Ordinary Unhappiness

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Abby and Patrick are joined by returning guest Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and columnist at New York magazine, to talk about the HBO series The White Lotus. From plotlines involving taboos like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist for the psychoanalytic mill, and Abby, Patrick, and Sam tackle all these with gusto (and plenty of spoilers). In addition to discussing the text on its own terms, they reflect on its popularity as a social symptom that implicates collective fantasies and anxieties about friendship, sexuality, money, religion, and more. As the three explore, contextualizing the show in political and ideological terms reveals not just the idiosyncratic preoccupations of The White Lotus’s creator, Mike White, but the paradoxes of how American audiences and the prestige TV shows we love navigate questions of desire, identity, cultural and sexual difference, and the repressions that underwrite them. 

Know Your Enemy: A Podcast About the American Right: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  

Sam Adler-Bell, “The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy”: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/the-movie-industrys-confused-eat-the-rich-fantasy.html

Neil Websdale, Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/familicidal-hearts-9780199325849

Imogen Binnie, Nevada: https://bookshop.org/p/books/nevada-imogen-binnie/17839995 

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
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Abby and Patrick are joined by writer and artist Lily Scherlis for a provocative reflection on the ideological subtexts, historical contexts, and real-world value of some of our moment’s most bandied-about concepts and terms. Beginning with her 2023 essay for Parapraxis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have proliferated across popular culture and have become ubiquitous in the workplace, in bestsellers, on social media, and in our most intimate interactions. What exactly are “boundaries,” when did having (or not having) them become such an issue, and how does their invocation function? Touching on themes and topics across Scherlis’s body of work, from CBT and DBT to the legacy of Dale Carnegie and beyond, the conversation builds to a consideration of the case of attachment theory. Unpacking the history, key concepts, and findings of this interdisciplinary field of study, Abby, Patrick, and Lily explore how its terms and categories have become so central to a cottage industry of online quizzes and therapeutic interventions. How do ideas of self-improvement and self-help relate to economic shifts in modes of production, material realities of employment precarity, and our felt sense of being together – and being alienated? What work do these terms do in the abstract, and what work are we as subjects expected to do in learning and using them? And how can we square our skepticism vis-à-vis such models and vocabularies with the traction they can give us when it comes to understanding ourselves, tolerating distress, navigating a difficult world, potentially changing our circumstances, and connecting with one another?

Selected texts cited:

Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else”

Lily Scherlis, “Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Its Discontents”

Lily Scherlis, “Going Soft: Future Proofing the American Worker”

Danielle Carr, “Don’t Be So Attached to Attachment Theory”

Robert Karen, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Ability to Love

Heidi Keller. The Myth of Attachment Theory A Critical Understanding for Multicultural Societies

Ruth O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Dallos, Katherine Berry, and Karen Bateson. Attachment Theory: The Basics

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
Provided by Fruits Music

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Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria: Fräulein Anna O. It is a paradoxical and deeply overdetermined text. This troubled young woman was a patient of Breuer’s, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, and an associationist model of the mind. But this famous case can also rightly be seen as the beginning of psychoanalysis; indeed, Anna O. herself coined the phrase “the talking cure.” Yet even as the case of Anna O. would come to serve as a kind of skeleton key for unlocking Freud’s subsequent sensitivities to listening, transference, and the layered temporalities of psychic traumas, her story would also become an object of mischaracterization and myth-making for Freud and others. Abby, Patrick, and Dan thus begin by addressing the case history as a broader genre while establishing some working distinctions between “Anna O.” as a character in Breuer’s text, the real-life Bertha Pappenheim (the person behind the pseudonym), and the subsequent legend of Anna O. as an arch-hysteric whose distress culminated in a (fictious) phantom pregnancy. They walk through Breuer’s narrative on its own terms, tackling Anna O.’s many symptoms, especially those involving her intermingling of silence and speech in multiple languages, and the pivotal scene that, per Breuer, represented a breakthrough in the treatment. The questions this all raises – about the limits of knowledge, the contingencies of suffering, and what it means to be healed – set up the next episode, about the story behind the story, and the remarkable biography of Bertha Pappenheim herself. 

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 returning guest Hannah Zeavin – scholar, write, editor, co-founder of the Psychosocial Foundation and Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine – to talk about her brand-new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. It’s an exploration of the complex relationships that have tied together the figure of the mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how they should go about doing it. What does it mean to think about the mother as a “medium” for containing, nurturing, and shepherding the development of a child, and why do debates about mothering pivot so invariably around questions of media consumption and technological mediation? The conversation spans the history of academic research into parenting from behaviorism to attachment theory; clinical and popular discourses about mothers from Freud to Dr. Spock; the profusion of tools that promise to “help” mothers with their kids; “good-enough” mothering, mother-blaming, and vicious double binds; moral, political, and legal debates about nannies, “helicopter mothers,” incarcerated mothers, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and much, much more. 

