Ordinary Unhappiness

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18: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 2: Hysteria, Hypnosis, and Imposter Syndrome Teaser Jul 29, 2023

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
We’re back with a new installment of the Standard Edition! We discuss two short reviews from 1887 (of Averbeck’s Die akute Neurasthenie [Acute Neurasthenia] and Weir Mitchell’s Die Behandlung gewisser Formen von Neurasthenie und Hysterie [the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria] and the essays “Hysteria” and “Hystero-Epilepsy” (1888). Then we get into the first parts of the “Papers on Hypnotism and Suggestion,” including the “Preface to the Translation of Bernheim’s Suggestion” (1888 or 1888-89) and the “Review of August Forel’s Der Hypnotismus [Hypnotism]” (1889) and finish up with Freud’s 1891 essay on “Hypnosis.” Along the way, we talk neurasthenia vs. hysteria, Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure,” Mesmer and the origins of hypnotism, the anxieties that underwrite historical arguments over hypnosis and suggestion, the legacies of hypnosis within what comes to be psychoanalysis, Freud’s imposter syndrome about his own failures as a hypnotist, and much more.
The Spiegel text that Patrick alludes to throughout the episode is Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel’s Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis (2nd ed): https://www.appi.org/Products/Psychotherapy/Trance-and-Treatment-Second-Edition
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

17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel Jul 22, 2023

Show notes

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-free
Primary texts we discuss include:

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
The 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 Corcoran

Some of the other books that Nica invokes include:

David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being
Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure
Nigel 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.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

16: Fantasy, Fascism, and Technology: From the Frankfurt School to Silicon Valley feat. Moira Weigel Jul 12, 2023

Show notes

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 It
Her book Labor of Love

The Adorno book about astrology is The Stars Down to Earth
Anna Weiner’s book Uncanny Valley
Logic 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

15: Diagnosis and Identity: Mailbag Episode! Jul 08, 2023

Show notes

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 Nobus
Juan-David Nasio, Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Alan Krohn, Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis
Robert Paul, Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on Culture
T. M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry
Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, eds. T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow
A 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

14: Standard Edition Volume I Part 1: Freud Goes to Paris Teaser Jul 01, 2023

Show notes

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
In this second episode of The Standard Edition, we finally start doing the reading, tackling the first three texts in Volume I of the Standard Edition: “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin,” (1886), “Preface to the Translation of Charcot’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System” (1886) and “Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anesthesia in A Hysterical Male” (1886). We do some ground-clearing about the history of medicine and the various disciplines in which the young Freud sought recognition and met with frustration; sketch out Freud’s biography and the world into which he was born and came of age; and discuss the figure of Jean-Martin Charcot and Freud’s time studying hysteria with him at the Salpêtrière in Paris. We pay close attention to an early case study of a male hysteric and how it prefigures some of Freud’s later case studies. Along the way, we also talk about Freud’s history with eels, anti-Semitism, cocaine, hypnosis, and his lifelong habit of making best friends and breaking up with them. We offer a handful of sources we’re consulting, whether for general edification or for reference for anyone who might be embarking on this project alongside us.
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

13: The Journalist and the Analyst: On Janet Malcolm feat. Sam Adler-Bell Jun 24, 2023

Show notes

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-method

His essay on John Le Carré here:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-father-of-all-secrets-adler-bell

Sam 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 Patreon

The essay that Sam quotes, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” by Hannah Gold

Janet Malcolm’s books under discussion:

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

In The Freud Archives

The Journalist and the Murderer

UNLOCKED: Short Session 1 - Transference, continued Jun 17, 2023

Show notes

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! 484 775-0107
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

12: From Parties to Projective Identification: Why is Group Life so Hard? feat. Christine Smallwood Jun 10, 2023

Show notes

Abby and Patrick welcome novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind. They discuss the novel’s protagonist Dorothy (who hires a second therapist to talk about her relationship with her first therapist) and Christine’s approach to psychoanalysis as a framework for thinking about everyday life. Then they turn to Wilfred Bion’s landmark 1961 book Experiences in Groups. They discuss the ways that group life and group experiences are frustrating and emotionally intense, from group chats to reading groups to classrooms to parties to military maneuvers; Bion’s notion of the various “basic assumptions” that underlie every group; projection versus projective identification; and counter-transference as a source of genuine insight. Plus, Dan explains how Bion helped him life-hack (and exit) corporate America!
You can find The Life of the Mind here:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-life-of-the-mind-christine-smallwood/14793178
Links to some of Christine’s recent writing mentioned in the episode are here:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/the-exorcist-the-shards-bret-easton-ellis/
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/04/06/poor-torvey-a-dolls-house/
And here is a recent NYRB interview with her:
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/04/22/infiltrating-literature-christine-smallwood/
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

11: Succession: Oedipus and Failsons Jun 03, 2023

Show notes

Abby, Patrick, and Dan get into the great Oedipal drama of our times: Succession. They discuss a ludicrously capacious number of versions of the Oedipus story; the development of the Oedipus complex throughout Freud’s writing; Freud’s notion of the primal father and the band of brothers who gather together to overthrow him; the real-life billionaire primitive accumulation monster dads who want to reverse-age themselves and live forever; Succession’s Oedipal double binds and Oedipal victories; how the show thematizes patrimony, inheritance, and destiny; what it is to have “the phallus” (and why the Roy kids don’t have it); Shiv as thwarted phallic mother; and Kendall’s symbolic castration.
The Atlantic article referenced in the episode is, “The Secret Fears of the Super Rich,” by Graeme Wood: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/
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

10: Wild Analysis: Problematic Faves and the Anxiety of Influence Teaser May 27, 2023

Show notes

The three of us talk problematic faves, guilty pleasures, comfort food (literal and metaphorical), and the dangers of nostalgia. We focus on thinkers who have been crucial to our own intellectual formation – and who have likewise been meaningful to so many people who have turned to psychoanalysis for answers and ideas. Plus: ridiculous stories about Derrida and Zizek! Subscribe to get access to the full episode and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
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

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