Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome Loren Dent, a clinical psychologist in the Lacanian tradition. The topic is psychosis, both as understood theoretically by Freud and Lacan, and also as experienced and encountered by real people in New York City, where Loren practices and where he has helped establish an innovative program of treatment and care. Starting by tackling a basic question – what is “psychosis?”...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick power through COVID brain fog to process Sunday’s announcement and the past few weeks of relentless breaking news. What do times like these do to our ability to process time in general? What do the timelines of presidential campaigns, news cycles, an...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2023 memoir Sink and a new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Set over the course of a single, chaotic day in a North Philadelphia hospital, Thomas’ novel unfolds across a multiplicity of geographies and timelines, and weaves together a dense network of human attachments in all their pleasures and pains. The convers...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness The season is here. The time is now. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes (again). And to help navigate it all, Abby, Patrick, and Dan are launching a new series: Gerontophallocracy 2024. In this first installment, they outline the goals for the series,...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan are joined by writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman (author of the recent book The Riddles of The Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle) to unpack the dense knots of overdetermination and fantasy that mak...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman, author of The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle , a book that’s part personal memoir, part cultural history, and part meditation on what it means to care about meaning in the first place. In typically overdetermined fashion, the three talk about the complex interweaving of lan...

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 explor...

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: Lus...

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 rang...

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 Europe...

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 masturbati...

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 o...

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 disillu...

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....

Abby lost her voice, so we're unlocking a favorite from behind the paywall! We'll be back next week with more Wild Analysis followed by an interview with the brilliant Sara Marcus on her book Political Disappointment. Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Behind the safety of the payw...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the latest installment of the Standard Edition – and our penultimate episode on the Freud-Fliess letters! – we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We ask what “phantasy” is as opposed to our everyday senses of the word “fantasy,” and th...

Abby and Patrick welcome Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. In our conversation, Ajay breaks down competing left- and right-wing versions of climate “realism” and how fantasy, cynicism, and opportunism explain the gaps between carbon goals in treaties, optimistic projections,...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan take on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Parts 1 and 2, Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, and a loud noise that goes [BRAAAAM]. After a crash overview of the franchise universe and a synopsis of the series plot, we unpack our various investments in the origin...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer Sophie Lewis and writer and psychotherapist M.E. O’Brien to discuss their recent books on family abolition, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care . They discuss the roots of “abolition” as a philosophical concept, why it doesn’t simply mean “destruction,” and the historical relationship o...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we discuss a number of the letters in the Fliess section of SE Volume 1 with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We examine a complex letter about memory, repression, and what patients do and do not rem...

Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their adventure through Lacan’s mirror stage! They reprise Lacan’s parable of the mirror-besotted baby and tie together the many threads – theoretical, clinical, and philosophical – woven through it. They walk through how Lacan musters evidence for his argument using both cases of pathology (i.e. psychosis) and “normal” dreams and fantasies , and how his situating o...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In a perfect pairing with our ongoing series on Lacan, we come in from the cold and go underground by watching Theodore Flicker’s neglected classic, “The President’s Analyst” (1967). James Coburn stars as a psychoanalyst drafted to serve as the president’s shrink, an...

Our journey through Lacan’s “mirror stage” continues as the scene before the mirror unfolds into a tragic drama. Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack the many meanings of “identification” and how, for Lacan, the self-identification the baby “assumes” from the slick image in the mirror offers a template for all subsequent identifications. They also talk about mirrors both literal and metaphorical; biologi...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we valiantly soldier through more of the Fliess Extracts section of SE Volume 1 with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We discuss the Freud-Fliess sibling dynamic; a case study of a recently married s...

Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing co...