wrong about what's the content of that book is. It may not be quite that diverse because I haven't read the book for quite a while, but that's what gave me an understanding of what I was actually doing. What's your take on this idea that I'm sort of trying currently to theorize and also look at it through different angles of philosophical health? Do you have a feeling that you are participating into such an idea? Or would you qualify differently? No, I think I would call it that for people in the field and for philosophers who understand what philosophical health actually means. Here in North America, the word philosophy is not well understood. And we even have movies that were from Harry Potter where the title was changed in North America because the philosopher Stone would not resonate with viewers here. They called it whatever I can't remember what it's called now, which really shocked me because it's one of these things where I thought North Americans were not very clued in about philosophy and the change in that movie title really confirmed it for me. So when you talk about philosophical health, you and I can understand roughly what that means. We may have slightly different perspectives, and I certainly agree with the importance of it, but to converse with someone, to spread the message about philosophical health, where I live anyway in North America, I don't think it would serve a very good purpose. So the point that the approach that I take is to teach people how to think well. And that's critical thinking, and that's a small part of what philosophy actually is. And by teaching people to think well, it not only helps them overcome an issue that they're involved in, which is philosophical counseling, they have a relationship issue, you help the person think through it and make decisions as to how to resolve the issue. It also helps to prevent. So when you help people think for themselves, think about philosophy for children, you help that child or the adult add to their toolbox, the toolbox they have of ways to resolve issues and ways to think about problems. And that's philosophical health, the way I understand it, that you have the ability to look at an issue from different perspectives, think about different consequences, decide on the one that you want as an outcome, which is moral, and which is possible, and so on. And that's a preventive approach that prevents young people from going up to be gangsters and so on and so forth. So philosophy throws off of the health, just like in medical health, it helps to overcome a situation, but who wants to wait till they get sick, we want to be healthy, so we take on a good diet to prevent the possibility of illness. And I look at philosophical health the same way. That's very interesting, and there are two points here that I want to unfold with you. The first one is the distinction between thinking well, and you mentioned that phrase, and thinking for yourself. But before we get into that, I think it's relevant to mention the young people in the sense that there is a discourse today, scientific discourse that says young people do a lot of silly things, stupid things, because their prefrontal lobe is not yet developed. Ten years ago, the science was saying it sort of gets mature at 20, now they're saying at 30. And so, and even the solution sometime that our proposal, they should do more sports, then they can focus because they're tired. And what you're saying with the preventive approach echoes with one aspect of philosophical health that I find important is the adequation between our thoughts, what we find relevant in terms of values in our acts, such that we don't act in contradiction with what we value. And this sort of self-reflection can be, for young people, a way to train what they supposedly are lacking, which is a sense of the consequence of their behavior, of their acts. Yeah, and so let's go back to something that is actually related, thinking well and thinking for yourself. Is that what you say it's the same thing? No, it's not. And if I may just go back a step to something you said about the prefrontal lobe. I've been writing lately about helping people to try and avoid blaming their brain, which is, again, very pervasive in our society. So if someone makes a bad decision, oh, their prefrontal lobe is not developed very well. And maybe we've got a drug that will help that. That's the step, that's a sequence of events in North American culture. It's very important for children to grow up and at home where parents make good decisions. And if the parents aren't able to make good decisions, the child's not going to learn that either. You don't learn making good decisions in school until you get to university where you can take philosophy and critical thinking classes. So what is it that trains a person to think well? They can think for themselves and it doesn't stop someone from getting into trouble because of decisions. They have a certain number, and I use the term loosely here, they have a certain number of tools to work with. They can ask their friends if the decision is difficult, they can ask their friends. The friends are limited by the tools they have in their toolbox. And of course, the tools that we have are culturally relevant. The things that we get from our culture, that's why travel is so important for young people to understand how other cultures think and act and behave and so on. So what happens is young people or anybody works with the tools they have and or they ask their friends and relatives who work with the tools they have, which may add 10% to what they've got now for a toolbox. And it still doesn't solve the problems, so to speak, in their life. And that's where philosophical counselor comes in, or a philosopher or whatever, where the tools that we have in our toolbox as philosophers are really extensive. And I've got a shelf full of tools behind me that are called books. And if I don't know something, I can look it up. But not many people have the kind of philosophy books