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Ordinary Unhappiness

<p>A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now, featuring Abby Kluchin &amp; Patrick Blanchfield</p>

Abby Kluchin, Patrick Blanchfield, and Dan Yowell

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe Summer of Narcissism brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to Freud’s landmark 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” While the sexologists considered narcissism a niche sexual perversion occurring only among a small number of adults, Freud structuralized the concept into a broader model of universal processes of development and subject formation. Moreover, Freud argued that some kind of narcissism was necessary for any basic human capacity for self-esteem, and saw it implicated not only in comparatively rare pathological formations, but also in socially celebrated activities like parenting and falling in love. And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, while much of Freud’s essay hasn’t stood the test of time (especially in its homophobia and misogyny), his distinction between “primary narcissism” and “secondary narcissism” remains vital and has proven foundational for subsequent theoretical and clinical thinking about personality disorders, treatability, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.comX: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

155: Freud’s “On Narcissism”: Narcissism, Part 6 Teaser

The Summer of Narcissism journey brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to late nineteenth century Europe, and to the revolutionary and controversial new discourse of sexology. Emerging at the intersections of medicine, anthropology, public health, education, and the legal system, sexology took up human sexual behavior not as a question of sin or theological denunciation, but as an object of scientific study. Introducing the field, Abby, Patrick, and Dan survey how various sexologists understood sexuality, sample the rich behavioral taxonomies they produced by way of reading from classic works by Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and reflect on how sexologists’ work combined an emphasis on self-consciously secular scientific objectivity with explicit moral attitudes and implicit normative assumptions. The three also how explore how the sexological enterprise struggled with the implications of two core problems – the question of auto-eroticism (the ways people use their own bodies for sexual pleasure) and the question of orientation (the ways people’s sexual behavior does or doesn’t involve the bodies of others). And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan discover, it was precisely while trying to reconcile those problems that two sexologists summoned Narcissus into modernity, and named “narcissism” for the very first time.  To support the Muriel Gardiners campaign at the Psychosocial Foundation for the Known and Elsewhere Collective, Parapraxis Books, and more: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/donateLearn more about the Psychosocial Foundation, including seminars, events, short courses, and therapy: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.orgLearn more about Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/Selected works cited:Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study” (1898)Paul Näcke, “Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt” (1899)Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1998)Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

154: Let’s Talk About Sex(ology): Narcissism, Part 5

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe Ordinary Unhappiness journey through the origins of narcissism arrives at the early modern period and a Europe in full-blown crisis. It’s a world where the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church no longer holds sway, where political and market forces have created new communities and dislocated old ones, and where traditional familiar theological answers fail to satisfy ever-more urgent existential questions. Working their way through the history of the Reformation and the theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Abby and Patrick trace the contours of this world’s emerging conception of selfhood and its many anxieties over interiority, predestination, success, luxury, conformity, modesty, pleasure, and more. They then unpack the particular implications of how this new order views sexual difference, turning to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and her remarkable account of why “the thoughts of women ever hover around their persons.”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

153: Everyone’s Looking at You and You’re Probably Going to Hell: Narcissism, Part 4 Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, critic, and religion scholar Jack Hanson for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation about the politics and social significance of the contemporary Catholic Church. With Jack’s new piece in Harper’s, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” as a guide, the three put the accession of the Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV into the context of the Church’s complicated relationship with modern geopolitics, economic pressures, and technological change. From papal critiques of nineteenth century industrialization to the emergence of liberation theology in the Global South to the impact of Vatican II and beyond, Jack walks Abby and Patrick through the intellectual traditions and internal tensions that have shaped the Church’s attitudes towards the state, the market, and secular political ideologies. Going beyond headlines and reductive soundbites, Jack helps Abby and Patrick situate the contradictions of American Catholicism – embodied most visibly in the reactionary politics of figures like J.D. Vance – within a broader narrative of US imperial decline and crises of institutional legitimacy and moral authority. As a case in point, the three turn to the Pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, its provocative assessment of AI specifically, and its account of conditions of contemporary anomie more generally. What ensues is a conversation about desire, fantasy, technology, solidarity, and what it means to be human.Jack Hanson, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival”: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/08/radical-reformation-jack-hanson-catholic-church-progressive/Jack’s Substack, Phantom Heresy: https://phantomheresy.substack.com/Jack on Magnifica Humanitas on the Know Your Enemy podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OZialymsdMglvaEdujzx2More by Jack on the Catholic Church:“The Text That May Be Key to How the New Pope Thinks,” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pope-leo-xiv-rerum-novarum-socialism/“Last Rites,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/10/20/last-rites-death-penalty-catholic-church/“Mamdani’s Newest Ally: The Catholic Church?”: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mamdanis-newest-ally-the-catholic-church.html“The Heresy of Americanism,” https://newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-americanism“The Post-Francis Church,” https://yalereview.org/article/pope-francis-death-future-catholocismHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

152: The Pope, the Church, and the Politics of Progress feat. Jack Hanson

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan continue tracking the reflections – and refractions – of the myth of Narcissus across Western history. From the songs of French troubadours to the tale of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to the poetry of Dante and the dialogues of Petrarch, they examine how Ovid’s narrative of Narcissus and Echo grew into a powerful cultural template for dramatizing changing attitudes towards love, sexuality, gender, and more. By the same token, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, the figure of Narcissus became a touchstone for other literary traditions, moral discourses, and theological traditions. Turning to key moments from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Church Fathers, the three then sketch out how the question of narcissism also came to reflect longstanding cultural anxieties about vanity, “vainglory,” pleasure, embodiment, humility, pride, and the nature of selfhood.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

151: All is Vanity: Narcissism, Part 3

Abby and Patrick welcome historian Stuart Schrader for a conversation about the history, ideology, and politics of contemporary American policing. Schrader’s new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, gives the three a chance to unpack the specific institutions behind the catchall of “the police” and to pinpoint the specific, historically contingent ways American police have acquired outsize political and cultural power. Stuart walks Abby and Patrick through his research on the history of police unions and the ecosystem of institutions that have made arming, funding, empowering, and immunizing police bipartisan priorities. Toggling between perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, Stuart, Abby, and Patrick address questions like: How are police unions different from other unions, and how is police work fundamentally different from other kinds of work? How is power distributed within police agencies, how do different institutions compete with one another for resources and patronage, what antagonisms divide police, and how do they nonetheless manage to protect their shared claim to wield violent, discretionary power? The conversation drills deep into urgent, fundamentally psychoanalytic questions, questions that hit all the harder on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States itself. Why are America’s police such objects of overdetermined discourse and fantasy? How are Americans variously taught to summon police, to identify with police, to fear police, and to otherwise think about the policing, oftentimes in ways entirely divorced from material realities? Why do so many Americans resist recognizing police as properly self-interested political actors, despite manifest evidence to the contrary, and even while police leaders have openly embraced partisan political engagement? How do police think about themselves, and what ideological narratives and cultural forces have made police such a naturalized and ubiquitous presence in American life? And if we can bring ourselves to see what’s repressed yet right front of our faces – the reality of “Blue Power” – then what new possibilities for insight, organizing, and political change might that open up? Stuart Schrader, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves. Stuard Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.More about Stuart: https://stuartschrader.com/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

150: Cops in Our Heads feat. Stuart Schrader

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan dig into the realms of myth and fable to investigate the ancient origins of the Narcissus myth. As they discover, behind the skeletal form of the story (i.e., guy falls in love with his own reflection) are a multitude of versions, with some striking variations and suggestive throughlines. After cataloguing these, they turn to the primary source for the modern version of the myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reading that poem’s account of the doomed encounter between Narcissus and the nymph Echo as a story of impossible desires and intertwined destinies.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

149: Myth, Fate, and Desire: Narcissism, Part 2

Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off Ordinary Unhappiness’s Summer of Narcissism series! In this first episode of many, the three reckon with how talk of “narcissism” and “narcissists” is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, from therapy sessions to self-help-books to popular media to op-eds to the dating scene and beyond. Yet as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, “narcissism” in practice seems to mean radically different things to different people, gets invoked for wildly different purposes, and is hotly debated, with plentiful disagreements, even among specialists in any given field, let alone across disciplines. At the same time, the idea of narcissism speaks powerfully to people as they navigate personal relationships and struggle to make sense of group behaviors. Narcissism, in other words, is a quintessentially overdetermined concept, with simultaneously clinical, theoretical, and all-too-personal implications, and one that raises philosophical, political, and painfully practical questions about the relationship between normality and pathology, the individual and the collective, the clinical and the polemical, and more besides. It’s both the beginning of a deep dive into the meanings, history, and stakes of a much used – and much-abused – buzzword and also a great (re)introduction to the Ordinary Unhappiness project and what it means to think psychoanalytically in general. Next week in Part 2: Narcissus in myth and imagination!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

148: You’re So Vain: Narcissism, Part 1

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick wrap up their reading of the Elisabeth von R case study. First, they tackle the Discussion section of Freud’s paper. As they discover, this section goes beyond Elisabeth’s story: it contains yet more case vignettes of still other patients, as well as a meditation on the strangeness of an approach to scientific inquiry and practical treatment where stories are the primary source of data. Second, they observe Freud’s beginning to explore a set of questions that will recur throughout his subsequent work – involving, above all, the relationships between embodied experiences, bodily metaphors, and the unconscious. Finally, Abby and Patrick go beyond the text to reflect on the biography of the woman who was Elisabeth von R – Ilona Weiss – and what it means for an analytic treatment to be successful. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

147: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 13: Studies on Hysteria, Part XIII: The Home Economics of Grief: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Concluded Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan close out their reading of Winnicott’s paper, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” focusing specifically on Winnicott’s two case studies. The first is the story of a distressed little boy who has developed an idiosyncratic relationship to string; the second is an adult woman struggling with feelings of loss, memories of her dislocated childhood, and a fantasy about a beautiful white horse. Along the way, Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott in conversation with other analytical concepts – from Freud’s notion of mourning to Lacan’s idea of the signifying chain – and work through some challenging implications for thinking about drug addiction, intergenerational traumas, and more.  Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

146: Winnicott: Creativity and Subjectivity, Part III Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome clinician, activist, and writer Lara Sheehi, author of the brand-new book, From the Clinic to The Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. Situating this book and her other work within the context of her background and experiences with psychoanalytic institutions, Sheehi leads Abby and Patrick on a frank and searching conversation with far-reaching implications. What does it mean to identify with psychoanalysis in the abstract, what are the tools psychoanalysis gives us for thinking about the political stakes of our identifications, and what does it mean when psychoanalytic institutions demand disidentification from lived experiences and urgent political concerns? What stories does mainstream psychoanalysis tell about itself, what histories does it repress, and what contemporary material realities does it disavow? What are the promises of a “despecialized” psychoanalysis, and how might a despecialized psychoanalysis put psychoanalytic concepts and approaches to liberatory use? Addressing these questions and more, the three discuss topics including: the history of psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric enterprise; its extensive weaponization as a tool of imperial domination and counterinsurgent repression; emancipatory and decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis via figures like Frantz Fanon; the complicities, contradictions, and enactments of contemporary psychoanalysis against a backdrop of transphobic legislation, genocide in Gaza, and more; psyops, psychological warfare, and military psychology; psychodynamic counterinsurgency theory; logics of blame, ingratitude, exclusion, and confusion; the work of “psychic intrusions” on the level of individual psyches and group dynamics; the necessity of “psychic militancy” as a concept and as a disciplined practice; and much, much more.Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary FuturesLara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in PalestineSara Ahmed, Willful SubjectsErnesto Che Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine”Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White MasksFanon, The Wretched of the Earth David Petraeus, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency“A conversation between sword and neck” Ghassan Kanafani’s 1970 interview with ABC’s Richard Carleton in Beirut Lara’s personal website The Psychic Militancy podcastHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

145: Psychic Militancy feat. Lara Sheehi

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan continue their reading of Winnicott’s famous essay, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Focusing on the middle third of the paper, the three unpack Winnicott’s description of the transitional object as the “first not-me possession,” the stakes of his idea of the “good enough mother,” and how “good enough” care involves an interplay of illusion and disillusion that Winnicott sees as essential to the development of an infant’s capacity for reality testing, self-awareness, and more. They close-read Winnicott’s narrative and diagrammatic illustration of an intergenerational story of symptoms and transitional objects within a single family; address the technical distinctions between his models and those of Melanie Klein; and consider implications for adult activities of artistic creation and aesthetic experience. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

