Monthly Archives: August 2026

What We Inherit: Martha Frick Symington Sanger on Family Trauma, Art, and Legacy

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In this episode of The Practitioner podcast, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, great-granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, discusses the 10-year process of researching her family history and the discoveries that changed how she understood Frick’s legacy.

At the center of the story is the death of Frick’s young daughter Martha, a loss from which Sanger believes he never recovered—and one she sees reflected in his art collecting. She also shares the resistance she encountered from family members who wanted to protect Frick’s reputation and what she learned about the emotional power of objects passed through generations.

For Sanger, examining the past offers families an opportunity to recognize inherited patterns, break destructive cycles, and avoid passing unresolved trauma to the next generation.

The conversation previews themes she will explore during her pre-conference session on narratives at the 2026 FFI Global Conference in New York City.

In this episode of the FFI Practitioner Podcast, Jordan Rich sits down with neuroscientist, Joseph LeDoux to explore:

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  • Split-brain research and subliminal perception
  • The evolution of emotion research
  • The role and limits of the amygdala
  • Calming automatic responses and renarrating experience
  • The connection between neuroscience and music
  • LeDoux’s upcoming FFI conference appearance

Joseph LeDoux is a pioneering neuroscientist, author, and musician whose work has advanced scientific understanding of survival circuits, emotion, memory, anxiety, and consciousness. His early research examined consciousness and behavior in split-brain patients before he turned to the neural systems involved in threat detection and defensive responses.

LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter for The Amygdaloids, a band known for what it calls “Heavy MeNtal”—original music about the mind, brain, emotion, and mental disorders. The band has released multiple albums and performed in the United States and internationally.