Episodi
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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 -
Episodi mancanti?
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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 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:
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
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 -
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan are joined by writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman (author of the recent book The Riddles of The Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle) to unpack the dense knots of overdetermination and fantasy that make up the recent rom-com "The Idea of You" (2024). It's a world where Anne Hathaway is a 40-year old divorced mom in mid-life crisis, Nicholas Galitzine is a 24-year heartthrob boy band pop star, and their meet-cute sets off sparks and a whirlwind romance. But if desire truly is the desire of the Other, what happens when the desire of the mother extends to a member of her daughter's favorite boy band? Is there too much incest in this film, or not enough? Plus: rom-com typologies, symptoms that can't be enjoyed, and more.
Plus: If you want more Anna on OU, please check out last week’s episode, in which Abby and Patrick interview her about crosswords, French feminism, and the sexual politics of wordplay!
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, 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 -
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 Freud’s earliest and strangest works: an untitled “psychology for neurologists,” 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 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 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 -
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 Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers”, a torrid tale of a trio whose shared passion is tennis – 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 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 -
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:
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Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
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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 – 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 1½ year-old Anna Freud; primate analogies, embodied metaphors, and noses turned up, turned down, and turned away; censorship both by “Russians” and the Stracheys; horrifying case studies and salacious gossip; and whether Freud’s much-trumpeted “self-analysis” 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 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 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
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