Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome Palestinian psychoanalyst and psychologist Dr. Jess Ghannam to talk about his twenty-five years of work doing empirical research and carrying out public health initiatives in Gaza. They discuss his studies of mental health in refugees from across the Middle East and in Palestinian children; intergenerational histories of traumas both collective and individual; the limits of the “post-” in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when it comes to what is “normal” in spaces of concentrated and ongoing trauma; his reflections from years of observing thousands of Palestinian children at play; the relationship between physical repression and psychic violence; and much more.Relevant articles by Dr. Ghannam include:Unattended Mental Health Needs in Primary Care: Lebanon’s Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. Clinical Medicine Insights Psychiatry. 2020 Jan 1; 11:117955732096252. Segal SS, Khoury KV, Salah SR, Ghannam GJ. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1179557320962523Coping with trauma and adversity among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: A qualitative, culture-informed analysis. J Health Psychol. 2020 10; 25(12):2031-2048. Afana AJ, Tremblay J, Ghannam J, Ronsbo H, Veronese G. PMID: 29974813. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29974813/Contributors to Screening Positive for Mental Illness in Lebanon's Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2018 Jan; 206(1):46-51. Segal SP, Khoury VC, Salah R, Ghannam J. PMID: 28976407. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28976407 The psychological toll of slum living—an assessment of mental health, disability, and slum-related adversities in Mumbai, India. The Lancet Global Health. 2014 May 1; 2:s26. Subbaraman SR, Nolan NL, Shitole ST, Sawant SK, Shitole SS, Sood SK, Nanarkar NM, Ghannam GJ, Bloom BD, Patil-Deshmukh PA. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(15)70048-3 Health and Human Rights in Palestine: The Siege and Invasion of Gaza and the Role of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. Human Rights in the Middle East. 2011 Jan 1; 245-261. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137001986_14 Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety among Gaza Strip adolescents in the wake of the second Uprising (Intifada). Child Abuse Negl. 2007 Jul; 31(7):719-29. Elbedour S, Onwuegbuzie AJ, Ghannam J, Whitcome JA, Abu Hein F. PMID: 17631959. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17631959 The use of psychoanalytic constructs in the service of empire: Comment on Baruch (2003). Psychoanalytic Psychology. 2005 Jan 1; 22(1):135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0736-9735.22.1.135 Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.

Sara Marcus discusses political disappointment as untimely desire, not disillusionment, highlighting mourning, determination, and creativity. They explore musical archives from W.E.B. DuBois to David Wojnarowicz, touching on utopianism and Melanie Klein. The conversation delves into the traps of political subjectivity with references to Fleetwood Mac and Tracy Chapman.

