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Abby and Patrick are joined by Séamus Malekafzali, a journalist whose reportage and commentary has proven indispensable to processing the United States’ war with Iran, and whose historical research and critical essays are vital for thinking about the modern Middle East in general. Séamus begins by talking about his work, setting ongoing events in context, and reflects on the differences between public discourse in English versus Arabic-language spaces. Toggling between contemporary headlines and historical texts, Séamus, Abby, and Patrick reflect on how material realities and geopolitical antagonisms have interacted with competing fantasies, traumatic memories, and logics of identification to produce our current juncture. What ensues is an earnest and searching conversation about dynamics of family, ethnicity, religion, race, and nationality; intergenerational experiences of historical traumas; identification with the aggressor; repression, resistance, and enactment as material and libidinal concepts; nationalism, chauvinism, and settler colonialism; Israeli-US relations as a “feedback loop”; the politics of language; the advocacy of diaspora communities; the difficulties of talking about what’s obvious; and much 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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
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Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome novelist and academic Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his brand-new novel, Night Night Fawn. Alternately hilarious and devasting, Night Night Fawn is written in the voice of Barbara Rosenberg, an embittered New York Jewish woman penning a deathbed memoir that documents her many disappointments and frustrations – with life, love, friendship, money, and, above all her trans son, whom she hallucinates as a large and ominous bird. Night Night Fawn is also incredibly overdetermined with respect to genre, representing an effort on Rosenberg’s part to write from the perspective of a fictionalized version of his own mother. On yet another level, it’s a sustained interrogation of the complex and painful interactions between material conditions and ideological systems, the forces that shape our experiences of family, class, religion, and ethnicity, and the specific histories of twentieth century American Jewishness as it relates to Zionism and the horrors of our twenty-first century present. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abby, Patrick, and Jordy discuss the social reproduction of bigotry; the relationship between ethnonationalism and the heteropatriarchal family form; the ethics and aesthetics of representation; the contemporary landscape of the political novel, and much, much more.

Selected Works Cited:

Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Fawn: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/689017/night-night-fawn-by-jordy-rosenberg/

Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556691/confessions-of-the-fox-by-jordy-rosenberg/

Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day”: https://avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/

Rosenberg, “The Daddy Dialectic”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I

Leon Trotsky, “Literature and Revolution”

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. Follow us on social media:

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Abby and Patrick resume the case history of Elisabeth von R. in the wake of her revelation of a previously unmentioned character – a would-be suitor. Unpacking the tale of Elisabeth’s courtship, and the sad circumstances of its end, Abby and Patrick itemize the conflicts, anxieties, and fantasies that seem to structure Elisabeth’s underlying psychic distress. As they explain, this grammar of suffering is at once singular to Elisabeth as an individual but also resonant for readers in the present, and sets the stage for a dramatic Freudian intervention as well as a resolution to the mystery of why Elisabeth’s symptoms are embodied in her legs.

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Helen Epstein, Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard College and author of the new book Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic. After sketching out the history of contemporary western sociological and philosophical accounts of suicide in general from Durkheim to the existentialists and beyond, the three turn to the specific focus of Epstein’s research: suicide epidemics. As Epstein elaborates, suicide epidemics – wherein entire communities experience sudden and acute spikes in suicide rates – raise urgent questions about the social, economic, and emotional contexts of suicidal distress. What broad conditions can make people feel like life is no longer worth living? What models of meaningful life do communities transmit intergenerationally, and how do those models – and those communities – crumble under pressure? Exploring examples from Micronesia to Nunavut and from 1990s Russia to the contemporary United States and taking up communities from 19th century industrial workers to contemporary American military veterans, Epstein walks Abby and Patrick through her findings, leading the three to reflect on how societies metabolize historical change and economic dislocation on the level of families and across generations.

Helen Epstein, Why Live: When Suicide Becomes an Epidemic.

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness

Twitter: @UnhappinessPod

Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness

Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Danielle Drori of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for the first in a two-part miniseries introducing the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012). A brilliant clinician and theorist in his own right, Laplanche combined a critical reading of Freud with insights drawn from anthropology, the history of science, and Western philosophy to revolutionize how many analysts saw questions of sexuality, development, language, and more. Yet while incredibly influential in France and beyond, Laplanche’s thought has only made limited inroads among clinicians and theorists in the English-speaking world. In this episode, Danielle, Abby, and Patrick introduce the figure of Laplanche, narrating his biography and discussing everything from his place in French critical theory to his encyclopedic scholarship of Freud (together with Jean Pontalis) to his disagreements with Lacan. They then sketch out some of Laplanche’s key ideas, with particular attention to his critique of Freud’s “seduction theory.” As they explain, Laplanche’s revision of that concept into a “generalized” model of seduction allows him and his contemporary interpreters to suggest some radical ways for thinking about questions of trauma, subjectivity, language, sexuality, and more. In Part Two (out next Saturday), the three get granular by close-reading key sections in Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis.

Texts Cited:

Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis

Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis

Dominique Scarfone, A brief introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity

Avgi Saketopoulou, “Laplanche, an introduction by Dominique Scarfone.” Review essay in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 99(3), 778–786.

Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of tongues between adults and the child: The language of tenderness and of passion

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness

Twitter: @UnhappinessPod

Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness

Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Abby and Patrick discuss the runaway streaming sensation, Heated Rivalry. Adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels by Canadian director Jacob Tierney, Heated Rivalry depicts a burgeoning romance between two young hockey players who are also bitter rivals. Taking up themes of athleticism, masculinity, language, desire, and more, Heated Rivalry also offers Abby and Patrick a perfect opportunity to sketch out a psychoanalytic perspective on the cultural meanings of professional sports, touching on topics like fantasy, regression, play, creativity, recognition, and beyond.

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby joins Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub on one of our favorite podcasts, In Bed With the Right! The topic is romantasy - as a genre of fiction, as a publishing phenomenon, and, above all, as a cultural symptom. What do readers - and women specifically - find in romantasy narratives? How does reading relate to play, and fantasy to trauma and healing? The three explore all these questions and more!

Texts include:

Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses series

Rebecca Yarros, Empyrean series

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating

Sigmund Freud, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" (1907)

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music