Explore every episode of the podcast Ordinary Unhappiness
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 121: LSD: Subjectivity, Ineffability, and Mental Health feat. Dan Karlin | 08 Nov 2025 | 01:56:52 | |
Abby and Patrick continue their series on psychedelics via an in-depth interview with Dr. Dan Karlin. Karlin is a psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at MindMed, where he oversees clinical trials using LSD to treat major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Karlin first fills Abby and Patrick in about those disorders, MindMed’s ongoing clinical trials, and both the history of LSD research and potential near-future therapeutic applications. In the wide-ranging conversation that follows, they explore provocative questions about the relationship between quantitative research and qualitative description, the challenges of thinking simultaneously about neurobiology and phenomenology, and how various models fall short in different ways when it comes to describing ineffable experiences. They also probe what Karlin’s work suggests about the ways bodily perceptions, metaphors, and narrative shape our subjective sense of self, how the symptoms of MDD and GAD can be seen in that light, and how certain psychedelics may work to rapidly reorganize those underlying patterns and configurations in ways that mirror the work of long-term therapy. Note: All opinions are Karlin's own and not attributable to MindMed 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 | |||
| 120: Wild Analysis: The Substance Teaser | 01 Nov 2025 | 00:05:22 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan process Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. From uncanny doubles to unsparing mirrors to the punishing reality principle of getting older, it’s a film that offers plenty of grist for the psychoanalytic mill. It’s also an occasion for Abby and Dan to reflect on sexual difference, gendered expectations, the male gaze, femininity as self-surveillance, the pleasures (and disgusts) of body horror, 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 | |||
| 113: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part III Teaser | 06 Sep 2025 | 00:05:38 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Dan, and Patrick conclude their viewing of Sophie Fiennes’ and Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). It’s the last stretch of the film, the part where Žižek tries to bring everything together, and it thus gives Abby, Dan, and Patrick a chance to assess the Guide in its entirety. How compelling is the film’s grand unifying theory of subjectivity, lack, and the work of film as a medium that teaches us “how to desire”? What does it mean that all films are ultimately, per Žižek, about the “impossibility of making a film” as such? What’s at stake in for Žižek in the film of Hitchcock and Lynch specifically, and why do the films so neatly showcase the perils of both getting exactly what you want and not knowing what you want after all? What are Žižek’s blind spots vis-à-vis gender, violence, and comedy? And what’s really going on with that favorite adverb of his – “precisely”? 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 | |||
| UNLOCKED: 14: Standard Edition Volume I Part 1: Freud Goes to Paris | 11 Nov 2023 | 01:40:07 | |
Friends! This week we are on deadline and/or under a terrifying pile of ungraded papers, so we're giving folks a chance to enter the wild world of The Standard Edition with this freshly unlocked episode that tackles Freud’s earliest work, his personal and professional anxieties, and the complicated disorder(s) he and his contemporaries called hysteria. (Please join us on Patreon if you like it!) And for our Patreon supporters, a lot more Fliess is coming soon in the next installments of the SE, plus Wild Analysis on settler colonialism and Thanksgiving… | |||
| 30: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 4: Wilhelm Fliess: The Anxiety of Influence (and a Theory of Noses) feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser | 04 Nov 2023 | 00:03:08 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, 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 | |||
| 29: Gender, Trauma, and Psychoanalytic Politics feat. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini | 28 Oct 2023 | 01:24:47 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou and psychoanalyst and academic Ann Pellegrini to discuss their new co-authored book, Gender Without Identity. They talk about the genesis of the manuscript, from its beginnings in a painful case of child analysis to its distressing reception by psychoanalytic gatekeepers and “repressive forces within psychoanalysis itself.” They explore the difficulties queer and trans patients have faced in seeking psychoanalytic treatment; the resistances of institutional psychoanalysis when it comes to theorizing queer subjectivities; the struggles of queer and trans analysts themselves; and the implication of psychoanalysis in broader moral panics and political mobilizations against trans people. They discuss how theory is never just abstract, but bears upon urgent questions of care; the power and fantasies of rhetorical appeals to “protect” children; and how to conceive of gender as an experiment rather than an essential given or a predetermined teleology. Finally, Avgi and Ann offer a provocative approach to thinking about what trauma is and does, including questions of “traumatophobia” and the challenging ways trauma can be theorized and experienced in relation to gendered formations of all sorts. | |||