144: Winnicott: Creativity and Subjectivity, Part II Teaser

Taking a breather from our moment’s unrelentingly grim headlines, Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to a favorite analytic thinker – Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) – and begin the first of a two-part episode on one of his most famous papers, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951/1953). Winnicott’s ostensible subject here is infantile development, and specifically the attachment very young children frequently develop towards a particularly favored object, whether that be a blanket, a stuffed animal, or the like. But Winnicott also imbues an infant’s “lovie” with profound significance that goes beyond its material incarnation. Rather than being just another plaything, it holds an essential role in the development of a child’s incipient subjectivity, and demands that we think beyond binary distinctions between subject and object, inside and outside, and self and other. As a “transitional object,” it even suggests a kind of template for sophisticated adultg activities ranging from artistic creation to religious rituals to sexual fetishism to addiction and more. Close reading the first six pages of the essay, Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack Winnicott’s deceptively simple prose and delightful lists, exploring how play is in fact neither frivolous nor merely the province of children, but in fact something much more serious, and thinking through the implications of Winnicott’s idea of “transitional phenomena” for psychotherapy, education, aesthetics, and more.Works Cited:Donald Woods Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in Playing and Reality (essay originally published in 1951; Playing and Reality, 1971)Also as mentioned in the episode, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research’s Annual Social is June 4th! Abby is on the host committee and we’ll both be there – come join us to support BISR? For more details and tickets: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/2026-annual-institute-social/And a link to Abby’s summer Brooklyn Institute class, Theories of Consent: Subjectivity and Sexual Ethics: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/theories-of-consent-subjectivity-and-sexual-ethics-2/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

143: Winnicott: Creativity and Subjectivity, Part I

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick arrive at the third and final phase of Freud’s treatment of Elizabeth von R. This is where everything comes together, where Elizabeth’s stories, re-told one last time, reveal a heartbreaking throughline, and where Freud’s approach yields a dramatic and decisive interpretation. Abby and Patrick walk through it all, reprising themes of genre, psychoanalytic technique, psychotherapeutic ethics, the cumulative psychic impact of life’s contingencies, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

142: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 12: Studies on Hysteria, Part XII: Dancing On My Own: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the second installment of a two-part series on the thought of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. Together, the three discuss a pivotal chapter in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, unpacking Laplanche’s “universalized” transformation of Freud’s seduction hypothesis; Laplanche’s “primal situation” and its roots in anthropology and phenomenology; and what these ideas reveal about our invariably messy experiences of parenting, therapy, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 133: Laplanche Part Two: The Primal Situation feat. Danielle Drori

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessClinician Chris Landry joins Abby and Patrick for a reflection on the life and legacy of prominent psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear (1948-2025). From Yale to the University of Chicago to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and beyond, Lear creatively combined his clinical experiences, a rigorous reading of Freud, and a perspective steeped in classical Western philosophical traditions. As Chris, Abby, and Patrick explore, the result is a singular body of work that clarifies otherwise challenging questions of epistemology and hermeneutics while also speaking directly to urgent political questions and the lived texture of contemporary human life. Chris, Abby, and Patrick proceed by close reading a chapter from one of Lear’s most celebrated works, Love and Its Place in Nature, unpacking Lear’s account of how love underwrites human development by making possible the experience of a “good-enough world.” The three then walk through the ethical implications of Lear’s thought for the institutions and practices of contemporary psychotherapy, which often neglect interpretative dialogue and attentive care in favor of alienating and crudely pathologizing both patients and practitioners. The conversation builds to a discussion by Chris of how Lear, together with Fanon, has inspired his own work in community psychoanalysis, in facilitating a working group for practitioners, and in critiquing the power dynamics of the contemporary clinical landscape.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

141: Jonathan Lear and the “Good-Enough World” feat. Chris Landry

Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Loren Dent. As co-director of Brooklyn’s Greene Clinic, Loren is the ideal person to unpack the history, meaning, and contemporary landscape of community psychoanalysis. Drawing on Brazilian analyst Gabriel Tupenambá’s idea of the “institutional circuit,” Loren walks Abby and Patrick through a history extending from Freud’s hopes for a “psychoanalysis for the people” to the refugee analyst diasporas of WW2 to the interventions of Jacques Lacan to contemporary efforts to bring a community psychoanalytic orientation to analytic institutions around the United States. As Loren, Abby, and Patrick explore, the idea of community also psychoanalysis raises questions about the communities psychoanalysis can serve, communities it has previously excluded, and psychoanalytic institutions as communities in their own right. Topics include the relationship between theory, practice, and doctrine; differing national histories of psychoanalysis; ego psychology and the question of adaptation; the embededness of signifiers; hierarchies and antagonisms within analytic institutions, as well as efforts to reconstellate them; the complicated stakes of “expanding access”; burnout as both an individual condition and institutional symptom; what drives people to practice psychoanalysis in the first place, and more.More about Loren at the Greene Clinic and about his courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.Works cited:Gabriel Tupinambá, The Desire of Psychoanalysis, Exercises in Psychoanalytic Thinking.Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis.Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-1938.Emily Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich.Resources:Foundation for Community PsychoanalysisPsychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) Community Psychoanalysis Track & ConsortiumThe Greene ClinicChicago Center for Psychoanalysis & PsychotherapyThe Kedzie Center, ChicagoWashington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Community Psychoanalysis Certificate ProgramBoston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Concentration in Community PsychoanalysisDIVISION/Review, Special Issue on Community Psychoanalysis, 2022A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

140: Psychoanalysis for the People feat. Loren Dent

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick cover the “second phase” of Freud’s treatment of Elisabeth von R. Their focus this time is on Freud’s technique, and especially on Freud’s insistence that his patient pursue her associations no matter where they might lead. What are we to make of Freud’s apparent confidence here – is it self-confidence, confidence in the process, confidence in Elisabeth, or some combination of all three? What is the character of “resistance” in this text – who or what is doing the resistance, and what is being resisted? How does Freud’s theory of psychic injuries that become manifested in bodily symptoms relate to the practice of interpretation, and the mechanism of therapeutic action in general? Close-reading Freud’s own words in some passages of remarkable candor, Abby and Patrick address these questions and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:  http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

139: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 11: Studies on Hysteria, Part XI: Technique and Resistance: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou for a frank conversation about politics, psychoanalysis, and the politics of psychoanalysts and of psychoanalytic institutions. Recent years have seen multiple psychoanalytic schools, museums, and other entities invite lecturers and panelists to discuss ongoing events in Israel and Palestine, only to then variously cancel, alter, or otherwise walk back those invitations. Avgi, who has both witnessed and been on the receiving end of such “disinvitations,” joins Abby and Patrick to reflect on their significance on multiple levels. In what ways do these events reflect how institutional psychoanalysis has responded to the genocide in Gaza more generally? How do such events play out as communications, both in terms of the language and rationales invoked by people involved, and in terms of what they implicitly convey as unspoken norms? If we see such “disinvitations” as enactments, then what are the underlying fantasies and anxieties they express? What is their immediate social and political context, what are their precedents, and what deeper histories and traumas might underwrite them? Avgi leads Abby and Patrick in a conversation that expands into topics including: the question of what is or isn’t “outside” the consulting room and what does or doesn’t get considered “political”; our fantasies about our capacities for tolerance, both in terms of distress and in terms of dissent; the uses of anger, the pathologization of affect, and the stakes of “making a scene”; tokenism, inclusivity, exclusion, and professional ethics; the weaponization of analytic concepts and intellectualization as a defense; transphobia, anti-Arab prejudice, anti-Semitism, and the impacts of oppression and historical traumas; the many meanings of resistance; the clinical encounter and Laplanche’s idea of “translation”; the creation of new spaces for psychoanalytic education and community; and much, much more.Selected Texts Cited:Avgi Saketopoulou, “Just Say Genocide: The Problem of Truth Sadism” in BattlegroundAvgi Saketopoulou, “Against Transantagonism: A Metapsychology for the Flourishing of Trans Children (Or, Did you all think pronouns were enough?)”Avgi Saketopoulou, “Genocide and the Screen of Irreverence,” in Petrucelli, J. and Schoen, S. (eds.), Proceedings of William Allanson White’s Conference on IrreverenceEdward Said (with Christopher Bollas and Jacqueline Rose), Freud and the Non-EuropeanFranz Kafka, “On Parables” John Stuart Mill, On LibertyP-HOLE (Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education) https://p-hole.com.  Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

138: Genocide and the Politics of Hospitality feat. Avgi Saketopoulou

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by Séamus Malekafzali, a journalist whose reportage and commentary has proven indispensable to processing the United States’ war with Iran, and whose historical research and critical essays are vital for thinking about the modern Middle East in general. Séamus begins by talking about his work, setting ongoing events in context, and reflects on the differences between public discourse in English versus Arabic-language spaces. Toggling between contemporary headlines and historical texts, Séamus, Abby, and Patrick reflect on how material realities and geopolitical antagonisms have interacted with competing fantasies, traumatic memories, and logics of identification to produce our current juncture. What ensues is an earnest and searching conversation about dynamics of family, ethnicity, religion, race, and nationality; intergenerational experiences of historical traumas; identification with the aggressor; repression, resistance, and enactment as material and libidinal concepts; nationalism, chauvinism, and settler colonialism; Israeli-US relations as a “feedback loop”; the politics of language; the advocacy of diaspora communities; the difficulties of talking about what’s obvious; and much more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

137: Repression, Resistance, and Reenactment feat. Séamus Malekafzali Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome novelist and academic Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his brand-new novel, Night Night Fawn. Alternately hilarious and devasting, Night Night Fawn is written in the voice of Barbara Rosenberg, an embittered New York Jewish woman penning a deathbed memoir that documents her many disappointments and frustrations – with life, love, friendship, money, and, above all her trans son, whom she hallucinates as a large and ominous bird. Night Night Fawn is also incredibly overdetermined with respect to genre, representing an effort on Rosenberg’s part to write from the perspective of a fictionalized version of his own mother. On yet another level, it’s a sustained interrogation of the complex and painful interactions between material conditions and ideological systems, the forces that shape our experiences of family, class, religion, and ethnicity, and the specific histories of twentieth century American Jewishness as it relates to Zionism and the horrors of our twenty-first century present. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abby, Patrick, and Jordy discuss the social reproduction of bigotry; the relationship between ethnonationalism and the heteropatriarchal family form; the ethics and aesthetics of representation; the contemporary landscape of the political novel, and much, much more.Selected Works Cited:Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Fawn: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/689017/night-night-fawn-by-jordy-rosenberg/ Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556691/confessions-of-the-fox-by-jordy-rosenberg/Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day”: https://avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/Rosenberg, “The Daddy Dialectic”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”Karl Marx, Capital, Vol ILeon Trotsky, “Literature and Revolution”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

136: Ideology and Family History feat. Jordy Rosenberg

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick resume the case history of Elisabeth von R. in the wake of her revelation of a previously unmentioned character – a would-be suitor. Unpacking the tale of Elisabeth’s courtship, and the sad circumstances of its end, Abby and Patrick itemize the conflicts, anxieties, and fantasies that seem to structure Elisabeth’s underlying psychic distress. As they explain, this grammar of suffering is at once singular to Elisabeth as an individual but also resonant for readers in the present, and sets the stage for a dramatic Freudian intervention as well as a resolution to the mystery of why Elisabeth’s symptoms are embodied in her legs.  Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

135: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 10: Studies on Hysteria, Part X: Daddy’s Daughter or Some Man’s Husband: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Helen Epstein, Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard College and author of the new book Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic. After sketching out the history of contemporary western sociological and philosophical accounts of suicide in general from Durkheim to the existentialists and beyond, the three turn to the specific focus of Epstein’s research: suicide epidemics. As Epstein elaborates, suicide epidemics – wherein entire communities experience sudden and acute spikes in suicide rates – raise urgent questions about the social, economic, and emotional contexts of suicidal distress. What broad conditions can make people feel like life is no longer worth living? What models of meaningful life do communities transmit intergenerationally, and how do those models – and those communities – crumble under pressure? Exploring examples from Micronesia to Nunavut and from 1990s Russia to the contemporary United States and taking up communities from 19th century industrial workers to contemporary American military veterans, Epstein walks Abby and Patrick through her findings, leading the three to reflect on how societies metabolize historical change and economic dislocation on the level of families and across generations. Helen Epstein, Why Live: When Suicide Becomes an Epidemic.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

134: On Suicide and the Indifference of Others feat. Helen Epstein

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the second installment of a two-part series on the thought of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. Together, the three discuss a pivotal chapter in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, unpacking Laplanche’s “universalized” transformation of Freud’s seduction hypothesis; Laplanche’s “primal situation” and its roots in anthropology and phenomenology; and what these ideas reveal about our invariably messy experiences of parenting, therapy, and more. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

