Afleveringen
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Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue tracking the reflections â and refractions â of the myth of Narcissus across Western history. From the songs of French troubadours to the tale of Chaucerâs Wife of Bath to the poetry of Dante and the dialogues of Petrarch, they examine how Ovidâs narrative of Narcissus and Echo grew into a powerful cultural template for dramatizing changing attitudes towards love, sexuality, gender, and more. By the same token, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, the figure of Narcissus became a touchstone for other literary traditions, moral discourses, and theological traditions. Turning to key moments from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Church Fathers, the three then sketch out how the question of narcissism also came to reflect longstanding cultural anxieties about vanity, âvainglory,â pleasure, embodiment, humility, pride, and the nature of selfhood.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Abby and Patrick welcome historian Stuart Schrader for a conversation about the history, ideology, and politics of contemporary American policing. Schraderâs new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, gives the three a chance to unpack the specific institutions behind the catchall of âthe policeâ and to pinpoint the specific, historically contingent ways American police have acquired outsize political and cultural power. Stuart walks Abby and Patrick through his research on the history of police unions and the ecosystem of institutions that have made arming, funding, empowering, and immunizing police bipartisan priorities. Toggling between perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, Stuart, Abby, and Patrick address questions like: How are police unions different from other unions, and how is police work fundamentally different from other kinds of work? How is power distributed within police agencies, how do different institutions compete with one another for resources and patronage, what antagonisms divide police, and how do they nonetheless manage to protect their shared claim to wield violent, discretionary power? The conversation drills deep into urgent, fundamentally psychoanalytic questions, questions that hit all the harder on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States itself. Why are Americaâs police such objects of overdetermined discourse and fantasy? How are Americans variously taught to summon police, to identify with police, to fear police, and to otherwise think about the policing, oftentimes in ways entirely divorced from material realities? Why do so many Americans resist recognizing police as properly self-interested political actors, despite manifest evidence to the contrary, and even while police leaders have openly embraced partisan political engagement? How do police think about themselves, and what ideological narratives and cultural forces have made police such a naturalized and ubiquitous presence in American life? And if we can bring ourselves to see whatâs repressed yet right front of our faces â the reality of âBlue Powerâ â then what new possibilities for insight, organizing, and political change might that open up?
Stuart Schrader, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves.
Stuard Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
More about Stuart: https://stuartschrader.com/
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Abby, Patrick, and Dan dig into the realms of myth and fable to investigate the ancient origins of the Narcissus myth. As they discover, behind the skeletal form of the story (i.e., guy falls in love with his own reflection) are a multitude of versions, with some striking variations and suggestive throughlines. After cataloguing these, they turn to the primary source for the modern version of the myth, Ovidâs Metamorphoses, reading that poemâs account of the doomed encounter between Narcissus and the nymph Echo as a story of impossible desires and intertwined destinies.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off Ordinary Unhappinessâs Summer of Narcissism series! In this first episode of many, the three reckon with how talk of ânarcissismâ and ânarcissistsâ is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, from therapy sessions to self-help-books to popular media to op-eds to the dating scene and beyond. Yet as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, ânarcissismâ in practice seems to mean radically different things to different people, gets invoked for wildly different purposes, and is hotly debated, with plentiful disagreements, even among specialists in any given field, let alone across disciplines. At the same time, the idea of narcissism speaks powerfully to people as they navigate personal relationships and struggle to make sense of group behaviors. Narcissism, in other words, is a quintessentially overdetermined concept, with simultaneously clinical, theoretical, and all-too-personal implications, and one that raises philosophical, political, and painfully practical questions about the relationship between normality and pathology, the individual and the collective, the clinical and the polemical, and more besides. Itâs both the beginning of a deep dive into the meanings, history, and stakes of a much used â and much-abused â buzzword and also a great (re)introduction to the Ordinary Unhappiness project and what it means to think psychoanalytically in general. Next week in Part 2: Narcissus in myth and imagination!
