Ordinary Unhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe Standard Edition will be a regular monthly series going forward – and here’s the latest installment! Working our way steadily through Volume I, we discuss: A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism (1892-93); the Preface and Footnotes to Charcot's Tuesday Lectures (1892-94); Sketches for the "Preliminary Communication of 1893" (1940-41 [1892]); and Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses (1893 [1888-1893]). Along the way, we tackle a fascinating case study about hypnotism, feeding, and breastfeeding; will versus “counter-will"; tics, cursing nuns, imps of perversity, and The Little Engine That Could; why certain concepts catch on and others don’t; the brilliant Josef Breuer and his complicated relationship to Freud; early models and definitions of trauma; and a good Freudian reason for why you should always read the footnotes.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

Unlocked 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 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/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.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 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 very near future of psychedelic therapy and its relation to current treatments for anxiety and depression; individual versus social drug experiences; cocaine and neoliberalism; the not-necessarily-liberatory politics of psychedelics; how drug advertising has changed throughout the course of the last century; and the biomedical turn in psychiatry and its relation to shifting social, political, and economic conditions.Ben’s new book Quick Fixes is here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2981-quick-fixesHis previous book Death and Mastery is here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/death-and-mastery/9780231542616You can read his recent article, “Who Deserves Amphetamines? A Social History of Stimulants” about the amphetamine shortage here: https://thepointmag.com/politics/who-deserves-amphetamines/And his new essay, “The Jobs and Freedom Strategy” is here: https://catalyst-journal.com/2023/08/the-jobs-and-freedom-strategyPlus if you’re in Chicago, you can catch Ben talking about Quick Fixes on October 13th at the Seminary Co-op bookstore: https://www.semcoop.com/event/ben-fong-quick-fixes-cedric-johnsonHave 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 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 of education; and what it means to be a serious person. Ben’s essay “The Punning of Reason” is here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-punning-of-reason/His essay “The Recline of the West: Couches and Psychoanalysis” is here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-recline-of-the-west-couches-and-psychoanalysis/His book Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/thinking-in-public-strauss-levinas-arendt-benjamin-aldes-wurgaft/11655520?ean=9780812224344His book Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/meat-planet-artificial-flesh-and-the-future-of-foodvolume-69-benjamin-aldes-wurgaft/16590129?ean=9780520379008His new book Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture, co-authored with Merry White, comes out later this month: https://bookshop.org/p/books/ways-of-eating-exploring-food-through-history-and-culture-volume-81-merry-white/19949891?ean=9780520392984 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 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; the tensions between queer theory and transgender studies and her notion of “egg theory”; sex, pleasure, desire, and shame; her eminently useful idea of “romances of intractability”; Eve Sedgwick’s, Judith Butler’s, and Lauren Berlant’s later-in-life turns towards transmasculinity; and Grace’s work as activist and advocate in both US and UK contexts.Grace’s book Pleasure and Efficacy is here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691243924/pleasure-and-efficacyHer memoir, Please Miss, is here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/grace-lavery/please-miss/9781541620643/?lens=seal-pressThe recent piece of hers we refer to in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), “Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books” is here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/Other texts referenced in the episode include:Leo Bersani, Thoughts and ThingsLeo Bersani and Adam Phillips, IntimaciesEve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “White Glasses”Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel”Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay”Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”Freud, “On Humor”Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway MusicalJoan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII)LaPlanche and Pontalis, The Language of PsychoanalysisJanet Malcolm, In the Freud ArchivesHave 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/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.htmlHave 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, 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 Zurich and the Burghölzli Hospital as a key center of early psychoanalysis; Freud’s one and only trip to America; women as objects of exchange in the development of psychoanalysis; Freud’s Judaism versus Jung’s Protestantism and Jung’s maddening (to Freud) tendencies towards mysticism; and the ways that Spielrein’s work prefigures the late Freudian concept of the death drive. Books discussed include:Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein, by John LaurenSabina Spielrein: the Woman and the Myth, by Angela M. SellsThe Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, edited by Ruth I. Cape and Raymond BurtFreud’s Women, by Lisa Appignanesi and John ForresterThe essay by Sabina Spielrein that Patrick discusses is entitled “Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being”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

Ordinary Unhappiness presents a live recording of the Podcast for Social Research! Abby recently joined Danny Lavery, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Kali Handelman to celebrate Danny’s new book, Dear Prudence, which spans his tenure as beloved advice columnist “Prudence” at Slate. The group tackles historical antecedents of advice columns from the New Testament to the Great Depression; how advice columns dramatize social norms as they change in real time; fictional representations of advice columns like Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; tricksters who set out to deceive advice columnists but wind up asking real questions despite themselves; transference and the idiosyncratic role of the advice columnist as both generic and specific Other; and crowdsourced advice seeking (AKA Reddit’s Am I The Asshole?). They wind up by taking questions and offering live, unscripted advice about real estate commitments, relationship commitments, and the dicey intersection thereof. Plus: pro tips on how to stage difficult interventions with roommates and others in your life about grooming, household chores, and more. Danny’s book Dear Prudence: Liberating Lesson’s from Slate.com’s Beloved Advice Columnist is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/dear-prudence-liberating-lessons-from-slate-com-s-beloved-advice-column-daniel-m-lavery/18617330?gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKow6xPL0DB2XXUyrThg9vTl7opsMa6wGA0cVaDkJUHDHWjp1K2vzW2BoC9NYQAvD_BwEYou can subscribe to his Substack, The Chatner, here: https://www.thechatner.com/Rebecca’s magazine Dilettante Army is here: https://dilettantearmy.com/ You can learn more about Kali’s work as an editor and writing coach here: https://kalihandelman.com/For more information about classes, events, and other programming at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/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

Dive into the intriguing world of historical mental health treatments, focusing on hysteria and the controversial 'rest cure' of the Victorian era. Explore the clash between neurasthenia and hysteria, alongside the enigmatic origins of hypnotism attributed to figures like Mesmer. Discover Freud’s candid reflections on his own struggles with hypnosis and the concept of imposter syndrome. Gain insight into how these historical discussions shape our understanding of modern mental health and the anxieties that linger from the past.