Shows
Ordinary UnhappinessBonus Episode: Martyrdom, Mourning, and the Legacy of Charlie KirkAbby and Patrick share Patrick’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast, hosted by friends of Ordinary Unhappiness Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Patrick, Matt, and Sam process last weekend’s televised memorial service for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The three unpack this overdetermined spectacle with an eye towards questions of theology, politics, narrative, affect, gender, and more. More Know Your Enemy here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a vo...
2025-09-291h 30
Ordinary Unhappiness116: Writing Panic feat. Michael CluneAbby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Michael Clune to discuss his new novel, Pan. It is the story of Nick, a teenage boy living alone with his divorced father in the 1990s Midwest. Precocious but troubled, he begins to suffer from panic attacks, obsessional symptoms, and more. Nick’s voice narrates these and other experiences with rich texture, yet his internal monologue steadily pushes the reader to question where and how the tumultuous life of a normal teenager ends and pathology begins. Discussing Pan thus allows Michael, Abby, and Patrick to talk through some elemental questions. How do we...
2025-09-271h 37
Ordinary Unhappiness115: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 6: Studies on Hysteria, Part VI: Katharina TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick read the shortest, strangest, and arguably saddest entry in the Studies on Hysteria – the case of “Katharina.” This case history sees Freud on Alpine vacation and approached by a local girl suffering a shortness of breath and episodes of anxiety, symptoms that have nothing to with altitude and everything to do with sordid goings-on in her family. Proceeding in ad-hoc, hypnosis-free dialogue, Freud traces the roots of Katharina’s distress back to her witnessing – and suffer...
2025-09-2007 min
Ordinary Unhappiness114: Fashion and Psychoanalysis feat. Valerie SteeleAbby and Patrick welcome Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, to discuss her new book, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, and the exhibition of the same name that opened this week. What does “fashion” mean, and why are so many psychoanalysts and cultural gatekeepers so resistant to think about the topic critically? How do society’s codes of dress reflect logics of identity, especially when it comes to gender, and how are those norms policed – and subverted? How does clothing mediate our first-person experience of our own...
2025-09-131h 22
Ordinary Unhappiness113: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part III TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Dan, and Patrick conclude their viewing of Sophie Fiennes’ and Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). It’s the last stretch of the film, the part where Žižek tries to bring everything together, and it thus gives Abby, Dan, and Patrick a chance to assess the Guide in its entirety. How compelling is the film’s grand unifying theory of subjectivity, lack, and the work of film as a medium that teaches us “ho...
2025-09-0605 min
Ordinary Unhappiness112: Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy feat. Josh WestAbby and Patrick are joined by Dr. Josh West to talk about some remarkable developments in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in Australia. Josh explains to Abby and Patrick how the clinical trials he describes are better understood as an experiment in sustained psychotherapy rather than just testing a new drug, and how that experiment has profound psychoanalytic and psychodynamic salience. From the process of patient preparation to the details of “dose day” to the work of subsequent sessions of “integration,” Josh walks Abby and Patrick through how he and other clinicians do their work, and how they tackle the unique demands of maint...
2025-08-301h 51
Ordinary Unhappiness111: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 5: Studies on Hysteria, Part V: Miss Lucy R. TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick turn to the next of Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria: the story of Miss Lucy R. It’s a short treatment – nine weeks – and an even shorter read – fifteen pages – and so the story of this English governess haunted by phantom smells often goes neglected. But as Abby and Patrick explain, her case marks a key shift in Freud’s clinical practice (away from hypnosis) and a succinct demonstration of his core therapeutic te...
2025-08-1604 min
Ordinary Unhappiness110: Wild Analysis: Sex and the City TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick mark the announcement of the end of And Just Like That... by giving it, and Sex and the City, a psychoanalytic send-off. From the durable popularity of the original series to the ambivalent comfort of hate-watching the spin-off, the two reflect on what made the franchise so influential, its role in the history of early “prestige TV,” and its place in popular memory. Abby and Patrick watch some classic episodes, unpack the now famous char...
2025-08-0911 min
Ordinary Unhappiness109: Somatics, Politics, and Practice feat. Sumitra RajkumarAbby and Patrick are joined by somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” and other exercises to explore histories of “shaping,” undo habitual patterns of embodiment, address trauma, and cultivate a capacity to remain centered and present...
2025-07-261h 26
Ordinary UnhappinessEpisode 108: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 4: Studies on Hysteria, Part IV: Frau Emmy von N. TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick examine the case study of “Frau Emmy von N.” From the perspective of both clinical technique and the history of psychoanalysis, it is primarily significant as an artifact from when Freud was still thinking in terms of associationist psychology and using hypnosis in treatment sessions. In terms of narrative, it seems, at least superficially, to be just another example of “hysterical neurosis” as encountered in the story of Anna O. Yet as Abby and Patrick...