133: Laplanche Part Two: The Primal Situation feat. Danielle Drori Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the first in a two-part miniseries introducing the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012). A brilliant clinician and theorist in his own right, Laplanche combined a critical reading of Freud with insights drawn from anthropology, the history of science, and Western philosophy to revolutionize how many analysts saw questions of sexuality, development, language, and more. Yet while incredibly influential in France and beyond, Laplanche’s thought has only made limited inroads among clinicians and theorists in the English-speaking world. In this episode, Danielle, Abby, and Patrick introduce the figure of Laplanche, narrating his biography and discussing everything from his place in French critical theory to his encyclopedic scholarship of Freud (together with Jean Pontalis) to his disagreements with Lacan. They then sketch out some of Laplanche’s key ideas, with particular attention to his critique of Freud’s “seduction theory.” As they explain, Laplanche’s revision of that concept into a “generalized” model of seduction allows him and his contemporary interpreters to suggest some radical ways for thinking about questions of trauma, subjectivity, language, sexuality, and more. In Part Two (out next Saturday), the three get granular by close-reading key sections in Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Texts Cited:Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of PsychoanalysisJean Laplanche, New Foundations for PsychoanalysisDominique Scarfone, A brief introduction to the work of Jean LaplancheAvgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without IdentityAvgi Saketopoulou, “Laplanche, an introduction by Dominique Scarfone.” Review essay in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 99(3), 778–786.Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of tongues between adults and the child: The language of tenderness and of passionHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

132: Laplanche Part One: Sexuality and Subjectivity feat. Danielle Drori

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick discuss the runaway streaming sensation, Heated Rivalry. Adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels by Canadian director Jacob Tierney, Heated Rivalry depicts a burgeoning romance between two young hockey players who are also bitter rivals. Taking up themes of athleticism, masculinity, language, desire, and more, Heated Rivalry also offers Abby and Patrick a perfect opportunity to sketch out a psychoanalytic perspective on the cultural meanings of professional sports, touching on topics like fantasy, regression, play, creativity, recognition, and beyond. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

131: Wild Analysis: Heated Rivalry Teaser

Abby joins Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub on one of our favorite podcasts, In Bed With the Right! The topic is romantasy - as a genre of fiction, as a publishing phenomenon, and, above all, as a cultural symptom. What do readers - and women specifically - find in romantasy narratives? How does reading relate to play, and fantasy to trauma and healing? The three explore all these questions and more!Texts include:Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses seriesRebecca Yarros, Empyrean seriesJudith Herman, Trauma and Recovery Andrea Dworkin, Women HatingSigmund Freud, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" (1907)Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

BONUS EPISODE: Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma

Abby and Patrick welcome film critic A.S. Hamrah. Hamrah is a prolific writer of reviews, essays, and dispatches, and the two brand-new collections of his most recent work, Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema, furnish Abby, Patrick, and Scott with the perfect opportunity to talk cinema, nostalgia, the political economy of movies, and much more. From moviegoing as an embodied experience to the nature of theaters as built environment, the three explore the overdetermined significance of going to sit in a dark room alongside strangers, simultaneously alone yet connected to one another. Unpacking the status of cinema as a quintessentially modern medium, they consider how developments like the smartphone, social media, Netflix, and the COVID-19 epidemic have reshaped both the film industry and our practices of media consumption. They also go deep into the relationship between cinema and television, addressing genre distinctions between soaps and prestige TV; the origins of reality TV in COPS, writers strikes and neoliberal austerity; and the direct line between reality TV and the Trumpian present. Along the way, Abby, Patrick, and Scott take up topics including: the social role of film criticism as a genre to popular discourses about fandom and “letting people enjoy things”; the loneliness of critics and the anomie of watching “second screen content”; and shifting norms of audience behavior (read: being rude). And it all builds to a debate over whether or not going to a movie versus binge-watching Netflix may express different fantasies, desires and anxieties about intimacy, control, and death. Silence your phones, get some popcorn, and enjoy! Texts cited:A.S. Hamrah, Last Week in End Times Cinema: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902686/last-week-in-end-times-cinema/A.S. Hamrah, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2019-2025: https://shop.nplusonemag.com/products/algorithm-of-the-night-by-a-s-hamrahA.S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Stremaing: Film Writing 2002-2018: https://shop.nplusonemag.com/products/the-earth-dies-streaming-by-a-s-hamrahJean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

130: Movies, Screens, and Fantasies feat. A.S. Hamrah

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick continue their reading of Freud's case study of Elisabeth von R. With each new loss and fragmentation suffered by Elisabeth's nuclear family, they track the shifting burdens put upon Elisabeth and the successive challenges to her own hopes, desires, and self-understanding. Arriving at a pivotal moment in Elisabeth's story - another scene of bedside grief - they glimpse what appears to be her family's darkest secret, and then share in Freud's surprise when Elisabeth delivers yet another offhand revelation.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

129: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 9: Studies on Hysteria, Part IX: Family Secrets and the Sacrifices of Marriage: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHappy New Year! We’re off this week taking a belated holiday rest. But as a complement to our miniseries on projective identification with Brian Ngo-Smith, we’re unlocking this episode featuring another returning audience favorite: Lily Scherlis. Lily leads Abby and Dan on a deep dive into the psychoanalytic study of groups, from its history and roots in Wilfred Bion’s theories to her own personal experiences and reportage. Like our recent episodes with Brian, the conversation expands to thinking about groups more broadly, and into the arena of contemporary politics in general and the challenges of leftist solidarity specifically. -Abby and Dan sit down with writer and performance artist Lily Scherlis to talk about her new essay for n+1, “Experiences in Groups” (a title that does homage to Wilfred Bion’s influential 1961 book of the same name). They discuss Lily’s experience at the 2024 Tavistock conference, the meaning of “group relations,” and the fantasies it can generate for those committed to leftist politics, before turning to their own experiences in groups and Bion’s influence on each of their lives.  Lily Scherlis, “Experiences in Groups”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/essays/experiences-in-groups/Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups: https://bookshop.org/p/books/experiences-in-groups-and-other-papers-w-r-bion/0d24f44dde25497d?ean=9780415040204&next=t&Nov 14th event of interest to NYC listeners: “Group as Form; Deep Study Session with Groups Group” (registration and fee required): https://www.poetryproject.org/events/group-as-form-deep-study-session-with-groups-group?page=1Our previous episode with Lily, “From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and Abuses of Pop Psychology”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/17036523-98-from-boundaries-to-attachment-the-uses-and-abuses-of-pop-psychology-feat-lily-scherlisOur previous episode on Bion’s Experiences in Groups with Christine Smallwood: “From Parties to Projective Identification: Why Is Group Life So Hard?”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/13002667-12-from-parties-to-projective-identification-why-is-group-life-so-hard-feat-christine-smallwood

UNLOCKED: 117: Experiences in Groups feat. Lily Scherlis

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessBrian Ngo-Smith returns for the second half of our miniseries on projective identification! In this episode, Abby, Patrick, and Brian pivot from the difficult terrain of theorizing projective identification in terms of individual development and abstract mental mechanisms to the much more tangible – and dramatic – manifestations of projective identification in group behavior. Indeed, as the three explore, thinking about projective identification in the interpersonal rather than intrapsychic domain is incredibly clarifying for understanding how groups come together, encourage various roles for their members, experience friction, manifest antagonisms, and otherwise function (or break down) in the real world. Building from two-person dyads to small groups to large collectivities, Brian, Abby, and Patrick apply the concept of projective identification at scale, thinking about everything from psychotherapy and marriage to classrooms and family businesses to giant corporations and politics at the national level and beyond. From “role suction” to scapegoating to Bion’s threefold model of group types and more, the three unpack some essential – and highly portable – terms, and work through how the idea of projective identification can help re-frame broader, longstanding questions about interpellation, leadership, solidarity, and more. They conclude with an extended consideration of the contemporary landscape of American mass incarceration, homelessness, and precarity, unpacking how the all-too-personal aspects of projective identification manifest in tandem with the operation of ostensibly impersonal histories, institutions, and policies to generate suffering, perpetuate inequality, and normalize logics of enactment, blame, trauma, indifference, and more. More about Brian Ngo-Smith at https://ngosmiththerapy.com/ and https://ngosmithconsulting.comPart I: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/18416396-127-projective-identification-part-i-feat-brian-ngo-smithOur previous episode with Brian, “Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/14213981-36-hate-help-and-housing-psychoanalysis-and-social-work-feat-brian-ngo-smith

128: Projective Identification Part II feat. Brian Ngo-Smith Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith for a conversation about one of the most difficult but powerful concepts in psychoanalytic theory: projective identification. A notion that demands simultaneously thinking about infantile development and adult behaviors, normal defenses and pathological patterns, the idea of projective identification captures an essential dimension of all kinds of interpersonal relationships – but it also throws some of our most basic assumptions about the distinction between self and other into question. In the first of a two-part series, Brian, Abby, and Patrick unpack the concept of projective identification, setting it in historical context, and considering it from a variety of perspectives. They explore topics including classical Freudian versus object relations approaches to development; the works of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion; the defense mechanisms in general and ideas of projection and introjection specifically; projective identification in therapy, romantic partnerships, and professional life; and more. In part II, which comes out next Saturday, Brian, Abby, and Patrick put the idea of projective identification to work in considering group behavior, institutional cultures, and politics.Texts cited:Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” Wilfred Bion, Experiences in GroupsTeresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical ProcessJL Mitrani, “'Taking the transference': Some technical implications in three papers by Bion”Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of DefenseJerome Blackman, 101 Defenses: How the Mind Shields ItselfMore about Brian at https://ngosmiththerapy.com/ and https://ngosmithconsulting.comOur previous episode with Brian, “Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/14213981-36-hate-help-and-housing-psychoanalysis-and-social-work-feat-brian-ngo-smithHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

127: Projective Identification Part I feat. Brian Ngo-Smith

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIt’s part two of our mailbag episode – which means Abby, Patrick, and Dan get to field yet more amazing listener questions! Topics include the many relationships, and problems of translation, between psychoanalysis and Buddhism; the figure of Melanie Klein and American resistances to her thought; how the right uses language and the question of whether the American left needs a new "master signifier"; the virality of buzzwords like "limerence" and "person addiction" and what they reveal about contemporary conditions of intimacy; and more! The three also reflect on themes of precarity, vulnerability, education, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

126: Mailbag Part 2: Searching for the Self Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by writer Grace Byron, author of the fantastic new novel Herculine. Alternately hilarious and terrifying, Herculine is the story of a young trans woman who leaves a frustrating life in New York City to join an erstwhile high school lover in a trans separatist commune in rural Indiana. But the community proves far from perfect, and the narrator soon finds herself enmeshed in a pressure-cooker milieu of personal jealousies and erotic rivalries, all with occult overtones – and there are literal demons, too. Abby, Patrick, and Grace reflect on the themes of the book, and probe the broader questions it addresses. How might trauma shape our ideas about healing and our pursuit of transformative experiences – in psychotherapy and beyond? How does identity relate to desire, how does theory relate to practice, and how might hegemonic structures reassert themselves in power dynamics within marginalized communities? What are the uses of utopian fantasies, and how do we square them with the real-world challenges of building solidarity? The three explore all these questions, as well as the power of religious symbolism, the practice of “conversion therapy,” media representations of the demonic, and more!  Texts cited:Grace Byron, Herculine: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Herculine/Grace-Byron/9781668087862 Grace Byron, “Idle Worship: Fairy Tales of Conversion,” in Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/idle-worshipGrace Byron, “Repossessed,” in The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/latest/repossessed-byronMcKenzie Wark, “Dear Cis Analysts: A Call for Reparations,” in Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/dear-cis-analystsAvgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity: https://www.uitbooks.com/shop/gender-without-identityImogen Binnie, Nevada: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374606619/nevada/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

125: Demons, Community, and Conversion Therapy feat. Grace Byron

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIt’s another mailbag episode (part one of two)! Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to listener questions about everything from the utility of psychoanalytic concepts in everyday life to the complexities of Melanie Klein to the allure of AI “wisdom” and beyond. Plus, they tackle Abraham Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” and get into the weeds of why, exactly, Hallmark movies exist, who they’re for, and what libidinal work they do.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

