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

Abby and Patrick continue their reading of Freud's case study of Elisabeth von R. With each new loss and fragmentation suffered by Elisabeth's nuclear family, they track the shifting burdens put upon Elisabeth and the successive challenges to her own hopes, desires, and self-understanding. Arriving at a pivotal moment in Elisabeth's story - another scene of bedside grief - they glimpse what appears to be her family's darkest secret, and then share in Freud's surprise when Elisabeth delivers yet another offhand revelation.

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

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Happy New Year! We’re off this week taking a belated holiday rest. But as a complement to our miniseries on projective identification with Brian Ngo-Smith, we’re unlocking this episode featuring another returning audience favorite: Lily Scherlis. Lily leads Abby and Dan on a deep dive into the psychoanalytic study of groups, from its history and roots in Wilfred Bion’s theories to her own personal experiences and reportage. Like our recent episodes with Brian, the conversation expands to thinking about groups more broadly, and into the arena of contemporary politics in general and the challenges of leftist solidarity specifically. 

-

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.  

Lily Scherlis, “Experiences in Groups”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/essays/experiences-in-groups/

Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups: https://bookshop.org/p/books/experiences-in-groups-and-other-papers-w-r-bion/0d24f44dde25497d?ean=9780415040204&next=t&

Nov 14th event of interest to NYC listeners: “Group as Form; Deep Study Session with Groups Group” (registration and fee required): https://www.poetryproject.org/events/group-as-form-deep-study-session-with-groups-group?page=1

Our previous episode with Lily, “From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and Abuses of Pop Psychology”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/17036523-98-from-boundaries-to-attachment-the-uses-and-abuses-of-pop-psychology-feat-lily-scherlis

Our previous episode on Bion’s Experiences in Groups with Christine Smallwood: “From Parties to Projective Identification: Why Is Group Life So Hard?”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/13002667-12-from-parties-to-projective-identification-why-is-group-life-so-hard-feat-christine-smallwood

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

Brian Ngo-Smith returns for the second half of our miniseries on projective identification! In this episode, Abby, Patrick, and Brian pivot from the difficult terrain of theorizing projective identification in terms of individual development and abstract mental mechanisms to the much more tangible – and dramatic – manifestations of projective identification in group behavior. Indeed, as the three explore, thinking about projective identification in the interpersonal rather than intrapsychic domain is incredibly clarifying for understanding how groups come together, encourage various roles for their members, experience friction, manifest antagonisms, and otherwise function (or break down) in the real world. Building from two-person dyads to small groups to large collectivities, Brian, Abby, and Patrick apply the concept of projective identification at scale, thinking about everything from psychotherapy and marriage to classrooms and family businesses to giant corporations and politics at the national level and beyond. From “role suction” to scapegoating to Bion’s threefold model of group types and more, the three unpack some essential – and highly portable – terms, and work through how the idea of projective identification can help re-frame broader, longstanding questions about interpellation, leadership, solidarity, and more. They conclude with an extended consideration of the contemporary landscape of American mass incarceration, homelessness, and precarity, unpacking how the all-too-personal aspects of projective identification manifest in tandem with the operation of ostensibly impersonal histories, institutions, and policies to generate suffering, perpetuate inequality, and normalize logics of enactment, blame, trauma, indifference, and more.

More about Brian Ngo-Smith at https://ngosmiththerapy.com/ and https://ngosmithconsulting.com

Part I: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/18416396-127-projective-identification-part-i-feat-brian-ngo-smith

Our previous episode with Brian, “Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/14213981-36-hate-help-and-housing-psychoanalysis-and-social-work-feat-brian-ngo-smith

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and clinical social worker Brian Ngo-Smith for a conversation about one of the most difficult but powerful concepts in psychoanalytic theory: projective identification. A notion that demands simultaneously thinking about infantile development and adult behaviors, normal defenses and pathological patterns, the idea of projective identification captures an essential dimension of all kinds of interpersonal relationships – but it also throws some of our most basic assumptions about the distinction between self and other into question. In the first of a two-part series, Brian, Abby, and Patrick unpack the concept of projective identification, setting it in historical context, and considering it from a variety of perspectives. They explore topics including classical Freudian versus object relations approaches to development; the works of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion; the defense mechanisms in general and ideas of projection and introjection specifically; projective identification in therapy, romantic partnerships, and professional life; and more. In part II, which comes out next Saturday, Brian, Abby, and Patrick put the idea of projective identification to work in considering group behavior, institutional cultures, and politics.