2025-07-1919 min
Ordinary UnhappinessEpisode 107: On Abjection TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does...
2025-07-1204 min
Ordinary Unhappiness104: Manufacturing Homelessness feat. Brian GoldstoneAbby and Patrick welcome journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone to discuss his new book, There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. A devastating and essential read, There is No Place for Us tells the stories of five Atlanta families as they join the ranks of an ever-growing class of Americans: the unhoused. Against the grain of common misconceptions about homelessness, the trajectory of these families reflects no errors or blameworthy mistakes on their part, nor still does their situation represent any kind of exception to the rule. In fact, as Brian explains, their stories e...
2025-06-141h 50
Ordinary Unhappiness103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah MillerSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Peruvian Amazon for two weeks of psychedelic treatment under a prominent indigenous shaman. Sarah relates and reflects on her experience, her relationship with the sh...
2025-06-0706 min
Ordinary Unhappiness102: Reparations, Responsibility, and Climate Justice feat. Olúfẹ́mi TáíwòAbby and Patrick welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on the occasion of the new edition of his book Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Reconsidering Reparations is a magisterial work that ties together global history, data from economics and public health, philosophy, and more, and dramatically cuts through many of our moment’s thorniest debates over identity, responsibility, and political change. Together, Abby, Patrick, and Olúfẹ́mi contextualize and walk through the book’s core arguments and their implications for audiences both psychoanalytic and otherwise. Beginning with...
2025-05-241h 39
Ordinary Unhappiness100: Mailbag: An Embarrassment of RichesAbby, Patrick, and Dan mark one hundred episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness! They start by looking back on the show’s run so far, and what they’ve gotten from engaging with psychoanalysis as a living body of knowledge, as a corpus of classic texts, as a way of seeing the world, and more. They then turn to the episode’s primary focus: a mailbag chock full of questions, fantasies, and desires from Ordinary Unhappiness listeners who have made the show possible. These include questions about therapeutic modalities fast and slow, the history of psychoanalytic theories about autism, the place of que...
2025-05-101h 30
Ordinary Unhappiness99: Wild Analysis: The White Lotus feat Sam Adler-Bell TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by returning guest Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and columnist at New York magazine, to talk about the HBO series The White Lotus. From plotlines involving taboos like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist for the psychoanalytic mill, and Abby, Patrick, and Sam tackle all these with gusto (and plenty of spoilers). In ad...
2025-05-0304 min
Ordinary Unhappiness98: From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and Abuses of Pop Psychology feat. Lily ScherlisAbby and Patrick are joined by writer and artist Lily Scherlis for a provocative reflection on the ideological subtexts, historical contexts, and real-world value of some of our moment’s most bandied-about concepts and terms. Beginning with her 2023 essay for Parapraxis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have proliferated across popular culture and have become ubiquitous in the workplace, in bestsellers, on social media, and in our most intimate interactions. What exactly are “boundaries,” when did having (or not...
2025-04-261h 47
Ordinary Unhappiness97: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 2: Studies on Hysteria, Part II: Anna O.Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria: Fräulein Anna O. It is a paradoxical and deeply overdetermined text. This troubled young woman was a patient of Breuer’s, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, and an associationist model of the mind. But this famous case can also righ...
2025-04-1903 min
Ordinary Unhappiness94: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 1: Pearls of Suffering: Studies on Hysteria, Part I TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick begin the Standard Edition Volume II. Their first text is Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria (1895), specifically its opening sections. First, they unpack the layered and suggestive series of Prefaces to successive editions of the book, revealing how each iteration charts the differing personal, professional, and theoretical trajectories of the two authors over time, and how they reveal Freud’s distinctive approach to memorializing his own intellectual development. Then they turn to the...
2025-03-2203 min
Ordinary Unhappiness91: Feminism, Antagonism, and Solidarity feat. Sophie LewisAbby and Patrick welcome author Sophie Lewis to discuss her latest book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Together, they explore the history of a variety of feminisms, self-identified and otherwise, that can justifiably provoke anxiety and even rejection in those invested in feminism as an emancipatory concept and project. Their conversation ranges from nineteenth-century activists who saw the rights of women as entailing the right to own slaves to those whose visions of abolition were inextricable from logics of racist imperialism; from twentieth-century eugenicists to prohibitionists; and from today’s transphobic demagogues to the pinkwashing boosters of...