that you and I have in our libraries at home. So thinking for yourself is limited. There's a range of ability you have by thinking all by yourself. And most people realize they get to a point where they get stuck and they can't think. And the teacher says, well, think harder. How do you do that? How do you, children have to be taught how to think about things. And so what happens is when people can't resolve an issue, they talk to their friends. But we are there as philosophical counselors and say, look, we've got the tools, we've got the expertise that we can help you with, right? Not that we're trying to tell you what to think. Because, well, humans said such and such or Spinoza said such and such. You should do what they said. That's not the way we work, right? We say, well, here's the perspective they took. And it's something to offer to the client for them to think about and perhaps accept or not. And any one of the next suggestion. So again, your question about thinking for yourself is very different from being able to think well for yourself, right? Right. And so it's interesting because that sort of might explain why I didn't know this anecdote about Harry Potter. And I'm very curious about the title of the American book because maybe that could be useful for us. But there is this idea that it's not only American that philosophy is very unpractical, right? So philosophers are these people who keep banging their head on doors because they are thinking about big ideas. And actually, the more they do so or the more someone might be interested by this deep questions, the more that person actually might be in danger of doing everything wrong with the domestics or the logistics of her or his life, right? So I think there is might be this sort of almost fear of the philosophical domain in a country in like maybe the US and Canada is a little bit different. We can talk about that later. But in a place where the the pragmatics of life are so important, right? The effectuality being effective. And so now what you're saying about the tools, I think comes from a sort of overarching idea that we know we are convinced that philosophy is actually generative. It's very useful and very pragmatic, in fact, because there is a deep connection between our ideas, whether these ideas are very clear or implicit or working as ideologies or fixed ideas within within our subconscious and the way we act. And this comes all the way back as of course, you know very well to the Greeks, we are well aware that philosophy, philosophizing was a way to become a better citizen, a better active citizen. And so what I believe that what we're trying to do with this concept of philosophical health and in practice with philosophical counseling is that we're really trying to democratize this empowering disposition that allows ideas to be social forces when they are well calibrated. And so of course, many professionals, philosophers would disagree with us, right? They would be, some of them would be outraged at the idea that, oh, that philosophers are giving tools for a better life, right? But I think that I deeply agree with you and it's interesting when we reread philosophers. Well, of course, I'm also trying to solve cosmological questions or questions of the logical coherence of reality, etc. But they are also, many of them, you mentioned Spinoza, there are many of them trying to answer the question, what can a philosophical conviction do? Spinoza said, what can a body do? We could say, what can a philosophical belief do? And so your experience, because nevertheless, you've been and perhaps maybe you're still practicing, you're helping many people from North America nevertheless. So your experience is that there is a space, even in a country that takes out the world philosopher from mainstream entertainment, your experience that there is a space for it and that it sort of, it works, you could say. That's a really good question and an interesting perspective. I have the experience of writing a book called The Philosophy's Role in Counseling and Psychotherapy. That was one of my latest books, you may have seen it. And it has been reviewed by one, I'm not sure, psychologist, psychiatrist, something like that, as being way too simple, as having dumbed down the information. So as a writer, I find myself stuck in the middle. Okay, when I write really strong philosophical, what I think are strong philosophical essays, I don't write books like that for a good reason. When I write strong essays, those essays are read by other philosophers who understand them. At least I assume that because I get feedback, right? When I look at the public out there, what I see them craving for is understanding of the stuff that philosophers are playing with. And I'm using the word playing, because there's a lot of material that's written that's only read by other philosophers. And the question is, what's the point? What good is that? So if you're going to, as a philosopher, help society, you have to think about, okay, at what level is society reading? In North America, the level of reading comprehension is quite low, in my opinion. And when it comes to philosophy, it's very, very low. So what we have in North America is a lot of sort of self-help books, okay? The latest one, the latest fad, is the recent fad was about positive psychology, which is helping people that isn't always critical of what's wrong with them. It's giving them tools to live a better life. And I'm thinking positive psychology, isn't it what philosophy has been doing for centuries? Okay, that was one fad that's gone now. Apart from Schopenhauer, who was doing negative psychology. And the latest fad is the one with mindfulness, right? And that goes right back to ancient Greece, and don't ask me to quote who it was, or the expression over the gate that says, no, thyself, right? That's mindfulness. So we're talking about 2,000-some-odd years of history of philosophy, trying to get people to be mindful of themselves, to understand why they believe what