Podd: Ordinary Unhappiness

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

22 februari 2025 | 97 min

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-feminisms

Abolish 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-now

Sophie’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

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

15 februari 2025 | 4 min

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

8 februari 2025 | 68 min

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/9780231184083

Disorganization and Sex is here: https://divided.online/all-books/disorganisation-and-sex

March 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 Tolentino

3/15/25 6pm Eastern at Riffraff (Providence, RI) in conversation with Kate Schapira

3/30/25 1pm Eastern virtual event with The Psychosocial Foundation

4/13/25 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 series

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

88: On Hate and Aggression, Part IV Teaser

1 februari 2025 | 3 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Abby, 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

Episode 87: On Hate and Aggression, Part III

25 januari 2025 | 107 min

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

86: On Hate and Aggression, Part II Teaser

18 januari 2025 | 4 min

85: On Hate and Aggression, Part I

11 januari 2025 | 96 min

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/9780190271398.003.0018

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

4 januari 2025 | 11 min

83: Religion and Neurosis feat. Nathan Rein Teaser

21 december 2024 | 10 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Abby 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) 450-0847

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

Closing song:
Track: Baby It's Cold Outside (With TNTVictory)
Artist: C.J. Ezell - / cjezell
Baby It's Cold Outside (With TNTVictory) - by C.J. Ezell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://bit.ly/CreativeCommons3-0)

82: Effing the Ineffable feat. Simon Critchley

14 december 2024 | 87 min

81: Mailbag Part II: Readings and Misreadings Teaser

7 december 2024 | 6 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Abby, 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

80: On Fantasy feat. Jordan Stein

30 november 2024 | 76 min

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) 450-0847

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

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

26 november 2024 | 111 min

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

In 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

79: Mailbag Episode: Resistances (Part One) Teaser

23 november 2024 | 4 min

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

16 november 2024 | 93 min

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=9781503640849

What 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=9780374538644

In Bed With the Right (with Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan) is here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight

Also 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-exist

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

9 november 2024 | 114 min

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

77: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Post-Election Processing Teaser

7 november 2024 | 10 min

76: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Floating Signifiers Teaser

2 november 2024 | 9 min

75: Psychosocial Realism feat. Daniel Lavery

26 oktober 2024 | 77 min

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

19 oktober 2024 | 5 min

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

12 oktober 2024 | 90 min

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=9780807008621

Other 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/12898635

Shulamith 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/21357717

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

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

5 oktober 2024 | 99 min

71: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Proxy Battles Teaser

3 oktober 2024 | 20 min

70: Wild Analysis: Heathers Teaser

28 september 2024 | 6 min

UNLOCKED: 38: Wild Analysis: Taylor Swift

21 september 2024 | 124 min

69: Truth, Lies, and Conspiracy Theories feat. Liz Franczak

14 september 2024 | 125 min

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

68: Gerontophallocracy 2024: The September Debate: Domination and Other Pleasures Teaser

11 september 2024 | 4 min

67: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Lethal Mothers and Try-Hard Sons feat. Sam Adler-Bell Teaser

7 september 2024 | 13 min

66: Teens, Cops, and Spies: The Varieties of Hysterical Experience feat. Dan Taberski

31 augusti 2024 | 85 min

Abby and Patrick welcome Dan Taberski, creator of the brand-new podcast series Hysterical. They explore the genesis of the series and the challenges and rewards of confronting both the history and the present of “the H-word.” Tracking the trajectories of this famously “elusive neurosis,” Hysterical looks to episodes from colonial America to Belle Epoque Paris to modern-day Iran, and tracks the stories of people from high school students in upstate New York to a prosecutor in Ohio to former CIA agents. How does the documentary balance the different senses of “hysteria” and being “hysterical” as concepts in the history of medicine, as labels used to stigmatize and dismiss suffering, and as a clarifying term for understanding contemporary events? What is ultimately diagnosable as “real” in the brain, in our genes, or according to the DSM – and how do we square those supposed answers with our personal narratives, beliefs, and certainties? In what ways do the individual symptoms of “conversion disorders” reflect underlying social conditions? And how do moral panics and fits of “mass hysteria” reveal hierarchies of gender, race, vulnerability, and power? Taberski tells us about what it was like to interview such a wide range of subjects, and how the show worked to put their stories and personal feelings about “the H-word” into dialogue with interpretations by doctors, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and pundits. Plus: secondary gain, the idea of “evenly hovering attention,” the ethics of leaning into messiness, and the psychoanalytically provocative aspects of podcasting.

You can listen to Hysterical anywhere you get your podcasts; more details are here: https://wondery.com/shows/hysterical/

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

65: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 11: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 2 Teaser

24 augusti 2024 | 6 min

64: Grief, Loss, and Love feat. Sarah Jaffe

17 augusti 2024 | 104 min

Abby and Patrick welcome labor journalist Sarah Jaffe – author of Necessary Trouble and Work Won’t Love You Back – for her first interview about her forthcoming book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. From the Ashes is at once a deeply personal narrative and a wide-ranging journey of searing reportage on the lives and struggles of individuals and communities. Sarah, Abby, and Patrick take on the overdeterminations of loss, grief, mourning, and memorialization from contemporary political discourse to Freud’s classic “Mourning and Melancholia.” In what ways can individual experiences of grief be fundamentally singular and yet also sites of collective solidarity and social transformation? What are the norms, narratives, and timelines that get imposed on expressions of psychic pain in the wake of loss, from the DSM to Human Resources to newspaper headlines? How does the experience of loss differ when the lost object in question isn’t necessarily a person, but a place, an ideal, intergenerational links, or expectations for a now-foreclosed future instead?