2025-02-221h 37
Ordinary Unhappiness90: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 12: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 3 TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan close out The Project for a Scientific Psychology - and the first volume of the Standard Edition - in its entirety! First, they unpack the key steps of Freud's quantitative argument" from the nature of "Q" to Freud's proposal of different kinds of "neurones" to how (in his view) the whole apparatus works to discharge built-up energy. Then, they turn to the qualitative half of Freud's account, which includes: how Freud relates the...
2025-02-1504 min
Ordinary Unhappiness89: Breath, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Jamieson WebsterAbby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster to discuss her brand-new book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, out in March 2025 from Catapult. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that traverses clinical, social, and political domains while remaining firmly grounded in one of the most basic prerequisites for human life: the activity of breathing. In what ways does the history of psychoanalysis represent a repression of the fact of breathing? How do analytic accounts from Freud to Winnicott to Bion to Lacan variously take up or downplay the necessity of respiration? How does thinking about breath im...
2025-02-081h 08
Ordinary Unhappiness88: On Hate and Aggression, Part IV TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott’s ideas about hate and aggression to work. What everyday situations, personal experiences, and institutional practices get clarified when we consider them as reflecting displaced feelings of hate? What do popular beliefs about hate look like when seen in Winnicottian terms, and how might familiar ideologies actually rely on channeling aggression while disavowing hate and even championing values like justice, family, and love? The conversation leads Abby, Patrick, and Dan to co...
2025-02-0102 min
Ordinary UnhappinessEpisode 87: On Hate and Aggression, Part IIIAbby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their close reading of Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” unpacking and tying together its three biggest arguments. First, there’s the connection Winnicott draws between the therapeutic encounter and childhood development: more than just an analogy, these two environments are directly connected, and in fraught ways. Second, there’s the link he draws between early experiences of “deprivation,” counter-transferential enactments in treatment, and the struggles of certain patients to establish a stable, safe sense of selfhood. Third, and most provocatively, is Winnicott’s articulation of how feelings of aggression and even hatred naturally arise not just f...
2025-01-251h 46
Ordinary Unhappiness86: On Hate and Aggression, Part II TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan start close-reading Winnicott’s famous paper, “Hate in the Counter-Transference” (1949, originally delivered as a paper two years earlier). They start with its place and time, situating Winnicott’s work within the context of post-war Britain. This was a clinical landscape where a tiny number of analysts stood apart from a psychiatric establishment that favored methods that Winnicott despised – above all, lobotomies. They then consider the kinds of cases Winnicott’s paper takes up and consider...
2025-01-1803 min
Ordinary Unhappiness85: On Hate and Aggression, Part IAbby, Patrick, and Dan take up a topic that couldn’t be more relevant to the contemporary zeitgeist – aggression – as theorized by an unlikely source: the British analyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. What did this beloved and famously gentle figure have to say about aggression, and our taboos and fantasies surrounding it? Where does aggression come from, and what is its function developmentally? And what role can acknowledging feelings of “hate” play in the family, in psychotherapy, and in everyday life? To answer all these questions, this episode – the first in a three-part series – sees Abby, Patrick, and Dan sketch out...
2025-01-111h 35
Ordinary Unhappiness84: New Year Vibe Check: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go OnSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan get together for a looking-forward, looking-backward session surveying the year that was and assessing the year ahead. It’s a suitably ambivalent, Janus-faced assessment of political developments, cultural milestones, new hobbies, simmering dreads, and bold resolutions. Plus: the dream of Lacanian Finance Grifting.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-084...
2025-01-0411 min
Ordinary Unhappiness83: Religion and Neurosis feat. Nathan Rein TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick sit down with religious studies scholar and Reformation historian Nathan Rein to discuss Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). This is Freud’s first extended treatment of religion as such, with a particular emphasis on ritual, and, in classic Freudian style, sees him provocatively linking individual symptoms with broader cultural formations. But what does Freud mean by “religion” anyway, in relation to his Jewish heritage on the one hand and his overwhelmingly Catholic Austrian mil...
2024-12-2109 min
Ordinary Unhappiness82: Effing the Ineffable feat. Simon CritchleyAbby and Patrick are joined by philosopher Simon Critchley to discuss his new book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. They discuss how, for Critchley, mysticism represents "a way of thinking about existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” Exploring the book’s survey of key figures and texts in the Western Christian tradition, the three unpack how accounts of mystical experiences can challenge our assumptions about the past, defy traditional philosophical ideas of subjectivity, and suggest new ways of thinking about the conditions of everyday life in the present, all with rich psychoanalytic implications. Thei...
2024-12-141h 26
Ordinary Unhappiness81: Mailbag Part II: Readings and Misreadings TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for different people; the differing things we may find moving intellectually or emotionally; how public engagements with thinkers and traditions can variously move conversations forward or sabotage them from the outset; and more. They start by talking more about specific analytic thinkers, taking stock of listener re...