124: Mailbag: Uses of Theory and AI Grinchiness Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by therapist and sexuality educator Lucie Fielding. First, the three talk about Lucie’s path to clinical work and the significance of her book, Trans Sex, just out in a revised Second Edition. They then turn to Freud’s classic, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), putting that text, and the broader legacy of Freud’s views on sexuality, in dialogue with contemporary questions of trans embodiment and sexual identity. This means reckoning with the ways that Freud’s account of sexual development is alternately retrograde and radical, both of his time and far ahead of it. The three focus in particular on Freud’s idea of “polymorphous perversity,” and the ambiguities of his distinction between “sexual object” and “sexual aim,” exploring how Freud’s vision of human sexuality as radically contingent and plastic may offer possibilities for thinking constructively and more inclusively about pleasure and the diverse range of human sexual expression.Lucie’s website is here: https://luciefielding.com/The new edition of Trans Sex is here: https://www.routledge.com/Trans-Sex-Nurturing-Trans-Erotic-Embodiment-and-Gender-Pleasure/Fielding/p/book/9781032737218Lucie’s recommended reading includes:Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without IdentityJosé Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer FuturityTourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. JohnsonOliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of SexAudre Lorde, “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

123: Polymorphous Perversity and Gender Pleasure feat. Lucie Fielding

Last year we unlocked part 1 of our Thanksgiving Special so that everyone could hear the good/bad news about the "Holiday Syndrome." This year we're unlocking part 2, on settler colonialism, history, fantasy, ritual, and more. Whether you're celebrating, traveling, or staying home, we promise there's a lot to chew on here!Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the second – overstuffed – installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the social demand to perform “thankfulness”; the parable of primal murder and subsequent myth-making at the heart of Freud’s first foray into armchair anthropology, Totem and Taboo (1913); Christianity, civic religion and the “totems” and sacrifices of ritual meals as obligatory touchstones for enforcing social cohesion; the history of the Thanksgiving holiday as a project of ideological integration and national-mythmaking; the history behind the supposed “first Thanskgiving”; the psychic tolls of repression at the level of the individual, the family, and the nation; settler colonialism as a term of political and libidinal economy; primal scenes and screen memories; indigenous activism, counter-memories, and the National Day of Mourning; compulsory identification, difficult recognitions, disidentifications, and the creation of new possibilities.Citations available on Patreon here.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 32: Thanksgiving Special, Part 2: Murder, Myth, and Memory

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick resume Freud’s case history of Elisabeth von R. They walk through Freud’s developing technique before unpacking what will prove to be one of his lifelong favorite and most evocative metaphors for psychic life: a city. Abby and Patrick then begin close-reading Elisabeth von R’s life story as she first relates it to Freud. What emerges is both a picture of Elisabeth’s family system, its patterns, and the distinctly gendered roles assigned to its members as well as the story of her personal fantasies and frustrations as the family goes through turmoil and loss. The episode builds to the articulation of a fundamental Freudian preoccupation: how do psychic injuries arise in relation to real-world misfortunes, and how do life experiences and contingent events determine the form of an individual’s bodily symptoms? Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

122: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 8: Studies on Hysteria, Part VIII: The Blow That Falls: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Peruvian Amazon for two weeks of psychedelic treatment under a prominent indigenous shaman. Sarah relates and reflects on her experience, her relationship with the shaman and his other clients, the business model of the “ayahuasca center,” and much more. Along the way, Sarah, Abby, and Patrick unpack broader narratives about therapy, ritual, and healing; the ways we metabolize feelings of guilt, sadness, and desires for change; the unavoidable context of capitalism, global inequality, and climate catastrophe; our expectations for psychedelics, our fantasies of transformative experiences, and what we can learn from plants. Sarah Miller's writing classes are ongoing, here is a description and contact information.Sarah Miller, “Pirates of the Ayahuasca”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/essays/pirates-of-the-ayahuasca/Sarah Miller, “Heaven or High Water”: https://popula.com/2019/04/02/heaven-or-high-water/Sarah’s Substack, The Real Sarah Miller: https://therealsarahmiller.substack.com/Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/357842/the-doors-of-perception-by-aldous-huxley/9780099458203Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and Anna Shulgin, PiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved): A Chemical Love Story: https://psychedelics.berkeley.edu/resources/pihkal/Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot, “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34975622/Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright, editors, In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia: https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-darkness-and-secrecyHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah Miller

Abby and Patrick continue their series on psychedelics via an in-depth interview with Dr. Dan Karlin. Karlin is a psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at MindMed, where he oversees clinical trials using LSD to treat major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Karlin first fills Abby and Patrick in about those disorders, MindMed’s ongoing clinical trials, and both the history of LSD research and potential near-future therapeutic applications. In the wide-ranging conversation that follows, they explore provocative questions about the relationship between quantitative research and qualitative description, the challenges of thinking simultaneously about neurobiology and phenomenology, and how various models fall short in different ways when it comes to describing ineffable experiences. They also probe what Karlin’s work suggests about the ways bodily perceptions, metaphors, and narrative shape our subjective sense of self, how the symptoms of MDD and GAD can be seen in that light, and how certain psychedelics may work to rapidly reorganize those underlying patterns and configurations in ways that mirror the work of long-term therapy.Note: All opinions are Karlin's own and not attributable to MindMedHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

121: LSD: Subjectivity, Ineffability, and Mental Health feat. Dan Karlin

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Dan process Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. From uncanny doubles to unsparing mirrors to the punishing reality principle of getting older, it’s a film that offers plenty of grist for the psychoanalytic mill. It’s also an occasion for Abby and Dan to reflect on sexual difference, gendered expectations, the male gaze, femininity as self-surveillance, the pleasures (and disgusts) of body horror, and more!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

120: Wild Analysis: The Substance Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by Nick Stock and Nick Peim, authors of the new book The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment. From the origin stories teachers tell about themselves to the ways the classroom looms large in our memories, popular media, and political rhetoric, it’s a conversation about education at the intersection of fantasies, reality, vocations, anxieties, addictions, and more. What are the narratives that drive people to study and to teach, and what are the satisfactions and frustrations that come with learning? How do credentials and rules work in tandem with transgression and license? How do our expectations of acquiring knowledge survive, or get dashed, by disillusionment when we finally “get” it? Can we ever truly learn anything – or is knowledge always unstable and transient? As Nick and Nick explain, a Lacanian perspective is singularly helpful for confronting these questions and more. Walking through Lacan’s theories of lack, identification, and institutional discourses, they also explore why so many people find the figure of Jacques Lacan himself so alluring.The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-93018-8Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

119: Lacan, Knowledge, Fantasy feat. Nick Stock and Nick Peim

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick arrive at the final case study in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria: the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. The case of this unfortunate young woman, literally hobbled by a conversion disorder affecting her gait, is neither particularly famous nor fraught with the controversies or large-than-life historical of previous cases in this series. Yet despite its superficially banal setting and seemingly low stakes, it's also Freud's single most complete and thoroughly documented case in the Studies and thus offers a fantastic chance to observe Freud as a clinician at his most earnest and dogged. And it is precisely the very ordinariness of Elisabeth von R's own life, and the fundamentally relatable details of her suffering, that makes this case study the perfect place to put Freud's developing ideas about the family, the body, time, loss, symbolization, change, and therapeutic cure into our own words. In the first of what will be several episodes on this case study, Abby and Patrick take up Elizabeth von R's story, and Freud's narration of it, by reading closely, tracking the richness of Freud's prose, and fleshing out the yearnings, disappointments, expectations, and frustrations that brought this young woman to seek Freud's care.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

118: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 7: Studies on Hysteria, Part VII: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms.References include: Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” in Powers of HorrorNoëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and PsychoanalysisRyan Thorneycroft, Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as AbjectionEyo Awara. The Psychic Life of Horror: Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s ThoughtDarieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary ImaginationKelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind.Mark Miller. Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal BritainCalvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and FilmA podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 107: On Abjection

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Dan sit down with writer and performance artist Lily Scherlis to talk about her new essay for n+1, “Experiences in Groups” (a title that does homage to Wilfred Bion’s influential 1961 book of the same name). They discuss Lily’s experience at the 2024 Tavistock conference, the meaning of “group relations,” and the fantasies it can generate for those committed to leftist politics, before turning to their own experiences in groups and Bion’s influence on each of their lives.  Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

117: Experiences in Groups feat. Lily Scherlis Teaser

Abby and Patrick share Patrick’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast, hosted by friends of Ordinary Unhappiness Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Patrick, Matt, and Sam process last weekend’s televised memorial service for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The three unpack this overdetermined spectacle with an eye towards questions of theology, politics, narrative, affect, gender, and more. More Know Your Enemy here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Bonus Episode: Martyrdom, Mourning, and the Legacy of Charlie Kirk

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Michael Clune to discuss his new novel, Pan. It is the story of Nick, a teenage boy living alone with his divorced father in the 1990s Midwest. Precocious but troubled, he begins to suffer from panic attacks, obsessional symptoms, and more. Nick’s voice narrates these and other experiences with rich texture, yet his internal monologue steadily pushes the reader to question where and how the tumultuous life of a normal teenager ends and pathology begins. Discussing Pan thus allows Michael, Abby, and Patrick to talk through some elemental questions. How do we come to know the world, what’s normal in it, and what’s normal for us? How do social interactions at school and with friends shape our own self-understanding? What are the pleasures of experiencing something for the first time, and what does it feel like to be in a developmental stage where everything can feel super-saturated with meaning? Pan thus offers Abby, Patrick, and Michael a perfect frame to discuss growing up, mental health, friendship, coolness, drugs, reading, and much more. Michael Clune, Pan: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771661/pan-by-michael-clune/Clune, Gamelife: A Memoir: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374536381/gamelife/Clune, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin: https://www.mcnallyeditions.com/books/p/white-out?srsltid=AfmBOooR9sPG-yosADPpcOUdl9k69upMya7iV7Q_Dt1vFnMHZzmEzMtuHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

116: Writing Panic feat. Michael Clune

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick read the shortest, strangest, and arguably saddest entry in the Studies on Hysteria – the case of “Katharina.” This case history sees Freud on Alpine vacation and approached by a local girl suffering a shortness of breath and episodes of anxiety, symptoms that have nothing to with altitude and everything to do with sordid goings-on in her family. Proceeding in ad-hoc, hypnosis-free dialogue, Freud traces the roots of Katharina’s distress back to her witnessing – and suffering – incestuous transgressions and public scandal. Yet certain details of Katharina’s story remained ambiguous and controversial for decades. Abby and Patrick unpack the story of Katharina as Freud initially presented it, as he dramatically revised it thirty years later, and as later excavated by psychoanalytic historians. Between the two versions of Katharina, and between these and the actual biography of the real-life Aurelia Kronich, Abby and Patrick grapple with challenging questions about trauma, memory, and abuse; the limits of what we can ever know, clinically and historically; what is or isn’t speakable, and how that troubles our ideas about validation, recognition, action, healing, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

115: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 6: Studies on Hysteria, Part VI: Katharina Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, to discuss her new book, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, and the exhibition of the same name that opened this week. What does “fashion” mean, and why are so many psychoanalysts and cultural gatekeepers so resistant to think about the topic critically? How do society’s codes of dress reflect logics of identity, especially when it comes to gender, and how are those norms policed – and subverted? How does clothing mediate our first-person experience of our own bodies, how do clothes and nakedness recur in our fantasies and dreams, and how do we use attire to communicate with others while alternately armoring and revealing ourselves? A renowned historian and theorist of fashion, Dr. Steele masterfully walks Abby and Patrick through fashion as a field of overdetermined material commodities and complex articulations of identity and desire. From Freud’s anxieties about paying his tailor to Lacan’s florid wardrobe to ongoing debates over what therapists should and shouldn’t wear; from Elsa Schiaparelli’s mirror jackets to Jean Paul Gaultier’s bullet bras to Sonia Rykiel’s self-caressing knitwear to Timothée Chalamet’s Haider Ackermann halter; from commodity fetishism in Marx to fetish objects in Freud; from Lacan’s mirror stage to Joan Riviere’s theories of masking and masquerade to the “skin ego” of Didier Anzieu; from high culture to low, and from the runway to the consulting room and beyond, it’s a stylish and provocative grand tour of fashion, psychoanalysis, and the ways we all use clothes, like it or not, to literally fashion ourselves.The exhibition Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis runs from September 10th 2025 to January 4th 2026 at the Museum at FIT (227 West 27th Street, New York, NY) and is free and open to the public: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/dress-dreams-desire/index.phpSteele’s book Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis will be released on October 30th 2025: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dress-dreams-and-desire-9781350428195/MFIT will host a Fashion and Psychoanalysis Symposium on Friday, November 14, 2025. Speakers include Laverne Cox, fashion designer Bella Freud, psychoanalysts Patricia Gherovici, Anouchka Grose, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Chanda Griffin, fashion scholar Simona Segre, and MFIT Director Valerie Steele. Attendance is free but registration is required: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/events/symposium/fashion-and-psychoanalysis/index.phpHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

