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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:

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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
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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 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:

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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, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms.

References include:

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” in Powers of Horror

Noëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis

Ryan Thorneycroft, Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection

Eyo Awara. The Psychic Life of Horror: Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s Thought

Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind.

Mark Miller. Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850

Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain

Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film

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

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Abby and Dan sit down with writer and performance artist Lily Scherlis to talk about her new essay for n+1, “Experiences in Groups” (a title that does homage to Wilfred Bion’s influential 1961 book of the same name). They discuss Lily’s experience at the 2024 Tavistock conference, the meaning of “group relations,” and the fantasies it can generate for those committed to leftist politics, before turning to their own experiences in groups and Bion’s influence on each of their lives.

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 share Patrick’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast, hosted by friends of Ordinary Unhappiness Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Patrick, Matt, and Sam process last weekend’s televised memorial service for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The three unpack this overdetermined spectacle with an eye towards questions of theology, politics, narrative, affect, gender, and more.

More Know Your Enemy here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy/

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 writer and academic Michael Clune to discuss his new novel, Pan. It is the story of Nick, a teenage boy living alone with his divorced father in the 1990s Midwest. Precocious but troubled, he begins to suffer from panic attacks, obsessional symptoms, and more. Nick’s voice narrates these and other experiences with rich texture, yet his internal monologue steadily pushes the reader to question where and how the tumultuous life of a normal teenager ends and pathology begins. Discussing Pan thus allows Michael, Abby, and Patrick to talk through some elemental questions. How do we come to know the world, what’s normal in it, and what’s normal for us? How do social interactions at school and with friends shape our own self-understanding? What are the pleasures of experiencing something for the first time, and what does it feel like to be in a developmental stage where everything can feel super-saturated with meaning? Pan thus offers Abby, Patrick, and Michael a perfect frame to discuss growing up, mental health, friendship, coolness, drugs, reading, and much more.

Michael Clune, Pan: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771661/pan-by-michael-clune/

Clune, Gamelife: A Memoir: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374536381/gamelife/

Clune, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin: https://www.mcnallyeditions.com/books/p/white-out?srsltid=AfmBOooR9sPG-yosADPpcOUdl9k69upMya7iV7Q_Dt1vFnMHZzmEzMtu

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 read the shortest, strangest, and arguably saddest entry in the Studies on Hysteria – the case of “Katharina.” This case history sees Freud on Alpine vacation and approached by a local girl suffering a shortness of breath and episodes of anxiety, symptoms that have nothing to with altitude and everything to do with sordid goings-on in her family. Proceeding in ad-hoc, hypnosis-free dialogue, Freud traces the roots of Katharina’s distress back to her witnessing – and suffering – incestuous transgressions and public scandal. Yet certain details of Katharina’s story remained ambiguous and controversial for decades. Abby and Patrick unpack the story of Katharina as Freud initially presented it, as he dramatically revised it thirty years later, and as later excavated by psychoanalytic historians. Between the two versions of Katharina, and between these and the actual biography of the real-life Aurelia Kronich, Abby and Patrick grapple with challenging questions about trauma, memory, and abuse; the limits of what we can ever know, clinically and historically; what is or isn’t speakable, and how that troubles our ideas about validation, recognition, action, healing, 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