2024-12-0706 min
Ordinary Unhappiness80: On Fantasy feat. Jordan SteinAbby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious? How do fantasies straddle the gaps between the real world as we understand it, scenarios we know to be impossible, and things we try, nonetheless, to envision otherwise? How is fantasy different from desire? And above all, how what does fantasy reflect our understandings of other...
2024-11-301h 15
Ordinary Unhappiness79: Mailbag Episode: Resistances (Part One) TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic perspective can offer in grappling with communication dynamics in the workplace, especially across differentials in power. What does it mean for an employee “to be heard,” and how does that relate to what management can tolerate hearing – or substantively change? But above all, t...
2024-11-2303 min
Ordinary Unhappiness78: Reactionary Fantasies: On “Cancel Culture” and Moral Panic feat. Adrian DaubAbby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global. Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints about so-called “political correctness,” and in what ways is it different? Why do broad narratives about getting canceled catch on, and what does it mean that anecdotes are so central to their virality? Why...
2024-11-161h 33
Ordinary UnhappinessUNLOCKED: 49: Wild Analysis: Civil WarWe're off this weekend, but here's a thematically appropriate episode from earlier this year. Come find us on Patreon for our recent political coverage, The Standard Edition series, and more Wild Analysis. We'll be back next Saturday.---While Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild analysis. The movie is Civil War (2024), and, to hear director Alex Garland tell it, it’s a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patr...
2024-11-091h 54
Ordinary Unhappiness77: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Post-Election Processing TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us navigate moments like these. Plus: what is "hope," actually, and what do we mean when we ask for it?Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to te...
2024-11-0709 min
Ordinary Unhappiness76: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Floating Signifiers TeaserIt’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 th...
2024-11-0209 min
Ordinary Unhappiness75: Psychosocial Realism feat. Daniel LaveryAbby 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...
2024-10-261h 17
Ordinary Unhappiness74: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part II TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan continue their watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does the impossibility of the sexual relationship mean that the inverse of the sexual relationship finds expression precisely in having sex?Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve tra...
2024-10-1904 min
Ordinary Unhappiness73: Romance Was Never Real: From Courtly Love to the Rise of the Fuckboy feat. Sabrina StringsAbby 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...
2024-10-121h 29
Ordinary Unhappiness72: Track Changes feat. Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of n+1Abby 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 publ...
2024-10-051h 38
Ordinary Unhappiness71: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Proxy Battles TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The key theme is proxies – candidates standing in for one another, gestures that say one thing while meaning another, scapegoats, displacements, and more. They unpack how such substitutions can function to resolve contradictions and disguise continuities, involving not only the candidates, but also ideologies, coalitions, history, and ongoing events.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or...
2024-10-0319 min
Ordinary Unhappiness70: Wild Analysis: Heathers TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan discuss the cult classic “Heathers” (Michael Lehmann, 1988). This coming-of-age satire offers them a chance to talk about high school movies as a genre, developmental milestones, and why grown adults are so obsessed with media about teenage life (and death). The movie also gives the three a through-the-looking glass meditation on what’s changed and what hasn’t since the movie’s filming (above all, a massive uptick in school shootings) and what is or isn’t c...
2024-09-2805 min
Ordinary Unhappiness69: Truth, Lies, and Conspiracy Theories feat. Liz FranczakAbby, 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...
2024-09-142h 05
Ordinary Unhappiness68: Gerontophallocracy 2024: The September Debate: Domination and Other Pleasures TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 Saturday...
2024-09-1204 min
Ordinary Unhappiness67: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Lethal Mothers and Try-Hard Sons feat. Sam Adler-Bell TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby 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 favo...
2024-09-0713 min
Ordinary Unhappiness66: Teens, Cops, and Spies: The Varieties of Hysterical Experience feat. Dan TaberskiAbby 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...
2024-08-311h 24
Ordinary Unhappiness65: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 11: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 2 TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 yo...
2024-08-2406 min
Ordinary Unhappiness64: Grief, Loss, and Love feat. Sarah JaffeAbby 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...
2024-08-171h 44
Ordinary Unhappiness62: Lacan and Psychosis in the City feat. Loren DentAbby 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 p...
2024-08-032h 07
Ordinary Unhappiness61: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Reality Testing and Temporal Distortion (It’s So Joever) TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby 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 dea...
2024-07-2303 min
Ordinary Unhappiness60: Love and Work feat. Joseph Earl ThomasAbby 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...
2024-07-201h 40
Ordinary Unhappiness59: Gerontophallocracy 2024: The June Debate TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe 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 o...