Details about From the Ashes are here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/sarah-jaffe/from-the-ashes/9781541703490/ and the book is available for preorder here: https://hachettebookgroup.formstack.com/forms/fromtheashes (use code FTA20 for 20% off, plus bonus content)

Sarah’s website is here: https://sarahljaffe.com/

Key texts cited in the episode:

Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Freud, “On Transience”

Jacqueline Rose, “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism”

Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

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! 484 775-0107

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

63: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part I Teaser

10 augusti 2024 | 6 min

62: Lacan and Psychosis in the City feat. Loren Dent

3 augusti 2024 | 127 min

Abby and Patrick welcome Loren Dent, a clinical psychologist in the Lacanian tradition. The topic is psychosis, both as understood theoretically by Freud and Lacan, and also as experienced and encountered by real people in New York City, where Loren practices and where he has helped establish an innovative program of treatment and care. Starting by tackling a basic question – what is “psychosis?” – the three chart Freud’s struggles to grasp psychotic phenomena, his messy efforts to make the notorious case of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber fit his theories about sex, and his late-career notion of “disavowal” as a mechanism of psychosis distinct from neurotic repression. Loren then describes how Jacques Lacan took this last concept, often translated as “foreclosure,” and integrated it with his own accounts of language, desire, and otherness. When taken together with therapeutic innovations by radical psychoanalytic thinkers like Félix Guattari, François Tosquelles, and Jean Oury, Lacan’s insights, as Loren explains, lay the groundwork for a robust and efficacious approach to treating psychotic patients in ways that challenge traditional hierarchies in hospitals, group homes, and beyond. After walking Abby and Patrick through what talk therapy looks like with patients with psychosis, Loren outlines his recommendations for treatment and support in the clinic and beyond. As Loren explains, this approach goes against the grain of how psychotic patients have been processed by institutions under contemporary neoliberalism, and has grown only more urgently necessary in New York City under the mayorship of Eric Adams. It also forces us all to confront and manage our anxieties about “madness,” from which Freud himself was hardly immune, which haunt commonplace assumptions about normative behavior and market rationality, and which manifest in day-to-day acts of avoidance, confinement, neglect, and violence that people with psychosis encounter in urban life.

Key texts cited in the episode:

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Bret Fimiani, Psychosis and Extreme States: An Ethic for Treatment

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on An Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”

Nev Jones & Robyn Lewis Brown, “The absence of psychiatric C/S/X perspectives in academic discourse: Consequences and Implications.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(1).

Darian Leader, What is Madness?

Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

Stijn Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective

Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis: https://www.communitypsychoanalysis.org/

Fountain House: https://www.fountainhouse.org/

The Greene Clinic: www.greeneclinic.com

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

61: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Reality Testing and Temporal Distortion (It’s So Joever) Teaser

23 juli 2024 | 4 min

60: Love and Work feat. Joseph Earl Thomas

20 juli 2024 | 101 min

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2023 memoir Sink and a new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Set over the course of a single, chaotic day in a North Philadelphia hospital, Thomas’ novel unfolds across a multiplicity of geographies and timelines, and weaves together a dense network of human attachments in all their pleasures and pains. The conversation ranges widely as Abby, Patrick, and Joseph discuss what “trauma” means in popular discourse, literary criticism, and real-world trauma centers; the pleasures of food, video games, and genre expectations; Freud, the family, and authentic human connections sustained online; liberal narratives of universality and the dignity of work; the rhetoric of “boundaries”; and living and working through familial relationships that defy neat categorization and challenge us at every turn.

Key texts cited in the episode:

Elaine Castillo, How To Read Now

Omari Akil, “Warning: Playing Pokémon GO is a Death Sentence if You are a Black Man, “ available at https://medium.com/dayone-a-new-perspective/warning-pokemon-go-is-a-death-sentence-if-you-are-a-black-man-acacb4bdae7f

Parul Sehgal, “The Tyranny of the Tale,” available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review

Sehgal, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-century America

Mat Johnson, Pym

Gayl Jones, Mosquito

Patrick Jagoda, “On Difficulty in Video Games,” available at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/699585

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! 484 775-0107

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

59: Gerontophallocracy 2024: The June Debate Teaser

1 juli 2024 | 3 min

58: Wild Analysis: The Idea of You feat. Anna Shechtman Teaser

29 juni 2024 | 3 min

57: “Do More Crosswords!” The Sexual Politics of Language feat. Anna Shechtman

22 juni 2024 | 90 min

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman, author of The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, a book that’s part personal memoir, part cultural history, and part meditation on what it means to care about meaning in the first place. In typically overdetermined fashion, the three talk about the complex interweaving of language, sexual difference, and the vicissitudes of our appetites for food, clues, accomplishments, “solutions,” and more. Along the way, they unpack the écriture feminine of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic, Luce Irigaray’s critique of phallogocentrism, the writing of Jane Gallop, and more. Whether on paper or otherwise, why do people love to create problems for ourselves, and how does the pleasure of solving any given puzzle relate to our apparently limitless hunger for new ones? How does the latent, overdetermined, and unconscious structure what’s manifest on a grid in a newspaper, magazine, or online? What did Lacan mean when he advised young psychoanalysts to “do more crosswords”? And how exactly does a crossword get made, anyway? Plus: plenty of puns, both punishing and pleasurable, frank talk about psychotherapy, and more!