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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X: @UnhappinessPod
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Abby and Patrick wrap up their reading of the Elisabeth von R case study. First, they tackle the Discussion section of Freudâs paper. As they discover, this section goes beyond Elisabethâs story: it contains yet more case vignettes of still other patients, as well as a meditation on the strangeness of an approach to scientific inquiry and practical treatment where stories are the primary source of data. Second, they observe Freudâs beginning to explore a set of questions that will recur throughout his subsequent work â involving, above all, the relationships between embodied experiences, bodily metaphors, and the unconscious. Finally, Abby and Patrick go beyond the text to reflect on the biography of the woman who was Elisabeth von R â Ilona Weiss â and what it means for an analytic treatment to be successful.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Abby, Patrick, and Dan close out their reading of Winnicottâs paper, âTransitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,â focusing specifically on Winnicottâs two case studies. The first is the story of a distressed little boy who has developed an idiosyncratic relationship to string; the second is an adult woman struggling with feelings of loss, memories of her dislocated childhood, and a fantasy about a beautiful white horse. Along the way, Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott in conversation with other analytical concepts â from Freudâs notion of mourning to Lacanâs idea of the signifying chain â and work through some challenging implications for thinking about drug addiction, intergenerational traumas, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Abby and Patrick welcome clinician, activist, and writer Lara Sheehi, author of the brand-new book, From the Clinic to The Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. Situating this book and her other work within the context of her background and experiences with psychoanalytic institutions, Sheehi leads Abby and Patrick on a frank and searching conversation with far-reaching implications. What does it mean to identify with psychoanalysis in the abstract, what are the tools psychoanalysis gives us for thinking about the political stakes of our identifications, and what does it mean when psychoanalytic institutions demand disidentification from lived experiences and urgent political concerns? What stories does mainstream psychoanalysis tell about itself, what histories does it repress, and what contemporary material realities does it disavow? What are the promises of a âdespecializedâ psychoanalysis, and how might a despecialized psychoanalysis put psychoanalytic concepts and approaches to liberatory use? Addressing these questions and more, the three discuss topics including: the history of psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric enterprise; its extensive weaponization as a tool of imperial domination and counterinsurgent repression; emancipatory and decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis via figures like Frantz Fanon; the complicities, contradictions, and enactments of contemporary psychoanalysis against a backdrop of transphobic legislation, genocide in Gaza, and more; psyops, psychological warfare, and military psychology; psychodynamic counterinsurgency theory; logics of blame, ingratitude, exclusion, and confusion; the work of âpsychic intrusionsâ on the level of individual psyches and group dynamics; the necessity of âpsychic militancyâ as a concept and as a disciplined practice; and much, much more.
Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures
Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine
Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects
Ernesto Che Guevara, âOn Revolutionary Medicineâ
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
David Petraeus, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency
âA conversation between sword and neckâ Ghassan Kanafaniâs 1970 interview with ABCâs Richard Carleton in Beirut
Laraâs personal website
The Psychic Militancy podcast
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Provided by Fruits Music -
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Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their reading of Winnicottâs famous essay, âTransitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.â Focusing on the middle third of the paper, the three unpack Winnicottâs description of the transitional object as the âfirst not-me possession,â the stakes of his idea of the âgood enough mother,â and how âgood enoughâ care involves an interplay of illusion and disillusion that Winnicott sees as essential to the development of an infantâs capacity for reality testing, self-awareness, and more. They close-read Winnicottâs narrative and diagrammatic illustration of an intergenerational story of symptoms and transitional objects within a single family; address the technical distinctions between his models and those of Melanie Klein; and consider implications for adult activities of artistic creation and aesthetic experience.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Taking a breather from our momentâs unrelentingly grim headlines, Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to a favorite analytic thinker â Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) â and begin the first of a two-part episode on one of his most famous papers, âTransitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenaâ (1951/1953). Winnicottâs ostensible subject here is infantile development, and specifically the attachment very young children frequently develop towards a particularly favored object, whether that be a blanket, a stuffed animal, or the like. But Winnicott also imbues an infantâs âlovieâ with profound significance that goes beyond its material incarnation. Rather than being just another plaything, it holds an essential role in the development of a childâs incipient subjectivity, and demands that we think beyond binary distinctions between subject and object, inside and outside, and self and other. As a âtransitional object,â it even suggests a kind of template for sophisticated adultg activities ranging from artistic creation to religious rituals to sexual fetishism to addiction and more. Close reading the first six pages of the essay, Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack Winnicottâs deceptively simple prose and delightful lists, exploring how play is in fact neither frivolous nor merely the province of children, but in fact something much more serious, and thinking through the implications of Winnicottâs idea of âtransitional phenomenaâ for psychotherapy, education, aesthetics, and more.
