Ordinary Unhappiness

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, author of the brilliant new book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes our Reality. Weaving together intellectual history and social commentary, Robin clarifies the origins of patriarchy as a keystone concept in twentieth century feminism, and traces its trajectories, for better and for worse, across the academy and beyond. Offering a new model for thinking about patriarchy in dynamic and structural terms, Robin suggests that we can think of patriarchy as a kind of grammar, a system for ordering social life, for processing individual experiences, and for reproducing logics of exploitation, dominance, and lack. The conversation that ensues not only subverts tired debates (about the crisis of masculinity, male loneliness, and the like) but clarifies their stakes, and suggests new ways of thinking about institutions, solidarity, and struggles going forward. Robin Dembroff, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes our Reality More about Robin here: https://robindembroff.com/ A recent piece by Robin: "The 'Real Man' Trap" Selected texts cited: Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words Hanna Rosin, The End of Men Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 success as symptomatic expressions of an overdetermined multitude of anxieties, cultural experiences, and generational touchstones. From the uncanny to creepypastas to strip-malls to COVID to therapy to internet surveillance and beyond, Abby, Patrick, and Dan excavate the materials that fill the backrooms of our culture’s networked unconscious, asking questions that implicate the conditions of the work of art under conditions of AI reproduction and our fears about interiority itself. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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, psychoanalytic concepts can bring together the perspectives of political economy, libidinal economy, and our own personal experiences to help us navigate overwhelming events and better track what’s new, what isn’t, what we need to remember, and what we’re encouraged to forget. To that end, Abby and Patrick take up psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan’s notion of the “chosen trauma,” a model for how episodes of mass trauma can become touchstones for defining group identity, and apply it to the events of 9/11, the “Global War on Terror” that ensued, and their ongoing legacy in our present. Toggling between artifacts of popular culture, military history, journalistic accounts, and more, Abby and Patrick reflect on how American society reacted to the trauma of 9/11; how political elites capitalized on the situation; how ideas of exceptionalism, innocence, vengeance, and even time and causality themselves were reconfigured; and how we’re still contending with the cultural and institutional consequences of those processes in the present. Note: It has come to our attention that Dick Cheney is, in fact, currently dead, at least for now. Texts cited include: Patrick Blanchfield and Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Brave Moles and Hungry Ghosts” in The Revealer (September 2016) https://therevealer.org/brave-moles-and-hungry-ghosts-911-memento-mori/ Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Memento Mori,” https://www.simkobednarskiphoto.com/memento-mori Vamik Volkan, “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity, in Group Analysis (March 2001) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/05333160122077730 Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East (2016) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241154/americas-war-for-the-greater-middle-east-by-andrew-j-bacevich/ Andrew Bacevich, “What I Learned After the End of History” (2025) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/learned-after-history.html Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Donald Trump (2022) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/reign-of-terror-by-spencer-ackerman/ Spencer Ackerman (interviewed by Jordan Uhl) “"Terrorist": How ICE Weaponized 9/11's Scarlet Letter” in The Intercept Briefing https://theintercept.com/2026/02/06/spencer-ackerman-9-11-terrorists-ice/ Susan Sontag (et al), “Tuesday and After” in The New Yorker (September 16, 2001) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of-the-town Jake Tapper and Bill Maher, “Bill Maher: The Salon Interview” (December 2002) https://www.salon.com/2002/12/11/maher_6/ The Brown University Watson School of International and Public Affairs' Costs of War Project https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/ Elizabeth Beavers, “Terrorizing Migrants: Five Ways Post 9/11 Legal Precedents Paved the Way for Anti-Immigrant Actions in the United States” https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/terrorizingmigrants 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 concept into a broader model of universal processes of development and subject formation. Moreover, Freud argued that some kind of narcissism was necessary for any basic human capacity for self-esteem, and saw it implicated not only in comparatively rare pathological formations, but also in socially celebrated activities like parenting and falling in love. And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, while much of Freud’s essay hasn’t stood the test of time (especially in its homophobia and misogyny), his distinction between “primary narcissism” and “secondary narcissism” remains vital and has proven foundational for subsequent theoretical and clinical thinking about personality disorders, treatability, 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 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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 study. Introducing the field, Abby, Patrick, and Dan survey how various sexologists understood sexuality, sample the rich behavioral taxonomies they produced by way of reading from classic works by Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and reflect on how sexologists’ work combined an emphasis on self-consciously secular scientific objectivity with explicit moral attitudes and implicit normative assumptions. The three also how explore how the sexological enterprise struggled with the implications of two core problems – the question of