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

It the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frictionless movement in video games to the ways anxieties about the existence other human minds appears to be driving ever more people to prefer the projections and grandiose claims of interactions with so-called “artificial intelligence.” They then turn to another space where the questions of friction, the possibility of pain, the promise of growth, and the role of transference loom large: the classroom. In particular, they explore the ethical and interpersonal stakes of teaching psychoanalysis, and teaching in general, with an eye toward questions of repetition, narcissism, Trauma Studies as a discipline, traumatic experiences of learning, what is or isn’t “outside the classroom,” the balance between taking things personally and meeting students where they are, and whether and how pedagogy and learning alike resemble therapy in all its possibilities and pains. Plus: turtles tortoises, a round of Fuck Marry Kill (yes), Wolfenstein, 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, Patrick, and Dan mark one hundred episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness! They start by looking back on the show’s run so far, and what they’ve gotten from engaging with psychoanalysis as a living body of knowledge, as a corpus of classic texts, as a way of seeing the world, and more. They then turn to the episode’s primary focus: a mailbag chock full of questions, fantasies, and desires from Ordinary Unhappiness listeners who have made the show possible. These include questions about therapeutic modalities fast and slow, the history of psychoanalytic theories about autism, the place of queerness in contemporary psychoanalysis, and more. But the three biggest topics Ordinary Unhappiness listeners want to learn more about are about drugs (especially psychedelics), the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the work of Jacques Lacan. In classic Ordinary Unhappiness style, all this leads the hosts to recommend a ton of reading suggestions, admit to the things about which they do not know (but want to learn), and to promise a follow-up episode for Patreon supporters, where Abby, Patrick, and Dan will tackle those questions and topics that were a little too spicy – or let’s say “overdetermined” – for a public episode. Enjoy – and thanks for listening!

For the reading list, please visit our Patreon page. It's too long to include here!

patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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

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

Abby and Patrick are joined by returning guest Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and columnist at New York magazine, to talk about the HBO series The White Lotus. From plotlines involving taboos like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist for the psychoanalytic mill, and Abby, Patrick, and Sam tackle all these with gusto (and plenty of spoilers). In addition to discussing the text on its own terms, they reflect on its popularity as a social symptom that implicates collective fantasies and anxieties about friendship, sexuality, money, religion, and more. As the three explore, contextualizing the show in political and ideological terms reveals not just the idiosyncratic preoccupations of The White Lotus’s creator, Mike White, but the paradoxes of how American audiences and the prestige TV shows we love navigate questions of desire, identity, cultural and sexual difference, and the repressions that underwrite them.

Know Your Enemy: A Podcast About the American Right: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Sam Adler-Bell, “The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy”: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/the-movie-industrys-confused-eat-the-rich-fantasy.html

Neil Websdale, Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/familicidal-hearts-9780199325849

Imogen Binnie, Nevada: https://bookshop.org/p/books/nevada-imogen-binnie/17839995

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 are joined by writer and artist Lily Scherlis for a provocative reflection on the ideological subtexts, historical contexts, and real-world value of some of our moment’s most bandied-about concepts and terms. Beginning with her 2023 essay for Parapraxis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have proliferated across popular culture and have become ubiquitous in the workplace, in bestsellers, on social media, and in our most intimate interactions. What exactly are “boundaries,” when did having (or not having) them become such an issue, and how does their invocation function? Touching on themes and topics across Scherlis’s body of work, from CBT and DBT to the legacy of Dale Carnegie and beyond, the conversation builds to a consideration of the case of attachment theory. Unpacking the history, key concepts, and findings of this interdisciplinary field of study, Abby, Patrick, and Lily explore how its terms and categories have become so central to a cottage industry of online quizzes and therapeutic interventions. How do ideas of self-improvement and self-help relate to economic shifts in modes of production, material realities of employment precarity, and our felt sense of being together – and being alienated? What work do these terms do in the abstract, and what work are we as subjects expected to do in learning and using them? And how can we square our skepticism vis-à-vis such models and vocabularies with the traction they can give us when it comes to understanding ourselves, tolerating distress, navigating a difficult world, potentially changing our circumstances, and connecting with one another?