Works Cited:
Donald Woods Winnicott, âTransitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,â in Playing and Reality (essay originally published in 1951; Playing and Reality, 1971)
Also as mentioned in the episode, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Researchâs Annual Social is June 4th! Abby is on the host committee and weâll both be there â come join us to support BISR?
For more details and tickets: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/2026-annual-institute-social/
And a link to Abbyâs summer Brooklyn Institute class, Theories of Consent: Subjectivity and Sexual Ethics: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/theories-of-consent-subjectivity-and-sexual-ethics-2/
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Provided by Fruits Music -
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Abby and Patrick arrive at the third and final phase of Freudâs treatment of Elizabeth von R. This is where everything comes together, where Elizabethâs stories, re-told one last time, reveal a heartbreaking throughline, and where Freudâs approach yields a dramatic and decisive interpretation. Abby and Patrick walk through it all, reprising themes of genre, psychoanalytic technique, psychotherapeutic ethics, the cumulative psychic impact of lifeâs contingencies, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
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Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
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Abby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the second installment of a two-part series on the thought of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. Together, the three discuss a pivotal chapter in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, unpacking Laplancheâs âuniversalizedâ transformation of Freudâs seduction hypothesis; Laplancheâs âprimal situationâ and its roots in anthropology and phenomenology; and what these ideas reveal about our invariably messy experiences of parenting, therapy, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Clinician Chris Landry joins Abby and Patrick for a reflection on the life and legacy of prominent psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear (1948-2025). From Yale to the University of Chicago to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and beyond, Lear creatively combined his clinical experiences, a rigorous reading of Freud, and a perspective steeped in classical Western philosophical traditions. As Chris, Abby, and Patrick explore, the result is a singular body of work that clarifies otherwise challenging questions of epistemology and hermeneutics while also speaking directly to urgent political questions and the lived texture of contemporary human life. Chris, Abby, and Patrick proceed by close reading a chapter from one of Learâs most celebrated works, Love and Its Place in Nature, unpacking Learâs account of how love underwrites human development by making possible the experience of a âgood-enough world.â The three then walk through the ethical implications of Learâs thought for the institutions and practices of contemporary psychotherapy, which often neglect interpretative dialogue and attentive care in favor of alienating and crudely pathologizing both patients and practitioners. The conversation builds to a discussion by Chris of how Lear, together with Fanon, has inspired his own work in community psychoanalysis, in facilitating a working group for practitioners, and in critiquing the power dynamics of the contemporary clinical landscape.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Loren Dent. As co-director of Brooklynâs Greene Clinic, Loren is the ideal person to unpack the history, meaning, and contemporary landscape of community psychoanalysis. Drawing on Brazilian analyst Gabriel TupenambĂĄâs idea of the âinstitutional circuit,â Loren walks Abby and Patrick through a history extending from Freudâs hopes for a âpsychoanalysis for the peopleâ to the refugee analyst diasporas of WW2 to the interventions of Jacques Lacan to contemporary efforts to bring a community psychoanalytic orientation to analytic institutions around the United States. As Loren, Abby, and Patrick explore, the idea of community also psychoanalysis raises questions about the communities psychoanalysis can serve, communities it has previously excluded, and psychoanalytic institutions as communities in their own right. Topics include the relationship between theory, practice, and doctrine; differing national histories of psychoanalysis; ego psychology and the question of adaptation; the embededness of signifiers; hierarchies and antagonisms within analytic institutions, as well as efforts to reconstellate them; the complicated stakes of âexpanding accessâ; burnout as both an individual condition and institutional symptom; what drives people to practice psychoanalysis in the first place, and more.