auto-eroticism (the ways people use their own bodies for sexual pleasure) and the question of orientation (the ways people’s sexual behavior does or doesn’t involve the bodies of others). And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan discover, it was precisely while trying to reconcile those problems that two sexologists summoned Narcissus into modernity, and named “narcissism” for the very first time. To support the Muriel Gardiners campaign at the Psychosocial Foundation for the Known and Elsewhere Collective, Parapraxis Books, and more: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/donate Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation, including seminars, events, short courses, and therapy: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org Learn more about Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/ Selected works cited: Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study” (1898) Paul Näcke, “Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt” (1899) Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1998) 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 new communities and dislocated old ones, and where traditional familiar theological answers fail to satisfy ever-more urgent existential questions. Working their way through the history of the Reformation and the theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Abby and Patrick trace the contours of this world’s emerging conception of selfhood and its many anxieties over interiority, predestination, success, luxury, conformity, modesty, pleasure, and more. They then unpack the particular implications of how this new order views sexual difference, turning to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and her remarkable account of why “the thoughts of women ever hover around their persons.” 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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 context of the Church’s complicated relationship with modern geopolitics, economic pressures, and technological change. From papal critiques of nineteenth century industrialization to the emergence of liberation theology in the Global South to the impact of Vatican II and beyond, Jack walks Abby and Patrick through the intellectual traditions and internal tensions that have shaped the Church’s attitudes towards the state, the market, and secular political ideologies. Going beyond headlines and reductive soundbites, Jack helps Abby and Patrick situate the contradictions of American Catholicism – embodied most visibly in the reactionary politics of figures like J.D. Vance – within a broader narrative of US imperial decline and crises of institutional legitimacy and moral authority. As a case in point, the three turn to the Pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas , its provocative assessment of AI specifically, and its account of conditions of contemporary anomie more generally. What ensues is a conversation about desire, fantasy, technology, solidarity, and what it means to be human. Jack Hanson, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival”: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/08/radical-reformation-jack-hanson-catholic-church-progressive/ Jack’s Substack, Phantom Heresy: https://phantomheresy.substack.com/ Jack on Magnifica Humanitas on the Know Your Enemy podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OZialymsdMglvaEdujzx2 More by Jack on the Catholic Church: “The Text That May Be Key to How the New Pope Thinks,” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pope-leo-xiv-rerum-novarum-socialism/ “Last Rites,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/10/20/last-rites-death-penalty-catholic-church/ “Mamdani’s Newest Ally: The Catholic Church?”: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mamdanis-newest-ally-the-catholic-church.html “The Heresy of Americanism,” https://newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-americanism “The Post-Francis Church,” https://yalereview.org/article/pope-francis-death-future-catholocism 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 how Ovid’s narrative of Narcissus and Echo grew into a powerful cultural template for dramatizing changing attitudes towards love, sexuality, gender, and more. By the same token, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, the figure of Narcissus became a touchstone for other literary traditions, moral discourses, and theological traditions. Turning to key moments from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Church Fathers, the three then sketch out how the question of narcissism also came to reflect longstanding cultural anxieties about vanity, “vainglory,” pleasure, embodiment, humility, pride, and the nature of selfhood. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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 police have acquired outsize political and cultural power. Stuart walks Abby and Patrick through his research on the history of police unions and the ecosystem of institutions that have made arming, funding, empowering, and immunizing police bipartisan priorities. Toggling between perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, Stuart, Abby, and Patrick address questions like: How are police unions different from other unions, and how is police work fundamentally different from other kinds of work? How is power distributed within police agencies, how do different institutions compete with one another for resources and patronage, what antagonisms divide police, and how do they nonetheless manage to protect their shared claim to wield violent, discretionary power? The conversation drills deep into urgent, fundamentally psychoanalytic questions, questions that hit all the harder on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States itself. Why are America’s police such objects of overdetermined discourse and fantasy? How are Americans variously taught to summon police, to identify with police, to fear police, and to otherwise think about the policing, oftentimes in ways entirely divorced from material realities? Why do so many Americans resist recognizing police as properly self-interested political actors, despite manifest evidence to the contrary, and even while police leaders have openly embraced partisan political engagement? How do police think about themselves, and what ideological narratives and cultural forces have made police such a naturalized and ubiquitous presence in American life? And if we can bring ourselves to see what’s repressed yet right front of our faces – the reality of “Blue Power” – then what new possibilities for insight, organizing, and political change might that open up? Stuart Schrader, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves . Stuard Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing . More about Stuart: https://stuartschrader.com/ 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 striking variations and suggestive throughlines. After cataloguing these, they turn to the primary source for the modern version of the myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reading that poem’s account of the doomed encounter between Narcissus and the nymph Echo as a story of impossible desires and intertwined destinies. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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 radically different things to different people, gets invoked for wildly different purposes, and is hotly debated, with plentiful disagreements, even among specialists in any given field, let alone across disciplines. At the same time, the idea of narcissism speaks powerfully to people as they navigate personal relationships and struggle to make sense of group behaviors. Narcissism, in other words, is a quintessentially overdetermined concept, with simultaneously clinical, theoretical, and all-too-personal implications, and one that raises philosophical, political, and painfully practical questions about the relationship between normality and pathology, the individual and the collective, the clinical and the polemical, and more besides. It’s both the beginning of a deep dive into the meanings, history, and stakes of a much used – and much-abused – buzzword and also a great (re)introduction to the Ordinary Unhappiness project and what it means to think psychoanalytically in general. Next week in Part 2: Narcissus in myth and 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 a meditation on the strangeness of an approach to scientific inquiry and practical treatment where stories are the primary source of data. Second, they observe Freud’s beginning to explore a set of questions that will recur throughout his subsequent work – involving, above all, the relationships between embodied experiences, bodily metaphors, and the unconscious. Finally, Abby and Patrick go beyond the text to reflect on the biography of the woman who was Elisabeth von R – Ilona Weiss – and what it means for an analytic treatment to be successful. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 relationship to string; the second is an adult woman struggling with feelings of loss, memories of her dislocated childhood, and a fantasy about a beautiful white horse. Along the way, Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott in conversation with other analytical concepts – from Freud’s notion of mourning to Lacan’s idea of the signifying chain – and work through some challenging implications for thinking about drug addiction, intergenerational traumas, 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 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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. What does it mean to identify with psychoanalysis in the abstract, what are the tools psychoanalysis gives us for thinking about the political stakes of our identifications, and what does it mean when psychoanalytic institutions demand disidentification from lived experiences and urgent political concerns? What stories does mainstream psychoanalysis tell about itself, what histories does it repress, and what contemporary material realities does it disavow? What are the promises of a “despecialized” psychoanalysis, and how might a despecialized psychoanalysis put psychoanalytic concepts and approaches to liberatory use? Addressing these questions and more, the three discuss topics including: the history of psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric enterprise; its extensive weaponization as a tool of imperial domination and counterinsurgent repression; emancipatory and decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis via figures like Frantz Fanon; the complicities, contradictions, and enactments of contemporary psychoanalysis against a backdrop of transphobic legislation, genocide in Gaza, and more; psyops, psychological warfare, and military psychology; psychodynamic counterinsurgency theory; logics of blame, ingratitude, exclusion, and confusion; the work of “psychic intrusions” on the level of individual psyches and group dynamics; the necessity of “psychic militancy” as a concept and as a disciplined practice; and much, much more. Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects Ernesto Che Guevara, “ On Revolutionary Medicine ” Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth David Petraeus, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency “A conversation between sword and neck” Ghassan Kanafani’s 1970 interview with ABC’s Richard Carleton in Beirut Lara’s personal website The Psychic Militancy podcast 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 possession,” the stakes of his idea of the “good enough mother,” and how “good enough” care involves an interplay of illusion and disillusion that Winnicott sees as essential to the development of an infant’s capacity for reality testing, self-awareness, and more. They close-read Winnicott’s narrative and diagrammatic illustration of an intergenerational story of symptoms and transitional objects within a single family; address the technical distinctions between his models and those of Melanie Klein; and consider implications for adult activities of artistic creation and aesthetic experience. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

