Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing conversation includes Lacan’s biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description ...

39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part I

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Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the final installment of the Fliess Extracts portion of the Standard Edition, we are joined by novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. These last letters see Freud really feeling himself as a stylist – and, not coincidentally, ruminating about masturbation, sexual dysfunction, and his mounting frustration with his interlocutor. We discuss the disinte...

52: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 9: Repression is a Scorpio: The Final Fliess Extracts feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser

Abby and Patrick welcome Palestinian psychoanalyst and psychologist Dr. Jess Ghannam to talk about his twenty-five years of work doing empirical research and carrying out public health initiatives in Gaza. They discuss his studies of mental health in refugees from across the Middle East and in Palestinian children; intergenerational histories of traumas both collective and individual; the limits of the “post-” in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when it comes to what is “normal” in space...

51: Psychoanalysis and Gaza feat. Jess Ghannam

Abby and Patrick are joined by academic, journalist, and critic Sara Marcus, author of the 2023 book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. After recalling their own experiences of political letdowns – infantile, adolescent, and all-too-recent – they explore how Sara’s notion of disappointment as “untimely desire” involves something other than disillusionment or a loss of faith. Rather, as Marcus explains, disappointment involves an ongoing relati...

50: Political Disappointment feat. Sara Marcus

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWhile Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild analysis. The movie is Civil War (2024), and, to hear director Alex Garland tell it, it’s a dire warning of how things could turn out in the US sometime soon. But to Dan and Patrick it’s also something else – at once a symptom, a product of underlying anxie...

49: Wild Analysis: Civil War Teaser

Abby lost her voice, so we're unlocking a favorite from behind the paywall! We'll be back next week with more Wild Analysis followed by an interview with the brilliant Sara Marcus on her book Political Disappointment. Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessBehind the safety of the paywall, we get worked up about trauma as a trope in some of the most influential media franchises of recent dec...

39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part I

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