More about Loren at the Greene Clinic and about his courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Works cited:
Gabriel TupinambĂĄ, The Desire of Psychoanalysis, Exercises in Psychoanalytic Thinking.
Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis.
Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freudâs Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-1938.
Emily Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich.
Resources:
Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) Community Psychoanalysis Track & Consortium
The Greene Clinic
Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy
The Kedzie Center, Chicago
Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Community Psychoanalysis Certificate Program
Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Concentration in Community Psychoanalysis
DIVISION/Review, Special Issue on Community Psychoanalysis, 2022
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music -
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Abby and Patrick cover the âsecond phaseâ of Freudâs treatment of Elisabeth von R. Their focus this time is on Freudâs technique, and especially on Freudâs insistence that his patient pursue her associations no matter where they might lead. What are we to make of Freudâs apparent confidence here â is it self-confidence, confidence in the process, confidence in Elisabeth, or some combination of all three? What is the character of âresistanceâ in this text â who or what is doing the resistance, and what is being resisted? How does Freudâs theory of psychic injuries that become manifested in bodily symptoms relate to the practice of interpretation, and the mechanism of therapeutic action in general? Close-reading Freudâs own words in some passages of remarkable candor, Abby and Patrick address these questions and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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Provided by Fruits Music -
Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou for a frank conversation about politics, psychoanalysis, and the politics of psychoanalysts and of psychoanalytic institutions. Recent years have seen multiple psychoanalytic schools, museums, and other entities invite lecturers and panelists to discuss ongoing events in Israel and Palestine, only to then variously cancel, alter, or otherwise walk back those invitations. Avgi, who has both witnessed and been on the receiving end of such âdisinvitations,â joins Abby and Patrick to reflect on their significance on multiple levels. In what ways do these events reflect how institutional psychoanalysis has responded to the genocide in Gaza more generally? How do such events play out as communications, both in terms of the language and rationales invoked by people involved, and in terms of what they implicitly convey as unspoken norms? If we see such âdisinvitationsâ as enactments, then what are the underlying fantasies and anxieties they express? What is their immediate social and political context, what are their precedents, and what deeper histories and traumas might underwrite them? Avgi leads Abby and Patrick in a conversation that expands into topics including: the question of what is or isnât âoutsideâ the consulting room and what does or doesnât get considered âpoliticalâ; our fantasies about our capacities for tolerance, both in terms of distress and in terms of dissent; the uses of anger, the pathologization of affect, and the stakes of âmaking a sceneâ; tokenism, inclusivity, exclusion, and professional ethics; the weaponization of analytic concepts and intellectualization as a defense; transphobia, anti-Arab prejudice, anti-Semitism, and the impacts of oppression and historical traumas; the many meanings of resistance; the clinical encounter and Laplancheâs idea of âtranslationâ; the creation of new spaces for psychoanalytic education and community; and much, much more.
Selected Texts Cited:
Avgi Saketopoulou, âJust Say Genocide: The Problem of Truth Sadismâ in Battleground
Avgi Saketopoulou, âAgainst Transantagonism: A Metapsychology for the Flourishing of Trans Children (Or, Did you all think pronouns were enough?)â
Avgi Saketopoulou, âGenocide and the Screen of Irreverence,â in Petrucelli, J. and Schoen, S. (eds.), Proceedings of William Allanson Whiteâs Conference on Irreverence
Edward Said (with Christopher Bollas and Jacqueline Rose), Freud and the Non-European
Franz Kafka, âOn Parablesâ
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
P-HOLE (Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education) https://p-hole.com.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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. Find us online:
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X: @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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Abby and Patrick are joined by SĂ©amus Malekafzali, a journalist whose reportage and commentary has proven indispensable to processing the United Statesâ war with Iran, and whose historical research and critical essays are vital for thinking about the modern Middle East in general. SĂ©amus begins by talking about his work, setting ongoing events in context, and reflects on the differences between public discourse in English versus Arabic-language spaces. Toggling between contemporary headlines and historical texts, SĂ©amus, Abby, and Patrick reflect on how material realities and geopolitical antagonisms have interacted with competing fantasies, traumatic memories, and logics of identification to produce our current juncture. What ensues is an earnest and searching conversation about dynamics of family, ethnicity, religion, race, and nationality; intergenerational experiences of historical traumas; identification with the aggressor; repression, resistance, and enactment as material and libidinal concepts; nationalism, chauvinism, and settler colonialism; Israeli-US relations as a âfeedback loopâ; the politics of language; the advocacy of diaspora communities; the difficulties of talking about whatâs obvious; and much more.