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 young children frequently develop towards a particularly favored object, whether that be a blanket, a stuffed animal, or the like. But Winnicott also imbues an infant’s “lovie” with profound significance that goes beyond its material incarnation. Rather than being just another plaything, it holds an essential role in the development of a child’s incipient subjectivity, and demands that we think beyond binary distinctions between subject and object, inside and outside, and self and other. As a “transitional object,” it even suggests a kind of template for sophisticated adultg activities ranging from artistic creation to religious rituals to sexual fetishism to addiction and more. Close reading the first six pages of the essay, Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack Winnicott’s deceptively simple prose and delightful lists, exploring how play is in fact neither frivolous nor merely the province of children, but in fact something much more serious, and thinking through the implications of Winnicott’s idea of “transitional phenomena” for psychotherapy, education, aesthetics, and more. Works Cited: Donald Woods Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in Playing and Reality (essay originally published in 1951; Playing and Reality, 1971) Also as mentioned in the episode, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research’s Annual Social is June 4th! Abby is on the host committee and we’ll both be there – come join us to support BISR? For more details and tickets: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/2026-annual-institute-social/ And a link to Abby’s summer Brooklyn Institute class, Theories of Consent: Subjectivity and Sexual Ethics: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/theories-of-consent-subjectivity-and-sexual-ethics-2/ 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 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 and decisive interpretation. Abby and Patrick walk through it all, reprising themes of genre, psychoanalytic technique, psychotherapeutic ethics, the cumulative psychic impact of life’s contingencies, 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 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the second installment of a two-part series on the thought of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. Together, the three discuss a pivotal chapter in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis , unpacking Laplanche’s “universalized” transformation of Freud’s seduction hypothesis; Laplanche’s “primal situation” and its roots in anthropology and phenomenology; and what these ideas reveal about our invariably messy experiences of parenting, therapy, 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 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.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 Clinician Chris Landry joins Abby and Patrick for a reflection on the life and legacy of prominent psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear (1948-2025). From Yale to the University of Chicago to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and beyond, Lear creatively combined his clinical experiences, a rigorous reading of Freud, and a perspective steeped in classical Western philosophical traditions. As Chris, Abby, and Patrick explore, the result is a singular body of work that clarifies otherwise challenging questions of epistemology and hermeneutics while also speaking directly to urgent political questions and the lived texture of contemporary human life. Chris, Abby, and Patrick proceed by close reading a chapter from one of Lear’s most celebrated works, Love and Its Place in Nature, unpacking Lear’s account of how love underwrites human development by making possible the experience of a “good-enough world.” The three then walk through the ethical implications of Lear’s thought for the institutions and practices of contemporary psychotherapy, which often neglect interpretative dialogue and attentive care in favor of alienating and crudely pathologizing both patients and practitioners. The conversation builds to a discussion by Chris of how Lear, together with Fanon, has inspired his own work in community psychoanalysis, in facilitating a working group for practitioners, and in critiquing the power dynamics of the contemporary clinical landscape. 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. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Loren Dent. As co-director of Brooklyn’s Greene Clinic, Loren is the ideal person to unpack the history, meaning, and contemporary landscape of community psychoanalysis. Drawing on Brazilian analyst Gabriel Tupenambá’s idea of the “institutional circuit,” Loren walks Abby and Patrick through a history extending from Freud’s hopes for a “psychoanalysis for the people” to the refugee analyst diasporas of WW2 to the interventions of Jacques Lacan to contemporary efforts to bring a community psychoanalytic orientation to analytic institutions around the United States. As Loren, Abby, and Patrick explore, the idea of community also psychoanalysis raises questions about the communities psychoanalysis can serve, communities it has previously excluded, and psychoanalytic institutions as communities in their own right. Topics include the relationship between theory, practice, and doctrine; differing national histories of psychoanalysis; ego psychology and the question of adaptation; the embededness of signifiers; hierarchies and antagonisms within analytic institutions, as well as efforts to reconstellate them; the complicated stakes of “expanding access”; burnout as both an individual condition and institutional symptom; what drives people to practice psychoanalysis in the first place, and more. More about Loren at the Greene Clinic and about his courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research . Works cited: Gabriel Tupinambá, The Desire of Psychoanalysis, Exercises in Psychoanalytic Thinking . Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis. Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-1938 . Emily Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich . Resources: Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) Community Psychoanalysis Track & Consortium The Greene Clinic Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy The Kedzie Center, Chicago Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Community Psychoanalysis Certificate Program Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Concentration in Community Psychoanalysis DIVISION/Review, Special Issue on Community Psychoanalysis, 2022 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online: http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com X: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music