Antonio Pascual-Leone

It depends what you...

call romantic.

But yeah, I started as a... I wasn't sure if I wanted to study biology and go to medicine or if I wanted to go into theater.

I ended up going into theater and somehow ended up in a compromise, which I think is psychology.

And many years later, I sort of realized that

There's something that happens on stage.

An actor generates an emotional experience on stage for the entertainment of the audience.

But those are real emotional experiences.

A therapist could help somebody have an emotional experience that's curative in its own right.

This isn't for the entertainment of anybody.

This is their life.

It's for the purposes of health care, that going through certain experiences can be curative, a corrective emotional experience.

Mostly quite bad poetry.

Thanks for asking.

You know, a lot of them, I guess I identified very much with the lovesick kind of unrequited love poetry, right?

I think that was also part of an identity that somehow I had, you know, this is like late adolescence, early 20s sort of thing.

I was very enamored.

Right.

And I think I kind of, you know, the relationship sort of fizzled out.

But my approach, I guess, was to lean in harder.