In this episode, Dr. Stephen Sternbach (Harvard Medical School; Cambridge Health Alliance; member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and of the École freudienne du Québec) speaks of his journey into psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and also literature as a space to explore the encounter with the Real. Sternbach discusses the changing relationship to psychoanalysis in psychiatric education and practice over the past decades in the United States. He touches on the concept of the defect in language in Willy Apollon's metapsychology, and concludes by sharing his aesthetic experience with a Wordsworth poem.