Anna’s book The Riddles of the Sphinx is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-riddles-of-the-sphinx-anna-shechtman/20143426

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! 484 775-0107

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

56: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 10: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 1 Teaser

15 juni 2024 | 5 min

55: What is the Pleasure Principle? feat. Rebecca Ariel Porte

1 juni 2024 | 111 min

Abby and Patrick welcome scholar and literary critic Rebecca Ariel Porte of Dilettante Army and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to talk about the key Freudian concept of the pleasure principle. Starting with Freud’s 1911 essay, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Rebecca, Abby, and Patrick probe the complicated question of what, exactly “pleasure” (German: Lust) means for Freud. At the end of the day, is “pleasure” simply the avoidance of pain, relative movement along a stimulus gradient, an object towards which we turn reflexively like sunflowers towards the sun, or something else? How does Freud’s notion of pleasure relate, on the one hand, to its apparent opposite, AKA “unpleasure” (German: Unlust), and to the “reality principle” on the other? What is the status and function of the different ways we imagine pleasure and find pleasure in imagining, from daydreams to fantasies to “hallucinatory satisfactions” in general? Plus: what Freud’s theories of pleasure miss and other analytic thinkers don’t (with reference to Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein); the relationship between ego instincts and sexual instincts; flights into illness and the meanings of neurosis; and a reading of an incredibly Freudian sequence in Milton’s Paradise Lost!

Rebecca’s recent essay on Cixous is here: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/helene-cixous-well-kept-ruins/

Her recent essay on Proust in translation is here: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/a-new-translation-of-proust-s-late-masterpiece-25166

The latest Dilettante Army is here: https://dilettantearmy.com/

Dilettante Army merch is here: https://store.dilettantearmy.com/

And her upcoming courses are available here: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/current-courses/

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! 484 775-0107

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

54: Wild Analysis: Challengers Teaser

25 maj 2024 | 3 min

53: Broke Psychoanalysis: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic feat. Kevin Duong

18 maj 2024 | 95 min

Patrick and Abby welcome politics professor Kevin Duong to discuss his research on the history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-1958), an experiment in radical psychoanalysis aimed at providing free care to marginalized community members in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Bringing together American notables like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison alongside a colorful array of expatriate European clinicians, including antifascist partisans and refugees, the clinic sought to fuse Freud’s calls for “psychotherapy for the people” with a Marxist attention to the material dimensions of suffering. Duong walks Abby and Patrick through how the clinic functioned and what therapy there was like, from group analysis of children at play to evening seminars in which everyone involved with the clinic worked with a consenting patient to explore their distress. They also unpack the clinic’s theoretical contributions, from the notion of “class unconsciousness” to “social neurosis,” and the implications of its work on our ideas about transference, scarcity, and abundance; the ways in which authority is constituted in both therapy and social movements; how organizing and therapy relate to the recognition of suffering and the realization of desires; the Cold War, contemporary memory, the repressed histories of radical psychoanalysis and what it would mean to “repeat with a difference”; and more.

Kevin’s article, “Broke Psychoanalysis: In Memory of Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic” is here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/broke-psychoanalysis

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! 484 775-0107

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

52: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 9: Repression is a Scorpio: The Final Fliess Extracts feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

11 maj 2024 | 5 min

51: Psychoanalysis and Gaza feat. Jess Ghannam

4 maj 2024 | 83 min

Abby and Patrick welcome Palestinian psychoanalyst and psychologist Dr. Jess Ghannam to talk about his twenty-five years of work doing empirical research and carrying out public health initiatives in Gaza. They discuss his studies of mental health in refugees from across the Middle East and in Palestinian children; intergenerational histories of traumas both collective and individual; the limits of the “post-” in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when it comes to what is “normal” in spaces of concentrated and ongoing trauma; his reflections from years of observing thousands of Palestinian children at play; the relationship between physical repression and psychic violence; and much more.

Relevant articles by Dr. Ghannam include:

Unattended Mental Health Needs in Primary Care: Lebanon’s Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. Clinical Medicine Insights Psychiatry. 2020 Jan 1; 11:117955732096252. Segal SS, Khoury KV, Salah SR, Ghannam GJ. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1179557320962523

Coping with trauma and adversity among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: A qualitative, culture-informed analysis. J Health Psychol. 2020 10; 25(12):2031-2048. Afana AJ, Tremblay J, Ghannam J, Ronsbo H, Veronese G. PMID: 29974813. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29974813/

Contributors to Screening Positive for Mental Illness in Lebanon's Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2018 Jan; 206(1):46-51. Segal SP, Khoury VC, Salah R, Ghannam J. PMID: 28976407. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28976407

The psychological toll of slum living—an assessment of mental health, disability, and slum-related adversities in Mumbai, India. The Lancet Global Health. 2014 May 1; 2:s26. Subbaraman SR, Nolan NL, Shitole ST, Sawant SK, Shitole SS, Sood SK, Nanarkar NM, Ghannam GJ, Bloom BD, Patil-Deshmukh PA. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(15)70048-3

Health and Human Rights in Palestine: The Siege and Invasion of Gaza and the Role of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. Human Rights in the Middle East. 2011 Jan 1; 245-261. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137001986_14

Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety among Gaza Strip adolescents in the wake of the second Uprising (Intifada). Child Abuse Negl. 2007 Jul; 31(7):719-29. Elbedour S, Onwuegbuzie AJ, Ghannam J, Whitcome JA, Abu Hein F. PMID: 17631959. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17631959

The use of psychoanalytic constructs in the service of empire: Comment on Baruch (2003). Psychoanalytic Psychology. 2005 Jan 1; 22(1):135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0736-9735.22.1.135

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! 484 775-0107

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.