they believe, and to decide what they want to keep and what they want to get rid of, right? And yet we have this latest fad of mindfulness books coming out. And when you read those books, they are philosophy at a very, very low level. They're extremely watered down. And that's what the general public needs. If you want to help people improve their lives, you have to write at a level that people can understand the material. And I see a huge division between the self-help books on one hand, which to me are extremely boring, and the philosophy books on the other hand, which often are very difficult to read, like Heidegger and what have you, right? There's very little in between that solid food, so to speak. We have baby pablum on one hand, and we have exotic meals on the other hand that people cannot afford to spend the time on, right? So that middle ground is really lacking. I think that's really interesting because among other points, two notions there. The first one is the idea of simplicity, which you brought up via the critique that was made to your book. And I think that's an epistemological question in the sense to use an un-simple word, but in the sense that when a philosopher uses what might sound today like a simple approach, for example, Spinoza. When Spinoza says, there is basically just one emotion. It's joy. And all the others are sort of modulations on joy. And joy is the feeling that your power over the world is increased, let's say, put it in a simple way. And there is a reason, a philosophical reason sometimes for choosing simple terms, especially today, where the psychotherapy field has been invaded by a very normative nomenclature, whether it's psychoanalysis with all its concepts from adipose to transference, etc. And each, let's say, each approach as its jargon, you take the DSM-5 and you have this very long list of syndromes. One of my games is I invent new ones just for the fun of it. For example, you have the red carpet syndrome. So red carpet syndrome is this syndrome that people have today that why is society not unfolding a red carpet? For me, I'm so unique, right? Or for my community. So I think that in a way it can be healthy to go back to simple words. Instead of saying you have obsessive compulsive, depressional disorder, say, maybe, let's say that you're sad. Why are you sad? Now, on the other hand, there is sometimes use of simplification without justification. And then you have these books that I agree with you are more or less all formatted the same. And also based very much on this idea of will, right? So if you want, you can. And I think that philosophers are very rarely saying that they are very much often trying to find a sort of an understanding for how how there can be a necessity, ethical necessity in your life, such that if you consistently believe in a certain value, and then you repeat certain actions, then this will create a reality because reality is often created by repetition. And the other point is that why is sometimes philosophy not contemplated directly at actually indeed, as you were saying, a tradition that has explored all these new fads before is perhaps that there is today the idea that if something is exotic, coming from abroad or the Middle East or or or China or India, then it's more exotic. So it's nicer, right? So mindfulness, for example, is a it's often presented as as a something inspired by Buddhism, etc. And so we have we tend to I think as Westerners, we also tend to forget our own spiritual traditions. Philosophy being one, I think it's Michel Foucault who actually and Pierre Hado who are two figures that pointed the fact that the Greeks were using philosophy as a way towards the good life. And they I mean, we are we tend to forget that we have these traditions within ourselves, whether it's the for example, the mystical tradition in Europe in the Middle Age, Europe, right? So when we look for mysticism, we prefer to look also again as at China or India. But so I think it's a good, I think it's a good idea. And I think more and more people are actually turning to philosophy to to help to help them articulate meaning in their life. But then we could be critical and say and observe or whatever, observe, I don't know if you agree with me that many people discover philosophy as a way of life through stoicism. And and this idea that, well, it's about accepting life as it is. And I find that politically significant that stoicism, even in the production of self health books, because there are now a few that are presenting themselves as philosophical, they are selling stoicism, which I find politically actually a bit dangerous in the sense that they're selling the idea that philosophy is about renunciation. But philosophy can also be about, you know, combat and idealism and transformation. But fair enough, maybe that's maybe that's one way to to enter the field. And maybe people, if they read stoicism, then they will discover other other aspects of philosophy. But my question, and you can, of course, comment on what I've said, but my question was also about your practice is like, tell us more about your practical experiences of counseling, like, for example, if you have one, of course, anonymously, one one case that was really a moment, a significant moment of your of your life of counselor that we'd like to share. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I have I have very few clients at the moment, because I'm retired from teaching, and I've sort of drawn back from from having personal sections, because I did that for what 15 years or something. And you do you do reach a point where, especially because I was involved in academics, where the face to face counseling is a lot of extra work. And it requires a particular mindset and so on. But but that's having said that. So I'm not I have, I have two clients right now. And I work by phone, which, you know, it saves me having to open my home to people and so on. Pardon me. And of course, with COVID, it's very risky to have clients anyway. So everything's been pulled way back, just like other businesses, mine is very much pulled back. But I want to okay, you made so many points, it's really hard to answer them all. The thing about jargon, I really hate that word. Because jargon suggests that you're doing something really stupid and silly, right, you're putting funny words. And I know you're doing it for a purpose. And I understand that. But when I get accused, or when I hear people accusing philosophy of using jargon, like my students sometimes have said that, I say to them, well, every profession has its jargon, but they don't call it jargon. They call it technical language, right, they call it their professional language. And the reason we have that is it makes discussion simple. So when I say existentialism, you know exactly what it means. I don't have to, I don't have to say, by the way, which is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, before you understand what I'm talking about. And then I forgot my thought anyway, at that point, right. So jargon is professional language that is a shortcut, so to speak, right. So, but, but it's a professional language. No doctor in my experience anyway, will tell a patient in medical terms, what's wrong with them. And that's the patient specifically asked, well, what is that, right. The doctor in a sense puts it in simple terms for the patient to understand in the medical field. And what I'm saying is that this happens in philosophy too. You have discussions in philosophy that are appropriate between professionals. And you have discussions in counseling that would not be appropriate with a bunch of jargon. So when I say to someone, you know, you have the right to make your own decisions in your life at your age, you can live your life the way you want, all you have to do is choose. I'm not going to then use all the expressions from, you know, authenticity and all those expressions a surter came up with to explain existentialism, right. I'm not using the jargon when I speak to clients. And that's important. And I can scare clients away too, when you use the jargon because they can't keep up with you, they don't know what you're talking about, right. The other thing that you mentioned, is about stoicism. And one of my clients that I have right now was really into stoicism because he lived a very, very troubling life as a young person. Very, very difficult family situation with a fairly brutal father from what I understand from what he told me. And for him, stoicism was totally appropriate to a point, okay. But where I draw the line is to, when you, when people look at stoicism, it's just putting up with what you're given, putting up what life, what life throws at you, and, and don't complain, just adapt, right. And there's, like you said, politically, there's a problem with that. If you've got a government that's on the brink of becoming a dictatorship, is there a really good idea to just go along with it and just adapt yourself to the dictatorship? And for most people, the answer would be no, you're crazy, we don't want that, we want democracy, right. Or whatever the situation is, there's a limit to the usefulness of stoicism. And, and because people don't understand the history of stoicism, they apply it to modern day situations and books come out, you know, about how to be a stoic in today's life. I told my client, right out, I said to him, stoicism can kill you, right. If you, if you just take a really strong attitude towards whatever sickness you have, and you just say, I'm going to be stoic and put up with whatever pain I'm suffering from, you can end your life that way very easily, right. So there's a limit to stoicism, but that's not presented in most books that that I'm familiar with. And I don't read a lot of current help self help stoic books. But you see, I'm saying there, you know, the understanding of philosophy is lacking. So we have, we have, we have students going into counseling that, you know, and I'm slightly off track here, but, but I'm sure you'll forgive me. We have students who go into counseling, who understand the technique of counseling, they understand the technique of existential therapy, okay, or rational motive behavior therapy, which is critical thinking skills, they understand the techniques, but they don't have the understanding of the philosophy behind them. The same with, with stoicism, people, people promote the idea in their books and what have you in their, in their groups and what have you of stoicism, but they don't understand where it came from, where it was meant for soldiers and poor people who had to put up with incredibly difficult situations in life, right. That could, that could often, you know, if you're in war and you're a stoic, you can get killed that way pretty easily, right. So that, that's my take on, and I'm not sure if I've answered all the different points you're making because you, you bring out a lot of points and you really stimulate my thinking, by the way, I appreciate that. Well, thanks. That's mutual. And that's a very good point. I think I share that conviction that if you want to be a philosophical counselor, you, you need to dig into the, you know, you need to have a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy and the text, etc. Otherwise, you can do something else. Can I just jump in here for one second? When I first started teaching my course in philosophy for counselors, I actually advertise it to our students in my university as philosophical counseling. Okay. And I advertise it to philosophy students. And like the first time I taught that the first semester, I think I had five students that signed up for the class, which was very disappointing, right. And I talked to some of the students and, and you know, as to, you know, why is it there's so few of you and basically what it came out to was, well, philosophy students, if you've advertised that the philosophy students, they don't want to be doing counseling, they want to do this, this philosophy stuff, this high level thinking stuff, that's what they're doing in class. So what I did after that is I advertised the course to students who want to become counselors and psychotherapists, and I changed the time of the course. And I call it philosophy for counselors. And now every time I, well, not now, because I'm not teaching anymore, but every time I taught the course after that, I've had overflow classes with spending room only. Because the students that signed up for it are students who want to already help people. Right. And I'm glad that in the second title of your, your course, you kept the word philosophy. That's, that's important. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and by the way, speaking of title, stoicism will kill you. That's a very good title. You should do a self-help book against all of these self-help books. I wanted to give an example, because some people might be wondering here, but what is it really that they're doing? And I want to give this just an anonymous, very brief example of one person that came to me and was a man of, of, you know, in the middle of fifties. And came to me because he, I mean, he felt lonely. And he had no family, never had a child. And he wanted to talk about that. And, you know, along our conversation was just the first session. So on the one hand, yeah, he wanted to find love. He expressed the need to find love and to, to have a child and to have a family. And then when I asked him to, to describe what women want, because he wanted love with a woman, he defined it as, you know, women want someone that has money, someone that has a house, someone that has a job, someone that dresses well. And, and so, you know, I led him to understand the contradiction between on the one hand, a philosophical sense that was idealism, this idea that love is desirable, and, and, and as a spiritual non material good. And on the one hand, the vision of women that he had that was typical of cynicism, which is another, which is a school of philosophy, by the way. And so, what I told him, because I, I mean, I try to be, especially in the first session, not to be judgmental. So the well, right now, at this stage, I'm not telling you be an idealist rather than a cynic, which, which I think people should be. But I just told him, you need to make a choice here for the sake of coherence, because your sort of mind set division between two opposite systems of thought might be precisely what prevents you from finding love. And then more details is that when he described the way he was trying to find love, he was going after married women. So this was very problematic. Right. So this is just to give an example of the kind of discussions we can have. It's like, we show that behind behaviors, there are belief systems assumptions. And, and that when two belief systems are contradictory, that has an impact on life. And that impact can be really, really sad and painful, such that we are alone in life and we feel, you know, more or less desperate. So I just wanted to, to add that example, perhaps you want to that, you know, triggered another thought or example from the past, I would like to, I know, for example, that you've written a book on women in philosophical counseling, would you like to say a little bit about that? Yeah, the whole idea of, maybe I can give a little bit more background. I was born and raised a fundamentalist Christian. And there are beliefs that I grew up with, that were absolutely rock solid. This is what we believe. And everything else is false, and so on and so forth. And we were taught basically that that questioning was you could really ask wrong questions, bad questions. And so the belief system I grew up in is religion. And I wanted to clarify that was that was part of what you talked about earlier, this, this philosophy can be looked at like a religion, I would really have, I would really disagree with you. I have lived religion, and it's very different from philosophy, where there are clear boundaries as to what you can, what you're allowed to, which are not allowed to believe, right? So, and it took me a long time to get over that. I had what I call this religious hangover for a long time, where my religious beliefs would interfere with my daily thinking, even while I was studying to be a philosopher, my religious beliefs would pop up every once in a while. So, and those beliefs certainly, you're absolutely right. The beliefs that you have determine how you live your life, and determine what other beliefs you accept or don't believe. And this is why I talk about philosophy being the attempt to examine your beliefs and your values and so on, so that you're not guided by them, you're not controlled by them, that you decide where they came from, and whether you want to keep them or not. And the only way you can decide whether you want to keep them or not is by looking at other beliefs and other values, and making a choice, and then coming to a choice that is moral, for one thing, and reasonable, in whatever, wherever you live, whatever society you're part of, right? So, I totally agree with you. The fact that there are people who are raised, and again, I've got a couple of clients like that, who have beliefs that are, in my opinion, really problematic, because they're supposed to, for example, love family members that treat them terrifically miserably according to what they've told me, right? There's a super contradiction. And by the way, that's been argued in a number of books as to a possible beginning for schizophrenia, if there is such a thing as schizophrenia, okay? And I dispute that. Where people are, as young people are raised with conflicting beliefs, and values and so on, where parents, for example, say, I love you, and they don't hesitate to, you know, to harm the child, right? The old, I love you, but don't touch me kind of thing, right? And so beliefs can have, you know, and the things that you believe and value can have such a huge impact on you. But I want to be very clear that I differentiate the beliefs that