2024-07-0102 min
Ordinary Unhappiness58: Wild Analysis: The Idea of You feat. Anna Shechtman TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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...
2024-06-2902 min
Ordinary Unhappiness57: “Do More Crosswords!” The Sexual Politics of Language feat. Anna ShechtmanAbby 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...
2024-06-221h 30
Ordinary Unhappiness56: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 10: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 1 TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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.
2024-06-1505 min
Ordinary Unhappiness55: What is the Pleasure Principle? feat. Rebecca Ariel PorteAbby 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 pleasu...
2024-06-011h 50
Ordinary Unhappiness54: Wild Analysis: Challengers TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for 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.
2024-05-2502 min
Ordinary Unhappiness53: Broke Psychoanalysis: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic feat. Kevin DuongPatrick 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 t...
2024-05-181h 34
Ordinary Unhappiness51: Psychoanalysis and Gaza feat. Jess GhannamAbby 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...
2024-05-041h 23
Ordinary Unhappiness50: Political Disappointment feat. Sara MarcusAbby 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 – infantile, adolescent, and all-too-recent – they explore how Sara’s notion of disappointment as “untimely desire” 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...
2024-04-271h 12
Ordinary Unhappiness49: Wild Analysis: Civil War TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWhile Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild analysis. The movie is Civil War (2024), and, to hear director Alex Garland tell it, it’s a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patrick it’s also something else – at once a symptom, a product of underlying anxieties, and a fantasy, a story that’s a...
2024-04-2005 min
Ordinary Unhappiness47: Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Problem with Resilience feat. Ajay Singh ChaudharyAbby 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 “realism” 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 forc...
2024-03-302h 07
Ordinary UnhappinessEpisode 46: Wild Analysis: Dune TeaserSubscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan take on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Parts 1 and 2, Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, and a loud noise that goes [BRAAAAM]. After a crash overview of the franchise universe and a synopsis of the series plot, we unpack our various investments in the original Frank Herbert source material (Abby has many, Dan, some, Patrick, none) and our reactions to the latest film (hated it, loved it, and indifferent, respectively). Abby addresses the centrality of inte...
2024-03-2303 min
Ordinary Unhappiness45: The Fantasy of Family and the Meaning of Family Abolition feat. Sophie Lewis and M.E. O’BrienAbby and Patrick welcome writer Sophie Lewis and writer and psychotherapist M.E. O’Brien 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 “abolition” as a philosophical concept, why it doesn’t simply mean “destruction,” and the historical relationship of family abolition to movements for police and prison abolition. Turning to the “family form” 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 p...
2024-03-162h 03
Ordinary Unhappiness43: The Mirror Crack’d: The Mirror Stage, Part IIIAbby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their adventure through Lacan’s mirror stage! They reprise Lacan’s parable of the mirror-besotted baby and tie together the many threads – theoretical, clinical, and philosophical – woven through it. They walk through how Lacan musters evidence for his argument using both cases of pathology (i.e. psychosis) and “normal” 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 Lacan’s polemic against “ego psychology” expands from a critique of contemporary An...
2024-03-021h 15
Ordinary Unhappiness41: Identification and Misrecognition: The Mirror Stage, Part IIOur journey through Lacan’s “mirror stage” continues as the scene before the mirror unfolds into a tragic drama. Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack the many meanings of “identification” and how, for Lacan, the self-identification the baby “assumes” 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 you’ve traversed the...
2024-02-101h 03
Ordinary Unhappiness39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part IAbby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing conversation includes Lacan’s biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description of his project as a “return to Freud”; the experience of reading Lacan; frustration, anxiety, the pressure of time, and the lo...
2024-01-271h 53
Ordinary UnhappinessUNLOCKED: 25: Wild Analysis: BarbieAbby and Patrick are traveling, so enjoy this unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWe talk about one of the biggest cinematic releases of the year: Barbie. We get into the film’s gender politics and vision of sexual difference; dolls, children’s play, and various forms of playfulness; dreams both literal and metaphoric; feminist utopian literature; how this movie is actually all about Ken; and why we read Barbie as a reaction formation against increasing public consciousness of gender beyond the binary....
2024-01-131h 27
Ordinary Unhappiness36: Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work feat. Brian Ngo-SmithAbby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith, President of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work (AAPCSW). Focusing on his paper “This Couch Has Bed Bugs: On the Homelessness of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Homelessness,” they talk about psychotherapy with unhoused clients and tensions between the priorities of psychoanalysis versus social work, the desire to help, and our society’s hatred of dependence. Turning to D.W. Winnicott’s ideas about hate in countertransference, they explore how unacknowledged hatred by caregivers for their patients manifests not only interpersonally but also in institutional behavior...