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Abby and Patrick welcome novelist and academic Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his brand-new novel, Night Night Fawn. Alternately hilarious and devasting, Night Night Fawn is written in the voice of Barbara Rosenberg, an embittered New York Jewish woman penning a deathbed memoir that documents her many disappointments and frustrations â with life, love, friendship, money, and, above all her trans son, whom she hallucinates as a large and ominous bird. Night Night Fawn is also incredibly overdetermined with respect to genre, representing an effort on Rosenbergâs part to write from the perspective of a fictionalized version of his own mother. On yet another level, itâs a sustained interrogation of the complex and painful interactions between material conditions and ideological systems, the forces that shape our experiences of family, class, religion, and ethnicity, and the specific histories of twentieth century American Jewishness as it relates to Zionism and the horrors of our twenty-first century present. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abby, Patrick, and Jordy discuss the social reproduction of bigotry; the relationship between ethnonationalism and the heteropatriarchal family form; the ethics and aesthetics of representation; the contemporary landscape of the political novel, and much, much more.
Selected Works Cited:
Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Fawn: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/689017/night-night-fawn-by-jordy-rosenberg/
Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556691/confessions-of-the-fox-by-jordy-rosenberg/
Rosenberg, âGender Trouble on Motherâs Dayâ: https://avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/
Rosenberg, âThe Daddy Dialecticâ: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/
Sigmund Freud, âMourning and Melancholiaâ
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I
Leon Trotsky, âLiterature and Revolutionâ
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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:
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Abby and Patrick resume the case history of Elisabeth von R. in the wake of her revelation of a previously unmentioned character â a would-be suitor. Unpacking the tale of Elisabethâs courtship, and the sad circumstances of its end, Abby and Patrick itemize the conflicts, anxieties, and fantasies that seem to structure Elisabethâs underlying psychic distress. As they explain, this grammar of suffering is at once singular to Elisabeth as an individual but also resonant for readers in the present, and sets the stage for a dramatic Freudian intervention as well as a resolution to the mystery of why Elisabethâs symptoms are embodied in her legs.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
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Abby and Patrick welcome Helen Epstein, Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard College and author of the new book Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic. After sketching out the history of contemporary western sociological and philosophical accounts of suicide in general from Durkheim to the existentialists and beyond, the three turn to the specific focus of Epsteinâs research: suicide epidemics. As Epstein elaborates, suicide epidemics â wherein entire communities experience sudden and acute spikes in suicide rates â raise urgent questions about the social, economic, and emotional contexts of suicidal distress. What broad conditions can make people feel like life is no longer worth living? What models of meaningful life do communities transmit intergenerationally, and how do those models â and those communities â crumble under pressure? Exploring examples from Micronesia to Nunavut and from 1990s Russia to the contemporary United States and taking up communities from 19th century industrial workers to contemporary American military veterans, Epstein walks Abby and Patrick through her findings, leading the three to reflect on how societies metabolize historical change and economic dislocation on the level of families and across generations.
Helen Epstein, Why Live: When Suicide Becomes an Epidemic.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
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Abby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the second installment of a two-part series on the thought of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. Together, the three discuss a pivotal chapter in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, unpacking Laplancheâs âuniversalizedâ transformation of Freudâs seduction hypothesis; Laplancheâs âprimal situationâ and its roots in anthropology and phenomenology; and what these ideas reveal about our invariably messy experiences of parenting, therapy, and more.
Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe youâve 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
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