we have, that we don't think about every single day, right? I believe, for example, my car is parked in the parking lot out here, but I'm not thinking about it until just now. I just totally forgot about it. Doesn't mean it's gone. It's still there. But there are, there is this belief about the unconscious or the subconscious, whatever. I think, what's the term that Freud uses? Is it unconscious or subconscious? I think it's the unconscious. Yeah, where you have no access to that, right? And it controls your life. And people worry, my clients, because of some of them have had psychotherapy and so on, have come up with this whole idea, well, there's this, you know, my unconscious, you know, and I always tell them, don't buy into that. It's like saying your brain is making you do things. What happens to free will at that point? If you say, you're doing this because of some unconscious thing, seek, you know, search it out, see what it is that your belief is that you're now behaving that, that's now driving you to behave a certain way. What is it you believe about the situation, like, like your client, like you said, two different things that conflict, that's, that's driving his life to be miserable, right? Those are not unconscious things, they can be. Well, he was not, he was not conscious about them in a way we could say we could argue, right? But that doesn't mean it was the unconscious. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, again, I totally agree with you that, that, you know, what you believe and what you value and what you fear. And those things, the trouble is those things can be diagnosed as mental illnesses too. That's, that's another old discussion topic, right? But actually, of course, we, there are so many topics and we'll, we'll finish in a few minutes for today. But I think I'd like to finish on that question because you, you have a very strong opinion that I find extremely interesting on, on the fact that many of the so-called mental diseases that are labeled are actually the wrong categorizations of, of sort of more philosophical or, or cognitive, you know, dissonances or, or constructions. Can you say a little bit more about that? Sure. The place to start is to, to see that in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and so on, in the, in the world right now of mental health care, there's a huge confusion. You talk about, you talk about, you know, contradictory messages that people live with, huge confusion between the brain and the mind. There are many books that, that I've read that say point blank that the brain is the same thing as the mind. The mind is the same thing as the brain, which is interesting because you can get a brain cancer, but I've never heard of mind cancer. So, you know, what's going on here? Well, the brain is an organ, like a kidney or the heart or the liver. And it can be, you can take it out and look at it and point your finger at it. It has external reality to your body. The mind doesn't have that. It doesn't have any of that. The mind, in my opinion, is your beliefs, your values, your thoughts. Okay. And, and that's who you are. You are not your brain. You are your mind. You are your beliefs, values. That's how people know you is by what you believe, by what you think, by what you, what you fear and so on. Right. And, and when, when they talk about mental illnesses, what they're really talking about sometimes is brain diseases. So you can have Alzheimer's, you can have Tourette syndrome, you can have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. And those things affect your brain and they affect your thinking. Okay. And they're caused by the brain, malfunction, some kind of malfunction. Okay. Mental illnesses are not caused by the brain. They're in a sense caused by your thinking. So you can have, you can, you can be, how does it go here? You're not suffering from depression. You're depressed about something. If you use the terminology that you're suffering from depression, you're in a sense reifying, you're making depression into something real, which it isn't. Depression is, is what you're thinking about, what you believe, right? If you say you're suffering from anxiety, same problem, you're not, you're anxious about something, right? And that differentiates the brain, which has causal explanations for what's going on to the mind, which has a different kind of causal thing, because the mind is, is not a physical entity. Your beliefs and values are so I'm collected. So when I wrote in one of my essays that, that when people talk about philosophy of mind, as though you can study one mind and understand minds, it's really a mistake. You can say you can study brain, the brain, you can study the brain, because most of people's brain, most of our brains are very, very similar, very almost identical, right? But you can say study a mind and know everybody's minds. Why? Because everybody's beliefs, values, fears, assumptions, hopes, all those things are very, very different. You and I, our minds are very unique, but your brains are not. Okay. And that's the big difference. And the problem in psychiatry, here's a metaphor I use quite often. The problem in psychiatry, and especially biological psychiatry is that they're studying a book. Okay. And the book is you. But the book is not you. Okay. The story in the book is you. And what psychiatry does is they open up the book, and they study the paper, the pages, and they study the ink spots. And they figure that's the way to figure out what the story is all about. And it's not the story is the book, the story is the story. Okay. The story is not the physical properties of the book. And so there's a huge problem in the research right now, when it comes to neurological research, there's something in the brain. And I asked my, you know, I asked my students when I was still teaching, I would say things like, well, does your brain make a date with your girlfriend? Does your brain decide what car you're going to buy? No, it's you. It's your beliefs and