New York City, late 1941. Afternoon light slants across a nearly empty avenue as a small patriotic parade marches by. A handful of Boy Scouts in ill-fitting uniforms carry a faded American flag; behind them a few veterans step in time. A lone flute plays a tune, slightly off-key, its thin notes echoing between brick apartment buildings. On the sidewalk stands a man in a rumpled suit, motionless among the sparse onlookers. Abraham Maslow has stopped on his drive home, compelled by curiosity or perhaps by something deeper. He can hear the distant sound of a radio broadcasting news of troop movements and victory gardens – reminders of the global conflict that has touched every life.

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA

Minneapolis, 1943. In the dim light of a basement laboratory, eight wooden boxes line the wall, each with a single restless pigeon inside. In one box, a white-feathered pigeon turns a slow circle to the left, again and again, its head bobbing in a curious dance. In another, a bird keeps pecking at the empty air, as if an invisible seed floats just out of reach. The room is hushed except for the whir of a fan and the occasional metallic click of a feeder mechanism. Every fifteen seconds, click—a hopper swings out in one of the boxes, delivering a few grains of food. The pigeon that had been turning in circles rushes to the hopper and gobbles the reward.

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA

Identity, crisis, and the lifelong journey of becoming.

A fair-haired boy of about ten stands outside his school in Karlsruhe, Germany, clutching his satchel and fighting back tears. It is the early 1910s, and young Erik Homburger – not yet Erik Erikson – has just endured another confusing day of taunts. At his Jewish temple school, his classmates sneered that he looked too Aryan, calling him goy, an outsider, because of his blue eyes and blond hair. But in the neighborhood streets, other children chased and mocked him with anti-Semitic slurs, seeing only that he was being raised in a Jewish household. Erik doesn’t know where he belongs; he feels he doesn’t fully fit in either world. That evening, after dinner, he screws up the courage to ask the question that has been haunting him: “Mother, why am I so different?” His mother, Karla, pauses, then takes a deep breath. It is time to tell the truth she has hidden for so long.

Selenius Media & Niklas S Osterman

A teenage boy sits at his desk in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, brow furrowed in concentration as he reads a letter that has just arrived. The year is 1911, and Jean Piaget, only fifteen years old, has received astonishing news: his former nanny has confessed that the dramatic story he’d been told as a child – how she fought off a kidnapper who tried to snatch baby Jean from his carriage – was entirely made up. In the letter, the ex-nurse apologizes for having lied years ago to cover her own neglect. Jean sets the letter down, heart pounding. He is bewildered, even embarrassed, to realize that he possesses a detailed memory of the attempted kidnapping: the struggle, the nanny’s heroic cries, even the police officer’s uniform. Yet none of it ever happened. How could he remember something that was a fiction? Young Piaget gazes out the window at the gathering dusk over Lake Neuchâtel, his mind racing with questions. This moment – the shattering of a vivid false memory – plants a seed in him that will grow into one of the great quests in the history of psychology: an investigation into how we construct knowledge and how the mind of a child, in particular, forms its own logic of reality.

Culture, gender, and the feminist revolt inside psychoanalysis.

Karen Horney stood at the podium with a steady gaze, the low hum of anticipation filling the lecture hall. It was 1941 in New York City, and she was about to address a crowd of psychoanalysts and students on why she had broken away from orthodox Freudianism. This was not just an academic lecture – it was a declaration of independence. As she surveyed the expectant faces, Karen could not help but recall the winding path that had brought her here, from a rebellious girlhood in Germany to this pivotal moment of asserting her own vision of psychology. She cleared her throat, heart pounding not with fear but with conviction, and began to speak of ideas that Sigmund Freud himself would surely have bristled at.

