Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Tom Wooldridge, author of Eating Disorders, a new volume in Routledge’s Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis series. Tom explains how a psychodynamic orientation can help clinicians go beyond a narrow focus on labeling symptoms to thinking about eating disorders in terms of personality structure and individual meaning. He then walks Abby and Patrick through a suite of concepts, drawn from an array of analytic traditions, that are useful for thinking about and treating eating disorders: alexithymia, object hunger, Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the idea of a “rotten core,” and more. At once theoretically nuanced, accessible, and focused throughout on the need to provide effective treatment, Wooldridge's book provides the occasion for a wide-ranging conversation about the many ways that psychic distress manifests through our complex relationships to our bodies, food, gender, family, and more.

Books by Tom include:

Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

Tom Wooldridge, End the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder

Tom Woolridge, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males: An Integrative Approach

Tom Wooldridge (editor), Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak

Tom Woolridge, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past

More about Tom: https://www.tomwooldridge.com/

Additional texts cited include:

Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”

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

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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 disappointment, generational memories, caring for an adorable old dog, religion, and a whole lot 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

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? What are the limits to what we can imagine, what we can consent to, and what media can represent back to us? If perfect communication and psychic transparency were possible, would that actually be a good thing – or would it be a living nightmare? The three follow these questions by taking up some of Freud’s strangest work – his writing on telepathy – alongside David Cronenberg’s 1981 classic movie Scanners. It’s a wild and rollicking journey that we promise won’t make your head explode (at least not in the literal, bad way).

More Mariana is here:

YouTube: (345) The Morbid Zoo - YouTube

Bluesky: Mariana Colín (@themorbidzoo.bsky.social) — Bluesky

Website: Mariana Colín (Page 1)

References include:

Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (1921)

Sigmund Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” from New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)

Claudie Massicotte, “Psychical Transmissions: Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult”

Maria Pierri, Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Ferenczi, and the Challenge of Thought Transference

Maria Pierri, Sigmund Freud and the Forsyth Case, Coincidences and the Thought-Transmission in Psychoanalysis

Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure

Roger Luchurst, The Invention of Telepathy

CS Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief”

Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia

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