your values and your hopes and your preferences and so on. And that's buying. Okay. But you can't put, you can't put the mind in the same category as you can put the brain, which is a physical thing. That's a long answer to a short question. Yes, no, but it's this is a very important topic. And I like the metaphor of the book. And we could say that as philosophical counselors, we, we try to help people write their own book and not just the the puppet in the story written by others. There's so much in what you said, which is for example, the cognitive diversity aspects. Right. The the how do we philosophically and politically favor a world where cognitive diversity thrives in a way that creates more possibilities, more ways, new ways of life. And indeed, there is a mental health approach today, which is connected to industrialism that tends to on the country have a mono, you know, I was going to say mono maniac, but you know, a very standard view of what a person is. And that is of course connected to the fact that there is a huge industry of medication. So we we're not going to go into into that. But that's of course the reification of depression that you were talking about. And of course, we're not saying that depression does not exist phenomenologically as something that people might might feel. And then we put a label, but very often, those labels are connected to some form of of medication station. And there's a problem there. So there's, I mean, what I I see is that this was just an introduction. Nevertheless, I suggest we we conclude here. But this is really interesting. Is there any final word that you would like to to conclude with, for example, I really like your idea that stoicism will kill you. So what if you tell that to your patient, your patient, who has a story? What else would you tell him? What counter what antidote to stoicism would you propose? That's that's a really good question. And I meant to mention that and it slipped my mind because we're talking about so many different things. What I suggested or not suggested, but what I got him to think about was the fact that he's not the problem. It's not his adaptation that's at fault for where he is in his life. It was a situation he grew up in, the society he grew up in the family he grew up in. And so I said to him, you know, the responsibility is not you and your bad thinking. The responsibility is how you're raised in your family and abused in the family in a society that got away with it, and the family got away with it. And that was a turning point. I felt anyway, I could hear the click in the in the in the mind of my client at the other end of the phone when he went, wow, it's not about me. It's about how I was raised. It's about how I was I was forced to live and where I was forced to believe. And I said, yeah. And this is the problem with stoicism is it says just put up with the kiddo, you know, whereas I said what I'm trying to teach you is is to how to think for yourself and decide how to live your life on your own. So that was a big thing. It's not just I was a warning him about stoicism, but I was I was offering him existentialism without throwing another isn't in there to make the pot, you know, much work here. Right, right, right. And then also the idea that once we have identified the negative determinisms of our past, then we shouldn't have bad faith, you know, the sartre and bad faith about it, in the sense that okay, we we're not going to pose as victims forever. We can from that start and then many people have, of course, different starts, but many people's would have reasons to complain about their what to do about it. This is another this is another really interesting point to an important point to the difference between blame and responsibility. Okay, so in the same, you know, the same conversation with the same client, I said to him, your parents, and where you grew up the neighborhood and so on, were responsible for what you believe and what you value and what you feel and what you fear. But it's hard. It's difficult to to hold them to blame, because your parents were probably doing what their parents taught them to do was a good way to raise their child. So I said, you know, and this is difficult for someone who's been abused by their parents, right? I said, you know, they were doing the best they knew how. And they victimized you. Okay, the trick now is for you, when you have children, he was in his 25, 30, something like that, I said it's not to not to then copy that, not to carry that lineage of that, you know, the abuse to your children, right? Because otherwise, who do you blame? Well, you can you can hold people responsible back into infinity. What your grandparents, your great grandparents, you know, on and on and on, where did it begin? Somebody has to stop in and step in and say, I'm going to stop here. I'm not going to do this anymore. So the lesson that that I tried to I said to him, that this the lesson you might want to learn is the fact that you don't need to be like your parents, right? That this is that this is not going to and people are worried about that too. I've had other I've had other clients who are worried about I'm going to be just like my parents when I grow up, because I yell at my child today. And I said, you know, you don't have to be that way. You can be the new beginning to the to your lineage to your family line by what you do. I literally had the same experience with my family. I mean, not that I was abused, but my family were not a huggy type of people. And and one visit that we made to my family, they're on the other end of the country. I actually decided to give my sister a hug. And she said, Oh, I didn't know we were huggy people. And I said, Well, we can change that. Okay, well, that's a that's, I think, a very beautiful conclusion. We'll end with that idea of new beginnings, right? And so this is them, we'll kill you. But existentialism will you will bring you back to life. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Peter.