Decades earlier, on a gray morning in 1880s Hamburg, a young Karen Danielsen peered out the window of her family’s home, wondering what future the world held for a girl like her. Born on September 16, 1885, in the Blankenese district of Hamburg, Germany, Karen had come into a household governed by contradictions. Her father, Berndt Danielsen, was a sea captain and a devout, authoritarian Protestant known in the family as “the Bible-thrower” for his harsh literalism. By contrast, her mother Clotilde – “Sonni” – was more liberal and nurturing, yet prone to bouts of depression and irritable dominance. In this environment, the sensitive and intelligent Karen learned to navigate both cold severity and stormy emotion. She sought refuge in books and in her own diary, where she sketched out dreams far beyond the confining walls of her childhood.

Selenius Media & Niklas S Osterman

Episode Title: Alfred Adler – The Striving for Superiority

Podcast: Pioneers of Psychology and Psychiatry Season 1: The Birth of the Mind (1860–1930) Produced by Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory.

In this episode, we turn to Alfred Adler, the Viennese doctor who believed that what truly drives human behavior is not sex, fear, or fate — but the will to overcome. A sickly child who once overheard a doctor say he would not survive, Adler grew up determined to prove him wrong. That early struggle shaped his lifelong conviction that humans are defined by their striving — their urge to rise above weakness and find belonging.

Breaking away from Freud’s focus on the unconscious, Adler founded Individual Psychology, a vision of the person as a unified, goal-directed being. He argued that every act, every dream, every ambition hides a single question: How can I matter? Feelings of inferiority, he said, are not flaws but sparks that push us to grow — or, if left unchecked, to dominate others.

This episode traces Adler’s rebellion against Freud, his work in Vienna’s working-class clinics, and his belief that mental health depends on Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest, the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself.

Adler’s ideas about equality, purpose, and the human need for connection would echo through education, therapy, and modern self-help. His was a psychology of courage — one that saw every life as a story of overcoming.

In this episode, we enter the world of Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who broke away from Freud to pursue a deeper vision of the mind — one that reached beyond the personal into the collective. For Jung, the psyche wasn’t just a battlefield of repressed desires; it was an ancient landscape filled with myths, archetypes, and symbols that spoke to all of humanity.

He called it the collective unconscious — the vast, inherited memory of our species. From this realm emerged the archetypes: the Hero, the Shadow, the Anima, the Wise Old Man — timeless patterns that shape our dreams, our stories, and our sense of self.

Jung’s journey was both scientific and spiritual. He experimented with the boundaries of reason, studied alchemy and religion, and kept meticulous records of his own visions — what would become The Red Book. Through his theory of individuation, he taught that the goal of life is not perfection, but wholeness: to confront our own shadows and integrate them into a unified self.

This episode explores Jung’s split with Freud, his descent into the depths of the unconscious, and his lifelong quest to bridge science, myth, and meaning. His ideas still echo in modern psychology, art, and storytelling — a testament to one man’s belief that the symbols of the inner world are as real as the outer one.

Bonus Song "A Long Way Home" (plays at the end)

Episode Title: Carl Jung – The Shadow and the Self

Podcast: Pioneers of Psychology and Psychiatry Season 1: The Birth of the Mind (1860–1930) Produced by Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory.

In this episode, we descend into the hidden chambers of the human psyche with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis — a man who dared to suggest that most of what drives us lies beyond our awareness. In Freud’s Vienna, the language of hysteria, dreams, and desire became the language of science. He believed that beneath every action, slip of the tongue, and dream symbol, the unconscious was speaking.

Freud’s theories of repression, defense, and sexuality scandalized his contemporaries and reshaped how we understand identity and motivation. Yet beneath his controversies was a revolutionary insight: that our minds are divided, layered, and haunted by what we refuse to see.

We follow Freud’s journey from neurologist to psychological pioneer, his clinical sessions in Berggasse 19, and the birth of talk therapy — an audacious idea that words could heal.

This episode explores how Freud’s world — his patients, his dreams, his own doubts — gave rise to a method that changed not just psychology, but modern culture itself. Here, the unconscious finds its voice, and the mind becomes a mystery we can never fully escape.

Bonus "Desert Moon" by The Artificial Laboratory