The Spark of an Idea
It’s 2019. Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I’m captivated by Catherine Cohen’s comedy cabaret when, mid-song, she delivers a line that cuts to the core of breakups: “It’s like you have a best friend and then they die.”
That statement hit me hard, and since then, I’ve wanted to explore breakups with the seriousness they deserve – as a form of grief, a catalyst for growth. In a world that pressures us to “get over it,” I’ve always wondered: What if we treated breakups with reverence, honoring the profound loss they represent?
Enter Taylor Swift. I’ve always admired how she takes her own emotional life seriously and, through her songwriting, empowers us to do the same. From young love to heartbreak, infatuation to self-discovery, Taylor covers it all, validating our feelings in a world that often favors the flippant over the earnest.
Initially, I considered writing sermons on grief and breakups, weaving in Taylor Swift’s lyrics. However, my spring semester at Harvard Divinity School took me down a different path. In a class on Carl Jung and Esoteric Religion, my professor used Taylor Swift as an example of mass projection and hero worship, then admitted he didn’t understand her cultural icon status.
The class debated. Some cited the “American Dream” or “girl next door” archetype, but I saw something bigger. In her music, she narrates so many universal human experience. Sure, relationships play a role, but it’s more about her transformation than any other person. Her music fills the void left by traditional myths, providing a narrative framework for navigating the complexities of modern life. Plus, given she’s prolific—releasing 243 songs across 18 years (as of 2024)— there’s so much to work with.
Intrigued, I started exploring Taylor Swift’s music in multiple classes. I wrote a sermon on perfectionism using her story from the Miss Americana documentary and created a podcast for my Jung class, demonstrating how her music captures key Jungian concepts: Individuation, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, Archetypes, the collective unconscious, and more.
The Spirit of this Podcast
This podcast builds on those experiments, blending a secular sermon, close reading, and a touch of TEDx talk. It’s my way of synthesizing my learnings in psychoanalysis and divinity school, then applying them to our culture. As they say, understanding happens when we take knowledge from one domain and apply it to another. That’s precisely what I’m attempting here.
I hope this podcast helps you unpack your projections onto Taylor Swift’s songs, understand your emotional responses, and gain insights into psychoanalysis and theology. As Taylor once said, “I’ve always felt music is the only way to give an instantaneous moment the feel of slow motion. To romanticise it and glorify it and give it a soundtrack and a rhythm.”
That’s what I’m trying to do here too – to glorify and respect the emotions and moments that make up our lives.
Oracle Podcast 