| 28: Wild Analysis: Halloween (1978) Teaser | 21 Oct 2023 | 00:04:06 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, 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 | |||
| 27: From HIV to COVID: Virality, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Steven Thrasher | 14 Oct 2023 | 01:41:27 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. We discuss Steven’s singular career trajectory (from Saturday Night Live to The Village Voice to academia); the difference between “having” or “owning” a body versus being a body; why pandemics are never just about biology, but implicate social realities, shared fantasies, and libidinal economy; the notion of the “viral underclass”; the changing landscape of HIV/AIDS criminalization laws and the case of Michael Johnson, a young Black man prosecuted for the “reckless transmission” of HIV; the origins, myths, and baggage of the term “Patient Zero”; logics of scapegoating and moral panics; hierarchies of social vulnerability and human disposability, especially as they implicate questions of race, class, sexuality, disability, incarceration, and housing status; our relationship to animals and our calculi about who gets to count as human; ideologies about health and disease, purity and pollution, infection and risk; and how viruses can help us reimagine our conceptions of borders, boundaries, permeability, autonomy, and interdependence. | |||
| 26: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 3: Freud’s Two Dads Teaser | 07 Oct 2023 | 00:04:41 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, 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 | |||
| UNLOCKED: 05: Wild Analysis: Mailbag - Dream Interpretation | 30 Sep 2023 | 01:24:09 | |
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 25: Wild Analysis: Barbie TEASER | 23 Sep 2023 | 00:04:10 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 24: Drugs and the Death Drive feat. Ben Fong | 16 Sep 2023 | 01:24:47 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome academic and writer Ben Fong, author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge as well as Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism. They discuss the many different reasons people take drugs; American exceptionalism with respect to drug consumption; how drug policy and drug discourse is never really just about drugs; what the distinction between legal and illegal drugs both illuminates and obscures; the fundamental fantasies that accompany drug prohibition as well as the fantasies that surround particular drugs themselves; the very near future of psychedelic therapy and its relation to current treatments for anxiety and depression; individual versus social drug experiences; cocaine and neoliberalism; the not-necessarily-liberatory politics of psychedelics; how drug advertising has changed throughout the course of the last century; and the biomedical turn in psychiatry and its relation to shifting social, political, and economic conditions. | |||
| 23: Puns, Jokes, and Serious People feat. Ben Wurgaft | 09 Sep 2023 | 01:30:11 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome intellectual historian, writer, editor, and noted wordsmith Ben Wurgaft. They talk about Ben’s experiences with long-term analysis and discuss ways of accessing low-cost options for psychoanalysis before collectively digging into Freud’s 1905 book on humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious – especially Freud’s jokes about beggars, millionaires, and salmon mayonnaise. They get into Freud’s hydraulic model of jokes as a release of pressure; Freud’s obsession with Jewish humor; what makes jokes funny, what makes them pleasurable, and what emotions they can express; the relationship of jokes to play, childhood, and the process of education; and what it means to be a serious person. | |||
| 112: Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy feat. Josh West | 30 Aug 2025 | 01:51:42 | |
Abby and Patrick are joined by Dr. Josh West to talk about some remarkable developments in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in Australia. Josh explains to Abby and Patrick how the clinical trials he describes are better understood as an experiment in sustained psychotherapy rather than just testing a new drug, and how that experiment has profound psychoanalytic and psychodynamic salience. From the process of patient preparation to the details of “dose day” to the work of subsequent sessions of “integration,” Josh walks Abby and Patrick through how he and other clinicians do their work, and how they tackle the unique demands of maintaining a holding environment, navigating transference, precipitating psychic change, and providing help to patients who are working through end of life crises, longstanding pathologies, and other kinds of profound distress. Along the way, he provides vital context about the history of lab-based psychedelic research and the (mis)appropriation of indigenous traditions while assessing the practical, ethical, and legal challenges that arise when psychedelics become objects of psychopharmacological study, routinized treatment, and corporate investment. Josh’s suggestions for further reading include: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind Marc B. Aixalà, Psychedelic Integration Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life Roberto Lovato, The Gentrification of Consciousness Other sources cited include: Robert Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life Andrei Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination 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 | |||
