Ordinary Unhappiness

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54: Wild Analysis: Challengers Teaser May 25, 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 sit down for a postgame analysis of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers”, a torrid tale of a trio whose shared passion is tennis – and who would rather spend their days on the court than simply go to throuples therapy. The conversation ranges from tennis to desire to how desire is the desire of the Other and what exactly that means. Along the way, they also get into triangulation, betrayal, undecidable endings, 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

53: Broke Psychoanalysis: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic feat. Kevin Duong May 18, 2024

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Patrick and Abby welcome politics professor Kevin Duong to discuss his research on the history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-1958), an experiment in radical psychoanalysis aimed at providing free care to marginalized community members in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Bringing together American notables like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison alongside a colorful array of expatriate European clinicians, including antifascist partisans and refugees, the clinic sought to fuse Freud’s calls for “psychotherapy for the people” with a Marxist attention to the material dimensions of suffering. Duong walks Abby and Patrick through how the clinic functioned and what therapy there was like, from group analysis of children at play to evening seminars in which everyone involved with the clinic worked with a consenting patient to explore their distress. They also unpack the clinic’s theoretical contributions, from the notion of “class unconsciousness” to “social neurosis,” and the implications of its work on our ideas about transference, scarcity, and abundance; the ways in which authority is constituted in both therapy and social movements; how organizing and therapy relate to the recognition of suffering and the realization of desires; the Cold War, contemporary memory, the repressed histories of radical psychoanalysis and what it would mean to “repeat with a difference”; and more.
Kevin’s article, “Broke Psychoanalysis: In Memory of Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic” is here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/broke-psychoanalysis
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

52: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 9: Repression is a Scorpio: The Final Fliess Extracts feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser May 11, 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
In the final installment of the Fliess Extracts portion of the Standard Edition, we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. These last letters see Freud really feeling himself as a stylist – and, not coincidentally, ruminating about masturbation, sexual dysfunction, and his mounting frustration with his interlocutor. We discuss the disintegrating Freud-Fliess friendship; an adorable dream from 1½ year-old Anna Freud; primate analogies, embodied metaphors, and noses turned up, turned down, and turned away; censorship both by “Russians” and the Stracheys; horrifying case studies and salacious gossip; and whether Freud’s much-trumpeted “self-analysis” would have ever been possible without a overdetermined transference with his nose-besotted friend.
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

51: Psychoanalysis and Gaza feat. Jess Ghannam May 04, 2024

Show notes

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/10.1177/1179557320962523
Coping 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.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUT

50: Political Disappointment feat. Sara Marcus Apr 27, 2024

Show notes

Abby and Patrick are joined by academic, journalist, and critic Sara Marcus, author of the 2023 book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. After recalling their own experiences of political letdowns – infantile, adolescent, and all-too-recent – they explore how Sara’s notion of disappointment as “untimely desire” involves something other than disillusionment or a loss of faith. Rather, as Marcus explains, disappointment involves an ongoing relationship towards an object, and can be a simultaneous opportunity for mourning, determination, creativity, and more. They unpack experiences of such disappointment across the twentieth century, tracking in particular their musical and audio archives – from the “Sorrow Songs” studied by W.E.B. DuBois to the exquisite nonverbals of Lead Belly to the monologues and Tracy Chapman bootlegs recorded by the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz. And they also get into the traps of utopianism, Melanie Klein, and the possibility of a “good enough” political subjectivity, with cameos by Fleetwood Mac, Bon Jovi, Peter Paul & Mary, and more along the way.

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

49: Wild Analysis: Civil War Teaser Apr 20, 2024

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
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! 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: 21: Wild Analysis: The Trauma Plot and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe Apr 13, 2024

Show notes

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/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Behind 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

48: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 8: Oedipus Approaches: The Fliess Extracts, Continued feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser Apr 06, 2024

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
In 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

47: Extraction, Exhaustion, and the Problem with Resilience feat. Ajay Singh Chaudhary Mar 30, 2024

Show notes

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-chaudhary
The Exhausted of the Earth is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-exhausted-of-earth-politics-in-a-burning-world-ajay-singh-chaudhary/19992842
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

Episode 46: Wild Analysis: Dune Teaser Mar 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 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 Ending

Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy

Adrian 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

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