50: Political Disappointment feat. Sara Marcus

27 april 2024 | 73 min

49: Wild Analysis: Civil War Teaser

20 april 2024 | 5 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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! 484 775-0107

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: 21: Wild Analysis: The Trauma Plot and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe

13 april 2024 | 95 min

48: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 8: Oedipus Approaches: The Fliess Extracts, Continued feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

6 april 2024 | 2 min

47: Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Problem with Resilience feat. Ajay Singh Chaudhary

30 mars 2024 | 128 min

Episode 46: Wild Analysis: Dune Teaser

23 mars 2024 | 3 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Abby, Patrick, and Dan take on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Parts 1 and 2, Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, and a loud noise that goes [BRAAAAM]. After a crash overview of the franchise universe and a synopsis of the series plot, we unpack our various investments in the original Frank Herbert source material (Abby has many, Dan, some, Patrick, none) and our reactions to the latest film (hated it, loved it, and indifferent, respectively). Abby addresses the centrality of interiority and overdetermination to the books’ tales of intrigue and galactic power politics, and Dan walks through Villeneuve’s process for translating the original texts to film. As becomes clear, Villeneuve’s adaptations have involved some ideologically suggestive erasures and narrative choices, including the elimination of “jihad” from the Fremen vocabulary, the creation of a “fundamentalist” tendency within the Fremen, and the characterization of Zendaya’s Chani as a “moderate rebel” standing against them. All these considerations and more bring our hosts to reflect on the political context of Herbert’s original books, the ideological contours of Villeneuve’s filmic vision, and what it feels like to watch these movies in 2024. If Dune is a dark tale of resource wars, indigenous revolts, fanaticism, and mass death wherein treasured prophecies, messianic expectations, and best intentions boil down to forced choices between godawful alternatives, then what does the runaway success of the franchise suggest about our present moment and the futures we can imagine?

Works discussed:

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy

Adrian Daub, “BRAAAM!”: The Sound That Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack,” https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-soundtracks/

Aaron Bady, “Dune Two Little,” https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/dune-2-movies-frank-herbert-books-meaning-differences.html

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! 484 775-0107

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

45: The Fantasy of Family and the Meaning of Family Abolition feat. Sophie Lewis and M.E. O’Brien

16 mars 2024 | 123 min

44: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 7: The Prehistoric Other and the Great Lord Penis: The Fliess Extracts, Continued feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

9 mars 2024 | 3 min

43: The Mirror Crack’d: The Mirror Stage, Part III

2 mars 2024 | 75 min

42: Wild Analysis: The President’s Analyst Teaser

17 februari 2024 | 5 min

41: Identification and Misrecognition: The Mirror Stage, Part II

10 februari 2024 | 63 min

40: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 6: The Symptom is a Compromise: The Fliess Extracts, Continued feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

3 februari 2024 | 4 min

39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part I

27 januari 2024 | 113 min

Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing conversation includes Lacan’s biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description of his project as a “return to Freud”; the experience of reading Lacan; frustration, anxiety, the pressure of time, and the logic of the “short session”; and more. Then they turn to the essay itself, getting granular about Lacan’s relationship to phenomenology (and what that is), his opposition to Descartes’ cogito (and what that entails), and more, building to the famous scene of the baby jubilant before the image of itself in the mirror. What a charming scene of self-recognition and unproblematic joy! Or is it? Stay tuned for the next installment.

Texts cited:

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton 2007. Translated by Bruce Fink.

Malcolm Bowie, Lacan.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations

Bruck Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique

Kareem Malone and Stephen Friedlander, eds. The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero

Jonathan Lear, Freud

Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in The Garden of Forking Paths

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! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

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Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
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Theme song:
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38: Wild Analysis: Taylor Swift Teaser

20 januari 2024 | 5 min

UNLOCKED: 25: Wild Analysis: Barbie

13 januari 2024 | 88 min

37: New Year’s Mailbag: The Capacity for Change Teaser

6 januari 2024 | 3 min

36: Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work feat. Brian Ngo-Smith

30 december 2023 | 96 min

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith, President of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work (AAPCSW). Focusing on his paper “This Couch Has Bed Bugs: On the Homelessness of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Homelessness,” they talk about psychotherapy with unhoused clients and tensions between the priorities of psychoanalysis versus social work, the desire to help, and our society’s hatred of dependence. Turning to D.W. Winnicott’s ideas about hate in countertransference, they explore how unacknowledged hatred by caregivers for their patients manifests not only interpersonally but also in institutional behaviors and broader social policy. They also discuss Brian’s recent work on the eros of care, including a paper entitled “Porosity and Preoccupation: Queer Thoughts on Psychoanalytic Care,” which he will deliver as the Gertrude and Ernst Ticho Memorial Lecture at the National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York this February.