| 22: Realism and Other Romances feat. Grace Lavery | 02 Sep 2023 | 01:29:17 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Grace Lavery to discuss her new book Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. They discuss Grace’s relationship to psychoanalysis; her uses of Freud and Freudianism for both theoretical and pragmatic political purposes and in service of bodily freedom; her interpretation of Freudian concepts like penis envy and the castration complex; her writing in both Pleasure and Efficacy and her memoir Please Miss on changing sexes as an empirical fact; the stakes of calling things “real” or “authentic” versus dismissing them as fake, try-hard, or otherwise affected; the tensions between queer theory and transgender studies and her notion of “egg theory”; sex, pleasure, desire, and shame; her eminently useful idea of “romances of intractability”; Eve Sedgwick’s, Judith Butler’s, and Lauren Berlant’s later-in-life turns towards transmasculinity; and Grace’s work as activist and advocate in both US and UK contexts. | |||
| 21: Wild Analysis: The Trauma Plot and the Joss Whedon Extended Cinematic Universe Teaser | 26 Aug 2023 | 00:02:27 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, 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 | |||
| 20: A Dangerous Method: Sabina Spielrein, Carl Jung, Otto Gross | 12 Aug 2023 | 01:42:06 | |
Abby, Patrick, and Dan watch David Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which dramatizes the complex relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They discuss Freud and Jung’s fraught relationship and eventual break; Jung’s relationship with Spielrein in life and on film; Spielrein’s biography and her pioneering work as a psychoanalytic theorist and clinician in her own right; other key figures in the development of psychoanalysis, including Eugen Bleuler and Otto Gross (especially Gross’s commitments to anarchism and his concept of mutual analysis); the role of Zurich and the Burghölzli Hospital as a key center of early psychoanalysis; Freud’s one and only trip to America; women as objects of exchange in the development of psychoanalysis; Freud’s Judaism versus Jung’s Protestantism and Jung’s maddening (to Freud) tendencies towards mysticism; and the ways that Spielrein’s work prefigures the late Freudian concept of the death drive. Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein, by John Lauren 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 | |||
| 19: Advice and Anonymity feat. Danny Lavery, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Kali Handelman: OU + the Podcast for Social Research | 05 Aug 2023 | 01:42:33 | |
Ordinary Unhappiness presents a live recording of the Podcast for Social Research! Abby recently joined Danny Lavery, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Kali Handelman to celebrate Danny’s new book, Dear Prudence, which spans his tenure as beloved advice columnist “Prudence” at Slate. The group tackles historical antecedents of advice columns from the New Testament to the Great Depression; how advice columns dramatize social norms as they change in real time; fictional representations of advice columns like Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; tricksters who set out to deceive advice columnists but wind up asking real questions despite themselves; transference and the idiosyncratic role of the advice columnist as both generic and specific Other; and crowdsourced advice seeking (AKA Reddit’s Am I The Asshole?). They wind up by taking questions and offering live, unscripted advice about real estate commitments, relationship commitments, and the dicey intersection thereof. Plus: pro tips on how to stage difficult interventions with roommates and others in your life about grooming, household chores, and more. | |||
| 18: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 2: Hysteria, Hypnosis, and Imposter Syndrome Teaser | 29 Jul 2023 | 00:02:56 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel | 22 Jul 2023 | 01:31:36 | |
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.
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| 16: Fantasy, Fascism, and Technology: From the Frankfurt School to Silicon Valley feat. Moira Weigel | 12 Jul 2023 | 01:29:17 | |
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. The Adorno book about astrology is The Stars Down to Earth 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 | |||
| 15: Diagnosis and Identity: Mailbag Episode! | 08 Jul 2023 | 01:31:53 | |
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.” | |||
| 14: Standard Edition Volume I Part 1: Freud Goes to Paris Teaser | 01 Jul 2023 | 00:03:40 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 13: The Journalist and the Analyst: On Janet Malcolm feat. Sam Adler-Bell | 24 Jun 2023 | 01:49:29 | |
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 The Journalist and the Murderer
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| 111: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 5: Studies on Hysteria, Part V: Miss Lucy R. Teaser | 16 Aug 2025 | 00:04:52 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick turn to the next of Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria: the story of Miss Lucy R. It’s a short treatment – nine weeks – and an even shorter read – fifteen pages – and so the story of this English governess haunted by phantom smells often goes neglected. But as Abby and Patrick explain, her case marks a key shift in Freud’s clinical practice (away from hypnosis) and a succinct demonstration of his core therapeutic techniques. Lucy R’s case also suggests something profound about the interlocking relationships between memories and repression, and between the history of symptoms and the course of treatment. Plus: noses, a rare novel about Lucy’s nose, and tantalizing connections to Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw about the haunting (or madness) of an English governess. 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 | |||
