Ordinary Unhappiness

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!

Join Abby, Patrick, and Sam as they dive into the controversial themes of The White Lotus, from patriarchy and family violence to class antagonism and desire. They analyze how these plotlines reflect societal anxieties and fantasies surrounding friendship, money, and sexuality. The discussion also touches on the show's creator's unique perspective and how American audiences relate to its provocative narratives. Plus, there's a poignant exploration of desire and identity shaped by childhood experiences, revealing the complex emotions tied to adult relationships.

Abby 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 having) them become such an issue, and how does their invocation function? Touching on themes and topics across Scherlis’s body of work, from CBT and DBT to the legacy of Dale Carnegie and beyond, the conversation builds to a consideration of the case of attachment theory. Unpacking the history, key concepts, and findings of this interdisciplinary field of study, Abby, Patrick, and Lily explore how its terms and categories have become so central to a cottage industry of online quizzes and therapeutic interventions. How do ideas of self-improvement and self-help relate to economic shifts in modes of production, material realities of employment precarity, and our felt sense of being together – and being alienated? What work do these terms do in the abstract, and what work are we as subjects expected to do in learning and using them? And how can we square our skepticism vis-à-vis such models and vocabularies with the traction they can give us when it comes to understanding ourselves, tolerating distress, navigating a difficult world, potentially changing our circumstances, and connecting with one another?Selected texts cited:Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else”Lily Scherlis, “Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Its Discontents”Lily Scherlis, “Going Soft: Future Proofing the American Worker”Danielle Carr, “Don’t Be So Attached to Attachment Theory”Robert Karen, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Ability to LoveHeidi Keller. The Myth of Attachment Theory A Critical Understanding for Multicultural SocietiesRuth O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Dallos, Katherine Berry, and Karen Bateson. Attachment Theory: The BasicsA 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 Provided 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 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 rightly be seen as the beginning of psychoanalysis; indeed, Anna O. herself coined the phrase “the talking cure.” Yet even as the case of Anna O. would come to serve as a kind of skeleton key for unlocking Freud’s subsequent sensitivities to listening, transference, and the layered temporalities of psychic traumas, her story would also become an object of mischaracterization and myth-making for Freud and others. Abby, Patrick, and Dan thus begin by addressing the case history as a broader genre while establishing some working distinctions between “Anna O.” as a character in Breuer’s text, the real-life Bertha Pappenheim (the person behind the pseudonym), and the subsequent legend of Anna O. as an arch-hysteric whose distress culminated in a (fictious) phantom pregnancy. They walk through Breuer’s narrative on its own terms, tackling Anna O.’s many symptoms, especially those involving her intermingling of silence and speech in multiple languages, and the pivotal scene that, per Breuer, represented a breakthrough in the treatment. The questions this all raises – about the limits of knowledge, the contingencies of suffering, and what it means to be healed – set up the next episode, about the story behind the story, and the remarkable biography of Bertha Pappenheim herself. 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 returning guest Hannah Zeavin – scholar, write, editor, co-founder of the Psychosocial Foundation and Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine – to talk about her brand-new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. It’s an exploration of the complex relationships that have tied together the figure of the mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how they should go about doing it. What does it mean to think about the mother as a “medium” for containing, nurturing, and shepherding the development of a child, and why do debates about mothering pivot so invariably around questions of media consumption and technological mediation? The conversation spans the history of academic research into parenting from behaviorism to attachment theory; clinical and popular discourses about mothers from Freud to Dr. Spock; the profusion of tools that promise to “help” mothers with their kids; “good-enough” mothering, mother-blaming, and vicious double binds; moral, political, and legal debates about nannies, “helicopter mothers,” incarcerated mothers, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and much, much more. Read and subscribe to Parapraxis here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation here: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/Mother Media is available here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049559/mother-media/An excerpt from Mother Media in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heir-conditioner/Zeavin, “Composite Case: The Fate of the Children of Psychoanalysis”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/composite-caseZeavin, “Unfree Associations”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/Zeavin, “Parallel Processes”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/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/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music