Articles discussed include:

D.W. Winnicott’s classic essay, “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” available here: Thttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330380/pdf/348.pdf

Brian Ngo-Smith, “This Couch Has Bed Bugs: On the Homelessness of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Homelessness,” Clinical Social Work Journal 46:1, March 2018.

Brian Ngo-Smith, “Porosity and Preoccupation: Queer Thoughts on Psychoanalytic Care,” to be delivered at the 2024 National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York on February 10th from 2-4pm.

Brian’s website is here: www.ngosmiththerapy.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! 484 775-0107

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

35: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 5: Fragments, Paranoia, and Projection: The Fliess Extracts, Continued feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

23 december 2023 | 7 min

34: Fatphobia and Moral Feelings feat. Kate Manne

16 december 2023 | 97 min

Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020), and the forthcoming Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (2024). They discuss our moral emotions – shame, contempt, disgust, abjection – and what they signal; the ideological ranking of bodies into specific hierarchies, the contingencies of when and how fatness has been valued, and the historical links between contemporary fatphobia and anti-Blackness; how discourse around fatness involves logics of scapegoating, victim-blaming, the mystifications of capitalism, anxieties about pleasure, and fantasies of self-mastery; fat activism and the insights of disability studies; and the necessity of undoing fatphobia as a crucial part of meaningful social change and solidarity.

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia comes out January 9, 2024 and is available for pre-order here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/unshrinking-how-to-face-fatphobia-kate-manne/19993688

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/down-girl-the-logic-of-misogyny-kate-manne/18742539

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/entitled-how-male-privilege-hurts-women-kate-manne/16881547

Kate’s Substack, “More to Hate,” is here: https://katemanne.substack.com/

Other texts cited include:

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Kate Harding, “How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman?” (available in Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Power and a World Without Rape, eds Friedman and Valenti)

Kate’s book tour dates include:

Book launch in Ithaca, NY at Buffalo Street Books on Jan 9th

Cambridge, MA at Harvard Bookstore on Jan 22th

Montclair, NJ at Montclair Public Library on Jan 24th

Brooklyn, NY at Community Books on Jan 26th

Washington, DC at Politics and Prose on Jan 27th

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! 484 775-0107

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
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Provided by Fruits Music

33: The Problem with Empathy feat. Jade E. Davis

25 november 2023 | 87 min

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

20 november 2023 | 7 min

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

18 november 2023 | 6 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

In 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.

The second part of our Thanksgiving Special – on Freudian anthropology, the history behind (and of) Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism – drops Wednesday, Nov 22, just in time for your holiday travel.

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! 484 775-0107

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: 14: Standard Edition Volume I Part 1: Freud Goes to Paris

11 november 2023 | 100 min

Friends! This week we are on deadline and/or under a terrifying pile of ungraded papers, so we're giving folks a chance to enter the wild world of The Standard Edition with this freshly unlocked episode that tackles Freud’s earliest work, his personal and professional anxieties, and the complicated disorder(s) he and his contemporaries called hysteria. (Please join us on Patreon if you like it!) And for our Patreon supporters, a lot more Fliess is coming soon in the next installments of the SE, plus Wild Analysis on settler colonialism and Thanksgiving…

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

In this second episode of The Standard Edition, we finally start doing the reading, tackling the first three texts in Volume I of the Standard Edition: “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin,” (1886), “Preface to the Translation of Charcot’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System” (1886) and “Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anesthesia in A Hysterical Male” (1886). We do some ground-clearing about the history of medicine and the various disciplines in which the young Freud sought recognition and met with frustration; sketch out Freud’s biography and the world into which he was born and came of age; and discuss the figure of Jean-Martin Charcot and Freud’s time studying hysteria with him at the Salpêtrière in Paris. We pay close attention to an early case study of a male hysteric and how it prefigures some of Freud’s later case studies. Along the way, we also talk about Freud’s history with eels, anti-Semitism, cocaine, hypnosis, and his lifelong habit of making best friends and breaking up with them. We offer a handful of sources we’re consulting, whether for general edification or for reference for anyone who might be embarking on this project alongside us.

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! 484 775-0107

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
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Provided by Fruits Music

30: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 4: Wilhelm Fliess: The Anxiety of Influence (and a Theory of Noses) feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

4 november 2023 | 3 min

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

In the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we begin the Fliess Extracts section of SE Volume 1 in conversation with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We discuss the figure of Wilhelm Fliess and what he meant to Freud; the history of the Freud-Fliess correspondence, only half of which survives; Fliess’s theories of noses, periodicity, and bisexuality; Freud’s anxiety about Fliess’s professional reputation and influence on his own ideas; Freud’s issues with condoms and coitus interruptus; and how Freud was thinking about categories like anxiety, depression, melancholia, and obsessional neurosis during this period.