| UNLOCKED: Short Session 1 - Transference, continued | 17 Jun 2023 | 00:33:18 | |
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. | |||
| 12: From Parties to Projective Identification: Why is Group Life so Hard? feat. Christine Smallwood | 10 Jun 2023 | 02:14:17 | |
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! | |||
| 11: Succession: Oedipus and Failsons | 03 Jun 2023 | 02:05:41 | |
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. | |||
| 10: Wild Analysis: Problematic Faves and the Anxiety of Influence Teaser | 27 May 2023 | 00:02:12 | |
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 | |||
| 09: The Pleasure of the Text: The Standard Edition | 20 May 2023 | 01:12:22 | |
Abby and Patrick introduce a new series: the Standard Edition. That’s right; they’re going to read and discuss the entire Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. In this episode, Abby and Patrick discuss why they’re undertaking this project; the origins of the Standard Edition and the cast of characters who brought it into being, including Ernest Jones, Anna Freud, and James and Alix Strachey; the allure of becoming a completist; the pleasures and surprises of rereading; what a canon is and how it gets created; enticements of and resistances to systematicity; and Freud’s obsessive, wonderful footnotes and countless intertexts. (The Standard Edition will be a regular Patreon-only series; to follow along, subscribe to the Patreon at patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness!) | |||
| 08: Political Economy, Libidinal Economy | 13 May 2023 | 01:27:15 | |
Abby puts Patrick on the hot seat to talk psychoanalysis and politics. They discuss how psychoanalytic concepts can help bypass partisan political explanations; the construction of a “we”; identifications and disidentifications with individuals, groups, and social orders; pleasure and the disavowal of pleasure; the church and the military; why more people don’t steal from Target; the rhetoric of how weapons of war “don’t belong on our streets”; why political legitimacy is like clapping for Tinkerbell; repetition compulsion, the death drive, and human disposability; and the concepts that animate Patrick’s writing on gun violence and mass shootings, especially political economy and libidinal economy. They return repeatedly to the case of Jordan Neely, who was killed on an F train in New York City on May 1st, 2023. | |||
| 07: Kettle Logic and Family Secrets: The Uncanny, Part II | 06 May 2023 | 01:18:37 | |
Abby and Patrick return to Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” as an unconventional path to their real target: the unconscious. They talk about the limits of our rationality; “kettle logic” and how it operates; Freud as a “master of suspicion”; narcissistic wounds; family secrets and intergenerational trauma; and the child as the symptom of the parents. | |||
| 06: Unheimlich Maneuver: The Uncanny, Part I | 29 Apr 2023 | 01:20:19 | |
Abby, Patrick, and Dan sneak up on the idea of the unconscious by tackling Freud’s concept of the “uncanny,” and its relationship to anxiety, fear, and the “omnipotence of thoughts.” They talk horror movies, doubles and doppelgangers, talking dolls, bleeding trees, Instagram face and the creepiness of mirrors, déjà vu, imaginary friends, ghosts, revenants, repetition, and the enchantment/disenchantment of the world. Part II coming next week! | |||
| 03: Bonus Content: Short session I - Transference, continued Teaser | 23 Apr 2023 | 00:02:47 | |
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. Subscribe to get access to the full episode and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 05: Wild Analysis: Mailbag Episode! Teaser | 23 Apr 2023 | 00:02:23 | |
We take your calls and talk about dream interpretation, professional ethics, and visions of therapy for the world we live in versus the world we want to inhabit. (We are also unexpectedly haunted by the example of the fantasy of wanting to kill your boss.) Subscribe to get access to the full episode and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness | |||
| 110: Wild Analysis: Sex and the City Teaser | 09 Aug 2025 | 00:11:46 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick mark the announcement of the end of And Just Like That... by giving it, and Sex and the City, a psychoanalytic send-off. From the durable popularity of the original series to the ambivalent comfort of hate-watching the spin-off, the two reflect on what made the franchise so influential, its role in the history of early “prestige TV,” and its place in popular memory. Abby and Patrick watch some classic episodes, unpack the now famous character types of the four women friends at the show’s center, and track recurrent themes of fantasy, neurosis, desire, money, identity, and – above all – fashion. This brings Abby and Patrick to dip into the psychoanalytic literature on clothing and fashion, from the status of clothes (like symptoms) as a “compromise” to theories of sexual fetishism to the story of an Esperanto-speaking fashion historian and psychoanalyst who played a key role in an interwar British “dress reform movement.” 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 | |||
