Ordinary Unhappiness

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Ordinary Unhappiness

Patrick & Abby

141 episodes

4 days ago

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith for a conversation about one of the most difficult but powerful concepts in psychoanalytic theory: projective identification. A notion that demands simultaneously thinking about infantile development and adult behaviors, normal defenses and pathological patterns, the idea of projective identification captures an essential dimension of all kinds of interpersonal relationships – but it also throws some of our most...

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Society & Culture,

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Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith for a conversation about one of the most difficult but powerful concepts in psychoanalytic theory: projective identification. A notion that demands simultaneously thinking about infantile development and adult behaviors, normal defenses and pathological patterns, the idea of projective identification captures an essential dimension of all kinds of interpersonal relationships – but it also throws some of our most...

Show more...

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/141)

Ordinary Unhappiness

127: Projective Identification Part I feat. Brian Ngo-Smith

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith for a conversation about one of the most difficult but powerful concepts in psychoanalytic theory: projective identification. A notion that demands simultaneously thinking about infantile development and adult behaviors, normal defenses and pathological patterns, the idea of projective identification captures an essential dimension of all kinds of interpersonal relationships – but it also throws some of our most...

1 week ago

1 hour 48 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

126: Mailbag Part 2: Searching for the Self Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness It’s part two of our mailbag episode – which means Abby, Patrick, and Dan get to field yet more amazing listener questions! Topics include the many relationships, and problems of translation, between psychoanalysis and Buddhism; the figure of Melanie Klein and American resistances to her thought; how the right uses language and the question of whether the Americ...

2 weeks ago

4 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

125: Demons, Community, and Conversion Therapy feat. Grace Byron

Abby and Patrick are joined by writer Grace Byron, author of the fantastic new novel Herculine. Alternately hilarious and terrifying, Herculine is the story of a young trans woman who leaves a frustrating life in New York City to join an erstwhile high school lover in a trans separatist commune in rural Indiana. But the community proves far from perfect, and the narrator soon finds herself enmeshed in a pressure-cooker milieu of personal jealousies and erotic rivalries, all with occult overto...

3 weeks ago

1 hour 27 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

124: Mailbag: Uses of Theory and AI Grinchiness Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness It’s another mailbag episode (part one of two)! Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to listener questions about everything from the utility of psychoanalytic concepts in everyday life to the complexities of Melanie Klein to the allure of AI “wisdom” and beyond. Plus, they tackle Abraham Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” and get into the weeds of why, exactly, Hall...

1 month ago

3 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

123: Polymorphous Perversity and Gender Pleasure feat. Lucie Fielding

Abby and Patrick are joined by therapist and sexuality educator Lucie Fielding. First, the three talk about Lucie’s path to clinical work and the significance of her book, Trans Sex, just out in a revised Second Edition. They then turn to Freud’s classic, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), putting that text, and the broader legacy of Freud’s views on sexuality, in dialogue with contemporary questions of trans embodiment and sexual identity. This means reckoning with the ways that...

1 month ago

1 hour 44 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

UNLOCKED: 32: Thanksgiving Special, Part 2: Murder, Myth, and Memory

Last year we unlocked part 1 of our Thanksgiving Special so that everyone could hear the good/bad news about the "Holiday Syndrome." This year we're unlocking part 2, on settler colonialism, history, fantasy, ritual, and more. Whether you're celebrating, traveling, or staying home, we promise there's a lot to chew on here! Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the second – overstuffed –...

1 month ago

2 hours 46 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

122: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 8: Studies on Hysteria, Part VIII: The Blow That Falls: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Continued Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick resume Freud’s case history of Elisabeth von R. They walk through Freud’s developing technique before unpacking what will prove to be one of his lifelong favorite and most evocative metaphors for psychic life: a city. Abby and Patrick then begin close-reading Elisabeth von R’s life story as she first relates it to Freud. What emerges is both a p...

1 month ago

2 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

UNLOCKED: 103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah Miller

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Per...

1 month ago

1 hour 19 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

121: LSD: Subjectivity, Ineffability, and Mental Health feat. Dan Karlin

Abby and Patrick continue their series on psychedelics via an in-depth interview with Dr. Dan Karlin. Karlin is a psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at MindMed, where he oversees clinical trials using LSD to treat major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Karlin first fills Abby and Patrick in about those disorders, MindMed’s ongoing clinical trials, and both the history of LSD research and potential near-future therapeutic applications. In the wide-ranging c...