114: Fashion and Psychoanalysis feat. Valerie Steele

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Dan, and Patrick conclude their viewing of Sophie Fiennes’ and Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). It’s the last stretch of the film, the part where Žižek tries to bring everything together, and it thus gives Abby, Dan, and Patrick a chance to assess the Guide in its entirety. How compelling is the film’s grand unifying theory of subjectivity, lack, and the work of film as a medium that teaches us “how to desire”? What does it mean that all films are ultimately, per Žižek, about the “impossibility of making a film” as such? What’s at stake in for Žižek in the film of Hitchcock and Lynch specifically, and why do the films so neatly showcase the perils of both getting exactly what you want and not knowing what you want after all? What are Žižek’s blind spots vis-à-vis gender, violence, and comedy? And what’s really going on with that favorite adverb of his – “precisely”?Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

113: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part III Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by Dr. Josh West to talk about some remarkable developments in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in Australia. Josh explains to Abby and Patrick how the clinical trials he describes are better understood as an experiment in sustained psychotherapy rather than just testing a new drug, and how that experiment has profound psychoanalytic and psychodynamic salience. From the process of patient preparation to the details of “dose day” to the work of subsequent sessions of “integration,” Josh walks Abby and Patrick through how he and other clinicians do their work, and how they tackle the unique demands of maintaining a holding environment, navigating transference, precipitating psychic change, and providing help to patients who are working through end of life crises, longstanding pathologies, and other kinds of profound distress. Along the way, he provides vital context about the history of lab-based psychedelic research and the (mis)appropriation of indigenous traditions while assessing the practical, ethical, and legal challenges that arise when psychedelics become objects of psychopharmacological study, routinized treatment, and corporate investment. Josh’s suggestions for further reading include: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind Marc B. Aixalà, Psychedelic Integration  Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life Roberto Lovato, The Gentrification of Consciousness Other sources cited include:Robert Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life Andrei Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western ImaginationHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

112: Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy feat. Josh West

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick turn to the next of Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria: the story of Miss Lucy R. It’s a short treatment – nine weeks – and an even shorter read – fifteen pages – and so the story of this English governess haunted by phantom smells often goes neglected. But as Abby and Patrick explain, her case marks a key shift in Freud’s clinical practice (away from hypnosis) and a succinct demonstration of his core therapeutic techniques. Lucy R’s case also suggests something profound about the interlocking relationships between memories and repression, and between the history of symptoms and the course of treatment. Plus: noses, a rare novel about Lucy’s nose, and tantalizing connections to Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw about the haunting (or madness) of an English governess.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

111: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 5: Studies on Hysteria, Part V: Miss Lucy R. Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick mark the announcement of the end of And Just Like That... by giving it, and Sex and the City, a psychoanalytic send-off. From the durable popularity of the original series to the ambivalent comfort of hate-watching the spin-off, the two reflect on what made the franchise so influential, its role in the history of early “prestige TV,” and its place in popular memory. Abby and Patrick watch some classic episodes, unpack the now famous character types of the four women friends at the show’s center, and track recurrent themes of fantasy, neurosis, desire, money, identity, and – above all – fashion. This brings Abby and Patrick to dip into the psychoanalytic literature on clothing and fashion, from the status of clothes (like symptoms) as a “compromise” to theories of sexual fetishism to the story of an Esperanto-speaking fashion historian and psychoanalyst who played a key role in an interwar British “dress reform movement.”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

110: Wild Analysis: Sex and the City Teaser

We’re happy to share In Bed With the Right's latest episode. Patrick sits down with friends of OU Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan to reckon with the Epstein case - what we know, what we don’t know, what we’ll never know, what we always already knew, and what all these contortions of anticipation, secrecy, revelation, and obviousness might mean.Listen to more In Bed With the Right here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight/Patrick Blanchfield, “Suffer The Children,” in The Revealer: https://therevealer.org/suffer-the-children/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

Bonus Episode: Jeffrey Epstein: Open Secrets (Crossover with In Bed With the Right)

Abby and Patrick are joined by somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” and other exercises to explore histories of “shaping,” undo habitual patterns of embodiment, address trauma, and cultivate a capacity to remain centered and present under pressure. As the three explore, what sets Sumitra’s approach apart from ostensibly “apolitical” or openly right-wing traditions is a self-conscious, critical awareness of power dynamics and different people’s varied relationships to historical oppression and their own bodies. Over and against “apolitical,” mystical, or openly right-wing tendencies of other practices, Sumitra’s vision of somatics is particularly attuned to the physical and psychic tolls of maintaining compassion, resisting burnout, and building relationships of solidarity with strangers. Rich with psychoanalytic resonances throughout, their conversation focuses in particular on the concept of the “transferential constellation,” which clarifies a great deal about the different dynamics between right and left mass movements, and casts many difficult experiences – whether in a consulting room, at a protest, or canvassing by knocking on doors – in provocative new light.The Action Lab: https://www.actionlabny.org/Art of Purpose fellowship application: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGsmA_TIm0/7-aSlMVivPoR4kHvJD-Hbg/view?utm_content=DAGsmA_TIm0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h12e5faa7a3#1More on somatics and Sumitra’s work:What is somatics? Somatics in practiceInstitutions Sumitra mentions include:Generative Somatics: https://generativesomatics.org/BOLD: https://www.boldorganizing.org/The Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/The Organizing Center: https://www.theorganizingcenter.org/The tweet that started this conversationHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

109: Somatics, Politics, and Practice feat. Sumitra Rajkumar

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick examine the case study of “Frau Emmy von N.” From the perspective of both clinical technique and the history of psychoanalysis, it is primarily significant as an artifact from when Freud was still thinking in terms of associationist psychology and using hypnosis in treatment sessions. In terms of narrative, it seems, at least superficially, to be just another example of “hysterical neurosis” as encountered in the story of Anna O. Yet as Abby and Patrick discuss, the case of Emmy Von N. in fact suggests some pivotal shifts in Freud’s thinking, from a “subconscious” to a dynamic unconscious, and from performing interpretations to listening to patients talk in their own terms and along their own timelines. And the real story behind the pseudonym Freud gave to Fanny Moser, née Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart, the richest woman in Central Europe, is actually a wild tale of social scandal, intergenerational loss and reparation, and possibly even True Crime.Sources include: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Freud’s Patients: A Book of LivesPhillip M. Bromberg, “Hysteria, Dissociation, and Cure: Emmy von N Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6:1 (1996)Henri Ellenberger, “A Critical Study of ‘Emmy von N.’ with New Documents,” in Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of PsychiatryElse Pappenheim, “Freud and Gilles de la Tourette: Diagnostic Speculations on ‘Frau Emmy von N,’” International Review of Psychoanalysis 7:265 (1980)Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Episode 108: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 4: Studies on Hysteria, Part IV: Frau Emmy von N. Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. Abby, Patrick, and Dan proceed through Kristeva’s many earthy examples, from food waste to vomit to excrement to corpses, and to the ideologies she perceives as relying on logics of abjection and making-abject, from hatred of mothers to antisemitism and beyond. Turning to explicitly contemporary political topics, they draw on the work of key interpreters of Kristeva to explain how the ongoing production of abject populations is vital to both real and figurative operations of boundary maintenance, oppression, and exploitation, and to core processes of state formation and policing of the public sphere. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms.For the complete reading list for this episode, visit our Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Episode 107: On Abjection Teaser

Abby and Patrick sit down with writer Hilary Plum to discuss her remarkable new book, State Champ. A novel at which the politics of abortion stand at the center, but far from a didactically “political novel,” State Champ gives the three an opportunity to explore a suite of deeply psychoanalytic themes and topics: from the gap between our first-person experiences of our bodies to the claims and restrictions made by others on our bodily autonomy; from the purposes of protest to our motivations for undertaking them; from discourses about “regret” versus certainty and judgement; from the knowledge we anticipate to come from experiences versus things we know already versus things that others think they better; and from sex to eating disorders to humor to running and more. The three also reflect on writing and reading novels in 2025, genre, audiences, and on what communication and psychic change we hope fiction can achieve. Hilary Plum, State Champ: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/state-champ-9781639735433/Hilary’s website: http://www.hilaryplum.com/Index for Continuance, a podcast about small press publishing, politics, and practice, hosted by Hilary Plum and Zach Peckham: https://www.csupoetrycenter.com/index-for-continuance-podcastSusan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

Episode 106: Abortion, Agency, and Protest feat. Hilary Plum

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan return to the first case study in Studies On Hysteria (1895). But while previously they examined the case of “Anna O.” as told narrowly by Josef Breuer on his own terms, this time they tell the story of the remarkable woman behind it: Bertha Pappenheim. They begin by addressing how the legend of a “hysterical pregnancy” came to overshadow the “Anna O.” case history, and how that apocryphal tale was the product of squabbles and mythmaking involving Freud, his biographers, his students, and his opponents. Next, they turn to the story of Bertha Pappenheim herself, focusing first on the actual details of her treatment with Breuer as well as her subsequent mental health history. Then, they unpack her incredible achievements beyond her time with Breuer. It’s a wide-ranging, continent-spanning, and ocean-crossing story of activism, authorship, and intellectual influence, tying together political themes of social work, German feminism, Jewish anti-Zionism, and more.***Ordinary Unhappiness is shifting to three episodes a month during summer 2025 due to health reasons – but Patreon subscribers will still get two exclusive episodes per month, including the Standard Edition series and Wild Analysis! Find us at https://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

105: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 3: Studies on Hysteria, Part III: Four Versions of Anna O. Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone to discuss his new book, There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.  A devastating and essential read, There is No Place for Us tells the stories of five Atlanta families as they join the ranks of an ever-growing class of Americans: the unhoused. Against the grain of common misconceptions about homelessness, the trajectory of these families reflects no errors or blameworthy mistakes on their part, nor still does their situation represent any kind of exception to the rule. In fact, as Brian explains, their stories expose how a variety of institutions – from housing markets to credit monitoring to policing and more – work together to actively push millions of Americans into homelessness, to trap them there, and to exploit their vulnerabilities at every turn. Moreover, as Brian, Abby, and Patrick explore, this reality is mystified by mainstream narratives, prevailing ideologies, and broader anxieties about precarity and homelessness. Unpacking questions of policy, history, and contemporary media coverage, the three discuss how misguided narratives about individual choice, moral desert, mental health, and more subvert recognition of what should be a basic right and policy priority (IE, access to housing), and confront what it would mean to cut through these and other fantasies.Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645871/there-is-no-place-for-us-by-brian-goldstone/https://www.briangoldstone.net/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

104: Manufacturing Homelessness feat. Brian Goldstone

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Peruvian Amazon for two weeks of psychedelic treatment under a prominent indigenous shaman. Sarah relates and reflects on her experience, her relationship with the shaman and his other clients, the business model of the “ayahuasca center,” and much more. Along the way, Sarah, Abby, and Patrick unpack broader narratives about therapy, ritual, and healing; the ways we metabolize feelings of guilt, sadness, and desires for change; the unavoidable context of capitalism, global inequality, and climate catastrophe; our expectations for psychedelics, our fantasies of transformative experiences, and what we can learn from plants. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah Miller

Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on the occasion of the new edition of his book Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Reconsidering Reparations is a magisterial work that ties together global history, data from economics and public health, philosophy, and more, and dramatically cuts through many of our moment’s thorniest debates over identity, responsibility, and political change. Together, Abby, Patrick, and Olúfẹ́mi contextualize and walk through the book’s core arguments and their implications for audiences both psychoanalytic and otherwise. Beginning with how a truly transatlantic history of the African slave trade and an awareness of how European colonialism as a properly global enterprise can together shed new light on both domestic inequalities within the United States and relations between the contemporary Global North and South, the three unpack how the accumulation of material advantages and disadvantages have, over time, resulted in landscapes of suffering that are simultaneously far-flung yet fundamentally interconnected. Historicizing and grounding the present in terms of what Táíwò terms “Global Racial Empire” renders uncanny the givenness of contemporary national borders, and throws into question many of our most foundational national narratives and even the givenness of the state form itself. Moreover, thinking seriously about history and oppression reveals what canonical philosophical accounts of the liberal social contract disavow, and what fantasies and concrete purposes so many contemporary invocations of meritocracy and justice as “fairness” serve. The conversation builds to Olúfẹ́mi’s “constructive view” of reparations, the centrality of climate justice to that program, and a series of crucial disambiguations and reconfigurations of prevailing notions of responsibility, accountability, guilt, liability, and more. Indeed, as the three describe, thinking about ourselves in terms of our ancestors, while understanding ourselves as ancestors, offers everyone a path forward, one that moves beyond the dead-ends of reflexive denialism and narcissistic injury to suggest new possibilities for identification, disidentification, and solidarity, and that powerfully clarifies goals, sustains motivation, and helps us imagine possibilities for change across social differences, geographical distances, and the span of time. Plus: “theory versus practice” versus “theory and practice”; the example and legacy of Frantz Fanon; the joys, perplexities, and embarrassments of being a philosophy nerd; and more. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparationsOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-captureOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/against-decolonisation/John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005426Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation (And Other Works, 1921-1945): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Love-Guilt-a