| 04: Guess Who’s Back, Back Again (It’s Freud) feat. Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston | 15 Apr 2023 | 01:24:51 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston, founders of the Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis magazine. The four discuss their paths to psychoanalysis; speculate about why Freud is back (or if he ever really left); and offer copious reading suggestions! Plus, Hannah talks about being both the child of analysts and a historian of psychoanalysis and Alex discusses his status as a “faithless Lacanian” and its implications for clinical practice. https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/
John Forrester, Freud & Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures (new edition forthcoming) Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France Daniel José Gaztambide, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love” Jacqueline Rose, “Where Does the Misery Come From? Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and The Event” Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (AKA the “Dora” case study) Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Malcom Bowie, Lacan Shoshana Felman, Lacan and the Adventure of Insight Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers Jordy Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day” Jonathan Culler, “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative”
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| 02: Transference | 08 Apr 2023 | 01:36:11 | |
Abby, Patrick, and Dan talk about transference in Freud’s essays on analytic technique and at your local bar; what resistance is and how it manifests in different ways; analytic neutrality; what you should say to the friend who keeps getting stuck in the same relationship over and over; why people want to have a beer with the president; and whether any kind of love at all is real | |||
| 01: What is Psychoanalysis? | 01 Apr 2023 | 01:15:59 | |
Abby and Patrick talk about the position of “the subject-supposed-to-know” and how they anxiously inhabit it; Anna O., the “talking cure” and the founding of psychoanalysis; and different ways to explain what psychoanalysis is and why it’s impossible for them to think without it | |||
| Bonus Episode: Jeffrey Epstein: Open Secrets (Crossover with In Bed With the Right) | 29 Jul 2025 | 01:15:21 | |
We’re happy to share In Bed With the Right's latest episode. Patrick sits down with friends of OU Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan to reckon with the Epstein case - what we know, what we don’t know, what we’ll never know, what we always already knew, and what all these contortions of anticipation, secrecy, revelation, and obviousness might mean. Listen to more In Bed With the Right here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight/ Patrick Blanchfield, “Suffer The Children,” in The Revealer: https://therevealer.org/suffer-the-children/ 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 | |||
| 109: Somatics, Politics, and Practice feat. Sumitra Rajkumar | 26 Jul 2025 | 01:26:31 | |
Abby and Patrick are joined by somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” and other exercises to explore histories of “shaping,” undo habitual patterns of embodiment, address trauma, and cultivate a capacity to remain centered and present under pressure. As the three explore, what sets Sumitra’s approach apart from ostensibly “apolitical” or openly right-wing traditions is a self-conscious, critical awareness of power dynamics and different people’s varied relationships to historical oppression and their own bodies. Over and against “apolitical,” mystical, or openly right-wing tendencies of other practices, Sumitra’s vision of somatics is particularly attuned to the physical and psychic tolls of maintaining compassion, resisting burnout, and building relationships of solidarity with strangers. Rich with psychoanalytic resonances throughout, their conversation focuses in particular on the concept of the “transferential constellation,” which clarifies a great deal about the different dynamics between right and left mass movements, and casts many difficult experiences – whether in a consulting room, at a protest, or canvassing by knocking on doors – in provocative new light. The Action Lab: https://www.actionlabny.org/ Art of Purpose fellowship application: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGsmA_TIm0/7-aSlMVivPoR4kHvJD-Hbg/view?utm_content=DAGsmA_TIm0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h12e5faa7a3#1 More on somatics and Sumitra’s work: Institutions Sumitra mentions include: Generative Somatics: https://generativesomatics.org/ BOLD: https://www.boldorganizing.org/ The Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/ The Organizing Center: https://www.theorganizingcenter.org/ The tweet that started this conversation 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 | |||
| Episode 108: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 4: Studies on Hysteria, Part IV: Frau Emmy von N. Teaser | 19 Jul 2025 | 00:19:00 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick examine the case study of “Frau Emmy von N.” From the perspective of both clinical technique and the history of psychoanalysis, it is primarily significant as an artifact from when Freud was still thinking in terms of associationist psychology and using hypnosis in treatment sessions. In terms of narrative, it seems, at least superficially, to be just another example of “hysterical neurosis” as encountered in the story of Anna O. Yet as Abby and Patrick discuss, the case of Emmy Von N. in fact suggests some pivotal shifts in Freud’s thinking, from a “subconscious” to a dynamic unconscious, and from performing interpretations to listening to patients talk in their own terms and along their own timelines. And the real story behind the pseudonym Freud gave to Fanny Moser, née Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart, the richest woman in Central Europe, is actually a wild tale of social scandal, intergenerational loss and reparation, and possibly even True Crime. Sources include: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives Phillip M. Bromberg, “Hysteria, Dissociation, and Cure: Emmy von N Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6:1 (1996) Henri Ellenberger, “A Critical Study of ‘Emmy von N.’ with New Documents,” in Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry Else Pappenheim, “Freud and Gilles de la Tourette: Diagnostic Speculations on ‘Frau Emmy von N,’” International Review of Psychoanalysis 7:265 (1980) 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 | |||
