Ordinary Unhappiness – Details, episodes & analysis

Abby and Patrick welcome Dan Taberski, creator of the brand-new podcast series Hysterical. They explore the genesis of the series and the challenges and rewards of confronting both the history and the present of “the H-word.” Tracking the trajectories of this famously “elusive neurosis,” Hysterical looks to episodes from colonial America to Belle Epoque Paris to modern-day Iran, and tracks the stories of people from high school students in upstate New York to a prosecutor in Ohio to former CIA agents. How does the documentary balance the different senses of “hysteria” and being “hysterical” as concepts in the history of medicine, as labels used to stigmatize and dismiss suffering, and as a clarifying term for understanding contemporary events? What is ultimately diagnosable as “real” in the brain, in our genes, or according to the DSM – and how do we square those supposed answers with our personal narratives, beliefs, and certainties? In what ways do the individual symptoms of “conversion disorders” reflect underlying social conditions? And how do moral panics and fits of “mass hysteria” reveal hierarchies of gender, race, vulnerability, and power? Taberski tells us about what it was like to interview such a wide range of subjects, and how the show worked to put their stories and personal feelings about “the H-word” into dialogue with interpretations by doctors, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and pundits. Plus: secondary gain, the idea of “evenly hovering attention,” the ethics of leaning into messiness, and the psychoanalytically provocative aspects of podcasting.

You can listen to Hysterical anywhere you get your podcasts; more details are here: https://wondery.com/shows/hysterical/

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

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

Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their journey through the Project for a Scientific Psychology. They explore how the Project reflects recent developments in technology, and how Freud is staging an intervention into ongoing contemporary investigations in the fields of neurology and biology. Working through key early chapters of the Project itself, they unpack how Freud’s thought reveals a preoccupation with flows of energy (“Q”) that traverse boundaries and both sustain and trouble psychic life. 

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

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

Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to one of Freud’s earliest and strangest works: an untitled “psychology for neurologists,” begun in shorthand on a moving train, which went unpublished until 1950. Grappling with the text in terms of its significance and genre, they explore how abandoned experiments and seeming dead-ends can still yield insight and how, when it comes to the tricky interfaces between mind and brain, theories and metaphors can illuminate precisely in how they fall short.

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

Abby and Patrick welcome scholar and literary critic Rebecca Ariel Porte of Dilettante Army and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to talk about the key Freudian concept of the pleasure principle. Starting with Freud’s 1911 essay, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Rebecca, Abby, and Patrick probe the complicated question of what, exactly “pleasure” (German: Lust) means for Freud. At the end of the day, is “pleasure” simply the avoidance of pain, relative movement along a stimulus gradient, an object towards which we turn reflexively like sunflowers towards the sun, or something else? How does Freud’s notion of pleasure relate, on the one hand, to its apparent opposite, AKA “unpleasure” (German: Unlust), and to the “reality principle” on the other? What is the status and function of the different ways we imagine pleasure and find pleasure in imagining, from daydreams to fantasies to “hallucinatory satisfactions” in general? Plus: what Freud’s theories of pleasure miss and other analytic thinkers don’t (with reference to Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein); the relationship between ego instincts and sexual instincts; flights into illness and the meanings of neurosis; and a reading of an incredibly Freudian sequence in Milton’s Paradise Lost!

Rebecca’s recent essay on Cixous is here: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/helene-cixous-well-kept-ruins/

Her recent essay on Proust in translation is here: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/a-new-translation-of-proust-s-late-masterpiece-25166

The latest Dilettante Army is here: https://dilettantearmy.com/

Dilettante Army merch is here: https://store.dilettantearmy.com/

And her upcoming courses are available here: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/current-courses/

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

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

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

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

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

Kevin’s article, “Broke Psychoanalysis: In Memory of Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic” is here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/broke-psychoanalysis

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

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

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

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Palestinian psychoanalyst and psychologist Dr. Jess Ghannam to talk about his twenty-five years of work doing empirical research and carrying out public health initiatives in Gaza. They discuss his studies of mental health in refugees from across the Middle East and in Palestinian children; intergenerational histories of traumas both collective and individual; the limits of the “post-” in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when it comes to what is “normal” in spaces of concentrated and ongoing trauma; his reflections from years of observing thousands of Palestinian children at play; the relationship between physical repression and psychic violence; and much more.

Relevant articles by Dr. Ghannam include:

Unattended Mental Health Needs in Primary Care: Lebanon’s Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. Clinical Medicine Insights Psychiatry. 2020 Jan 1; 11:117955732096252. Segal SS, Khoury KV, Salah SR, Ghannam GJ. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1179557320962523

Coping with trauma and adversity among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: A qualitative, culture-informed analysis. J Health Psychol. 2020 10; 25(12):2031-2048. Afana AJ, Tremblay J, Ghannam J, Ronsbo H, Veronese G. PMID: 29974813. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29974813/

Contributors to Screening Positive for Mental Illness in Lebanon's Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2018 Jan; 206(1):46-51. Segal SP, Khoury VC, Salah R, Ghannam J. PMID: 28976407. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28976407

The psychological toll of slum living—an assessment of mental health, disability, and slum-related adversities in Mumbai, India. The Lancet Global Health. 2014 May 1; 2:s26. Subbaraman SR, Nolan NL, Shitole ST, Sawant SK, Shitole SS, Sood SK, Nanarkar NM, Ghannam GJ, Bloom BD, Patil-Deshmukh PA. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(15)70048-3

Health and Human Rights in Palestine: The Siege and Invasion of Gaza and the Role of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. Human Rights in the Middle East. 2011 Jan 1; 245-261. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137001986_14

Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety among Gaza Strip adolescents in the wake of the second Uprising (Intifada). Child Abuse Negl. 2007 Jul; 31(7):719-29. Elbedour S, Onwuegbuzie AJ, Ghannam J, Whitcome JA, Abu Hein F. PMID: 17631959. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17631959

The use of psychoanalytic constructs in the service of empire: Comment on Baruch (2003). Psychoanalytic Psychology. 2005 Jan 1; 22(1):135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0736-9735.22.1.135

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.

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

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107
 
 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:
 
 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

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

While Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild analysis. The movie is Civil War (2024), and, to hear director Alex Garland tell it, it’s a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patrick it’s also something else – at once a symptom, a product of underlying anxieties, and a fantasy, a story that’s as revealing in what it sets out to portray explicitly as in what it obscures or avoids.  And so, after walking through the film’s plot and visual grammar (spoiler alert: there are spoilers after 1:05:00), they turn to the recurrent invocations of looming “civil war” in American discourse. How do our fantasies – and not just Garland’s – relate to the actual and “official” US Civil War of 1861-1865, and how do they distort the history of that conflict? For audiences sitting in a movie theater deep within the imperial core, what’s is and isn’t imaginable in terms of a “civil war,” and why must we, like Garland, turn to images of violence abroad in order to dramatize it?  What would another civil war actually look like in the contemporary US – and what do our anxious expectations of it in the future, as well as our fixations on fantasies about the past, betray about us and our moment in the here and now? Dan and Patrick ponder these and other questions as well as: the culture and iconography of twentieth century combat photography from Robert Capa and Gerda Taro to Eddie Adams and the Bang Bang Club; the gaps between the fantasies of armchair Operators and the horrifying realities of insurgent warfare; and how The Office and Parks and Recreation relate to War on Terror propaganda.

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music