Ordinary Unhappiness

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.

Abby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in Parapraxis. Nica tells our listeners about Frantz Fanon’s life, situating both his personal journey and his writing within the context of his work as a clinician and clinical theorist. As Nica recounts, Fanon’s clinical writings were only recently collected and translated in the 2018 volume Alienation and Freedom, which has ushered in a renaissance in Fanon studies in the Anglophone world. Tracking Fanon’s story from Martinique to metropolitan France to Tunisia to Algeria, a focus on Fanon as a clinician helps us to rethink and recontextualize the major texts that bracket his life: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Abby, Patrick, and Nica also discuss resistances to Fanon; distinctive clinical concepts like the “transferential constellation”; neurosis versus psychosis; syndromes as political resistance; political exhaustion and the exhaustion of the political; revolutionary subjectivity; the superego of the contemporary left; and much more. Nica’s Parapraxis essay on Fanon as clinician, “Destiny to Be Set Free: Fanon Between Repair and Reparation” was, happily, released online earlier than we expected: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/destiny-to-be-set-freePrimary texts we discuss include:Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White MasksFanon, The Wretched of the EarthThe volume of Fanon’s clinical writings Nica is discussing is Alienation and Freedom, edited and compiled by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, translated by Steven CorcoranSome of the other books that Nica invokes include:David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of BeingCamille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar FranceFred Moten, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)Hannah Zeavin, The Distance CureNigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (Creolizing the Canon)You can learn more about Nica’s work and get in touch with her at nicasiegel.comHave 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 welcome writer, critic, and scholar Moira Weigel, co-founder of Logic magazine and co-editor with Ben Tarnoff of Voices of the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do And How They Do It. Moira introduces listeners to the history and key insights of the Frankfurt School in advance of a (free!) symposium this weekend in New York examining its legacy a hundred years later. They discuss Theodor Adorno’s work on “the authoritarian personality” and talk about personality types and social categories as they are constructed everywhere from astrology columns to the speeches of demagogues to Facebook algorithms. The four then turn to Moira’s recent work on Silicon Valley, especially her recent collection of interviews with tech workers ranging from engineers to writers to cooks to masseuses to data scientists to the larger-than-life “Founders.” They talk about the surprising sincerity of techno-optimism; what failing upwards does to people; what Adorno would have thought of being called a “thought leader”; whether the Internet is a giant hate machine; and the labor politics and emerging forms of Silicon Valley, a realm that’s bigger than just a geographical area, and where we all live, one way or another, like it or not. To register for the 100 Years of the Frankfurt School event in NYC (and also streaming live) on July 14th and 15th: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/the-frankfurt-school-and-the-now-a-symposium/Moira’s co-edited book Voices of the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do ItHer book Labor of LoveThe Adorno book about astrology is The Stars Down to EarthAnna Weiner’s book Uncanny ValleyLogic magazine (now being relaunched as Logics) is here: https://logicmag.io/The Collective Action in Tech site that Moira refers to is https://collectiveaction.tech/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, Patrick, and Dan take your calls! They spend the bulk of the episode on a fascinating question about whether or not it is important to know your own psychic structure. They consider the relationship between identity and diagnosis; how theoretical language can help an individual feel named or misnamed; whether truth or meaning matters more in the language of diagnosis;; bibliotherapy and why they’re constantly giving book recommendations; self-diagnosis versus external diagnosis; the relationship of diagnostic and other categories to suffering, healing, and psychic change; and diagnosis and its relation to material conditions. The next three calls involve speculation about the evolutionary basis of the unconscious; ways to think about analytically informed interventions, both radical or incremental, in the crises of mental health under neoliberalism generally and the crisis faced by unhoused people specifically; and a recurring dream involving nicotine patches, a “complete void,” and a “wake up man.”***Since we have received some requests from callers to read their questions aloud rather than play calls directly to protect privacy, we’ve defaulted to reading all calls aloud during this non-paywalled episode, and used effects to make it abundantly clear when Abby is reading a call vs. speaking as herself. If you call our hotline, please let us know whether it’s okay to play your call on the podcast or whether you’d prefer us to read it!***Books mentioned in this episode:Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany NobusJuan-David Nasio, Hysteria: The Splendid Child of PsychoanalysisBruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian PsychoanalysisAndrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of DepressionAlan Krohn, Hysteria: The Elusive NeurosisRobert Paul, Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on CultureT. M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American PsychiatryOur Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, eds. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn MarrowA helpful interview with Luhrmann is also here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/11/culture-influences-voice-hearing-interview-stanford-anthropologist-tanya-luhrmann/And the 100th anniversary of the Frankfurt School event we mentioned, both in person in NYC and also streaming live: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/the-frankfurt-school-and-the-now-a-symposium/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

In this podcast, they delve into Freud's early studies in Paris, his biography, and his time studying hysteria with Jean-Martin Charcot. They also discuss Freud's history with eels, anti-Semitism, cocaine, and his habit of making and breaking friendships.

Abby and Patrick welcome journalist and critic Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Dissent magazine’s Know Your Enemy podcast. They talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, thefts, and betrayals; the so-called “Freud wars”; and the internal politics of psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, they examine Malcolm’s famous claim that the task of the journalist is “morally indefensible” and its implications for the work of the analyst. You can read Sam’s essay on Janet Malcolm here: https://newrepublic.com/article/170930/janet-malcolm-dangerous-methodHis essay on John Le Carré here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-father-of-all-secrets-adler-bellSam on Succession and repetition compulsion is here:https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/succession-season-three/Know Your Enemy is available on all your favorite podcast platforms and their PatreonThe essay that Sam quotes, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” by Hannah GoldJanet Malcolm’s books under discussion:Psychoanalysis: The Impossible ProfessionIn The Freud ArchivesThe Journalist and the MurdererHave 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.Continuing the conversation on transference started in Episode 2, Patrick and Dan discuss free guitars, transference as defense, magical thinking, and why experiencing transferential relationships is better than not having any relationships at all.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! 484 775-0107A 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