| Episode 107: On Abjection Teaser | 12 Jul 2025 | 00:04:25 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. Abby, Patrick, and Dan proceed through Kristeva’s many earthy examples, from food waste to vomit to excrement to corpses, and to the ideologies she perceives as relying on logics of abjection and making-abject, from hatred of mothers to antisemitism and beyond. Turning to explicitly contemporary political topics, they draw on the work of key interpreters of Kristeva to explain how the ongoing production of abject populations is vital to both real and figurative operations of boundary maintenance, oppression, and exploitation, and to core processes of state formation and policing of the public sphere. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms. For the complete reading list for this episode, visit our Patreon: 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! (646) 450-0847 | |||
| Episode 106: Abortion, Agency, and Protest feat. Hilary Plum | 05 Jul 2025 | 01:34:09 | |
Abby and Patrick sit down with writer Hilary Plum to discuss her remarkable new book, State Champ. A novel at which the politics of abortion stand at the center, but far from a didactically “political novel,” State Champ gives the three an opportunity to explore a suite of deeply psychoanalytic themes and topics: from the gap between our first-person experiences of our bodies to the claims and restrictions made by others on our bodily autonomy; from the purposes of protest to our motivations for undertaking them; from discourses about “regret” versus certainty and judgement; from the knowledge we anticipate to come from experiences versus things we know already versus things that others think they better; and from sex to eating disorders to humor to running and more. The three also reflect on writing and reading novels in 2025, genre, audiences, and on what communication and psychic change we hope fiction can achieve. Hilary Plum, State Champ: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/state-champ-9781639735433/ Hilary’s website: http://www.hilaryplum.com/ Index for Continuance, a podcast about small press publishing, politics, and practice, hosted by Hilary Plum and Zach Peckham: https://www.csupoetrycenter.com/index-for-continuance-podcast Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” 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 | |||
| 105: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 3: Studies on Hysteria, Part III: Four Versions of Anna O. Teaser | 21 Jun 2025 | 00:05:51 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to the first case study in Studies On Hysteria (1895). But while previously they examined the case of “Anna O.” as told narrowly by Josef Breuer on his own terms, this time they tell the story of the remarkable woman behind it: Bertha Pappenheim. They begin by addressing how the legend of a “hysterical pregnancy” came to overshadow the “Anna O.” case history, and how that apocryphal tale was the product of squabbles and mythmaking involving Freud, his biographers, his students, and his opponents. Next, they turn to the story of Bertha Pappenheim herself, focusing first on the actual details of her treatment with Breuer as well as her subsequent mental health history. Then, they unpack her incredible achievements beyond her time with Breuer. It’s a wide-ranging, continent-spanning, and ocean-crossing story of activism, authorship, and intellectual influence, tying together political themes of social work, German feminism, Jewish anti-Zionism, and more. ***Ordinary Unhappiness is shifting to three episodes a month during summer 2025 due to health reasons – but Patreon subscribers will still get two exclusive episodes per month, including the Standard Edition series and Wild Analysis! Find us at https://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! (646) 450-0847 | |||
| 119: Lacan, Knowledge, Fantasy feat. Nick Stock and Nick Peim | 25 Oct 2025 | 01:45:40 | |
Abby and Patrick are joined by Nick Stock and Nick Peim, authors of the new book The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment. From the origin stories teachers tell about themselves to the ways the classroom looms large in our memories, popular media, and political rhetoric, it’s a conversation about education at the intersection of fantasies, reality, vocations, anxieties, addictions, and more. What are the narratives that drive people to study and to teach, and what are the satisfactions and frustrations that come with learning? How do credentials and rules work in tandem with transgression and license? How do our expectations of acquiring knowledge survive, or get dashed, by disillusionment when we finally “get” it? Can we ever truly learn anything – or is knowledge always unstable and transient? As Nick and Nick explain, a Lacanian perspective is singularly helpful for confronting these questions and more. Walking through Lacan’s theories of lack, identification, and institutional discourses, they also explore why so many people find the figure of Jacques Lacan himself so alluring. The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-93018-8 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 | |||
