29: Psychoanalyst Macario Giraldo on How the Unconscious Shapes Our Lives

2026-01-06

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From a coffee farm in rural Colombia to the psychoanalytic couch, Macario Giraldo has spent his life listening for the quiet forces that shape a human life: language, loss, desire, and love.At the age of ten, Macario left his family to join the La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that would become his home for the next twenty-five years. Beneath the structure of faith and vocation, an early sense of separation endured. Over time, it found expression as a desire for something he had long deferred: a family of...

From a coffee farm in rural Colombia to the psychoanalytic couch, Macario Giraldo has spent his life listening for the quiet forces that shape a human life: language, loss, desire, and love.

At the age of ten, Macario left his family to join the La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that would become his home for the next twenty-five years. Beneath the structure of faith and vocation, an early sense of separation endured. Over time, it found expression as a desire for something he had long deferred: a family of his own.

A Fulbright scholarship brought Macario to Washington, D.C. It was here that he received a rare dispensation from the Church to leave the brotherhood and encountered psychology and the work of Jacques Lacan, which would shape the rest of his analytic life.

In dialogue with Colette Soler, an analysand of Lacan, as well as clinicians Marianne Goldberger and Hugh Mullan, Macario developed a distinctive approach to group therapy informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his work, he listens not only to what is said, but to what stirs between people: the unconscious processes that emerge in groups, including conflict, desire, identification, and shared symbolic history.

In this episode, we explore:

✦ Cause and triggers

✦ Group therapy as a modern ritual

✦ Lacanian thinking beyond the individual

✦ The fantasy of complete satisfaction

✦ Listening as a psychological practice

✦ The journey to become your own friend

Macario invites us to wonder about the desires that take shape in relation to others, the limits of certainty, and how, over a lifetime, we might learn to live more truthfully with ourselves and with one another

Chapters

0:00:00 Introduction

0:03:21 Picasso and the Desire of Others

0:08:27 Presence, Absence, and the Fort-Da Game

0:15:18 From Coffee Farm to the Christian Brothers

0:18:53 Discovering Jacques Lacan

0:24:49 Jouissance: The Pursuit and Crisis of Desire

0:30:34 The Unexplored Gold Mine of Group Therapy

0:38:34 The Power of Listening

0:41:35 Anxiety is an Index of the Real

0:48:27 Faith after Dogma

0:55:35 The Journey to Become Your Own Friend