Episoder
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Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us navigate moments like these. Plus: what is "hope," actually, and what do we mean when we ask for it?
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
It’s the last installment of Gerontophallocracy 2024 before the election. Abby, Patrick, and Dan process the vibes both in The Discourse and here in Pennsylvania (chaotic and bad); reflect on Harris on Call Her Daddy versus Trump on Rogan; talk about forced choices, votes, and fantasies of voting; discuss complicity and lesser-of-two evilism from the depressive position; and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
Manglende episoder?
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Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel. Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very contingencies of family, community, and human life itself. Abby and Patrick talk with Daniel about how he came to conceive of the project, his influences and inspiration, his method for producing such rich characterizations, the question of style, and more. It’s also a chance for the three to explore the psychoanalytically rich themes and topics the book takes up, from the desire for recognition to anxieties over conflicting social mores to substance abuse to family estrangement to religious preference and much, much more.
Women’s Hotel is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-s-hotel-daniel-m-lavery/21024970Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does the impossibility of the sexual relationship mean that the inverse of the sexual relationship finds expression precisely in having sex?
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
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 -
Abby and Patrick welcome Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of literary magazine n+1. The magazine is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and marking this milestone with the publication of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. Lisa, Mark, Abby, and Patrick engage in a conversation that ranges from the history of the magazine to the legacy of the Iraq War to the early dysphorias of the Trump administration to the contemporary publishing landscape and more. But at heart, it’s a discussion of the psychodynamic dimensions of the relationships between writers and editors, editors and publishers, and outlets and their audiences. We talk about how good writing can help readers, writers, and editors process the world, and about how such writing emerges from a profoundly intersubjective relationship that unfolds via drafts, correspondences, revisions, and more than a little transference.
You can catch Mark and Lisa in person in NYC on October 8th (free but RSVP required): https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/events/why-is-everything-so-ugly-a-discussion/
The Intellectual Situation is available here: https://shop.nplusonemag.com/products/the-intellectual-situation-the-best-of-n-1-s-second-decade?srsltid=AfmBOoojmEq9XJN4YJ3Mt3x8wEhGneEnhqQU-cZdGdtqoLRjRa91H8BW
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The key theme is proxies – candidates standing in for one another, gestures that say one thing while meaning another, scapegoats, displacements, and more. They unpack how such substitutions can function to resolve contradictions and disguise continuities, involving not only the candidates, but also ideologies, coalitions, history, and ongoing events.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss the cult classic “Heathers” (Michael Lehmann, 1988). This coming-of-age satire offers them a chance to talk about high school movies as a genre, developmental milestones, and why grown adults are so obsessed with media about teenage life (and death). The movie also gives the three a through-the-looking glass meditation on what’s changed and what hasn’t since the movie’s filming (above all, a massive uptick in school shootings) and what is or isn’t capable of being imagined satirically or otherwise in 2024.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
We set out to discuss the Eras tour film but got drawn into the broader cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. Along the way, we talk about the concepts of cathexis and the Big Other; our own embarrassing childhood attachments to music; how the Eras tour is like Nietzsche’s eternal return; Swift’s self-narration about her relationship to praise, food, and body image in Miss Americana; and Abby’s unexpectedly strong negative investment in the Travis-Taylor relationship.
Texts we discussed:
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom,” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/magazine/taylor-swift-eras-tour.html
Sam Lansky, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. 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 -
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan process last night’s Trump-Harris debate. They talk about the pleasures of domination, perverse and otherwise; the power of identifications over and against appeals to statistics; narcissistic rage in the face of symbolic castration; and the meaning of “libidinal economy.” They also get frank about abortion, nativism, and the grotesque stakes of Trump’s xenophobia.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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby and Patrick are joined by friend of the show and returning guest Sam Adler-Bell! Together, the three process events in the US electoral landscape in the past month, focusing in particular on the selection of J.D.Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the ascendance of Kamala Harris, and the spectacle of the Democratic Convention. Objects of psychodynamic-flavored punditry include Vance’s Daddy Issues, Harris as Phallic Mother, and the significance of one of America’s favorite pastimes (Stepmom Porn).
Check out Sam’s recent piece in The Baffler on Adam Phillips here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/good-enough-adler-bell
The Know Your Enemy episodes we discuss are here:
What's Wrong with J.D. Vance?https://www.patreon.com/posts/whats-wrong-with-109853554
René Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz)https://www.patreon.com/posts/rene-girard-and-99243002
A Remedy for Envy? René Girard Reduxhttps://www.patreon.com/posts/remedy-for-envy-99640142
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 -
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their journey through the Project for a Scientific Psychology. They explore how the Project reflects recent developments in technology, and how Freud is staging an intervention into ongoing contemporary investigations in the fields of neurology and biology. Working through key early chapters of the Project itself, they unpack how Freud’s thought reveals a preoccupation with flows of energy (“Q”) that traverse boundaries and both sustain and trouble psychic life.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 -
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby and Dan get into the first part of Slavoj Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, directed by Sophie Fiennes). They consider one of the film’s core propositions – that cinema is an instruction in how and what to desire. This leads them through Zizek’s (and their own) interpretations of classic Hitchcock films, Alien, Blue Velvet, and beyond. More broadly, they discuss whether psychoanalysis is essential for understanding film, reading movies like books, the allure of exegesis, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 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 -
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby and Patrick power through COVID brain fog to process Sunday’s announcement and the past few weeks of relentless breaking news. What do times like these do to our ability to process time in general? What do the timelines of presidential campaigns, news cycles, and breaking stories do to our subjective experience of time and the other timelines that structure our lives? What did Freud mean when he said the unconscious was “timeless”? Plus: the denial of death, survived assassinations, terminal narcissism, political theology, and Kamala Harris as phenomenologist.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 -
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-plotSaidiya 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:
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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The season is here. The time is now. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes (again). And to help navigate it all, Abby, Patrick, and Dan are launching a new series: Gerontophallocracy 2024. In this first installment, they outline the goals for the series, explain what the Goldwater Rule is and isn’t, and unpack how psychoanalysis can help us get some purchase, if not on what’s going on inside either candidate’s head, then on how our society is collectively metabolizing the spectacle and stakes of the whole thing. They then look at Thursday’s debate through the lens of psychic defense mechanisms in general and Melanie Klein’s notion of “splitting” in particular. Splitting, they explain, is a fundamental concept for understanding not just what went down that night but how our media and political elites have subsequently reacted, and for starting to get a handle on our contemporary moment in all its mind-bending rhetorical and emotional dimensions.
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 - Vis mere
