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 gender, and how are those norms policed – and subverted? How does clothing mediate our first-person experience of our own bodies, how do clothes and nakedness recur in our fantasies and dreams, and how do we use attire to communicate with others while alternately armoring and revealing ourselves? A renowned historian and theorist of fashion, Dr. Steele masterfully walks Abby and Patrick through fashion as a field of overdetermined material commodities and complex articulations of identity and desire. From Freud’s anxieties about paying his tailor to Lacan’s florid wardrobe to ongoing debates over what therapists should and shouldn’t wear; from Elsa Schiaparelli’s mirror jackets to Jean Paul Gaultier’s bullet bras to Sonia Rykiel’s self-caressing knitwear to Timothée Chalamet’s Haider Ackermann halter; from commodity fetishism in Marx to fetish objects in Freud; from Lacan’s mirror stage to Joan Riviere’s theories of masking and masquerade to the “skin ego” of Didier Anzieu; from high culture to low, and from the runway to the consulting room and beyond, it’s a stylish and provocative grand tour of fashion, psychoanalysis, and the ways we all use clothes, like it or not, to literally fashion ourselves.

The exhibition Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis runs from September 10th 2025 to January 4th 2026 at the Museum at FIT (227 West 27th Street, New York, NY) and is free and open to the public: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/dress-dreams-desire/index.php

Steele’s book Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis will be released on October 30th 2025: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dress-dreams-and-desire-9781350428195/

MFIT will host a Fashion and Psychoanalysis Symposium on Friday, November 14, 2025. Speakers include Laverne Cox, fashion designer Bella Freud, psychoanalysts Patricia Gherovici, Anouchka Grose, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Chanda Griffin, fashion scholar Simona Segre, and MFIT Director Valerie Steele. Attendance is free but registration is required: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/events/symposium/fashion-and-psychoanalysis/index.php

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

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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 subjectivity, lack, and the work of film as a medium that teaches us “how to desire”? What does it mean that all films are ultimately, per Žižek, about the “impossibility of making a film” as such? What’s at stake in for Žižek in the film of Hitchcock and Lynch specifically, and why do the films so neatly showcase the perils of both getting exactly what you want and not knowing what you want after all? What are Žižek’s blind spots vis-à-vis gender, violence, and comedy? And what’s really going on with that favorite adverb of his – “precisely”?

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 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 of “integration,” Josh walks Abby and Patrick through how he and other clinicians do their work, and how they tackle the unique demands of maintaining a holding environment, navigating transference, precipitating psychic change, and providing help to patients who are working through end of life crises, longstanding pathologies, and other kinds of profound distress. Along the way, he provides vital context about the history of lab-based psychedelic research and the (mis)appropriation of indigenous traditions while assessing the practical, ethical, and legal challenges that arise when psychedelics become objects of psychopharmacological study, routinized treatment, and corporate investment.

Josh’s suggestions for further reading include:

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

Marc B. Aixalà, Psychedelic Integration

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

Roberto Lovato, The Gentrification of Consciousness

Other sources cited include:

Robert Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life

Andrei Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination

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