Texts cited:

Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” 

Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups

Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect 

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process

JL Mitrani, “'Taking the transference': Some technical implications in three papers by Bion”

Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense

Jerome Blackman, 101 Defenses: How the Mind Shields Itself

More about Brian at https://ngosmiththerapy.com/ and https://ngosmithconsulting.com

Our previous episode with Brian, “Hate, Help, and Housing: Psychoanalysis and Social Work”: https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/14213981-36-hate-help-and-housing-psychoanalysis-and-social-work-feat-brian-ngo-smith

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

It’s part two of our mailbag episode – which means Abby, Patrick, and Dan get to field yet more amazing listener questions! Topics include the many relationships, and problems of translation, between psychoanalysis and Buddhism; the figure of Melanie Klein and American resistances to her thought; how the right uses language and the question of whether the American left needs a new "master signifier"; the virality of buzzwords like "limerence" and "person addiction" and what they reveal about contemporary conditions of intimacy; and more! The three also reflect on themes of precarity, vulnerability, education, 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

Abby and Patrick are joined by writer Grace Byron, author of the fantastic new novel Herculine. Alternately hilarious and terrifying, Herculine is the story of a young trans woman who leaves a frustrating life in New York City to join an erstwhile high school lover in a trans separatist commune in rural Indiana. But the community proves far from perfect, and the narrator soon finds herself enmeshed in a pressure-cooker milieu of personal jealousies and erotic rivalries, all with occult overtones – and there are literal demons, too. Abby, Patrick, and Grace reflect on the themes of the book, and probe the broader questions it addresses. How might trauma shape our ideas about healing and our pursuit of transformative experiences – in psychotherapy and beyond? How does identity relate to desire, how does theory relate to practice, and how might hegemonic structures reassert themselves in power dynamics within marginalized communities? What are the uses of utopian fantasies, and how do we square them with the real-world challenges of building solidarity? The three explore all these questions, as well as the power of religious symbolism, the practice of “conversion therapy,” media representations of the demonic, and more!  

Texts cited:

Grace Byron, Herculine: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Herculine/Grace-Byron/9781668087862 

Grace Byron, “Idle Worship: Fairy Tales of Conversion,” in Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/idle-worship

Grace Byron, “Repossessed,” in The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/latest/repossessed-byron

McKenzie Wark, “Dear Cis Analysts: A Call for Reparations,” in Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/dear-cis-analysts

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity: https://www.uitbooks.com/shop/gender-without-identity

Imogen Binnie, Nevada: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374606619/nevada/

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

It’s another mailbag episode (part one of two)! Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to listener questions about everything from the utility of psychoanalytic concepts in everyday life to the complexities of Melanie Klein to the allure of AI “wisdom” and beyond. Plus, they tackle Abraham Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” and get into the weeds of why, exactly, Hallmark movies exist, who they’re for, and what libidinal work they do.

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 therapist and sexuality educator Lucie Fielding. First, the three talk about Lucie’s path to clinical work and the significance of her book, Trans Sex, just out in a revised Second Edition. They then turn to Freud’s classic, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), putting that text, and the broader legacy of Freud’s views on sexuality, in dialogue with contemporary questions of trans embodiment and sexual identity. This means reckoning with the ways that Freud’s account of sexual development is alternately retrograde and radical, both of his time and far ahead of it. The three focus in particular on Freud’s idea of “polymorphous perversity,” and the ambiguities of his distinction between “sexual object” and “sexual aim,” exploring how Freud’s vision of human sexuality as radically contingent and plastic may offer possibilities for thinking constructively and more inclusively about pleasure and the diverse range of human sexual expression.

Lucie’s website is here: https://luciefielding.com/

The new edition of Trans Sex is here: https://www.routledge.com/Trans-Sex-Nurturing-Trans-Erotic-Embodiment-and-Gender-Pleasure/Fielding/p/book/9781032737218

Lucie’s recommended reading includes:

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex

Audre Lorde, “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power”

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

Last year we unlocked part 1 of our Thanksgiving Special so that everyone could hear the good/bad news about the "Holiday Syndrome." This year we're unlocking part 2, on settler colonialism, history, fantasy, ritual, and more. Whether you're celebrating, traveling, or staying home, we promise there's a lot to chew on here!

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

In the second – overstuffed – installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the social demand to perform “thankfulness”; the parable of primal murder and subsequent myth-making at the heart of Freud’s first foray into armchair anthropology, Totem and Taboo (1913); Christianity, civic religion and the “totems” and sacrifices of ritual meals as obligatory touchstones for enforcing social cohesion; the history of the Thanksgiving holiday as a project of ideological integration and national-mythmaking; the history behind the supposed “first Thanskgiving”; the psychic tolls of repression at the level of the individual, the family, and the nation; settler colonialism as a term of political and libidinal economy; primal scenes and screen memories; indigenous activism, counter-memories, and the National Day of Mourning; compulsory identification, difficult recognitions, disidentifications, and the creation of new possibilities.

Citations available on Patreon here.

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 resume Freud’s case history of Elisabeth von R. They walk through Freud’s developing technique before unpacking what will prove to be one of his lifelong favorite and most evocative metaphors for psychic life: a city. Abby and Patrick then begin close-reading Elisabeth von R’s life story as she first relates it to Freud. What emerges is both a picture of Elisabeth’s family system, its patterns, and the distinctly gendered roles assigned to its members as well as the story of her personal fantasies and frustrations as the family goes through turmoil and loss. The episode builds to the articulation of a fundamental Freudian preoccupation: how do psychic injuries arise in relation to real-world misfortunes, and how do life experiences and contingent events determine the form of an individual’s bodily symptoms? 

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