Ordinary Unhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness It’s a Very Special Gerontophallocracy episode! Abby, Dan, and Patrick gather around the dining room table to process the US midterms and, more broadly, to work through where they’re all at. It’s a conversation about hope and depression, cycles of triumph and disappo...

Just in time for Halloween, Abby and Patrick welcome video essayist and scholar Mariana Colín (aka The Morbid Zoo) for a wide-ranging conversation about media, communication, consent, the problem(s) of other minds, and more. What lies behind our fantasies about science, and in what ways can our narratives about new technologies merely reprise old problems – while also creating entirely new ones? W...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick take up Josef Breuer’s final contribution to the Studies on Hysteria. The second-last-chapter of the Studies , this lengthy “Theoretical” essay is generally viewed by commentators as holding only historical interest. Yet it crystallizes the clinical...

Abby and Patrick are joined by Elizabeth Cotton, author of UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health, and Linda Michaels of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), for a conversation about platform capitalism and datafication are reshaping psychotherapy, and how clinicians and patients can organize for safer, deeper care. From Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to practice-...

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness 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, wit...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness “No one leaves a star – that’s what makes one a star!” In the latest installment of Wild Analysis, Abby and Dan discuss Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. From Gloria Swanson’s masterful portrayal of faded starlet Norma Desmond to the film’s ruthless...

Abby and Patrick welcome back returning guest Adrian Daub. The occasion is Adrian’s latest book, What Tech Calls Governing. A follow-up to his 2020 book What Tech Calls Thinking, an intellectual history of Silicon Valley and critique of tech culture, What Tech Calls Governing unpacks subsequent developments and continuities that go deeper than pundits’ loose talk of a “vibe shift.” Indeed, as Adri...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness The Ordinary Unhappiness journey through the landscape of modern narcissism continues – and arrives in the United States! In this episode, Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the work of Karen Horney, a figure who has variously been called a Neo-Freudian, a forerunner of...

What does it mean to talk about “patriarchy” in the present? What are the origins of the term, its uses, and its limits? How has it impacted popular discourse, and why does it seem to have gone out of fashion in the academy? And in what ways might the term – and the concept – still hold untapped power? To tackle all these questions and more, Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Robin Dembroff, aut...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan venture deep into the labyrinthine warrens of Kane Parson’s smash-hit movie, Backrooms (2026). Eschewing the impulse to pin the film down to background “lore” or a single interpretative meaning, they instead take up both the film and its succes...

Abby and Patrick bring a psychoanalytic lens to bear on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. As they explain, psychoanalysis offers tools for thinking both about specific political conditions and historical events and for reflecting more generally on the ways dramatic events can function politically and become “history” in the first place. Moreover, psychoana...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness The Summer of Narcissism brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to Freud’s landmark 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” While the sexologists considered narcissism a niche sexual perversion occurring only among a small number of adults, Freud structuralized the conc...

The Summer of Narcissism journey brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to late nineteenth century Europe, and to the revolutionary and controversial new discourse of sexology. Emerging at the intersections of medicine, anthropology, public health, education, and the legal system, sexology took up human sexual behavior not as a question of sin or theological denunciation, but as an object of scientific stu...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness The Ordinary Unhappiness journey through the origins of narcissism arrives at the early modern period and a Europe in full-blown crisis. It’s a world where the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church no longer holds sway, where political and market forces have created...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, critic, and religion scholar Jack Hanson for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation about the politics and social significance of the contemporary Catholic Church. With Jack’s new piece in Harper’s, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” as a guide, the three put the accession of the Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV into the...

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 tracking the reflections – and refractions – of the myth of Narcissus across Western history. From the songs of French troubadours to the tale of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to the poetry of Dante and the dialogues of Petrarch, they examine...

Abby and Patrick welcome historian Stuart Schrader for a conversation about the history, ideology, and politics of contemporary American policing. Schrader’s 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 “the police” and to pinpoint the specific, historically contingent ways American...

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

Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off Ordinary Unhappiness’s Summer of Narcissism series! In this first episode of many, the three reckon with how talk of “narcissism” and “narcissists” 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, “narcissism” in practice seems to mean rad...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick wrap up their reading of the Elisabeth von R case study. First, they tackle the Discussion section of Freud’s paper. As they discover, this section goes beyond Elisabeth’s story: it contains yet more case vignettes of still other patients, as well as...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan close out their reading of Winnicott’s paper, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” focusing specifically on Winnicott’s two case studies. The first is the story of a distressed little boy who has developed an idiosyncratic relatio...

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....

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 reading of Winnicott’s famous essay, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Focusing on the middle third of the paper, the three unpack Winnicott’s description of the transitional object as the “first not-me possessio...

Taking a breather from our moment’s unrelentingly grim headlines, Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to a favorite analytic thinker – Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) – and begin the first of a two-part episode on one of his most famous papers, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951/1953). Winnicott’s ostensible subject here is infantile development, and specifically the attachment very yo...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick arrive at the third and final phase of Freud’s treatment of Elizabeth von R. This is where everything comes together, where Elizabeth’s stories, re-told one last time, reveal a heartbreaking throughline, and where Freud’s approach yields a dramatic a...