Selected texts cited:

Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else”

Lily Scherlis, “Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Its Discontents”

Lily Scherlis, “Going Soft: Future Proofing the American Worker”

Danielle Carr, “Don’t Be So Attached to Attachment Theory”

Robert Karen, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Ability to Love

Heidi Keller. The Myth of Attachment Theory A Critical Understanding for Multicultural Societies

Ruth O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Dallos, Katherine Berry, and Karen Bateson. Attachment Theory: The Basics

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
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 turn to the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria: Fräulein Anna O. It is a paradoxical and deeply overdetermined text. This troubled young woman was a patient of Breuer’s, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, and an associationist model of the mind. But this famous case can also rightly be seen as the beginning of psychoanalysis; indeed, Anna O. herself coined the phrase “the talking cure.” Yet even as the case of Anna O. would come to serve as a kind of skeleton key for unlocking Freud’s subsequent sensitivities to listening, transference, and the layered temporalities of psychic traumas, her story would also become an object of mischaracterization and myth-making for Freud and others. Abby, Patrick, and Dan thus begin by addressing the case history as a broader genre while establishing some working distinctions between “Anna O.” as a character in Breuer’s text, the real-life Bertha Pappenheim (the person behind the pseudonym), and the subsequent legend of Anna O. as an arch-hysteric whose distress culminated in a (fictious) phantom pregnancy. They walk through Breuer’s narrative on its own terms, tackling Anna O.’s many symptoms, especially those involving her intermingling of silence and speech in multiple languages, and the pivotal scene that, per Breuer, represented a breakthrough in the treatment. The questions this all raises – about the limits of knowledge, the contingencies of suffering, and what it means to be healed – set up the next episode, about the story behind the story, and the remarkable biography of Bertha Pappenheim herself.

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 returning guest Hannah Zeavin – scholar, write, editor, co-founder of the Psychosocial Foundation and Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine – to talk about her brand-new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. It’s an exploration of the complex relationships that have tied together the figure of the mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how they should go about doing it. What does it mean to think about the mother as a “medium” for containing, nurturing, and shepherding the development of a child, and why do debates about mothering pivot so invariably around questions of media consumption and technological mediation? The conversation spans the history of academic research into parenting from behaviorism to attachment theory; clinical and popular discourses about mothers from Freud to Dr. Spock; the profusion of tools that promise to “help” mothers with their kids; “good-enough” mothering, mother-blaming, and vicious double binds; moral, political, and legal debates about nannies, “helicopter mothers,” incarcerated mothers, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and much, much more.

Read and subscribe to Parapraxis here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/

Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation here: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/

Mother Media is available here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049559/mother-media/

An excerpt from Mother Media in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heir-conditioner/

Zeavin, “Composite Case: The Fate of the Children of Psychoanalysis”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/composite-case

Zeavin, “Unfree Associations”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/

Zeavin, “Parallel Processes”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/

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

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

By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself?

Selected texts cited:

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (editors), Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development: https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224177/slaverys-capitalism/

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

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. 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, and who swiftly goes from starstruck to depleted to a fugitive on the run. This satiric romp hit a nerve with the FBI, was censored in post-production, and quickly disappeared from theaters. A loving sendup of psychoanalysis, an acid-addled dramatization of Cold War anxieties, and just a gonzo all-around-good time, the film gives us plenty to talk about, from the paranoic structure of knowledge to the Big Other of surveillance to unorthodox cures for “hostility” to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret flirtations with self-analysis and more.

Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is G-MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

You can listen to Barry McGuire’s “Inner-Manipulations” (featured in the film) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7F_u9L5X8

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