Ordinary Unhappiness

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81: Mailbag Part II: Readings and Misreadings Teaser Dec 07, 2024

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Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for different people; the differing things we may find moving intellectually or emotionally; how public engagements with thinkers and traditions can variously move conversations forward or sabotage them from the outset; and more. They start by talking more about specific analytic thinkers, taking stock of listener responses to our (brief) thoughts on Jung and Jungians, and then turning to the exciting growth of research on Sabina Spielrein. Abby, Patrick, and Dan then turn to psychoanalysis in the arts. First up is the relationship between analysis and fiction, with topics including analysts who write fiction, the idiosyncratic genre of the case study as a kind of quasi-fiction, analysts in fiction, and what psychoanalysis suggests about our expectations of narrative movement or the lack thereof. Novel, short story, and nonfiction recommendations abound! Then the three turn to film, psychoanalytic film theory, and the stakes of using psychoanalytic thinkers and theory in other discourses more generally. Their conversation gets into everything from the pitfalls of jargon to anxieties of influence, constructive misreadings, bad faith appropriations, to what fidelity to texts and tradition means in the first place. How portable is psychoanalytic theory, and what gets lost – or gained – when analytic concepts move from use in one domain to another? Finally, they turn to yet a different sense of “movement” altogether to consider the relationships between psychoanalysis and anarchism. This involves a quick crash-course on the biography and theory of the brilliant and troubled analyst-anarchist Otto Gross, who practiced psychoanalysis as a kind of mutual aid and linked metaphorical inner revolutions with political outward ones, and our reflections on how thinking anarchism and psychoanalysis alongside one another raises provocative questions about our attachments to notions of hierarchy, individuality, institutions from the state to the clinic, and, above all, the meaning of “work.”
We tried to publish the whole reading list for this episode (22 recommendations!) and went way above the word limit. Visit us at Patreon to get the whole list!
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

80: On Fantasy feat. Jordan Stein Nov 30, 2024

Show notes

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious? How do fantasies straddle the gaps between the real world as we understand it, scenarios we know to be impossible, and things we try, nonetheless, to envision otherwise? How is fantasy different from desire? And above all, how what does fantasy reflect our understandings of other people, living or dead, whom we may “know” only via the popular imagination, as cultural figures, and yet who come to play crucial roles in our own self-fashioning and navigation of life events? Jordan’s wonderful new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone, offers a perfect springboard for pursuing these questions, while also casting new light on the biography, oeuvre, and legacy of an artist whose ability to give literal voice to so many different characters and fantasies has few other parallels in twentieth century music. Abby, Patrick, and Jordan’s conversation ranges widely through Simone’s work, from her classic songbook standards to her transformational covers of singers as from Bob Dylan to Sinatra to the Bee Gees, and explores what we know, and what we can only fantasize about, her personal transformations, political engagements, and singular expressions of joy, loneliness, yearning, and so much more.
Books by Jordan Alexander Stein: Fantasies of Nina Simone, Avidly Reads Theory, When Novels Were Books.
A Spotify playlist for Fantasies of Nina Simone is available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6QUnsR5Pl8qbQ1jzqYLb0a
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

UNLOCKED: 31: Thanksgiving Special, Part 1: The Holiday Syndrome Nov 26, 2024

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Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
In the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi’s “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies.
Subscribe now for immediate access to Part II - on Freudian anthropology, the history behind Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism. Subscription also will give you access to our ever-growing backlog of Patreon-only content, including series like The Standard Edition (we're reading Freud's complete works thing together!) Wild Analysis (psychoanalysis goes to the movies), Gerontophallocracy 2024 (on the recent election and beyond), and much, much more!
Articles referenced include:
Cattell, J P. The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.
Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.
Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.
Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.
Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available here.

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

79: Mailbag Episode: Resistances (Part One) Teaser Nov 23, 2024

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic perspective can offer in grappling with communication dynamics in the workplace, especially across differentials in power. What does it mean for an employee “to be heard,” and how does that relate to what management can tolerate hearing – or substantively change? But above all, the three show they’ve heard you by talking a LOT about Jung and our resistances to him. This leads into a conversation about the allure of the occult (both in Jung’s time and hours), Western esoteric traditions, archetypes, alchemy, demons, and more. Note: we got so many great questions that there will definitely be a Part Two forthcoming!
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

78: Reactionary Fantasies: On “Cancel Culture” and Moral Panic feat. Adrian Daub Nov 16, 2024

Show notes

Abby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global. Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints about so-called “political correctness,” and in what ways is it different? Why do broad narratives about getting canceled catch on, and what does it mean that anecdotes are so central to their virality? Why do fantasies about college campuses feature so prominently in cancel culture stories? From its origins as a quintessentially American phenomenon, how has the furor over cancel culture crossed borders and languages, crystalized into terms like the French “le wokeism”? What do our fantasies of cancelation activate, what do they confirm, and what are the deeper anxieties they variously betray or conceal? It’s a wide-ranging interrogation of reactionary politics, reaction formations, and histrionics in our chaotic digital moment.
The Cancel Culture Panic is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cancel-culture-panic-how-an-american-obsession-went-global-adrian-daub/21145470?ean=9781503640849
What Tech Calls Thinking is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/what-tech-calls-thinking-an-inquiry-into-the-intellectual-bedrock-of-silicon-valley-adrian-daub/14220491?ean=9780374538644
In Bed With the Right (with Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan) is here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight
Also discussed: Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Does not Exist: How Campus War is Made,” available at https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist

UNLOCKED: 49: Wild Analysis: Civil War Nov 09, 2024

Show notes

We're off this weekend, but here's a thematically appropriate episode from earlier this year. Come find us on Patreon for our recent political coverage, The Standard Edition series, and more Wild Analysis. We'll be back next Saturday.
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While 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! (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

77: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Post-Election Processing Teaser Nov 06, 2024

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us navigate moments like these. Plus: what is "hope," actually, and what do we mean when we ask for it?
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

76: Gerontophallocracy 2024: Floating Signifiers Teaser Nov 02, 2024

Show notes

It’s the last installment of Gerontophallocracy 2024 before the election. Abby, Patrick, and Dan process the vibes both in The Discourse and here in Pennsylvania (chaotic and bad); reflect on Harris on Call Her Daddy versus Trump on Rogan; talk about forced choices, votes, and fantasies of voting; discuss complicity and lesser-of-two evilism from the depressive position; 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

75: Psychosocial Realism feat. Daniel Lavery Oct 26, 2024

Show notes

Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel. Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very contingencies of family, community, and human life itself. Abby and Patrick talk with Daniel about how he came to conceive of the project, his influences and inspiration, his method for producing such rich characterizations, the question of style, and more. It’s also a chance for the three to explore the psychoanalytically rich themes and topics the book takes up, from the desire for recognition to anxieties over conflicting social mores to substance abuse to family estrangement to religious preference and much, much more.
Women’s Hotel is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-s-hotel-daniel-m-lavery/21024970

74: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part II Teaser Oct 19, 2024

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does the impossibility of the sexual relationship mean that the inverse of the sexual relationship finds expression precisely in having sex?
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

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