2023-12-301h 36
Ordinary Unhappiness34: Fatphobia and Moral Feelings feat. Kate ManneAbby and Patrick welcome philosopher Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020), and the forthcoming Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (2024). They discuss our moral emotions – shame, contempt, disgust, abjection – and what they signal; the ideological ranking of bodies into specific hierarchies, the contingencies of when and how fatness has been valued, and the historical links between contemporary fatphobia and anti-Blackness; how discourse around fatness involves logics of scapegoating, victim-blaming, the mystifications of capitalism, anxieties about pleasure, and fantasies of self-mastery; fat activism and the insights of disability studies; and the nece...
2023-12-161h 37
Ordinary Unhappiness33: The Problem with Empathy feat. Jade E. DavisAbby and Patrick welcome Jade E. Davis, author of the new book The Other Side of Empathy. They discuss Jade’s critique of naïve notions of “empathy” and what she calls “empathy culture.” They examine the ways empathy can flatten suffering, demand particular performances of suffering, and serve fantasies that there’s one “right way” to suffer and that the Other can always be assimilated into the self. Other topics include Davis’ genealogy of the term “empathy” and how its history is more recent than many might think; the fundamentally colonial aspects of the empathetic gaze; human zoos and some of their conte...
2023-11-251h 27
Ordinary Unhappiness29: Gender, Trauma, and Psychoanalytic Politics feat. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann PellegriniAbby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou and psychoanalyst and academic Ann Pellegrini to discuss their new co-authored book, Gender Without Identity. They talk about the genesis of the manuscript, from its beginnings in a painful case of child analysis to its distressing reception by psychoanalytic gatekeepers and “repressive forces within psychoanalysis itself.” They explore the difficulties queer and trans patients have faced in seeking psychoanalytic treatment; the resistances of institutional psychoanalysis when it comes to theorizing queer subjectivities; the struggles of queer and trans analysts themselves; and the implication of psychoanalysis in broader moral panics and political mobilizations agai...
2023-10-281h 24
Ordinary Unhappiness27: From HIV to COVID: Virality, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Steven ThrasherAbby and Patrick welcome Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. We discuss Steven’s singular career trajectory (from Saturday Night Live to The Village Voice to academia); the difference between “having” or “owning” a body versus being a body; why pandemics are never just about biology, but implicate social realities, shared fantasies, and libidinal economy; the notion of the “viral underclass”; the changing landscape of HIV/AIDS criminalization laws and the case of Michael Johnson, a young Black man prosecuted for the “reckless transmission” of HIV; the origins, myths, and baggage of the ter...
2023-10-141h 41
Ordinary UnhappinessUNLOCKED: 05: Wild Analysis: Mailbag - Dream InterpretationUnlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick take your calls and talk about dream interpretation, professional ethics, and visions of therapy for the world we live in versus the world we want to inhabit. (They are also unexpectedly haunted by the example of the fantasy of wanting to kill your boss.)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
2023-09-301h 24
Ordinary Unhappiness24: Drugs and the Death Drive feat. Ben FongAbby and Patrick welcome academic and writer Ben Fong, author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge as well as Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism. They discuss the many different reasons people take drugs; American exceptionalism with respect to drug consumption; how drug policy and drug discourse is never really just about drugs; what the distinction between legal and illegal drugs both illuminates and obscures; the fundamental fantasies that accompany drug prohibition as well as the fantasies that surround particular drugs themselves; the...
2023-09-161h 24
Ordinary Unhappiness23: Puns, Jokes, and Serious People feat. Ben WurgaftAbby and Patrick welcome intellectual historian, writer, editor, and noted wordsmith Ben Wurgaft. They talk about Ben’s experiences with long-term analysis and discuss ways of accessing low-cost options for psychoanalysis before collectively digging into Freud’s 1905 book on humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious – especially Freud’s jokes about beggars, millionaires, and salmon mayonnaise. They get into Freud’s hydraulic model of jokes as a release of pressure; Freud’s obsession with Jewish humor; what makes jokes funny, what makes them pleasurable, and what emotions they can express; the relationship of jokes to play, childhood, and the process...
2023-09-091h 30
Ordinary Unhappiness22: Realism and Other Romances feat. Grace LaveryAbby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Grace Lavery to discuss her new book Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. They discuss Grace’s relationship to psychoanalysis; her uses of Freud and Freudianism for both theoretical and pragmatic political purposes and in service of bodily freedom; her interpretation of Freudian concepts like penis envy and the castration complex; her writing in both Pleasure and Efficacy and her memoir Please Miss on changing sexes as an empirical fact; the stakes of calling things “real” or “authentic” versus dismissing them as fake, try-hard, or otherwise affected...
