What if your mind isn’t lying to you… it just won’t let you know the truth? In this mini episode of Doctor the Psychology, we explore how defense mechanisms quietly script your sense of self, filter your experience of others, and organize your understanding of reality—all without your consent.

From repression and denial to mature sublimation, we explain the hierarchy of defenses, the neuroscience of nonconscious processing, and how narrative coherence can become a prison of the false self.

This is the crash course on what defenses are really doing—psychologically, emotionally, and developmentally.

Because what protects you… can also trap you.

Everyone thinks they know what a narcissist looks like. The White Lotus doesn’t just challenge that—it undoes it. This episode unpacks how narcissism hides in plain sight: beneath beauty, charm, and high-functioning personas. We’re not diagnosing characters. We’re tracing a structure—one that’s painfully real, hauntingly familiar, and easy to miss. Episode 3 of Doctor the Psychology breaks down narcissism from its structural core, and corrects public misinterpretation of the concept. Learn the cardinal rules of pathological narcissism, how to identify it, and how it belies a completely different personality structure from normal functioning.

For our first mini episode, we're talking it back to the basics and explaining the foundational concepts of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis. We're breaking down the id, the ego, and the superego, with a twist that solely comes from our unique perspective on psychodynamic theory. Whether you're familiar with these concepts or not, we think there's a little something hear that you might want to hear.