102: Reparations, Responsibility, and Climate Justice feat. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frictionless movement in video games to the ways anxieties about the existence other human minds appears to be driving ever more people to prefer the projections and grandiose claims of interactions with so-called “artificial intelligence.” They then turn to another space where the questions of friction, the possibility of pain, the promise of growth, and the role of transference loom large: the classroom. In particular, they explore the ethical and interpersonal stakes of teaching psychoanalysis, and teaching in general, with an eye toward questions of repetition, narcissism, Trauma Studies as a discipline, traumatic experiences of learning, what is or isn’t “outside the classroom,” the balance between taking things personally and meeting students where they are, and whether and how pedagogy and learning alike resemble therapy in all its possibilities and pains. Plus: turtles tortoises, a round of Fuck Marry Kill (yes), Wolfenstein, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

101: Mailbag: On Pain, Learning, and the Problem of Other Minds Teaser

Abby, Patrick, and Dan mark one hundred episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness! They start by looking back on the show’s run so far, and what they’ve gotten from engaging with psychoanalysis as a living body of knowledge, as a corpus of classic texts, as a way of seeing the world, and more. They then turn to the episode’s primary focus: a mailbag chock full of questions, fantasies, and desires from Ordinary Unhappiness listeners who have made the show possible. These include questions about therapeutic modalities fast and slow, the history of psychoanalytic theories about autism, the place of queerness in contemporary psychoanalysis, and more. But the three biggest topics Ordinary Unhappiness listeners want to learn more about are about drugs (especially psychedelics), the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the work of Jacques Lacan. In classic Ordinary Unhappiness style, all this leads the hosts to recommend a ton of reading suggestions, admit to the things about which they do not know (but want to learn), and to promise a follow-up episode for Patreon supporters, where Abby, Patrick, and Dan will tackle those questions and topics that were a little too spicy – or let’s say “overdetermined” – for a public episode. Enjoy – and thanks for listening!For the reading list, please visit our Patreon page. It's too long to include here!patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

100: Mailbag: An Embarrassment of Riches

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by returning guest Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and columnist at New York magazine, to talk about the HBO series The White Lotus. From plotlines involving taboos like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist for the psychoanalytic mill, and Abby, Patrick, and Sam tackle all these with gusto (and plenty of spoilers). In addition to discussing the text on its own terms, they reflect on its popularity as a social symptom that implicates collective fantasies and anxieties about friendship, sexuality, money, religion, and more. As the three explore, contextualizing the show in political and ideological terms reveals not just the idiosyncratic preoccupations of The White Lotus’s creator, Mike White, but the paradoxes of how American audiences and the prestige TV shows we love navigate questions of desire, identity, cultural and sexual difference, and the repressions that underwrite them. Know Your Enemy: A Podcast About the American Right: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Sam Adler-Bell, “The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy”: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/the-movie-industrys-confused-eat-the-rich-fantasy.htmlNeil Websdale, Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/familicidal-hearts-9780199325849Imogen Binnie, Nevada: https://bookshop.org/p/books/nevada-imogen-binnie/17839995 Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

99: Wild Analysis: The White Lotus feat Sam Adler-Bell Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by writer and artist Lily Scherlis for a provocative reflection on the ideological subtexts, historical contexts, and real-world value of some of our moment’s most bandied-about concepts and terms. Beginning with her 2023 essay for Parapraxis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have proliferated across popular culture and have become ubiquitous in the workplace, in bestsellers, on social media, and in our most intimate interactions. What exactly are “boundaries,” when did having (or not having) them become such an issue, and how does their invocation function? Touching on themes and topics across Scherlis’s body of work, from CBT and DBT to the legacy of Dale Carnegie and beyond, the conversation builds to a consideration of the case of attachment theory. Unpacking the history, key concepts, and findings of this interdisciplinary field of study, Abby, Patrick, and Lily explore how its terms and categories have become so central to a cottage industry of online quizzes and therapeutic interventions. How do ideas of self-improvement and self-help relate to economic shifts in modes of production, material realities of employment precarity, and our felt sense of being together – and being alienated? What work do these terms do in the abstract, and what work are we as subjects expected to do in learning and using them? And how can we square our skepticism vis-à-vis such models and vocabularies with the traction they can give us when it comes to understanding ourselves, tolerating distress, navigating a difficult world, potentially changing our circumstances, and connecting with one another?Selected texts cited:Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else”Lily Scherlis, “Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Its Discontents”Lily Scherlis, “Going Soft: Future Proofing the American Worker”Danielle Carr, “Don’t Be So Attached to Attachment Theory”Robert Karen, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Ability to LoveHeidi Keller. The Myth of Attachment Theory A Critical Understanding for Multicultural SocietiesRuth O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Dallos, Katherine Berry, and Karen Bateson. Attachment Theory: The BasicsA podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 Provided by Fruits Music

98: From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and Abuses of Pop Psychology feat. Lily Scherlis

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria: Fräulein Anna O. It is a paradoxical and deeply overdetermined text. This troubled young woman was a patient of Breuer’s, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, and an associationist model of the mind. But this famous case can also rightly be seen as the beginning of psychoanalysis; indeed, Anna O. herself coined the phrase “the talking cure.” Yet even as the case of Anna O. would come to serve as a kind of skeleton key for unlocking Freud’s subsequent sensitivities to listening, transference, and the layered temporalities of psychic traumas, her story would also become an object of mischaracterization and myth-making for Freud and others. Abby, Patrick, and Dan thus begin by addressing the case history as a broader genre while establishing some working distinctions between “Anna O.” as a character in Breuer’s text, the real-life Bertha Pappenheim (the person behind the pseudonym), and the subsequent legend of Anna O. as an arch-hysteric whose distress culminated in a (fictious) phantom pregnancy. They walk through Breuer’s narrative on its own terms, tackling Anna O.’s many symptoms, especially those involving her intermingling of silence and speech in multiple languages, and the pivotal scene that, per Breuer, represented a breakthrough in the treatment. The questions this all raises – about the limits of knowledge, the contingencies of suffering, and what it means to be healed – set up the next episode, about the story behind the story, and the remarkable biography of Bertha Pappenheim herself. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

97: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 2: Studies on Hysteria, Part II: Anna O.

Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Hannah Zeavin – scholar, write, editor, co-founder of the Psychosocial Foundation and Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine – to talk about her brand-new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. It’s an exploration of the complex relationships that have tied together the figure of the mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how they should go about doing it. What does it mean to think about the mother as a “medium” for containing, nurturing, and shepherding the development of a child, and why do debates about mothering pivot so invariably around questions of media consumption and technological mediation? The conversation spans the history of academic research into parenting from behaviorism to attachment theory; clinical and popular discourses about mothers from Freud to Dr. Spock; the profusion of tools that promise to “help” mothers with their kids; “good-enough” mothering, mother-blaming, and vicious double binds; moral, political, and legal debates about nannies, “helicopter mothers,” incarcerated mothers, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and much, much more. Read and subscribe to Parapraxis here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation here: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/Mother Media is available here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049559/mother-media/An excerpt from Mother Media in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heir-conditioner/Zeavin, “Composite Case: The Fate of the Children of Psychoanalysis”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/composite-caseZeavin, “Unfree Associations”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/Zeavin, “Parallel Processes”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

96: Mediating Motherhood feat. Hannah Zeavin

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessBy popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself? Selected texts cited:Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htmAdam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (editors), Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development: https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224177/slaverys-capitalism/ Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

95: Wild Analysis: Severance Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn a perfect pairing with our ongoing series on Lacan, we come in from the cold and go underground by watching Theodore Flicker’s neglected classic, “The President’s Analyst” (1967). James Coburn stars as a psychoanalyst drafted to serve as the president’s shrink, and who swiftly goes from starstruck to depleted to a fugitive on the run. This satiric romp hit a nerve with the FBI, was censored in post-production, and quickly disappeared from theaters. A loving sendup of psychoanalysis, an acid-addled dramatization of Cold War anxieties, and just a gonzo all-around-good time, the film gives us plenty to talk about, from the paranoic structure of knowledge to the Big Other of surveillance to unorthodox cures for “hostility” to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret flirtations with self-analysis and more. Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is G-MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. You can listen to Barry McGuire’s “Inner-Manipulations” (featured in the film) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7F_u9L5X8Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 42: Wild Analysis: The President’s Analyst

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick begin the Standard Edition Volume II. Their first text is Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria (1895), specifically its opening sections. First, they unpack the layered and suggestive series of Prefaces to successive editions of the book, revealing how each iteration charts the differing personal, professional, and theoretical trajectories of the two authors over time, and how they reveal Freud’s distinctive approach to memorializing his own intellectual development. Then they turn to the opening essay, originally published in 1893, “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” Topics include the so-called “cathartic method,” the question of origins, the tensions and productivities of collaborative dialogues (not just between Freud and Breuer, but between these men and their female patients), and our first glimpses of Freud as a distinctively “coy” stylist. Abby and Patrick also dip into deep waters about questions of contingency and of origins – of symptoms, of cures, and of human suffering more generally – and how injuries to the psyche follow logics of causality, temporality, meaning, and alleviation that are all markedly different from those governing other traumas. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

94: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 1: Pearls of Suffering: Studies on Hysteria, Part I Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Ann Conrad Lammers, a Jungian psychotherapist and the primary editor and assistant translator of Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, a brand-new volume from Princeton University Press. Going against the grain of traditional narratives that present Emma as a helpmeet to her more famous husband, this collection brings together for the first time many of Emma Jung’s works across a variety of media and genres, highlighting her outsize contributions, both material and intellectual, to the tradition known as Analytical Psychology. The wide-ranging conversation explores Emma’s biography, her ambitions, and her intellectual preoccupations. The three also dig into the story of how Emma managed the complications, at once personal and professional, of simultaneously being the wife of Carl Jung, a foundational player in several analytic institutions, a deeply respected correspondent of Sigmund Freud, and a clinician in her own right. What emerges is a tale of betrayals and boundary violations, but also of growth, resilience, and the confrontation of lifelong tasks, with implications not just for how we understand the often-neglected stories of many women clinicians in the early decades of psychoanalysis, but the stakes of confronting patriarchy while embracing the work of therapy in the present.Selected texts: Ann Conrad Lammers, Thomas Fischer, and Medea Hoch, editors. Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, Princeton University Press, 2025.Ann Conrad Lammers. ‘Emma Jung’s Years of Self-Liberation.’ Essay available at:  https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/emma-jungs-years-of-self-liberation. Ferne Jensen and Sidney Mullen, editors. C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances. The Analytical Psychology Club of San Francisco, 1982Emma Jung and Marie-Louise Von Franz. The Grail Legend. Princeton University Press, 1998.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

93: On Emma Jung feat. Ann Conrad Lammers

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessFor the first time since the inauguration, our series metabolizing the ongoing chaos of American politics returns. That’s right: Gerontophallocracy is back! The topic is a certain grandiose deadbeat manchild patriarch who has succeeded in making himself even more of a ubiquitous object of speculation than Donald Trump: Elon Musk. But instead of focusing on Elon’s erratic behavior and personal symptoms, Abby, Patrick, and Dan tackle the question of Musk’s existence and prominence as a symptom of underlying political economic and libidinal economic conditions. It’s a tale of the Return of the (Barely) Repressed extending from religious myths to secular fictions and from the dawn of patriarchy and emergence of private property to the dream of a future where the scions of billionaires can plant their flags and dynasties on Mars. It’s a lot. Texts include:Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/)Sigmund Freud, Totem and TabooKarl Marx, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital Vol I (available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm)Robert Paul, "Yes, the Primal Crime Did Take Place," in Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on CultureCarole Pateman, The Sexual ContractHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