| 104: Manufacturing Homelessness feat. Brian Goldstone | 14 Jun 2025 | 01:50:00 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone to discuss his new book, There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645871/there-is-no-place-for-us-by-brian-goldstone/ https://www.briangoldstone.net/ 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 | |||
| 103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah Miller | 07 Jun 2025 | 00:06:09 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Peruvian Amazon for two weeks of psychedelic treatment under a prominent indigenous shaman. Sarah relates and reflects on her experience, her relationship with the shaman and his other clients, the business model of the “ayahuasca center,” and much more. Along the way, Sarah, Abby, and Patrick unpack broader narratives about therapy, ritual, and healing; the ways we metabolize feelings of guilt, sadness, and desires for change; the unavoidable context of capitalism, global inequality, and climate catastrophe; our expectations for psychedelics, our fantasies of transformative experiences, and what we can learn from plants. 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 | |||
| 102: Reparations, Responsibility, and Climate Justice feat. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò | 24 May 2025 | 01:39:23 | |
Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on the occasion of the new edition of his book Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Reconsidering Reparations is a magisterial work that ties together global history, data from economics and public health, philosophy, and more, and dramatically cuts through many of our moment’s thorniest debates over identity, responsibility, and political change. Together, Abby, Patrick, and Olúfẹ́mi contextualize and walk through the book’s core arguments and their implications for audiences both psychoanalytic and otherwise. Beginning with how a truly transatlantic history of the African slave trade and an awareness of how European colonialism as a properly global enterprise can together shed new light on both domestic inequalities within the United States and relations between the contemporary Global North and South, the three unpack how the accumulation of material advantages and disadvantages have, over time, resulted in landscapes of suffering that are simultaneously far-flung yet fundamentally interconnected. Historicizing and grounding the present in terms of what Táíwò terms “Global Racial Empire” renders uncanny the givenness of contemporary national borders, and throws into question many of our most foundational national narratives and even the givenness of the state form itself. Moreover, thinking seriously about history and oppression reveals what canonical philosophical accounts of the liberal social contract disavow, and what fantasies and concrete purposes so many contemporary invocations of meritocracy and justice as “fairness” serve. The conversation builds to Olúfẹ́mi’s “constructive view” of reparations, the centrality of climate justice to that program, and a series of crucial disambiguations and reconfigurations of prevailing notions of responsibility, accountability, guilt, liability, and more. Indeed, as the three describe, thinking about ourselves in terms of our ancestors, while understanding ourselves as ancestors, offers everyone a path forward, one that moves beyond the dead-ends of reflexive denialism and narcissistic injury to suggest new possibilities for identification, disidentification, and solidarity, and that powerfully clarifies goals, sustains motivation, and helps us imagine possibilities for change across social differences, geographical distances, and the span of time. Plus: “theory versus practice” versus “theory and practice”; the example and legacy of Frantz Fanon; the joys, perplexities, and embarrassments of being a philosophy nerd; and more. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparations Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/against-decolonisation/ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005426 Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation (And Other Works, 1921-1945): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Love-Guilt-a | |||
| 101: Mailbag: On Pain, Learning, and the Problem of Other Minds Teaser | 17 May 2025 | 00:09:57 | |
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frictionless movement in video games to the ways anxieties about the existence other human minds appears to be driving ever more people to prefer the projections and grandiose claims of interactions with so-called “artificial intelligence.” They then turn to another space where the questions of friction, the possibility of pain, the promise of growth, and the role of transference loom large: the classroom. In particular, they explore the ethical and interpersonal stakes of teaching psychoanalysis, and teaching in general, with an eye toward questions of repetition, narcissism, Trauma Studies as a discipline, traumatic experiences of learning, what is or isn’t “outside the classroom,” the balance between taking things personally and meeting students where they are, and whether and how pedagogy and learning alike resemble therapy in all its possibilities and pains. Plus: turtles tortoises, a round of Fuck Marry Kill (yes), Wolfenstein, 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 | |||