Ordinary Unhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

“No one leaves a star – that’s what makes one a star!” In the latest installment of Wild Analysis, Abby and Dan discuss Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. From Gloria Swanson’s masterful portrayal of faded starlet Norma Desmond to the film’s ruthless depiction of Hollywood’s love affair with youth and the very idea of movie magic itself, it’s a perfect opportunity for Abby and Dan to explore themes of celebrity, narcissism, and the tyranny of the image. Along the way, they talk psychic retreats, mirrors and the mirror stage, glamorous outfits, dead chimpanzees, and more.

References:
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
Nilofer Kaul, “Breaching the Frame: Psychoanalysis and Sunset Boulevard”

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 back returning guest Adrian Daub. The occasion is Adrian’s latest book, What Tech Calls Governing. A follow-up to his 2020 book What Tech Calls Thinking, an intellectual history of Silicon Valley and critique of tech culture, What Tech Calls Governing unpacks subsequent developments and continuities that go deeper than pundits’ loose talk of a “vibe shift.” Indeed, as Adrian explains, recent years have seen Big Tech abandon the rhetoric of not being “evil” and promises of progressive uplift in favor of a rhetoric of inevitability, brazen collaboration with right-wing actors, and vague appeals to half-baked “longterm” utilitarianism. Adrian, Abby, and Patrick reflect on the distinctively gendered aspects of these developments, from the public antics of high-profile tech titans like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to deeper logics of contempt for vulnerability and the celebration of dominance. Along the way, they explore questions of exhaustion, embarrassment, male homosociality, creepiness, narcissism, the indignities of middle age, generational anxieties, and more.

References include:

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Governing

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

Pre-order Adrian’s forthcoming book, Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now

Adrian’s podcast, In Bed With The Right

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Novalis, The Novices of Sais

Albert Burneko, “I Don’t Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys”

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

Kate Manne, "A Culture Hooked on Generative AI is a Culture that Misses Female Sycophants" 

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 landscape of modern narcissism continues – and arrives in the United States! In this episode, Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the work of Karen Horney, a figure who has variously been called a Neo-Freudian, a forerunner of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, a key player in a psychoanalytic “Cultural Turn,” and one of the first prominent psychoanalytic feminists. But as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, such labels fall short of capturing the power of Horney’s insights and the lucidity of her prose. Rejecting Freud’s misogyny and his biological account of drives, Horney developed a psychoanalytic approach that was thoroughly cultural and that emphasized notions of selfhood and identity. For Horney, “neurosis” (IE, non-psychotic mental illness and problems in living) reflected the ways in which an individual’s strategies for emotional survival, first developed during their childhood in response to distress in the family environment, could crystalize into maladaptive patterns for relating to both the self and to others. Horney thus saw “narcissism” as useful only insofar as the term pinpointed “self-inflation” as a defensive strategy that, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explain, comes at a painful and alienating price.

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

What does it mean to talk about “patriarchy” in the present? What are the origins of the term, its uses, and its limits? How has it impacted popular discourse, and why does it seem to have gone out of fashion in the academy? And in what ways might the term – and the concept – still hold untapped power? To tackle all these questions and more, Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Robin Dembroff, author of the brilliant new book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes our Reality. Weaving together intellectual history and social commentary, Robin clarifies the origins of patriarchy as a keystone concept in twentieth century feminism, and traces its trajectories, for better and for worse, across the academy and beyond. Offering a new model for thinking about patriarchy in dynamic and structural terms, Robin suggests that we can think of patriarchy as a kind of grammar, a system for ordering social life, for processing individual experiences, and for reproducing logics of exploitation, dominance, and lack. The conversation that ensues not only subverts tired debates (about the crisis of masculinity, male loneliness, and the like) but clarifies their stakes, and suggests new ways of thinking about institutions, solidarity, and struggles going forward.

Robin Dembroff, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes our Reality
More about Robin here: https://robindembroff.com/
A recent piece by Robin: "The 'Real Man' Trap"

Selected texts cited:
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution
David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Hanna Rosin, The End of Men
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

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 venture deep into the labyrinthine warrens of Kane Parson’s smash-hit movie, Backrooms (2026). Eschewing the impulse to pin the film down to background “lore” or a single interpretative meaning, they instead take up both the film and its success as symptomatic expressions of an overdetermined multitude of anxieties, cultural experiences, and generational touchstones. From the uncanny to creepypastas to strip-malls to COVID to therapy to internet surveillance and beyond, Abby, Patrick, and Dan excavate the materials that fill the backrooms of our culture’s networked unconscious, asking questions that implicate the conditions of the work of art under conditions of AI reproduction and our fears about interiority itself.

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 bring a psychoanalytic lens to bear on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. As they explain, psychoanalysis offers tools for thinking both about specific political conditions and historical events and for reflecting more generally on the ways dramatic events can function politically and become “history” in the first place. Moreover, psychoanalytic concepts can bring together the perspectives of political economy, libidinal economy, and our own personal experiences to help us navigate overwhelming events and better track what’s new, what isn’t, what we need to remember, and what we’re encouraged to forget. To that end, Abby and Patrick take up psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan’s notion of the “chosen trauma,” a model for how episodes of mass trauma can become touchstones for defining group identity, and apply it to the events of 9/11, the “Global War on Terror” that ensued, and their ongoing legacy in our present. Toggling between artifacts of popular culture, military history, journalistic accounts, and more, Abby and Patrick reflect on how American society reacted to the trauma of 9/11; how political elites capitalized on the situation; how ideas of exceptionalism, innocence, vengeance, and even time and causality themselves were reconfigured; and how we’re still contending with the cultural and institutional consequences of those processes in the present.
Note: It has come to our attention that Dick Cheney is, in fact, currently dead, at least for now.

Texts cited include:

Patrick Blanchfield and Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Brave Moles and Hungry Ghosts” in The Revealer (September 2016) https://therevealer.org/brave-moles-and-hungry-ghosts-911-memento-mori/

Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Memento Mori,” https://www.simkobednarskiphoto.com/memento-mori

Vamik Volkan, “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity, in Group Analysis (March 2001) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/05333160122077730

Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East (2016)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241154/americas-war-for-the-greater-middle-east-by-andrew-j-bacevich/

Andrew Bacevich, “What I Learned After the End of History” (2025) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/learned-after-history.html

Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Donald Trump (2022) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/reign-of-terror-by-spencer-ackerman/

Spencer Ackerman (interviewed by Jordan Uhl) “"Terrorist": How ICE Weaponized 9/11's Scarlet Letter” in The Intercept Briefing https://theintercept.com/2026/02/06/spencer-ackerman-9-11-terrorists-ice/

Susan Sontag (et al), “Tuesday and After” in The New Yorker (September 16, 2001) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of-the-town

Jake Tapper and Bill Maher, “Bill Maher: The Salon Interview” (December 2002) https://www.salon.com/2002/12/11/maher_6/

The Brown University Watson School of International and Public Affairs' Costs of War Project
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/

Elizabeth Beavers, “Terrorizing Migrants: Five Ways Post 9/11 Legal Precedents Paved the Way for Anti-Immigrant Actions in the United States” https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/terrorizingmigrants

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 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.

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

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