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The Summer of Narcissism brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to Freud’s landmark 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” While the sexologists considered narcissism a niche sexual perversion occurring only among a small number of adults, Freud structuralized the concept into a broader model of universal processes of development and subject formation. Moreover, Freud argued that some kind of narcissism was necessary for any basic human capacity for self-esteem, and saw it implicated not only in comparatively rare pathological formations, but also in socially celebrated activities like parenting and falling in love. And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, while much of Freud’s essay hasn’t stood the test of time (especially in its homophobia and misogyny), his distinction between “primary narcissism” and “secondary narcissism” remains vital and has proven foundational for subsequent theoretical and clinical thinking about personality disorders, treatability, and more.

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A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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

The Summer of Narcissism journey brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to late nineteenth century Europe, and to the revolutionary and controversial new discourse of sexology. Emerging at the intersections of medicine, anthropology, public health, education, and the legal system, sexology took up human sexual behavior not as a question of sin or theological denunciation, but as an object of scientific study. Introducing the field, Abby, Patrick, and Dan survey how various sexologists understood sexuality, sample the rich behavioral taxonomies they produced by way of reading from classic works by Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and reflect on how sexologists’ work combined an emphasis on self-consciously secular scientific objectivity with explicit moral attitudes and implicit normative assumptions. The three also how explore how the sexological enterprise struggled with the implications of two core problems – the question of auto-eroticism (the ways people use their own bodies for sexual pleasure) and the question of orientation (the ways people’s sexual behavior does or doesn’t involve the bodies of others). And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan discover, it was precisely while trying to reconcile those problems that two sexologists summoned Narcissus into modernity, and named “narcissism” for the very first time.

To support the Muriel Gardiners campaign at the Psychosocial Foundation for the Known and Elsewhere Collective, Parapraxis Books, and more: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/donate

Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation, including seminars, events, short courses, and therapy: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org

Learn more about Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/

Selected works cited:

Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study” (1898)

Paul Näcke, “Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt” (1899)

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1998)

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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

The Ordinary Unhappiness journey through the origins of narcissism arrives at the early modern period and a Europe in full-blown crisis. It’s a world where the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church no longer holds sway, where political and market forces have created new communities and dislocated old ones, and where traditional familiar theological answers fail to satisfy ever-more urgent existential questions. Working their way through the history of the Reformation and the theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Abby and Patrick trace the contours of this world’s emerging conception of selfhood and its many anxieties over interiority, predestination, success, luxury, conformity, modesty, pleasure, and more. They then unpack the particular implications of how this new order views sexual difference, turning to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and her remarkable account of why “the thoughts of women ever hover around their persons.”

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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, critic, and religion scholar Jack Hanson for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation about the politics and social significance of the contemporary Catholic Church. With Jack’s new piece in Harper’s, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” as a guide, the three put the accession of the Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV into the context of the Church’s complicated relationship with modern geopolitics, economic pressures, and technological change. From papal critiques of nineteenth century industrialization to the emergence of liberation theology in the Global South to the impact of Vatican II and beyond, Jack walks Abby and Patrick through the intellectual traditions and internal tensions that have shaped the Church’s attitudes towards the state, the market, and secular political ideologies. Going beyond headlines and reductive soundbites, Jack helps Abby and Patrick situate the contradictions of American Catholicism – embodied most visibly in the reactionary politics of figures like J.D. Vance – within a broader narrative of US imperial decline and crises of institutional legitimacy and moral authority. As a case in point, the three turn to the Pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, its provocative assessment of AI specifically, and its account of conditions of contemporary anomie more generally. What ensues is a conversation about desire, fantasy, technology, solidarity, and what it means to be human.

Jack Hanson, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival”: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/08/radical-reformation-jack-hanson-catholic-church-progressive/

Jack’s Substack, Phantom Heresy: https://phantomheresy.substack.com/

Jack on Magnifica Humanitas on the Know Your Enemy podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OZialymsdMglvaEdujzx2

More by Jack on the Catholic Church:

“The Text That May Be Key to How the New Pope Thinks,” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pope-leo-xiv-rerum-novarum-socialism/

“Last Rites,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/10/20/last-rites-death-penalty-catholic-church/

“Mamdani’s Newest Ally: The Catholic Church?”: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mamdanis-newest-ally-the-catholic-church.html

“The Heresy of Americanism,” https://newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-americanism

“The Post-Francis Church,” https://yalereview.org/article/pope-francis-death-future-catholocism

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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, Patrick, and Dan continue tracking the reflections – and refractions – of the myth of Narcissus across Western history. From the songs of French troubadours to the tale of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to the poetry of Dante and the dialogues of Petrarch, they examine how Ovid’s narrative of Narcissus and Echo grew into a powerful cultural template for dramatizing changing attitudes towards love, sexuality, gender, and more. By the same token, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, the figure of Narcissus became a touchstone for other literary traditions, moral discourses, and theological traditions. Turning to key moments from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Church Fathers, the three then sketch out how the question of narcissism also came to reflect longstanding cultural anxieties about vanity, “vainglory,” pleasure, embodiment, humility, pride, and the nature of selfhood.

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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

Abby and Patrick welcome historian Stuart Schrader for a conversation about the history, ideology, and politics of contemporary American policing. Schrader’s new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, gives the three a chance to unpack the specific institutions behind the catchall of “the police” and to pinpoint the specific, historically contingent ways American police have acquired outsize political and cultural power. Stuart walks Abby and Patrick through his research on the history of police unions and the ecosystem of institutions that have made arming, funding, empowering, and immunizing police bipartisan priorities. Toggling between perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, Stuart, Abby, and Patrick address questions like: How are police unions different from other unions, and how is police work fundamentally different from other kinds of work? How is power distributed within police agencies, how do different institutions compete with one another for resources and patronage, what antagonisms divide police, and how do they nonetheless manage to protect their shared claim to wield violent, discretionary power? The conversation drills deep into urgent, fundamentally psychoanalytic questions, questions that hit all the harder on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States itself. Why are America’s police such objects of overdetermined discourse and fantasy? How are Americans variously taught to summon police, to identify with police, to fear police, and to otherwise think about the policing, oftentimes in ways entirely divorced from material realities? Why do so many Americans resist recognizing police as properly self-interested political actors, despite manifest evidence to the contrary, and even while police leaders have openly embraced partisan political engagement? How do police think about themselves, and what ideological narratives and cultural forces have made police such a naturalized and ubiquitous presence in American life? And if we can bring ourselves to see what’s repressed yet right front of our faces – the reality of “Blue Power” – then what new possibilities for insight, organizing, and political change might that open up?

Stuart Schrader, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves.

Stuard Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.

More about Stuart: https://stuartschrader.com/

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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, Patrick, and Dan dig into the realms of myth and fable to investigate the ancient origins of the Narcissus myth. As they discover, behind the skeletal form of the story (i.e., guy falls in love with his own reflection) are a multitude of versions, with some striking variations and suggestive throughlines. After cataloguing these, they turn to the primary source for the modern version of the myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reading that poem’s account of the doomed encounter between Narcissus and the nymph Echo as a story of impossible desires and intertwined destinies.

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. Find us online:

http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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