Ordinary Unhappiness

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 friend of the show and returning guest Sam Adler-Bell! Together, the three process events in the US electoral landscape in the past month, focusing in particular on the selection of J.D.Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the ascendance of Kamala Harris, and the spectacle of the Democratic Convention. Objects of psychodynamic-flavored punditry include Vance’s Daddy Issues, Harris as Phallic Mother, and the significance of one of America’s favorite pastimes (Stepmom Porn).Check out Sam’s recent piece in The Baffler on Adam Phillips here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/good-enough-adler-bellThe Know Your Enemy episodes we discuss are here:What's Wrong with J.D. Vance?https://www.patreon.com/posts/whats-wrong-with-109853554René Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz)https://www.patreon.com/posts/rene-girard-and-99243002A Remedy for Envy? René Girard Reduxhttps://www.patreon.com/posts/remedy-for-envy-99640142A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Dan Taberski, creator of the brand-new podcast series Hysterical. They explore the genesis of the series and the challenges and rewards of confronting both the history and the present of “the H-word.” Tracking the trajectories of this famously “elusive neurosis,” Hysterical looks to episodes from colonial America to Belle Epoque Paris to modern-day Iran, and tracks the stories of people from high school students in upstate New York to a prosecutor in Ohio to former CIA agents. How does the documentary balance the different senses of “hysteria” and being “hysterical” as concepts in the history of medicine, as labels used to stigmatize and dismiss suffering, and as a clarifying term for understanding contemporary events? What is ultimately diagnosable as “real” in the brain, in our genes, or according to the DSM – and how do we square those supposed answers with our personal narratives, beliefs, and certainties? In what ways do the individual symptoms of “conversion disorders” reflect underlying social conditions? And how do moral panics and fits of “mass hysteria” reveal hierarchies of gender, race, vulnerability, and power? Taberski tells us about what it was like to interview such a wide range of subjects, and how the show worked to put their stories and personal feelings about “the H-word” into dialogue with interpretations by doctors, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and pundits. Plus: secondary gain, the idea of “evenly hovering attention,” the ethics of leaning into messiness, and the psychoanalytically provocative aspects of podcasting.You can listen to Hysterical anywhere you get your podcasts; more details are here: https://wondery.com/shows/hysterical/A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/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 you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Sarah Jaffe, a labor journalist and author, joins for an insightful conversation about her forthcoming book, "From the Ashes." They explore the transformative nature of grief, intertwining personal and collective experiences. The discussion navigates how mourning reshapes identity and facilitates social solidarity. Jaffe critiques societal norms around loss, from Freud's theories to modern expectations, emphasizing the impact of collective grief on identity and community resilience. Their conversation highlights the emotional bonds between work, love, and the experiences of loss.

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Dan get into the first part of Slavoj Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, directed by Sophie Fiennes). They consider one of the film’s core propositions – that cinema is an instruction in how and what to desire. This leads them through Zizek’s (and their own) interpretations of classic Hitchcock films, Alien, Blue Velvet, and beyond. More broadly, they discuss whether psychoanalysis is essential for understanding film, reading movies like books, the allure of exegesis, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Loren Dent, a clinical psychologist in the Lacanian tradition. The topic is psychosis, both as understood theoretically by Freud and Lacan, and also as experienced and encountered by real people in New York City, where Loren practices and where he has helped establish an innovative program of treatment and care. Starting by tackling a basic question – what is “psychosis?” – the three chart Freud’s struggles to grasp psychotic phenomena, his messy efforts to make the notorious case of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber fit his theories about sex, and his late-career notion of “disavowal” as a mechanism of psychosis distinct from neurotic repression. Loren then describes how Jacques Lacan took this last concept, often translated as “foreclosure,” and integrated it with his own accounts of language, desire, and otherness. When taken together with therapeutic innovations by radical psychoanalytic thinkers like Félix Guattari, François Tosquelles, and Jean Oury, Lacan’s insights, as Loren explains, lay the groundwork for a robust and efficacious approach to treating psychotic patients in ways that challenge traditional hierarchies in hospitals, group homes, and beyond. After walking Abby and Patrick through what talk therapy looks like with patients with psychosis, Loren outlines his recommendations for treatment and support in the clinic and beyond. As Loren explains, this approach goes against the grain of how psychotic patients have been processed by institutions under contemporary neoliberalism, and has grown only more urgently necessary in New York City under the mayorship of Eric Adams. It also forces us all to confront and manage our anxieties about “madness,” from which Freud himself was hardly immune, which haunt commonplace assumptions about normative behavior and market rationality, and which manifest in day-to-day acts of avoidance, confinement, neglect, and violence that people with psychosis encounter in urban life.Key texts cited in the episode:Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-OedipusBret Fimiani, Psychosis and Extreme States: An Ethic for TreatmentFreud, Civilization and its DiscontentsFreud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on An Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”Nev Jones & Robyn Lewis Brown, “The absence of psychiatric C/S/X perspectives in academic discourse: Consequences and Implications.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(1).Darian Leader, What is Madness?Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar FranceStijn Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian PerspectiveFoundation for Community Psychoanalysis: https://www.communitypsychoanalysis.org/Fountain House: https://www.fountainhouse.org/The Greene Clinic: www.greeneclinic.com A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/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 death, survived assassinations, terminal narcissism, political theology, and Kamala Harris as phenomenologist.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Joseph Earl Thomas, an acclaimed writer and academic behind the memoir Sink and a novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, joins the conversation. He discusses the complexities of trauma, both in literature and real life, challenging oversimplified narratives. The interplay of food, gaming, and family dynamics adds depth to the dialogue, revealing how personal experiences intertwine with broader societal issues. Thomas also reflects on the significance of virtual spaces and their influence on identity, blending humor and depth throughout.

Subscribe 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 our society is collectively metabolizing the spectacle and stakes of the whole thing. They then look at Thursday’s debate through the lens of psychic defense mechanisms in general and Melanie Klein’s notion of “splitting” in particular. Splitting, they explain, is a fundamental concept for understanding not just what went down that night but how our media and political elites have subsequently reacted, and for starting to get a handle on our contemporary moment in all its mind-bending rhetorical and emotional dimensions. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/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 meet-cute sets off sparks and a whirlwind romance. But if desire truly is the desire of the Other, what happens when the desire of the mother extends to a member of her daughter's favorite boy band?  Is there too much incest in this film, or not enough? Plus: rom-com typologies, symptoms that can't be enjoyed, and more.Plus: If you want more Anna on OU, please check out last week’s episode, in which Abby and Patrick interview her about crosswords, French feminism, and the sexual politics of wordplay!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music