92: Gerontophallocracy 2025: The Primitive Accumulation Monster Dad at the End of History Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome author Sophie Lewis to discuss her latest book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Together, they explore the history of a variety of feminisms, self-identified and otherwise, that can justifiably provoke anxiety and even rejection in those invested in feminism as an emancipatory concept and project. Their conversation ranges from nineteenth-century activists who saw the rights of women as entailing the right to own slaves to those whose visions of abolition were inextricable from logics of racist imperialism; from twentieth-century eugenicists to prohibitionists; and from today’s transphobic demagogues to the pinkwashing boosters of the carceral state. What are the lessons of these movements and figures, how do they reflect material and ideological struggles over social reproduction, and what challenges do they pose for the formulation of feminist projects? How, from a psychoanalytic perspective, can we interrogate our own libidinal investments in logics of exclusion, and balance our competing desires to identify and disidentify with others? Are there ways we can receive inspiration from, and claim to be in continuity with, problematic figures in the past, while also critically acknowledging their shortcomings? And above all, can we draw on those lessons to both meaningfully practice solidarity and face opposition in the present?Enemy Feminisms is here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2440-enemy-feminismsAbolish The Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation is here: https://lasophielle.org/writing/abolish-the-family-a-manifesto-for-care-and-liberation/Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family is here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/711-full-surrogacy-nowSophie’s book tour dates are available here: https://lasophielle.org/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

91: Feminism, Antagonism, and Solidarity feat. Sophie Lewis

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan close out The Project for a Scientific Psychology - and the first volume of the Standard Edition - in its entirety! First, they unpack the key steps of Freud's quantitative argument" from the nature of "Q" to Freud's proposal of different kinds of "neurones" to how (in his view) the whole apparatus works to discharge built-up energy. Then, they turn to the qualitative half of Freud's account, which includes: how Freud relates the perception of pain to the emergence of memory; his schematic formula of a minimal "ego"; and the remarkable capacity of the brain to temporarily satisfy itself through a hallucinatory "primary process." Along the way, they also encounter Freud trying out some new terms for the first time, get a preview of some key material that will appear in Studies on Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams, and more!The promised “chunky bibliography” is available on Patreon.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

90: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 12: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 3 Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster to discuss her brand-new book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, out in March 2025 from Catapult. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that traverses clinical, social, and political domains while remaining firmly grounded in one of the most basic prerequisites for human life: the activity of breathing. In what ways does the history of psychoanalysis represent a repression of the fact of breathing? How do analytic accounts from Freud to Winnicott to Bion to Lacan variously take up or downplay the necessity of respiration? How does thinking about breath implicate our ideas about development, embodiment, the production of speech, and more? And how does thinking in a sustained way about breath challenge our assumptions about individuality, independence, and wellbeing? The three explore the stakes and meanings of breathing, from COVID wards to police violence to the wellness industry and beyond. A pre-order link for On Breathing is available here: https://books.catapult.co/books/on-breathing/Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis is here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083Disorganization and Sex is here: https://divided.online/all-books/disorganisation-and-sexMarch and April book tour dates for On Breathing:3/11/25 7pm Eastern at Brooklyn Public Library - Central Library, Dweck Center (Brooklyn, NY) in conversation with Jia Tolentino3/15/25 6pm Eastern at Riffraff (Providence, RI) in conversation with Kate Schapira3/30/25 1pm Eastern virtual event with The Psychosocial Foundation4/13/25 2pm Eastern at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) in conversation with Leslie Jamison and a performance by Andros Zins-Browne as part of the Second Sunday seriesHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

89: Breath, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Jamieson Webster

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott’s ideas about hate and aggression to work. What everyday situations, personal experiences, and institutional practices get clarified when we consider them as reflecting displaced feelings of hate? What do popular beliefs about hate look like when seen in Winnicottian terms, and how might familiar ideologies actually rely on channeling aggression while disavowing hate and even championing values like justice, family, and love? The conversation leads Abby, Patrick, and Dan to consider everything from theologies of “hating the sin but loving the sinner” and the injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” to the differing approaches of Democrats and Republicans when it comes to assigning blame, enjoying cruelty, and claiming collective righteousness. They also explore how the invocation of hate can be flexibly used to disqualify, condemn, or explain away the behavior and motivations of entire groups, mystify material political antagonisms, and even assert dominance in hateful ways while maintaining fantasies about legitimacy, the impersonality of state violence, and much more. Key texts in addition to Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference” and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents include On Loving, Hating, and Living Well: The Public Psychoanalytic Lectures of Ralph R. Greenson, M.D. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

88: On Hate and Aggression, Part IV Teaser

Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their close reading of Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” unpacking and tying together its three biggest arguments. First, there’s the connection Winnicott draws between the therapeutic encounter and childhood development: more than just an analogy, these two environments are directly connected, and in fraught ways. Second, there’s the link he draws between early experiences of “deprivation,” counter-transferential enactments in treatment, and the struggles of certain patients to establish a stable, safe sense of selfhood. Third, and most provocatively, is Winnicott’s articulation of how feelings of aggression and even hatred naturally arise not just from a child seeking to assert its independence, but from a caregiver. As Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss, Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough mother,” far from being an exercise in mother-blaming, is in fact a humbling and compassionate recognition of motherhood as a kind of “impossible profession” (and more). And it reveals an approach to pathology, social conventions, and ideologies of the family that are critically different from Freud’s. Plus: the cruelty of the “cult of mother,” sublimated aggression in grim nursery rhymes, and the joy of stealing noses. Up next, in Part IV: we get granular about the implications of Winnicott’s thinking for confronting real-world expressions of hate and aggression in everyday social interactions, institutional dynamics, and, above all, politics.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Episode 87: On Hate and Aggression, Part III

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan start close-reading Winnicott’s famous paper, “Hate in the Counter-Transference” (1949, originally delivered as a paper two years earlier). They start with its place and time, situating Winnicott’s work within the context of post-war Britain. This was a clinical landscape where a tiny number of analysts stood apart from a psychiatric establishment that favored methods that Winnicott despised – above all, lobotomies. They then consider the kinds of cases Winnicott’s paper takes up and consider how the behavior of patients can, in Winnicott’s words, prove singularly “irksome” to even the most tolerant and well-intentioned clinicians. But whereas many of his contemporaries would swiftly send such patients off for psychosurgery, Winnicott instead explores the dynamics of the transferential encounter at play.  This leads Abby, Patrick, and Dan to consider the ways that the “problem of aggression” and the recognition of hate are central for Winnicott’s visions of development, the therapeutic relationship, and even institutional dynamics. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

86: On Hate and Aggression, Part II Teaser

Abby, Patrick, and Dan take up a topic that couldn’t be more relevant to the contemporary zeitgeist – aggression – as theorized by an unlikely source: the British analyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. What did this beloved and famously gentle figure have to say about aggression, and our taboos and fantasies surrounding it? Where does aggression come from, and what is its function developmentally? And what role can acknowledging feelings of “hate” play in the family, in psychotherapy, and in everyday life? To answer all these questions, this episode – the first in a three-part series – sees Abby, Patrick, and Dan sketch out Winnicott’s biography, discuss his theoretical preoccupations, and unpack his approach to therapy, especially with severely distressed children and adults. Close-reading his essay, “The Roots of Aggression” (collected in the The Child, the Family, and the Outside World) they explore how, for Winnicott, the capacity to work with aggression implicates everything from our ability to move in physical space to our feeling deserving of love.Robert Adès et al., editors. “Index of Available Audio Recordings.” The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 12, Appendices and Bibliographies, Oxford University Press, 2016: https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780190271442.003.0011“Winnicott: The ‘Good-Enough Mother’ Radio Broadcasts.” OUPblog, Dec. 2016:https://blog.oup.com/2016/12/winnicott-radio-broadcasts/Brett Kahr, “Winnicott’s ‘Anni Horribiles’: The Biographical Roots of ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference.’” American Imago, vol. 68, no. 2, 2011, pp. 173–211.D. W. Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-Transference.” The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 4, 1994, pp. 348–56.Winnicott, “Roots of Aggression.” The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 7, 1964 - 1966, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, Oxford University Press, 2016:https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780190271398.003.0018Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

85: On Hate and Aggression, Part I

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan get together for a looking-forward, looking-backward session surveying the year that was and assessing the year ahead. It’s a suitably ambivalent, Janus-faced assessment of political developments, cultural milestones, new hobbies, simmering dreads, and bold resolutions. Plus: the dream of Lacanian Finance Grifting.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

84: New Year Vibe Check: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick sit down with religious studies scholar and Reformation historian Nathan Rein to discuss Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). This is Freud’s first extended treatment of religion as such, with a particular emphasis on ritual, and, in classic Freudian style, sees him provocatively linking individual symptoms with broader cultural formations. But what does Freud mean by “religion” anyway, in relation to his Jewish heritage on the one hand and his overwhelmingly Catholic Austrian milieu on the other? What can looking at the nuances of Freud’s German reveal about his understanding of what we would today call obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)? What are we to make of his account of individual “obsessional neuroses” as a kind of “private suffering” versus the collective work done by shared public rituals, and how does that bear on Freud’s ideas about the origins of our beliefs and, per Freud, our “ignorance” about them? And what is the character of Freud’s feelings about religion – is his just a stance of disillusionment, or is it tinged by a more personal ambivalence, perhaps even one that’s particularly recognizable this holiday season? Plus: Martin Luther’s bowel troubles, the importance of respecting Melusine’s boundaries, and objections to Christmas standards at church dances from an unexpected source.Texts discussed include:Sigmund Freud, “Religious Actions and Obsessive Practices.”Donald Capps, Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader. Yale University Press, 2001.Christopher Alan Lewis and Kate M. Loewenthal, editors. “Religion and Obsessionality: Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” a special volume of Mental Health, Religion & Culture, February 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674676.2018.1481192.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @ordinaryunhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits MusicClosing song:Track: Baby It's Cold Outside (With TNTVictory)Artist: C.J. Ezell -   ￼  / cjezellBaby It's Cold Outside (With TNTVictory) - by C.J. Ezell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://bit.ly/CreativeCommons3-0)

83: Religion and Neurosis feat. Nathan Rein Teaser

Abby and Patrick are joined by philosopher Simon Critchley to discuss his new book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. They discuss how, for Critchley, mysticism represents "a way of thinking about existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” Exploring the book’s survey of key figures and texts in the Western Christian tradition, the three unpack how accounts of mystical experiences can challenge our assumptions about the past, defy traditional philosophical ideas of subjectivity, and suggest new ways of thinking about the conditions of everyday life in the present, all with rich psychoanalytic implications. Their conversation ranges from the cognitive and affective dimensions of mystical experience to mystical accounts of embodiment, gender, and erotic jouissance to the biographies and autobiographies of mystics, and more. Plus: what it might have been like to travel with the constantly weeping Margery Kempe, Meister Eckhart’s inspired defense against charges of heresy, the ecstatic pleasures of your favorite playlist, and why absolutely everyone should read the Song of Songs.On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy is available here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/mysticismA pre-order link for Simon’s forthcoming Your Life is Not a (Fucking) Story is available here: https://everyday-analysis.sellfy.store/p/your-life-is-not-a-story-by-simon-critchley/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @ordinaryunhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

82: Effing the Ineffable feat. Simon Critchley

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for different people; the differing things we may find moving intellectually or emotionally; how public engagements with thinkers and traditions can variously move conversations forward or sabotage them from the outset; and more. They start by talking more about specific analytic thinkers, taking stock of listener responses to our (brief) thoughts on Jung and Jungians, and then turning to the exciting growth of research on Sabina Spielrein. Abby, Patrick, and Dan then turn to psychoanalysis in the arts. First up is the relationship between analysis and fiction, with topics including analysts who write fiction, the idiosyncratic genre of the case study as a kind of quasi-fiction, analysts in fiction, and what psychoanalysis suggests about our expectations of narrative movement or the lack thereof. Novel, short story, and nonfiction recommendations abound! Then the three turn to film, psychoanalytic film theory, and the stakes of using psychoanalytic thinkers and theory in other discourses more generally. Their conversation gets into everything from the pitfalls of jargon to anxieties of influence, constructive misreadings, bad faith appropriations, to what fidelity to texts and tradition means in the first place. How portable is psychoanalytic theory, and what gets lost – or gained – when analytic concepts move from use in one domain to another? Finally, they turn to yet a different sense of “movement” altogether to consider the relationships between psychoanalysis and anarchism. This involves a quick crash-course on the biography and theory of the brilliant and troubled analyst-anarchist Otto Gross, who practiced psychoanalysis as a kind of mutual aid and linked metaphorical inner revolutions with political outward ones, and our reflections on how thinking anarchism and psychoanalysis alongside one another raises provocative questions about our attachments to notions of hierarchy, individuality, institutions from the state to the clinic, and, above all, the meaning of “work.” We tried to publish the whole reading list for this episode (22 recommendations!) and went way above the word limit. Visit us at Patreon to get the whole list!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

