Ordinary Unhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan get together for a looking-forward, looking-backward session surveying the year that was and assessing the year ahead. It’s a suitably ambivalent, Janus-faced assessment of political developments, cultural milestones, new hobbies, simmering dre...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick sit down with religious studies scholar and Reformation historian Nathan Rein to discuss Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). This is Freud’s first extended treatment of religion as such, with a particular emphasis on ritual, a...

Abby and Patrick are joined by philosopher Simon Critchley to discuss his new book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy . They discuss how, for Critchley, mysticism represents "a way of thinking about existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” Exploring the book’s survey of key figures and texts in the Western Christian tradition, the three unpack how accounts...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for different people; the differing things we may find mo...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious? How do fantasies straddle the gaps between the re...

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic perspective can offer in grappling with communicati...

Abby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global . Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints...

We're off this weekend, but here's a thematically appropriate episode from earlier this year. Come find us on Patreon for our recent political coverage, The Standard Edition series, and more Wild Analysis. We'll be back next Saturday. --- 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...

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 an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us navigate moments...

It’s the last installment of Gerontophallocracy 2024 before the election. Abby, Patrick, and Dan process the vibes both in The Discourse and here in Pennsylvania (chaotic and bad); reflect on Harris on Call Her Daddy versus Trump on Rogan; talk about forced choices, votes, and fantasies of voting; discuss complicity and lesser-of-two evilism from the depressive position; and more. Have you noticed...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel . Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very con...

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 watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does...

Abby and Patrick welcome Sabrina Strings, professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, to talk about her new book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. The book is both a deep dive into the genealogy of western notions of "romance" - from medieval courtly love to Victorian mother/whore complexes - and a searing critique of contemporary ideolo...

Abby and Patrick welcome Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of literary magazine n+1 . The magazine is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and marking this milestone with the publication of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade . Lisa, Mark, Abby, and Patrick engage in a conversation that ranges from the history of the magazine to the legacy of the Iraq War to the early d...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The key theme is proxies – candidates standing in for one another, gestures that say one thing while meaning another, scapegoats, displacements, and more. They unpack how such substitutions...

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 the cult classic “Heathers” (Michael Lehmann, 1988). This coming-of-age satire offers them a chance to talk about high school movies as a genre, developmental milestones, and why grown adults are so obsessed with media about teenage lif...

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness We set out to discuss the Eras tour film but got drawn into the broader cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. Along the way, we talk about the concepts of cathexis and the Big Other; our own embarrassing childhood attachments to music; how the Eras tour...

Abby, Patrick, and Dan welcome the incomparable Liz Franczak of TrueAnon! The topic is conspiracy theories, from real to imagined, documented to discredited, ludicrous to all-too-likely, and more. The first half of the episode is ground-clearing and working through some basic questions. They unpack the phrase “conspiracy theory,” tracking its shift over the twentieth century from a neutral term to...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan process last night’s Trump-Harris debate. They talk about the pleasures of domination, perverse and otherwise; the power of identifications over and against appeals to statistics; narcissistic rage in the face of symbolic castration; and the me...

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 friend of the show and returning guest Sam Adler-Bell! Together, the three process events in the US electoral landscape in the past month, focusing in particular on the selection of J.D.Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the ascendan...

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 st...

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...

Abby and Patrick welcome labor journalist Sarah Jaffe – author of Necessary Trouble and Work Won’t Love You Back – for her first interview about her forthcoming book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. From the Ashes is at once a deeply personal narrative and a wide-ranging journey of searing reportage on the lives and struggles of individuals and communities. Sarah, Abby, an...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan get into the first part of Slavoj Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, directed by Sophie Fiennes). They consider one of the film’s core propositions – that cinema is an instruction in how and what to desire. This leads them through Zizek’s (and...