Episodi
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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 thatâs 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, âsolutions,â and more. Along the way, they unpack the Ă©criture feminine of HĂ©lĂšne Cixous, Julia Kristevaâs idea of the semiotic, Luce Irigarayâs 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 whatâs manifest on a grid in a newspaper, magazine, or online? What did Lacan mean when he advised young psychoanalysts to âdo more crosswordsâ? And how exactly does a crossword get made, anyway? Plus: plenty of puns, both punishing and pleasurable, frank talk about psychotherapy, and more!
Annaâs 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 youâve 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, Patrick, and Dan turn to one of Freudâs earliest and strangest works: an untitled âpsychology for neurologists,â begun in shorthand on a moving train, which went unpublished until 1950. Grappling with the text in terms of its significance and genre, they explore how abandoned experiments and seeming dead-ends can still yield insight and how, when it comes to the tricky interfaces between mind and brain, theories and metaphors can illuminate precisely in how they fall short.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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 -
Episodi mancanti?
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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 Freudâs 1911 essay, âFormulations Regarding Two Principles of Mental Functioning,â Rebecca, Abby, and Patrick probe the complicated question of what, exactly âpleasureâ (German: Lust) means for Freud. At the end of the day, is âpleasureâ 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 Freudâs notion of pleasure relate, on the one hand, to its apparent opposite, AKA âunpleasureâ (German: Unlust), and to the âreality principleâ 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 âhallucinatory satisfactionsâ in general? Plus: what Freudâs theories of pleasure miss and other analytic thinkers donât (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 Miltonâs Paradise Lost!
Rebeccaâs 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 youâve 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, Patrick, and Dan sit down for a postgame analysis of Luca Guadagninoâs new film âChallengersâ, a torrid tale of a trio whose shared passion is tennis â and who would rather spend their days on the court than simply go to throuples therapy. The conversation ranges from tennis to desire to how desire is the desire of the Other and what exactly that means. Along the way, they also get into triangulation, betrayal, undecidable endings, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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 -
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 Freudâs calls for âpsychotherapy for the peopleâ 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 clinicâs theoretical contributions, from the notion of âclass unconsciousnessâ to âsocial neurosis,â 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 ârepeat with a differenceâ; and more.
Kevinâs article, âBroke Psychoanalysis: In Memory of Harlemâs Lafargue Clinicâ is here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/broke-psychoanalysis
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
In the final installment of the Fliess Extracts portion of the Standard Edition, we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. These last letters see Freud really feeling himself as a stylist â and, not coincidentally, ruminating about masturbation, sexual dysfunction, and his mounting frustration with his interlocutor. We discuss the disintegrating Freud-Fliess friendship; an adorable dream from 1Âœ year-old Anna Freud; primate analogies, embodied metaphors, and noses turned up, turned down, and turned away; censorship both by âRussiansâ and the Stracheys; horrifying case studies and salacious gossip; and whether Freudâs much-trumpeted âself-analysisâ would have ever been possible without a overdetermined transference with his nose-besotted friend.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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 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 âpost-â in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when it comes to what is ânormalâ 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: Lebanonâs 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 livingâan 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 youâve 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. -
Abby and Patrick are joined by academic, journalist, and critic Sara Marcus, author of the 2023 book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. After recalling their own experiences of political letdowns â infantile, adolescent, and all-too-recent â they explore how Saraâs notion of disappointment as âuntimely desireâ involves something other than disillusionment or a loss of faith. Rather, as Marcus explains, disappointment involves an ongoing relationship towards an object, and can be a simultaneous opportunity for mourning, determination, creativity, and more. They unpack experiences of such disappointment across the twentieth century, tracking in particular their musical and audio archives â from the âSorrow Songsâ studied by W.E.B. DuBois to the exquisite nonverbals of Lead Belly to the monologues and Tracy Chapman bootlegs recorded by the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz. And they also get into the traps of utopianism, Melanie Klein, and the possibility of a âgood enoughâ political subjectivity, with cameos by Fleetwood Mac, Bon Jovi, Peter Paul & Mary, and more along the way.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
While Abbyâs 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, itâs a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patrick itâs also something else â at once a symptom, a product of underlying anxieties, and a fantasy, a story thatâs as revealing in what it sets out to portray explicitly as in what it obscures or avoids. And so, after walking through the filmâs plot and visual grammar (spoiler alert: there are spoilers after 1:05:00), they turn to the recurrent invocations of looming âcivil warâ in American discourse. How do our fantasies â and not just Garlandâs â relate to the actual and âofficialâ 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, whatâs is and isnât imaginable in terms of a âcivil war,â 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 â 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 youâve 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 lost her voice, so we're unlocking a favorite from behind the paywall! We'll be back next week with more Wild Analysis followed by an interview with the brilliant Sara Marcus on her book Political Disappointment.