1 month ago

1 hour 56 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

120: Wild Analysis: The Substance Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan process Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. From uncanny doubles to unsparing mirrors to the punishing reality principle of getting older, it’s a film that offers plenty of grist for the psychoanalytic mill. It’s also an occasion for Abby and Dan to reflect on sexual difference, gendered expectations, th...

2 months ago

5 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

119: Lacan, Knowledge, Fantasy feat. Nick Stock and Nick Peim

Abby and Patrick are joined by Nick Stock and Nick Peim, authors of the new book The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment. From the origin stories teachers tell about themselves to the ways the classroom looms large in our memories, popular media, and political rhetoric, it’s a conversation about education at the intersection of fantasies, reality, vocations, anxieties, addictions, and more. What are the narratives that drive people to study and to teach, and what are the sati...

2 months ago

1 hour 45 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

118: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 7: Studies on Hysteria, Part VII: Fräulein Elisabeth von R Teaser

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 final case study in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria: the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. The case of this unfortunate young woman, literally hobbled by a conversion disorder affecting her gait, is neither particularly famous nor fraught with the controversies or large-than-life historical of previous cases in this series. ...

2 months ago

3 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

UNLOCKED: 107: On Abjection

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader sta...

2 months ago

1 hour 30 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

117: Experiences in Groups feat. Lily Scherlis Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan sit down with writer and performance artist Lily Scherlis to talk about her new essay for n+1, “Experiences in Groups” (a title that does homage to Wilfred Bion’s influential 1961 book of the same name). They discuss Lily’s experience at the 2024 Tavistock conference, the meaning of “group relations,” and the fantasies it can generate for those comm...

3 months ago

3 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

Bonus Episode: Martyrdom, Mourning, and the Legacy of Charlie Kirk

Abby and Patrick share Patrick’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast, hosted by friends of Ordinary Unhappiness Matthew Sitman and Sam-Adler Bell. Patrick, Matt, and Sam process last weekend’s televised memorial service for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The three unpack this overdetermined spectacle with an eye towards questions of theology, politics, narrative, affect, gender, and more. More Know Your Enemy here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy/ Have you noticed...

3 months ago

1 hour 30 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

116: Writing Panic feat. Michael Clune

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Michael Clune to discuss his new novel, Pan. It is the story of Nick, a teenage boy living alone with his divorced father in the 1990s Midwest. Precocious but troubled, he begins to suffer from panic attacks, obsessional symptoms, and more. Nick’s voice narrates these and other experiences with rich texture, yet his internal monologue steadily pushes the reader to question where and how the tumultuous life of a normal teenager ends and pathology be...

3 months ago

1 hour 37 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

115: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 6: Studies on Hysteria, Part VI: Katharina Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick read the shortest, strangest, and arguably saddest entry in the Studies on Hysteria – the case of “Katharina.” This case history sees Freud on Alpine vacation and approached by a local girl suffering a shortness of breath and episodes of anxiety, symptoms that have nothing to with altitude and everything to do with sordid goings-on in her family...

3 months ago

7 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

114: Fashion and Psychoanalysis feat. Valerie Steele

Abby and Patrick welcome Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, to discuss her new book, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, and the exhibition of the same name that opened this week. What does “fashion” mean, and why are so many psychoanalysts and cultural gatekeepers so resistant to think about the topic critically? How do society’s codes of dress reflect logics of identity, especially when it comes to ...

3 months ago

1 hour 22 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

113: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part III Teaser

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Dan, and Patrick conclude their viewing of Sophie Fiennes’ and Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). It’s the last stretch of the film, the part where Žižek tries to bring everything together, and it thus gives Abby, Dan, and Patrick a chance to assess the Guide in its entirety. How compelling is the film’s grand unifying theory of subjectivit...

4 months ago

5 minutes

Ordinary Unhappiness

112: Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy feat. Josh West

Abby and Patrick are joined by Dr. Josh West to talk about some remarkable developments in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in Australia. Josh explains to Abby and Patrick how the clinical trials he describes are better understood as an experiment in sustained psychotherapy rather than just testing a new drug, and how that experiment has profound psychoanalytic and psychodynamic salience. From the process of patient preparation to the details of “dose day” to the work of subsequent sessions ...

4 months ago

1 hour 51 minutes