Articles discussed in this episode include:

Young, Annie Riddington. "Freud’s friend Fliess." The Journal of Laryngology & Otology 116.12 (2002): 992-995: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-laryngology-and-otology/article/abs/freuds-friend-fliess/7F87416E73813F4EFEB9B46CB38B3D8B

Zucker, Arthur, and David Wiegand. "Freud, Fliess, and the nasogenital reflex: did a look into the nose let us see the mind?" Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery 98.4 (1988): 319-322: https://aao-hnsfjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019459988809800409

Blum, Harold P. "Freud, Fliess, and the parenthood of psychoanalysis." The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 59.1 (1990): 21-40:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1990.11927262

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! 484 775-0107

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
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Provided by Fruits Music

29: Gender, Trauma, and Psychoanalytic Politics feat. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini

28 oktober 2023 | 85 min

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou and psychoanalyst and academic Ann Pellegrini to discuss their new co-authored book, Gender Without Identity. They talk about the genesis of the manuscript, from its beginnings in a painful case of child analysis to its distressing reception by psychoanalytic gatekeepers and “repressive forces within psychoanalysis itself.” They explore the difficulties queer and trans patients have faced in seeking psychoanalytic treatment; the resistances of institutional psychoanalysis when it comes to theorizing queer subjectivities; the struggles of queer and trans analysts themselves; and the implication of psychoanalysis in broader moral panics and political mobilizations against trans people. They discuss how theory is never just abstract, but bears upon urgent questions of care; the power and fantasies of rhetorical appeals to “protect” children; and how to conceive of gender as an experiment rather than an essential given or a predetermined teleology. Finally, Avgi and Ann offer a provocative approach to thinking about what trauma is and does, including questions of “traumatophobia” and the challenging ways trauma can be theorized and experienced in relation to gendered formations of all sorts.

Gender Without Identity is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/gender-without-identity-ann-pellegrini/20606066

Avgi’s recent book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/sexuality-beyond-consent-risk-race-traumatophilia-avgi-saketopoulou/18390655?ean=9781479820252

Ann’s book Performance Anxiety: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/performance-anxieties-staging-psychoanalysis-staging-race-ann-pellegrini/9006711?ean=9780415916868

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! 484 775-0107

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

28: Wild Analysis: Halloween (1978) Teaser

21 oktober 2023 | 4 min

27: From HIV to COVID: Virality, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Steven Thrasher

14 oktober 2023 | 101 min

26: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 3: Freud’s Two Dads Teaser

7 oktober 2023 | 5 min

UNLOCKED: 05: Wild Analysis: Mailbag - Dream Interpretation

30 september 2023 | 84 min

25: Wild Analysis: Barbie TEASER

23 september 2023 | 4 min

24: Drugs and the Death Drive feat. Ben Fong

16 september 2023 | 85 min

Abby and Patrick welcome academic and writer Ben Fong, author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge as well as Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism. They discuss the many different reasons people take drugs; American exceptionalism with respect to drug consumption; how drug policy and drug discourse is never really just about drugs; what the distinction between legal and illegal drugs both illuminates and obscures; the fundamental fantasies that accompany drug prohibition as well as the fantasies that surround particular drugs themselves; the very near future of psychedelic therapy and its relation to current treatments for anxiety and depression; individual versus social drug experiences; cocaine and neoliberalism; the not-necessarily-liberatory politics of psychedelics; how drug advertising has changed throughout the course of the last century; and the biomedical turn in psychiatry and its relation to shifting social, political, and economic conditions.

Ben’s new book Quick Fixes is here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2981-quick-fixes

His previous book Death and Mastery is here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/death-and-mastery/9780231542616

You can read his recent article, “Who Deserves Amphetamines? A Social History of Stimulants” about the amphetamine shortage here: https://thepointmag.com/politics/who-deserves-amphetamines/

And his new essay, “The Jobs and Freedom Strategy” is here: https://catalyst-journal.com/2023/08/the-jobs-and-freedom-strategy

Plus if you’re in Chicago, you can catch Ben talking about Quick Fixes on October 13th at the Seminary Co-op bookstore: https://www.semcoop.com/event/ben-fong-quick-fixes-cedric-johnson

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! 484 775-0107

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

23: Puns, Jokes, and Serious People feat. Ben Wurgaft

9 september 2023 | 90 min

22: Realism and Other Romances feat. Grace Lavery

2 september 2023 | 89 min

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Grace Lavery to discuss her new book Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. They discuss Grace’s relationship to psychoanalysis; her uses of Freud and Freudianism for both theoretical and pragmatic political purposes and in service of bodily freedom; her interpretation of Freudian concepts like penis envy and the castration complex; her writing in both Pleasure and Efficacy and her memoir Please Miss on changing sexes as an empirical fact; the stakes of calling things “real” or “authentic” versus dismissing them as fake, try-hard, or otherwise affected; the tensions between queer theory and transgender studies and her notion of “egg theory”; sex, pleasure, desire, and shame; her eminently useful idea of “romances of intractability”; Eve Sedgwick’s, Judith Butler’s, and Lauren Berlant’s later-in-life turns towards transmasculinity; and Grace’s work as activist and advocate in both US and UK contexts.

Grace’s book Pleasure and Efficacy is here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691243924/pleasure-and-efficacy

Her memoir, Please Miss, is here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/grace-lavery/please-miss/9781541620643/?lens=seal-press

The recent piece of hers we refer to in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), “Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books” is here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/

Other texts referenced in the episode include:

Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “White Glasses”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay”
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”
Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”
Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”
Freud, “On Humor”
Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”
D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII)
LaPlanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives

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! 484 775-0107

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
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

21: Wild Analysis: The Trauma Plot and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe Teaser

26 augusti 2023 | 2 min

20: A Dangerous Method: Sabina Spielrein, Carl Jung, Otto Gross

12 augusti 2023 | 102 min

Abby, Patrick, and Dan watch David Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which dramatizes the complex relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They discuss Freud and Jung’s fraught relationship and eventual break; Jung’s relationship with Spielrein in life and on film; Spielrein’s biography and her pioneering work as a psychoanalytic theorist and clinician in her own right; other key figures in the development of psychoanalysis, including Eugen Bleuler and Otto Gross (especially Gross’s commitments to anarchism and his concept of mutual analysis); the role of Zurich and the Burghölzli Hospital as a key center of early psychoanalysis; Freud’s one and only trip to America; women as objects of exchange in the development of psychoanalysis; Freud’s Judaism versus Jung’s Protestantism and Jung’s maddening (to Freud) tendencies towards mysticism; and the ways that Spielrein’s work prefigures the late Freudian concept of the death drive.