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Behind the safety of the paywall, we get worked up about trauma as a trope in some of the most influential media franchises of recent decades: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvelâs Avengers, and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe in general. We talk about the device of traumatizing protagonists in lieu of character or organic plot development; irony that isnât actually ironic, quippy banter, genre pastiche, and different versions of postmodernism; Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman; recent popular discourse around the use of the idea of trauma and its underlying politics (if any); and why we hate âresilienceâ when itâs praised by exploitative institutions and demanded by life under late capitalism in general.
The excellent piece by Danielle Carr that we discuss is here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trauma-bessel-van-der-kolk-the-body-keeps-the-score-profile.html
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
In the latest installment of the Standard Edition â and our penultimate episode on the Freud-Fliess letters! â we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We ask what âphantasyâ is as opposed to our everyday senses of the word âfantasy,â and then embark on Freudâs catalog of his and his patientsâ many fantasies, which involve everything from mushrooms to abortions to compulsive gift wrapping. As we see, Freud is clearly struggling, and not just with the question of how fantasies in general relate to memories, conscious or otherwise: he's confronting some difficult material from his own dreams and self-analysis. These anxieties have everything to do with paternity and sexual violence, with Freudâs own father and with Freud as a father â and they lead him to turn, for the first time, to the myth of Oedipus.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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 Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. In our conversation, Ajay breaks down competing left- and right-wing versions of climate ârealismâ and how fantasy, cynicism, and opportunism explain the gaps between carbon goals in treaties, optimistic projections, and the grim facts on the ground. But as Ajay argues, contemporary capitalism mines far more than just fossil fuels: it taps psychic resources, too. Drawing on Fanon, a major influence on his work, Ajay explains how material and libidinal forces conspire to ensnare us in an âextractive circuit,â how the packaging of âresilienceâ mystifies exploitation, and how exhaustion itself might serve as a political force and touchstone for solidarity.
The chapter on resilience we reference is here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/sick-and-tired-chaudhary
The Exhausted of the Earth is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-exhausted-of-earth-politics-in-a-burning-world-ajay-singh-chaudhary/19992842
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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, Patrick, and Dan take on Denis Villeneuveâs Dune Parts 1 and 2, Frank Herbertâs 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 booksâ tales of intrigue and galactic power politics, and Dan walks through Villeneuveâs process for translating the original texts to film. As becomes clear, Villeneuveâs adaptations have involved some ideologically suggestive erasures and narrative choices, including the elimination of âjihadâ from the Fremen vocabulary, the creation of a âfundamentalistâ tendency within the Fremen, and the characterization of Zendayaâs Chani as a âmoderate rebelâ standing against them. All these considerations and more bring our hosts to reflect on the political context of Herbertâs original books, the ideological contours of Villeneuveâs 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, âBRAAAM!â: The Sound That Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack,â https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-soundtracks/
Aaron Bady, âDune Two Little,â 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 youâve 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 Sophie Lewis and writer and psychotherapist M.E. OâBrien to discuss their recent books on family abolition, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. They discuss the roots of âabolitionâ as a philosophical concept, why it doesnât simply mean âdestruction,â and the historical relationship of family abolition to movements for police and prison abolition. Turning to the âfamily formâ itself, they juxtapose the family as an abstract social ideal with the actual history of the nuclear family as an institution fundamentally related to the political economies of property accumulation, slavery, and settler colonialism, and more. They explore how contemporary resistances to the mere phrase âfamily abolitionâ can reflect an investment in fantasy over and against the social realities of the family as a site of violence, abuse, and labor that is rendered invisible and even disposable. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, they unpack how questioning the family as a form can in fact catalyze liberatory and even life-saving modes of care and solidarity from the austerity-ridden cores of Western social democracies to Gaza and beyond.
Sophie Lewisâs books are available here:
Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation: https://bookshop.org/p/books/abolish-the-family-a-manifesto-for-care-and-liberation-sophie-lewis/17862950Full Surrogacy Now: https://bookshop.org/p/books/full-surrogacy-now-feminism-against-family-sophie-lewis/12024545?ean=9781786637291
M.E. OâBrienâs books are available here:
Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/family-abolition-capitalism-and-the-communizing-of-care-m-e-o-brien/17561686
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, with Eman Abdelhadi: https://bookshop.org/p/books/everything-for-everyone-an-oral-history-of-the-new-york-commune-2052-2072-eman-abdelhadi/18166819
Other relevant articles:
Sophie Lewis, âCovid-19 is Straining the Concept of the Family. Letâs Break It.â https://www.thenation.com/article/society/family-covid-care-marriage/
Lewis, âIâll Do The Dishes,â https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/sophie-lewis/i-ll-do-the-dishes
Lewis, âMothering Against Motherhood,â https://haters.noblogs.org/files/2022/03/Mothering-Against-imposed.pdf
M.E. OâBrien, âThe Family Problem, Nowâ: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-family-problem-outro
OâBrien, âTrans Childhoods and the Family Romance,â https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/trans-childhoods
OâBrien, âCommunizing Care,â https://pinko.online/pinko-1/communizing-care
Pinko Magazine: https://pinko.online/
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoana -
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 discuss a number of the letters in the Fliess section of SE Volume 1 with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We examine a complex letter about memory, repression, and what patients do and do not remember; what Freud means by âperversionâ at this point in his writing; the way Freud transforms the question of heredity from a biological to a family-centered matter, and in so doing encounters the effects of we would now call intergenerational trauma; Freudâs obsession with witches and their broomsticks; a swooningly romantic letter to Fliess about Italy, dreams, and telegraphs; and much more.
