Ordinary Unhappiness

Sumitra Rajkumar, a somatics practitioner at the Action Lab, joins the conversation to explore how somatics intersects with personal and collective transformation. She describes how somatic practices, distinct from talk therapy, engage the body to address trauma and habitual patterns. Sumitra critiques self-help culture for its apolitical tendencies, emphasizing the need for awareness of power dynamics. The discussion delves into the synergy of embodied practices and activism, highlighting the role of community engagement in fostering social change.

Dive into the fascinating case of Frau Emmy von N, revealing significant shifts in Freud's thinking about psychoanalysis. Explore how her narrative challenges traditional views on hysteria and reflects the evolution toward a more dynamic understanding of the unconscious. The podcast also uncovers the scandalous life of Fanny Moser, intertwining social issues and mental health struggles of Victorian women. Plus, enjoy insights on the changing dynamics of the therapist-patient relationship through Freud's early techniques and the complexity of their interactions.

Subscribe 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 more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. Abby, Patrick, and Dan proceed through Kristeva’s many earthy examples, from food waste to vomit to excrement to corpses, and to the ideologies she perceives as relying on logics of abjection and making-abject, from hatred of mothers to antisemitism and beyond. Turning to explicitly contemporary political topics, they draw on the work of key interpreters of Kristeva to explain how the ongoing production of abject populations is vital to both real and figurative operations of boundary maintenance, oppression, and exploitation, and to core processes of state formation and policing of the public sphere. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms.For the complete reading list for this episode, visit our Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick sit down with writer Hilary Plum to discuss her remarkable new book, State Champ. A novel at which the politics of abortion stand at the center, but far from a didactically “political novel,” State Champ gives the three an opportunity to explore a suite of deeply psychoanalytic themes and topics: from the gap between our first-person experiences of our bodies to the claims and restrictions made by others on our bodily autonomy; from the purposes of protest to our motivations for undertaking them; from discourses about “regret” versus certainty and judgement; from the knowledge we anticipate to come from experiences versus things we know already versus things that others think they better; and from sex to eating disorders to humor to running and more. The three also reflect on writing and reading novels in 2025, genre, audiences, and on what communication and psychic change we hope fiction can achieve. Hilary Plum, State Champ: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/state-champ-9781639735433/Hilary’s website: http://www.hilaryplum.com/Index for Continuance, a podcast about small press publishing, politics, and practice, hosted by Hilary Plum and Zach Peckham: https://www.csupoetrycenter.com/index-for-continuance-podcastSusan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”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) 450-0847A 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan return to the first case study in Studies On Hysteria (1895). But while previously they examined the case of “Anna O.” as told narrowly by Josef Breuer on his own terms, this time they tell the story of the remarkable woman behind it: Bertha Pappenheim. They begin by addressing how the legend of a “hysterical pregnancy” came to overshadow the “Anna O.” case history, and how that apocryphal tale was the product of squabbles and mythmaking involving Freud, his biographers, his students, and his opponents. Next, they turn to the story of Bertha Pappenheim herself, focusing first on the actual details of her treatment with Breuer as well as her subsequent mental health history. Then, they unpack her incredible achievements beyond her time with Breuer. It’s a wide-ranging, continent-spanning, and ocean-crossing story of activism, authorship, and intellectual influence, tying together political themes of social work, German feminism, Jewish anti-Zionism, and more.***Ordinary Unhappiness is shifting to three episodes a month during summer 2025 due to health reasons – but Patreon subscribers will still get two exclusive episodes per month, including the Standard Edition series and Wild Analysis! Find us at https://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome 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 expose how a variety of institutions – from housing markets to credit monitoring to policing and more – work together to actively push millions of Americans into homelessness, to trap them there, and to exploit their vulnerabilities at every turn. Moreover, as Brian, Abby, and Patrick explore, this reality is mystified by mainstream narratives, prevailing ideologies, and broader anxieties about precarity and homelessness. Unpacking questions of policy, history, and contemporary media coverage, the three discuss how misguided narratives about individual choice, moral desert, mental health, and more subvert recognition of what should be a basic right and policy priority (IE, access to housing), and confront what it would mean to cut through these and other fantasies.Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645871/there-is-no-place-for-us-by-brian-goldstone/https://www.briangoldstone.net/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/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 shaman and his other clients, the business model of the “ayahuasca center,” and much more. Along the way, Sarah, Abby, and Patrick unpack broader narratives about therapy, ritual, and healing; the ways we metabolize feelings of guilt, sadness, and desires for change; the unavoidable context of capitalism, global inequality, and climate catastrophe; our expectations for psychedelics, our fantasies of transformative experiences, and what we can learn from plants. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome 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 how a truly transatlantic history of the African slave trade and an awareness of how European colonialism as a properly global enterprise can together shed new light on both domestic inequalities within the United States and relations between the contemporary Global North and South, the three unpack how the accumulation of material advantages and disadvantages have, over time, resulted in landscapes of suffering that are simultaneously far-flung yet fundamentally interconnected. Historicizing and grounding the present in terms of what Táíwò terms “Global Racial Empire” renders uncanny the givenness of contemporary national borders, and throws into question many of our most foundational national narratives and even the givenness of the state form itself. Moreover, thinking seriously about history and oppression reveals what canonical philosophical accounts of the liberal social contract disavow, and what fantasies and concrete purposes so many contemporary invocations of meritocracy and justice as “fairness” serve. The conversation builds to Olúfẹ́mi’s “constructive view” of reparations, the centrality of climate justice to that program, and a series of crucial disambiguations and reconfigurations of prevailing notions of responsibility, accountability, guilt, liability, and more. Indeed, as the three describe, thinking about ourselves in terms of our ancestors, while understanding ourselves as ancestors, offers everyone a path forward, one that moves beyond the dead-ends of reflexive denialism and narcissistic injury to suggest new possibilities for identification, disidentification, and solidarity, and that powerfully clarifies goals, sustains motivation, and helps us imagine possibilities for change across social differences, geographical distances, and the span of time. Plus: “theory versus practice” versus “theory and practice”; the example and legacy of Frantz Fanon; the joys, perplexities, and embarrassments of being a philosophy nerd; and more. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparationsOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-captureOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/against-decolonisation/John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005426Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation (And Other Works, 1921-1945): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Love-Guilt-a

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frictionless movement in video games to the ways anxieties about the existence other human minds appears to be driving ever more people to prefer the projections and grandiose claims of interactions with so-called “artificial intelligence.” They then turn to another space where the questions of friction, the possibility of pain, the promise of growth, and the role of transference loom large: the classroom. In particular, they explore the ethical and interpersonal stakes of teaching psychoanalysis, and teaching in general, with an eye toward questions of repetition, narcissism, Trauma Studies as a discipline, traumatic experiences of learning, what is or isn’t “outside the classroom,” the balance between taking things personally and meeting students where they are, and whether and how pedagogy and learning alike resemble therapy in all its possibilities and pains. Plus: turtles tortoises, a round of Fuck Marry Kill (yes), Wolfenstein, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

The hosts celebrate reaching their hundredth milestone with a reflective look at their journey. They dive into listener questions covering therapeutic modalities, the interplay of psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the influence of Jacques Lacan. A lively discussion unfolds about the role of psychedelics in therapy, as well as the complexities of gender, sexuality, and autism. Humorous insights and reading recommendations add flavor, while a promise of a spicy follow-up for Patreon supporters keeps the conversation engaging!