Books discussed include:

Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein, by John Lauren

Sabina Spielrein: the Woman and the Myth, by Angela M. Sells

The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, edited by Ruth I. Cape and Raymond Burt

Freud’s Women, by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester

The essay by Sabina Spielrein that Patrick discusses is entitled “Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being”

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! 484 775-0107

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

19: Advice and Anonymity feat. Danny Lavery, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Kali Handelman: OU + the Podcast for Social Research

5 augusti 2023 | 103 min

Ordinary Unhappiness presents a live recording of the Podcast for Social Research! Abby recently joined Danny Lavery, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Kali Handelman to celebrate Danny’s new book, Dear Prudence, which spans his tenure as beloved advice columnist “Prudence” at Slate. The group tackles historical antecedents of advice columns from the New Testament to the Great Depression; how advice columns dramatize social norms as they change in real time; fictional representations of advice columns like Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; tricksters who set out to deceive advice columnists but wind up asking real questions despite themselves; transference and the idiosyncratic role of the advice columnist as both generic and specific Other; and crowdsourced advice seeking (AKA Reddit’s Am I The Asshole?). They wind up by taking questions and offering live, unscripted advice about real estate commitments, relationship commitments, and the dicey intersection thereof. Plus: pro tips on how to stage difficult interventions with roommates and others in your life about grooming, household chores, and more.

Danny’s book Dear Prudence: Liberating Lesson’s from Slate.com’s Beloved Advice Columnist is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/dear-prudence-liberating-lessons-from-slate-com-s-beloved-advice-column-daniel-m-lavery/18617330?gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKow6xPL0DB2XXUyrThg9vTl7opsMa6wGA0cVaDkJUHDHWjp1K2vzW2BoC9NYQAvD_BwE

You can subscribe to his Substack, The Chatner, here: https://www.thechatner.com/

Rebecca’s magazine Dilettante Army is here: https://dilettantearmy.com/

You can learn more about Kali’s work as an editor and writing coach here: https://kalihandelman.com/

For more information about classes, events, and other programming at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research: https://thebrooklyninstitute.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! 484 775-0107

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

18: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 2: Hysteria, Hypnosis, and Imposter Syndrome Teaser

29 juli 2023 | 3 min

17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel

22 juli 2023 | 92 min

Abby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in Parapraxis.

Nica tells our listeners about Frantz Fanon’s life, situating both his personal journey and his writing within the context of his work as a clinician and clinical theorist. As Nica recounts, Fanon’s clinical writings were only recently collected and translated in the 2018 volume Alienation and Freedom, which has ushered in a renaissance in Fanon studies in the Anglophone world. Tracking Fanon’s story from Martinique to metropolitan France to Tunisia to Algeria, a focus on Fanon as a clinician helps us to rethink and recontextualize the major texts that bracket his life: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Abby, Patrick, and Nica also discuss resistances to Fanon; distinctive clinical concepts like the “transferential constellation”; neurosis versus psychosis; syndromes as political resistance; political exhaustion and the exhaustion of the political; revolutionary subjectivity; the superego of the contemporary left; and much more.

Nica’s Parapraxis essay on Fanon as clinician, “Destiny to Be Set Free: Fanon Between Repair and Reparation” was, happily, released online earlier than we expected: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/destiny-to-be-set-free

Primary texts we discuss include:

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
The volume of Fanon’s clinical writings Nica is discussing is Alienation and Freedom, edited and compiled by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, translated by Steven Corcoran

Some of the other books that Nica invokes include:

David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being
Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure
Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (Creolizing the Canon)

You can learn more about Nica’s work and get in touch with her at nicasiegel.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! 484 775-0107

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

16: Fantasy, Fascism, and Technology: From the Frankfurt School to Silicon Valley feat. Moira Weigel

12 juli 2023 | 89 min

Abby, Patrick, and Dan welcome writer, critic, and scholar Moira Weigel, co-founder of Logic magazine and co-editor with Ben Tarnoff of Voices of the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do And How They Do It. Moira introduces listeners to the history and key insights of the Frankfurt School in advance of a (free!) symposium this weekend in New York examining its legacy a hundred years later. They discuss Theodor Adorno’s work on “the authoritarian personality” and talk about personality types and social categories as they are constructed everywhere from astrology columns to the speeches of demagogues to Facebook algorithms. The four then turn to Moira’s recent work on Silicon Valley, especially her recent collection of interviews with tech workers ranging from engineers to writers to cooks to masseuses to data scientists to the larger-than-life “Founders.” They talk about the surprising sincerity of techno-optimism; what failing upwards does to people; what Adorno would have thought of being called a “thought leader”; whether the Internet is a giant hate machine; and the labor politics and emerging forms of Silicon Valley, a realm that’s bigger than just a geographical area, and where we all live, one way or another, like it or not.