The (as of yet untranslated) novel Christine cites is Imago, by Carl Spitteler.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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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Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their adventure through Lacanâs mirror stage! They reprise Lacanâs parable of the mirror-besotted baby and tie together the many threads â theoretical, clinical, and philosophical â woven through it. They walk through how Lacan musters evidence for his argument using both cases of pathology (i.e. psychosis) and ânormalâ dreams and fantasies, and how his situating of alienation within the ego puts him at odds with other schools of psychoanalysis, specifically those associated with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. They outline how Lacanâs polemic against âego psychologyâ expands from a critique of contemporary Anglophone psychoanalysis into a broader objection to schemes of social control and ideologies of âa freedom that is never so authentically affirmed as when it is within the walls of a prison.â Does Lacanâs parable suggest any radical potential, and does it open up new ways for thinking about the inevitability, limits, and flexibility of identity claims in our own lives and our historical moment? They confront this question by unpacking the different senses of an âexitâ to the mirror stage, and how Lacanâs essay on the origins of subjectivity relates to the open question of where work of therapy ends and new possibilities of remaking ourselves and the world begin.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107A 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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In a perfect pairing with our ongoing series on Lacan, we come in from the cold and go underground by watching Theodore Flickerâs neglected classic, âThe Presidentâs Analystâ (1967). James Coburn stars as a psychoanalyst drafted to serve as the presidentâs shrink, and who swiftly goes from starstruck to depleted to a fugitive on the run. This satiric romp hit a nerve with the FBI, was censored in post-production, and quickly disappeared from theaters. A loving sendup of psychoanalysis, an acid-addled dramatization of Cold War anxieties, and just a gonzo all-around-good time, the film gives us plenty to talk about, from the paranoic structure of knowledge to the Big Other of surveillance to unorthodox cures for âhostilityâ to J. Edgar Hooverâs secret flirtations with self-analysis and more.Beverly Gageâs biography of J. Edgar Hoover is G-MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
You can listen to Barry McGuireâs âInner-Manipulationsâ (featured in the film) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7F_u9L5X8
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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 -
Our journey through Lacanâs âmirror stageâ continues as the scene before the mirror unfolds into a tragic drama. Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack the many meanings of âidentificationâ and how, for Lacan, the self-identification the baby âassumesâ from the slick image in the mirror offers a template for all subsequent identifications. They also talk about mirrors both literal and metaphorical; biological models, developmental teleologies, and roles we assume; the desire for knowledge; and knowledge as a destination versus knowledge as a process.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
In the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we valiantly soldier through more of the Fliess Extracts section of SE Volume 1 with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We discuss the Freud-Fliess sibling dynamic; a case study of a recently married singer suffering from anxiety that reminds us of âDoraâ in multiple ways, including Freudâs interrogation-style approach to her treatment; why Freudâs women patients keep fleeing analysis; the notion of a symptom as fundamentally a structure of compromise; an early discussion of the idea of âdefenceâ; and Freudâs dream about his dead father. Also: Patrick unexpectedly breaks into an aria.Christine cites Juliet Mitchellâs book Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother: https://bookshop.org/p/books/fratriarchy-the-sibling-trauma-and-the-law-of-the-mother-juliet-mitchell/18705733
Christineâs new book on Chantal Akermanâs La Captive will be out in March, and in the meantime, here is an excerpt (about Akerman and Proust) in The New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/time-unregained-la-captive-chantal-akerman/
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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, 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 Lacanâs biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description of his project as a âreturn to Freudâ; the experience of reading Lacan; frustration, anxiety, the pressure of time, and the logic of the âshort sessionâ; and more. Then they turn to the essay itself, getting granular about Lacanâs relationship to phenomenology (and what that is), his opposition to Descartesâ 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, âPierre Menard, Author of the Quixoteâ in The Garden of Forking Paths
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
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