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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, the male gaze, femininity as self-surveillance, the pleasures (and disgusts) of body horror, 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
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Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

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 satisfactions and frustrations that come with learning? How do credentials and rules work in tandem with transgression and license? How do our expectations of acquiring knowledge survive, or get dashed, by disillusionment when we finally “get” it? Can we ever truly learn anything – or is knowledge always unstable and transient? As Nick and Nick explain, a Lacanian perspective is singularly helpful for confronting these questions and more. Walking through Lacan’s theories of lack, identification, and institutional discourses, they also explore why so many people find the figure of Jacques Lacan himself so alluring.

The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy, and Enjoyment: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-93018-8

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 arrive at the final case study in Freud and Breuer's Studies on the 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. Yet despite its superficially banal setting and seemingly low stakes, it's also Freud's single most complete and thoroughly documented case in the Studies and thus offers a fantastic chance to observe Freud as a clinician at his most earnest and dogged. And it is precisely the very ordinariness of Elisabeth von R's own life, and the fundamentally relatable details of her suffering, that makes this case study the perfect place to put Freud's developing ideas about the family, the body, time, loss, symbolization, change, and therapeutic cure into our own words. In the first of what will be several episodes on this case study, Abby and Patrick take up Elizabeth von R's story, and Freud's narration of it, by reading closely, tracking the richness of Freud's prose, and fleshing out the yearnings, disappointments, expectations, and frustrations that brought this young woman to seek Freud's care.

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