Subscribe 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 as revealing in what it sets out to portray explicitly as in what it obscures or avoids.  And so, after walking through the film’s plot and visual grammar (spoiler alert: there are spoilers after 1:05:00), they turn to the recurrent invocations of looming “civil war” in American discourse. How do our fantasies – and not just Garland’s – relate to the actual and “official” US Civil War of 1861-1865, and how do they distort the history of that conflict? For audiences sitting in a movie theater deep within the imperial core, what’s is and isn’t imaginable in terms of a “civil war,” and why must we, like Garland, turn to images of violence abroad in order to dramatize it?  What would another civil war actually look like in the contemporary US – and what do our anxious expectations of it in the future, as well as our fixations on fantasies about the past, betray about us and our moment in the here and now? Dan and Patrick ponder these and other questions as well as: the culture and iconography of twentieth century combat photography from Robert Capa and Gerda Taro to Eddie Adams and the Bang Bang Club; the gaps between the fantasies of armchair Operators and the horrifying realities of insurgent warfare; and how The Office and Parks and Recreation relate to War on Terror propaganda.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 lost her voice, so we're unlocking a favorite from behind the paywall! We'll be back next week with more Wild Analysis followed by an interview with the brilliant Sara Marcus on her book Political Disappointment. Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessBehind the safety of the paywall, we get worked up about trauma as a trope in some of the most influential media franchises of recent decades: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvel’s Avengers, and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe in general. We talk about the device of traumatizing protagonists in lieu of character or organic plot development; irony that isn’t actually ironic, quippy banter, genre pastiche, and different versions of postmodernism; Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman; recent popular discourse around the use of the idea of trauma and its underlying politics (if any); and why we hate “resilience” when it’s praised by exploitative institutions and demanded by life under late capitalism in general.The excellent piece by Danielle Carr that we discuss is here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trauma-bessel-van-der-kolk-the-body-keeps-the-score-profile.html 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the latest installment of the Standard Edition – and our penultimate episode on the Freud-Fliess letters! – we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We ask what “phantasy” is as opposed to our everyday senses of the word “fantasy,” and then embark on Freud’s catalog of his and his patients’ many fantasies, which involve everything from mushrooms to abortions to compulsive gift wrapping. As we see, Freud is clearly struggling, and not just with the question of how fantasies in general relate to memories, conscious or otherwise: he's confronting some difficult material from his own dreams and self-analysis. These anxieties have everything to do with paternity and sexual violence, with Freud’s own father and with Freud as a father – and they lead him to turn, for the first time, to the myth of Oedipus.  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 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 forces conspire to ensnare us in an “extractive circuit,” how the packaging of “resilience” mystifies exploitation, and how exhaustion itself might serve as a political force and touchstone for solidarity. The chapter on resilience we reference is here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/sick-and-tired-chaudharyThe Exhausted of the Earth is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-exhausted-of-earth-politics-in-a-burning-world-ajay-singh-chaudhary/19992842Have 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 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 interiority and overdetermination to the books’ tales of intrigue and galactic power politics, and Dan walks through Villeneuve’s process for translating the original texts to film. As becomes clear, Villeneuve’s adaptations have involved some ideologically suggestive erasures and narrative choices, including the elimination of “jihad” from the Fremen vocabulary, the creation of a “fundamentalist” tendency within the Fremen, and the characterization of Zendaya’s Chani as a “moderate rebel” standing against them. All these considerations and more bring our hosts to reflect on the political context of Herbert’s original books, the ideological contours of Villeneuve’s filmic vision, and what it feels like to watch these movies in 2024. If Dune is a dark tale of resource wars, indigenous revolts, fanaticism, and mass death wherein treasured prophecies, messianic expectations, and best intentions boil down to forced choices between godawful alternatives, then what does the runaway success of the franchise suggest about our present moment and the futures we can imagine?Works discussed:Frank Kermode, The Sense of an EndingKermode, The Genesis of SecrecyAdrian Daub, “BRAAAM!”: The Sound That Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack,” https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-soundtracks/Aaron Bady, “Dune Two Little,” https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/dune-2-movies-frank-herbert-books-meaning-differences.html  Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome writer 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 political economies of property accumulation, slavery, and settler colonialism, and more. They explore how contemporary resistances to the mere phrase “family abolition” can reflect an investment in fantasy over and against the social realities of the family as a site of violence, abuse, and labor that is rendered invisible and even disposable. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, they unpack how questioning the family as a form can in fact catalyze liberatory and even life-saving modes of care and solidarity from the austerity-ridden cores of Western social democracies to Gaza and beyond.Sophie Lewis’s books are available here:Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation: https://bookshop.org/p/books/abolish-the-family-a-manifesto-for-care-and-liberation-sophie-lewis/17862950Full Surrogacy Now: https://bookshop.org/p/books/full-surrogacy-now-feminism-against-family-sophie-lewis/12024545?ean=9781786637291M.E. O’Brien’s books are available here:Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care:https://bookshop.org/p/books/family-abolition-capitalism-and-the-communizing-of-care-m-e-o-brien/17561686Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, with Eman Abdelhadi: https://bookshop.org/p/books/everything-for-everyone-an-oral-history-of-the-new-york-commune-2052-2072-eman-abdelhadi/18166819Other relevant articles:Sophie Lewis, “Covid-19 is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/family-covid-care-marriage/Lewis, “I’ll Do The Dishes,” https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/sophie-lewis/i-ll-do-the-dishesLewis, “Mothering Against Motherhood,” https://haters.noblogs.org/files/2022/03/Mothering-Against-imposed.pdfM.E. O’Brien, “The Family Problem, Now”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-family-problem-outroO’Brien, “Trans Childhoods and the Family Romance,” https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/trans-childhoodsO’Brien, “Communizing Care,” https://pinko.online/pinko-1/communizing-carePinko Magazine: https://pinko.online/Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoana

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we discuss a number of the letters in the Fliess section of SE Volume 1 with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We examine a complex letter about memory, repression, and what patients do and do not remember; what Freud means by “perversion” at this point in his writing; the way Freud transforms the question of heredity from a biological to a family-centered matter, and in so doing encounters the effects of we would now call intergenerational trauma; Freud’s obsession with witches and their broomsticks; a swooningly romantic letter to Fliess about Italy, dreams, and telegraphs; and much more. The (as of yet untranslated) novel Christine cites is Imago, by Carl Spitteler. 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

Exploring Lacan's mirror stage through a parable of mirror-besotted babies, psychosis, and ego psychology. How the mirror stage challenges identity claims and the potential for radical change. The interplay between self-perception, ego development, and fluidity in the formation of the 'I'. Critiquing traditional views of the ego in psychoanalysis and advocating for embracing individual otherness in relationships for more flexible interactions.