To register for the 100 Years of the Frankfurt School event in NYC (and also streaming live) on July 14th and 15th: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/the-frankfurt-school-and-the-now-a-symposium/

Moira’s co-edited book Voices of the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It

Her book Labor of Love

The Adorno book about astrology is The Stars Down to Earth

Anna Weiner’s book Uncanny Valley

Logic magazine (now being relaunched as Logics) is here: https://logicmag.io/

The Collective Action in Tech site that Moira refers to is https://collectiveaction.tech/

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! 484 775-0107

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

15: Diagnosis and Identity: Mailbag Episode!

8 juli 2023 | 92 min

Abby, Patrick, and Dan take your calls! They spend the bulk of the episode on a fascinating question about whether or not it is important to know your own psychic structure. They consider the relationship between identity and diagnosis; how theoretical language can help an individual feel named or misnamed; whether truth or meaning matters more in the language of diagnosis;; bibliotherapy and why they’re constantly giving book recommendations; self-diagnosis versus external diagnosis; the relationship of diagnostic and other categories to suffering, healing, and psychic change; and diagnosis and its relation to material conditions. The next three calls involve speculation about the evolutionary basis of the unconscious; ways to think about analytically informed interventions, both radical or incremental, in the crises of mental health under neoliberalism generally and the crisis faced by unhoused people specifically; and a recurring dream involving nicotine patches, a “complete void,” and a “wake up man.”

***Since we have received some requests from callers to read their questions aloud rather than play calls directly to protect privacy, we’ve defaulted to reading all calls aloud during this non-paywalled episode, and used effects to make it abundantly clear when Abby is reading a call vs. speaking as herself. If you call our hotline, please let us know whether it’s okay to play your call on the podcast or whether you’d prefer us to read it!***

Books mentioned in this episode:
Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus
Juan-David Nasio, Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Alan Krohn, Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis
Robert Paul, Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on Culture
T. M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry
Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, eds. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow

A helpful interview with Luhrmann is also here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/11/culture-influences-voice-hearing-interview-stanford-anthropologist-tanya-luhrmann/

And the 100th anniversary of the Frankfurt School event we mentioned, both in person in NYC and also streaming live: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/the-frankfurt-school-and-the-now-a-symposium/

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! 484 775-0107

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

14: Standard Edition Volume I Part 1: Freud Goes to Paris Teaser

1 juli 2023 | 4 min

13: The Journalist and the Analyst: On Janet Malcolm feat. Sam Adler-Bell

24 juni 2023 | 109 min

Abby and Patrick welcome journalist and critic Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Dissent magazine’s Know Your Enemy podcast. They talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, thefts, and betrayals; the so-called “Freud wars”; and the internal politics of psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, they examine Malcolm’s famous claim that the task of the journalist is “morally indefensible” and its implications for the work of the analyst.

You can read Sam’s essay on Janet Malcolm here:

https://newrepublic.com/article/170930/janet-malcolm-dangerous-method

His essay on John Le Carré here:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-father-of-all-secrets-adler-bell

Sam on Succession and repetition compulsion is here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/succession-season-three/

Know Your Enemy is available on all your favorite podcast platforms and their Patreon

The essay that Sam quotes, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” by Hannah Gold

Janet Malcolm’s books under discussion:

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

In The Freud Archives

The Journalist and the Murderer

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! 484 775-0107

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: Short Session 1 - Transference, continued

17 juni 2023 | 33 min

12: From Parties to Projective Identification: Why is Group Life so Hard? feat. Christine Smallwood

10 juni 2023 | 134 min

11: Succession: Oedipus and Failsons

3 juni 2023 | 126 min

10: Wild Analysis: Problematic Faves and the Anxiety of Influence Teaser

27 maj 2023 | 2 min

09: The Pleasure of the Text: The Standard Edition

20 maj 2023 | 72 min

08: Political Economy, Libidinal Economy

13 maj 2023 | 87 min

07: Kettle Logic and Family Secrets: The Uncanny, Part II

6 maj 2023 | 79 min

06: Unheimlich Maneuver: The Uncanny, Part I

29 april 2023 | 80 min

05: Wild Analysis: Mailbag Episode! Teaser

23 april 2023 | 2 min

03: Bonus Content: Short session I - Transference, continued Teaser

23 april 2023 | 3 min

04: Guess Who’s Back, Back Again (It’s Freud) feat. Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston

15 april 2023 | 85 min

Abby and Patrick welcome Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston, founders of the Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis magazine. The four discuss their paths to psychoanalysis; speculate about why Freud is back (or if he ever really left); and offer copious reading suggestions! Plus, Hannah talks about being both the child of analysts and a historian of psychoanalysis and Alex discusses his status as a “faithless Lacanian” and its implications for clinical practice.

https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/
https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/

Reading suggestions in the order that they were offered:

Lisa Appignanesi & John Forrester, Freud’s Women

John Forrester, Freud & Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures (new edition forthcoming)

Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

Daniel José Gaztambide, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love”

Jacqueline Rose, “Where Does the Misery Come From? Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and The Event”

Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (AKA the “Dora” case study)

Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”

Malcom Bowie, Lacan

Shoshana Felman, Lacan and the Adventure of Insight

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers

Jordy Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day”

Jonathan Culler, “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative”

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! 484 775-0107

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

02: Transference

8 april 2023 | 96 min

01: What is Psychoanalysis?

1 april 2023 | 76 min

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