Jon-David Settell(He/Him/His)

Much of philosophy today contends that modern life is damaged life. Some say this life is wrong and cannot be lived rightly, while others observe that, in terms of our structures of feeling and knowing the world, we have become impoverished; others say magic died long ago. Wrong life, poverty of experience, and the death of magic: how then can we live?

This question animates Dr. Settell's approach to care. Trained as a psychotherapist and literary theorist, he works with patients to understand the impact of modernity on the human psyche and nurture damaged life. Dr. Settell attends deeply to language—every word, even the silences and sighs—as he seeks to cultivate the ruptures of the unconscious and make way for what is unsayable and at times unthinkable. Attending to the unconscious and its articulations in language, dreams, slips of the tongue, fantasies, and repetition can reveal long-forgotten hopes and desires, in turn generating deep insight into how you became the person you are. It makes space for articulating a practical philosophy for living damaged life as well as possible, and for thinking and dreaming about who you want to become.

Because even damaged life is beautiful life, Dr. Settell thinks alongside the 13th C. Persian poet, Rumi, who tells us that the wound is the place where the light comes in. Using insights from the Frankfurt School and scholarship into the history of subjectivity, he takes the emotional pain of daily life—sorrow and sadness, anxiety, loneliness, trauma, and the sometimes unbearable heaviness of being—as what Theodor Adorno calls the "splinters in your eye." These splinters can be a magnifying glass for understanding the Self, letting the light come in, and remembering how to find joy in the most mundane experiences and moments of our lives.