Virtual Memories Show 217:
Vanessa Sinclair
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“Nothing’s as static as people make it out to be.”
Make psychoanalysis subversive again! Vanessa Sinclair joins the show to talk about her new book, Switching Mirrors. We get into psychoanalysis, art and the occult, magical thinking (good and bad), Vanessa’s use of cut-up theory and practice, finding The Third Mind with her collaborator, Katelan Foisy, how she went from ghost-hunter to psychoanalyst, the problem with the lack of rites of passage in western culture, where psychology went wrong, having a book problem, and co-founding an underground anarchist psychoanalyst gang! Give it a listen! And go buy Switching Mirrors!
“I was told that if you treat someone analytically, you’re being unethical, that it’s better just to give them medication so they can go back to work and be productive.”
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About our Guest
Vanessa Sinclair, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City. She is a founding member of Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis, which facilitates psychoanalytic lectures, classes, and events in and around New York City. Together with artist Katelan Foisy, she explores the magic and artistic expression of the cut-up method and the third mind. You can learn more about that at Chaos of the Third Mind. She contributes to a variety of publications, including the The Fenris Wolf, DIVISION/Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum, ERIS Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Dr. Sinclair’s office on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
(Amazon/New Harvest), profiles a dozen New Yorker cartoonists. We talk about the genesis of that project, lament the dearth of cartooning in print and online, bond over Abe Vigoda, and ponder why it is that so many New Yorker cartoonists had teachers or educators for parents. We also get into Richard’s history in the arts-journalism racket, the joys of Robert Walser, his time in the Boy Scouts with Matt Groening, how he built a career out of his oddball enthusiasms, and the most mind-blowing “Which celebrity did you totally melt down around?” story in the history of this podcast. (Seriously.) 
and co-authored 
with the Vermont quartet. His new book is 
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digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on the same setup in a hotel room in San Diego, when my voice was shot from a three-day podcast-athon in Los Angeles. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Mr. Gehr by me.