2023-09-021h 29
Ordinary Unhappiness20: A Dangerous Method: Sabina Spielrein, Carl Jung, Otto GrossAbby, Patrick, and Dan watch David Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which dramatizes the complex relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They discuss Freud and Jung’s fraught relationship and eventual break; Jung’s relationship with Spielrein in life and on film; Spielrein’s biography and her pioneering work as a psychoanalytic theorist and clinician in her own right; other key figures in the development of psychoanalysis, including Eugen Bleuler and Otto Gross (especially Gross’s commitments to anarchism and his concept of mutual analysis); the role of Zu...
2023-08-121h 42
Ordinary Unhappiness17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica SiegelAbby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in Parapraxis. Nica tells our listeners about Frantz Fanon’s life, situating both his personal journey and his writing within the context of his work as a clinician and clinical theorist. As Nica recounts, Fanon’s clinical writings were only recently collected and translated in the 2018 volume Alienation and Freedom, which has ushered in a renaissance in Fanon studies in the Anglopho...
2023-07-221h 31
Ordinary Unhappiness16: Fantasy, Fascism, and Technology: From the Frankfurt School to Silicon Valley feat. Moira WeigelAbby, Patrick, and Dan welcome writer, critic, and scholar Moira Weigel, co-founder of Logic magazine and co-editor with Ben Tarnoff of Voices of the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do And How They Do It. Moira introduces listeners to the history and key insights of the Frankfurt School in advance of a (free!) symposium this weekend in New York examining its legacy a hundred years later. They discuss Theodor Adorno’s work on “the authoritarian personality” and talk about personality types and social categories as they are constructed everywhere from astrology columns to the speeches of demagogues to Fac...
2023-07-121h 29
Ordinary Unhappiness15: Diagnosis and Identity: Mailbag Episode!Abby, Patrick, and Dan take your calls! They spend the bulk of the episode on a fascinating question about whether or not it is important to know your own psychic structure. They consider the relationship between identity and diagnosis; how theoretical language can help an individual feel named or misnamed; whether truth or meaning matters more in the language of diagnosis;; bibliotherapy and why they’re constantly giving book recommendations; self-diagnosis versus external diagnosis; the relationship of diagnostic and other categories to suffering, healing, and psychic change; and diagnosis and its relation to material conditions. The next three calls in...
2023-07-081h 31
Ordinary Unhappiness13: The Journalist and the Analyst: On Janet Malcolm feat. Sam Adler-BellAbby and Patrick welcome journalist and critic Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Dissent magazine’s Know Your Enemy podcast. They talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, th...
2023-06-241h 49
Ordinary Unhappiness12: From Parties to Projective Identification: Why is Group Life so Hard? feat. Christine SmallwoodAbby and Patrick welcome novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind. They discuss the novel’s protagonist Dorothy (who hires a second therapist to talk about her relationship with her first therapist) and Christine’s approach to psychoanalysis as a framework for thinking about everyday life. Then they turn to Wilfred Bion’s landmark 1961 book Experiences in Groups. They discuss the ways that group life and group experiences are frustrating and emotionally intense, from group chats to reading groups to classrooms to parties to military maneuvers; Bion’s notion of the various “basic assumption...
2023-06-102h 14Ordinary Unhappiness11: Succession: Oedipus and FailsonsAbby, Patrick, and Dan get into the great Oedipal drama of our times: Succession. They discuss a ludicrously capacious number of versions of the Oedipus story; the development of the Oedipus complex throughout Freud’s writing; Freud’s notion of the primal father and the band of brothers who gather together to overthrow him; the real-life billionaire primitive accumulation monster dads who want to reverse-age themselves and live forever; Succession’s Oedipal double binds and Oedipal victories; how the show thematizes patrimony, inheritance, and destiny; what it is to have “the phallus” (and why the Roy kids don’t have it); Sh...
2023-06-032h 05Ordinary Unhappiness09: The Pleasure of the Text: The Standard EditionAbby and Patrick introduce a new series: the Standard Edition. That’s right; they’re going to read and discuss the entire Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. In this episode, Abby and Patrick discuss why they’re undertaking this project; the origins of the Standard Edition and the cast of characters who brought it into being, including Ernest Jones, Anna Freud, and James and Alix Strachey; the allure of becoming a completist; the pleasures and surprises of rereading; what a canon is and how it gets created; enticements of and resistances to systematicity; and Freud’...