81: Mailbag Part II: Readings and Misreadings Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious? How do fantasies straddle the gaps between the real world as we understand it, scenarios we know to be impossible, and things we try, nonetheless, to envision otherwise? How is fantasy different from desire? And above all, how what does fantasy reflect our understandings of other people, living or dead, whom we may “know” only via the popular imagination, as cultural figures, and yet who come to play crucial roles in our own self-fashioning and navigation of life events? Jordan’s wonderful new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone, offers a perfect springboard for pursuing these questions, while also casting new light on the biography, oeuvre, and legacy of an artist whose ability to give literal voice to so many different characters and fantasies has few other parallels in twentieth century music. Abby, Patrick, and Jordan’s conversation ranges widely through Simone’s work, from her classic songbook standards to her transformational covers of singers as from Bob Dylan to Sinatra to the Bee Gees, and explores what we know, and what we can only fantasize about, her personal transformations, political engagements, and singular expressions of joy, loneliness, yearning, and so much more.Books by Jordan Alexander Stein: Fantasies of Nina Simone, Avidly Reads Theory, When Novels Were Books.A Spotify playlist for Fantasies of Nina Simone is available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6QUnsR5Pl8qbQ1jzqYLb0a Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

80: On Fantasy feat. Jordan Stein

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi’s “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies.  Subscribe now for immediate access to Part II - on Freudian anthropology, the history behind Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism. Subscription also will give you access to our ever-growing backlog of Patreon-only content, including series like The Standard Edition (we're reading Freud's complete works thing together!) Wild Analysis (psychoanalysis goes to the movies), Gerontophallocracy 2024 (on the recent election and beyond), and much, much more!Articles referenced include:Cattell, J P.  The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available here. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 31: Thanksgiving Special, Part 1: The Holiday Syndrome

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic perspective can offer in grappling with communication dynamics in the workplace, especially across differentials in power. What does it mean for an employee “to be heard,” and how does that relate to what management can tolerate hearing – or substantively change? But above all, the three show they’ve heard you by talking a LOT about Jung and our resistances to him. This leads into a conversation about the allure of the occult (both in Jung’s time and hours), Western esoteric traditions, archetypes, alchemy, demons, and more. Note: we got so many great questions that there will definitely be a Part Two forthcoming!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

79: Mailbag Episode: Resistances (Part One) Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global. Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints about so-called “political correctness,” and in what ways is it different? Why do broad narratives about getting canceled catch on, and what does it mean that anecdotes are so central to their virality? Why do fantasies about college campuses feature so prominently in cancel culture stories? From its origins as a quintessentially American phenomenon, how has the furor over cancel culture crossed borders and languages, crystalized into terms like the French “le wokeism”? What do our fantasies of cancelation activate, what do they confirm, and what are the deeper anxieties they variously betray or conceal? It’s a wide-ranging interrogation of reactionary politics, reaction formations, and histrionics in our chaotic digital moment. The Cancel Culture Panic is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cancel-culture-panic-how-an-american-obsession-went-global-adrian-daub/21145470?ean=9781503640849What Tech Calls Thinking is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/what-tech-calls-thinking-an-inquiry-into-the-intellectual-bedrock-of-silicon-valley-adrian-daub/14220491?ean=9780374538644In Bed With the Right (with Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan) is here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRightAlso discussed: Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Does not Exist: How Campus War is Made,” available at https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-existHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

78: Reactionary Fantasies: On “Cancel Culture” and Moral Panic feat. Adrian Daub

We're off this weekend, but here's a thematically appropriate episode from earlier this year. Come find us on Patreon for our recent political coverage, The Standard Edition series, and more Wild Analysis. We'll be back next Saturday.---While Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild analysis. The movie is Civil War (2024), and, to hear director Alex Garland tell it, it’s a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patrick it’s also something else – at once a symptom, a product of underlying anxieties, and a fantasy, a story that’s as revealing in what it sets out to portray explicitly as in what it obscures or avoids.  And so, after walking through the film’s plot and visual grammar (spoiler alert: there are spoilers after 1:05:00), they turn to the recurrent invocations of looming “civil war” in American discourse. How do our fantasies – and not just Garland’s – relate to the actual and “official” US Civil War of 1861-1865, and how do they distort the history of that conflict? For audiences sitting in a movie theater deep within the imperial core, what’s is and isn’t imaginable in terms of a “civil war,” and why must we, like Garland, turn to images of violence abroad in order to dramatize it?  What would another civil war actually look like in the contemporary US – and what do our anxious expectations of it in the future, as well as our fixations on fantasies about the past, betray about us and our moment in the here and now? Dan and Patrick ponder these and other questions as well as: the culture and iconography of twentieth century combat photography from Robert Capa and Gerda Taro to Eddie Adams and the Bang Bang Club; the gaps between the fantasies of armchair Operators and the horrifying realities of insurgent warfare; and how The Office and Parks and Recreation relate to War on Terror propaganda.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 49: Wild Analysis: Civil War

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us navigate moments like these. Plus: what is "hope," actually, and what do we mean when we ask for it?Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

77: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Post-Election Processing Teaser

It’s the last installment of Gerontophallocracy 2024 before the election. Abby, Patrick, and Dan process the vibes both in The Discourse and here in Pennsylvania (chaotic and bad); reflect on Harris on Call Her Daddy versus Trump on Rogan; talk about forced choices, votes, and fantasies of voting; discuss complicity and lesser-of-two evilism from the depressive position; and more. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

76: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Floating Signifiers Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel. Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very contingencies of family, community, and human life itself. Abby and Patrick talk with Daniel about how he came to conceive of the project, his influences and inspiration, his method for producing such rich characterizations, the question of style, and more. It’s also a chance for the three to explore the psychoanalytically rich themes and topics the book takes up, from the desire for recognition to anxieties over conflicting social mores to substance abuse to family estrangement to religious preference and much, much more. Women’s Hotel is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-s-hotel-daniel-m-lavery/21024970Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

75: Psychosocial Realism feat. Daniel Lavery

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan continue their watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does the impossibility of the sexual relationship mean that the inverse of the sexual relationship finds expression precisely in having sex?Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

74: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part II Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Sabrina Strings, professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, to talk about her new book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. The book is both a deep dive into the genealogy of western notions of "romance" - from medieval courtly love to Victorian mother/whore complexes - and a searing critique of contemporary ideologies of love, normative gender roles, practices of dating, and more. Strings takes Abby and Patrick on a journey through how a seemingly abstract "Romantic Ideal" is in fact dependent on histories of racialization, abjection, and a formulation of the bodies of black women as "the commons." Tracing the legacies of these histories to the present, they examine how love, transgressive and otherwise, gets represented in media from Sex and the City and Friends to reality TV shows from Love is Blind to the (undersung) Tool Academy. Must the legacy of Romantic love as a mechanism for perpetuating the social reproduction of inequality and subordination continue to weigh on our relationships today - or are there other possibilities? Plus: a critical theory of the fuckboy!The End of Love is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-end-of-love-racism-sexism-and-the-death-of-romance-sabrina-strings/20054512?ean=9780807008621Other key texts cited: Tressie MacMillan Cottom, “In the Name of Beauty,” in Thick: And Other Essays: https://bookshop.org/p/books/thick-and-other-essays-tressie-mcmillan-cottom/12898635Shulamith Firestone, “The Culture of Romance,” in the The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dialectic-of-sex-the-case-for-feminist-revolution-shulamith-firestone/21357717Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

73: Romance Was Never Real: From Courtly Love to the Rise of the Fuckboy feat. Sabrina Strings

Abby and Patrick welcome Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of literary magazine n+1. The magazine is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and marking this milestone with the publication of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. Lisa, Mark, Abby, and Patrick engage in a conversation that ranges from the history of the magazine to the legacy of the Iraq War to the early dysphorias of the Trump administration to the contemporary publishing landscape and more. But at heart, it’s a discussion of the psychodynamic dimensions of the relationships between writers and editors, editors and publishers, and outlets and their audiences. We talk about how good writing can help readers, writers, and editors process the world, and about how such writing emerges from a profoundly intersubjective relationship that unfolds via drafts, correspondences, revisions, and more than a little transference.You can catch Mark and Lisa in person in NYC on October 8th (free but RSVP required): https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/events/why-is-everything-so-ugly-a-discussion/The Intellectual Situation is available here: https://shop.nplusonemag.com/products/the-intellectual-situation-the-best-of-n-1-s-second-decade?srsltid=AfmBOoojmEq9XJN4YJ3Mt3x8wEhGneEnhqQU-cZdGdtqoLRjRa91H8BWHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

72: Track Changes feat. Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of n+1

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The key theme is proxies – candidates standing in for one another, gestures that say one thing while meaning another, scapegoats, displacements, and more. They unpack how such substitutions can function to resolve contradictions and disguise continuities, involving not only the candidates, but also ideologies, coalitions, history, and ongoing events.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

71: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Proxy Battles Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan discuss the cult classic “Heathers” (Michael Lehmann, 1988). This coming-of-age satire offers them a chance to talk about high school movies as a genre, developmental milestones, and why grown adults are so obsessed with media about teenage life (and death). The movie also gives the three a through-the-looking glass meditation on what’s changed and what hasn’t since the movie’s filming (above all, a massive uptick in school shootings) and what is or isn’t capable of being imagined satirically or otherwise in 2024.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

70: Wild Analysis: Heathers Teaser

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWe set out to discuss the Eras tour film but got drawn into the broader cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. Along the way, we talk about the concepts of cathexis and the Big Other; our own embarrassing childhood attachments to music; how the Eras tour is like Nietzsche’s eternal return; Swift’s self-narration about her relationship to praise, food, and body image in Miss Americana; and Abby’s unexpectedly strong negative investment in the Travis-Taylor relationship.Texts we discussed:Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom,” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/magazine/taylor-swift-eras-tour.htmlSam Lansky, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of MemoryChristopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self ExperienceHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

UNLOCKED: 38: Wild Analysis: Taylor Swift

Abby, Patrick, and Dan welcome the incomparable Liz Franczak of TrueAnon! The topic is conspiracy theories, from real to imagined, documented to discredited, ludicrous to all-too-likely, and more. The first half of the episode is ground-clearing and working through some basic questions. They unpack the phrase “conspiracy theory,” tracking its shift over the twentieth century from a neutral term to a label redolent with scorn, dismissal, and even pathologization. They explore how this trajectory has reflected anxieties about modernity, technology, and mass movements in general and communism specifically. Sharing some of their own experiences of getting “conspiracy-pilled,” they think through the ways in which the charge of having a “conspiracy theory” or being a “conspiracy theorist” functions in contemporary politics and popular discourse. If a “conspiracy theory” suggests a general way of knowing, an outlook on the world and events, what satisfactions does that provide – both for conspiracy “theorists” and those who marginalize them? Of what do today’s conspiracy theories suggest themselves to be symptoms? And how can we productively understand both the appeals and pitfalls of conspiratorial thinking in our own moment, for better and for worse?In the second half of the episode, the group takes up a singular object – the “rich text” that is Conspiracy Theory (1997). Directed by Richard Donner (of Lethal Weapon fame), this bizarre thriller-mystery-romcom-fusion stars Mel Gibson as a disturbed taxi driver/conspiracy-newsletter-writer and Julia Roberts as a hard-charging federal prosecutor haunted by the murder of her father; Patrick Stewart also appears as an American-accented former MK Ultra scientist turned private sector assassin puppet master working for the New World Order (maybe? he has a black helicopter). Anyway, the film’s a wild mess, but the overstuffed plot (and Dan’s capable navigation thereof) allows Liz, Abby, and Patrick to read the film as: (1) a quaint artifact of a distinctively conspiracy-friendly moment (the Clinton 1990s); (2) the uncanny expression of social anxieties on the threshold of a new millennium of internet-poisoned paranoia; (3) a  mystical tale of the dialectic between Belief and Truth, sublated into Love via an Oedipal victory in which nobody can have sex. Plus: our favorite conspiracy theories (good), Mel and Hutton Gibson’s favorite conspiracy theories (very bad), and a very special closeout.You can find more Liz at https://www.patreon.com/TrueAnonPod (we especially recommend TrueAnon’s incredible series The Game, an investigation of Synanon and the troubled teen industry)Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music