2023-05-201h 12Ordinary Unhappiness08: Political Economy, Libidinal EconomyAbby puts Patrick on the hot seat to talk psychoanalysis and politics. They discuss how psychoanalytic concepts can help bypass partisan political explanations; the construction of a “we”; identifications and disidentifications with individuals, groups, and social orders; pleasure and the disavowal of pleasure; the church and the military; why more people don’t steal from Target; the rhetoric of how weapons of war “don’t belong on our streets”; why political legitimacy is like clapping for Tinkerbell; repetition compulsion, the death drive, and human disposability; and the concepts that animate Patrick’s writing on gun violence and mass shootings, especially pol...
2023-05-131h 27Ordinary Unhappiness07: Kettle Logic and Family Secrets: The Uncanny, Part IIAbby and Patrick return to Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” as an unconventional path to their real target: the unconscious. They talk about the limits of our rationality; “kettle logic” and how it operates; Freud as a “master of suspicion”; narcissistic wounds; family secrets and intergenerational trauma; and the child as the symptom of the parents.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! 484 775-0107A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer n...
2023-05-061h 18Ordinary Unhappiness06: Unheimlich Maneuver: The Uncanny, Part IAbby, Patrick, and Dan sneak up on the idea of the unconscious by tackling Freud’s concept of the “uncanny,” and its relationship to anxiety, fear, and the “omnipotence of thoughts.” They talk horror movies, doubles and doppelgangers, talking dolls, bleeding trees, Instagram face and the creepiness of mirrors, déjà vu, imaginary friends, ghosts, revenants, repetition, and the enchantment/disenchantment of the world. Part II coming next week!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
2023-04-291h 20Ordinary Unhappiness04: Guess Who’s Back, Back Again (It’s Freud) feat. Hannah Zeavin and Alex ColstonAbby and Patrick welcome Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston, founders of the Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis magazine. The four discuss their paths to psychoanalysis; speculate about why Freud is back (or if he ever really left); and offer copious reading suggestions! Plus, Hannah talks about being both the child of analysts and a historian of psychoanalysis and Alex discusses his status as a “faithless Lacanian” and its implications for clinical practice.https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/Reading suggestions in the order that they were offered:Lisa Appignanesi & John...
2023-04-151h 24Ordinary Unhappiness02: TransferenceAbby, Patrick, and Dan talk about transference in Freud’s essays on analytic technique and at your local bar; what resistance is and how it manifests in different ways; analytic neutrality; what you should say to the friend who keeps getting stuck in the same relationship over and over; why people want to have a beer with the president; and whether any kind of love at all is realHave 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! 484 775-010...
2023-04-081h 36Ordinary Unhappiness01: What is Psychoanalysis?Abby and Patrick talk about the position of “the subject-supposed-to-know” and how they anxiously inhabit it; Anna O., the “talking cure” and the founding of psychoanalysis; and different ways to explain what psychoanalysis is and why it’s impossible for them to think without itHave 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! 484 775-0107A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
2023-04-011h 15
The Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep44: Patrick & Abby Warn of the Biggest Challenges Nonprofits Face in 2021Your organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits to share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick also answers fundraising questions, and most importantly, showcases how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!Ready for 2021? B...
2021-01-0722 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep32: BEST OF EPISODE Patrick and Abby Answer Tough Listener QuestionsYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!You are not...
2020-11-2610 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Episode 30: Patrick & Abby Answer Tough Listener QuestionsYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!"Third-party endorsement is...
2020-11-1908 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep28 Patrick & Abby Answer Tough Listener QuestionsYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!How do you...
2020-11-1210 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep21: Patrick and Abby Answer Tough Listener QuestionsYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!You are not...
2020-10-1509 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep19: Patrick & Abby Talk “5 Day Fundraising Framework”Your organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!Google “5 Day Fundraising Fr...
2020-10-0813 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep13: Patrick and Abby Reflect & Celebrate on Do Good Better Consulting’s 3rd BirthdayYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer! The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!“That Business Plan wen...
2020-09-1715 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep6: “When Events Attack!” Patrick and Abby Share What To Do When Events Go WrongYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!When Events Attack!
2020-08-2018 minThe Official Do Good Better PodcastThe Official Do Good Better Podcast Season 2 Ep4: Our Glossophobia Episode: Public Speaking Tips From Patrick and AbbyYour organization is awesome.But sometimes you want to be even awesomer!The Official Do Good Better Podcast is here to help!Each episode features (fundraising expert, speaker, event creator and author) Patrick Kirby interviewing leaders and champions of small and medium nonprofits share their successes, their impact, and what makes them a unicorn in a field of horses. Patrick will also answer a fundraising question, and most importantly, showcase how you can support these small nonprofits doing great big things!On today’s Pa...
2020-08-1318 min