Read and subscribe to Parapraxis here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/

Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation here: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/

Mother Media is available here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049559/mother-media/

An excerpt from Mother Media in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heir-conditioner/

Zeavin, “Composite Case: The Fate of the Children of Psychoanalysis”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/composite-case

Zeavin, “Unfree Associations”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/

Zeavin, “Parallel Processes”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/

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

By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself? 

Selected texts cited:

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (editors), Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development: https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224177/slaverys-capitalism/ 

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

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In a perfect pairing with our ongoing series on Lacan, we come in from the cold and go underground by watching Theodore Flicker’s neglected classic, “The President’s Analyst” (1967). James Coburn stars as a psychoanalyst drafted to serve as the president’s shrink, and who swiftly goes from starstruck to depleted to a fugitive on the run. This satiric romp hit a nerve with the FBI, was censored in post-production, and quickly disappeared from theaters. A loving sendup of psychoanalysis, an acid-addled dramatization of Cold War anxieties, and just a gonzo all-around-good time, the film gives us plenty to talk about, from the paranoic structure of knowledge to the Big Other of surveillance to unorthodox cures for “hostility” to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret flirtations with self-analysis and more. 

Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is G-MAN: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. 

You can listen to Barry McGuire’s “Inner-Manipulations” (featured in the film) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7F_u9L5X8

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 begin the Standard Edition Volume II. Their first text is Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria (1895), specifically its opening sections. First, they unpack the layered and suggestive series of Prefaces to successive editions of the book, revealing how each iteration charts the differing personal, professional, and theoretical trajectories of the two authors over time, and how they reveal Freud’s distinctive approach to memorializing his own intellectual development. Then they turn to the opening essay, originally published in 1893, “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” Topics include the so-called “cathartic method,” the question of origins, the tensions and productivities of collaborative dialogues (not just between Freud and Breuer, but between these men and their female patients), and our first glimpses of Freud as a distinctively “coy” stylist. Abby and Patrick also dip into deep waters about questions of contingency and of origins – of symptoms, of cures, and of human suffering more generally – and how injuries to the psyche follow logics of causality, temporality, meaning, and alleviation that are all markedly different from those governing other traumas. 

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 Ann Conrad Lammers, a Jungian psychotherapist and the primary editor and assistant translator of Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, a brand-new volume from Princeton University Press. Going against the grain of traditional narratives that present Emma as a helpmeet to her more famous husband, this collection brings together for the first time many of Emma Jung’s works across a variety of media and genres, highlighting her outsize contributions, both material and intellectual, to the tradition known as Analytical Psychology. The wide-ranging conversation explores Emma’s biography, her ambitions, and her intellectual preoccupations. The three also dig into the story of how Emma managed the complications, at once personal and professional, of simultaneously being the wife of Carl Jung, a foundational player in several analytic institutions, a deeply respected correspondent of Sigmund Freud, and a clinician in her own right. What emerges is a tale of betrayals and boundary violations, but also of growth, resilience, and the confrontation of lifelong tasks, with implications not just for how we understand the often-neglected stories of many women clinicians in the early decades of psychoanalysis, but the stakes of confronting patriarchy while embracing the work of therapy in the present.

Selected texts: 

Ann Conrad Lammers, Thomas Fischer, and Medea Hoch, editors. Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, Princeton University Press, 2025.

Ann Conrad Lammers. ‘Emma Jung’s Years of Self-Liberation.’ Essay available at:  https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/emma-jungs-years-of-self-liberation. 

Ferne Jensen and Sidney Mullen, editors. C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances. The Analytical Psychology Club of San Francisco, 1982

Emma Jung and Marie-Louise Von Franz. The Grail Legend. Princeton University Press, 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. 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

For the first time since the inauguration, our series metabolizing the ongoing chaos of American politics returns. That’s right: Gerontophallocracy is back! The topic is a certain grandiose deadbeat manchild patriarch who has succeeded in making himself even more of a ubiquitous object of speculation than Donald Trump: Elon Musk. But instead of focusing on Elon’s erratic behavior and personal symptoms, Abby, Patrick, and Dan tackle the question of Musk’s existence and prominence as a symptom of underlying political economic and libidinal economic conditions. It’s a tale of the Return of the (Barely) Repressed extending from religious myths to secular fictions and from the dawn of patriarchy and emergence of private property to the dream of a future where the scions of billionaires can plant their flags and dynasties on Mars. It’s a lot. 

Texts include:

Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/)

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

Karl Marx, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital Vol I (available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm)

Robert Paul, "Yes, the Primal Crime Did Take Place," in Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on Culture

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

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 author Sophie Lewis to discuss her latest book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Together, they explore the history of a variety of feminisms, self-identified and otherwise, that can justifiably provoke anxiety and even rejection in those invested in feminism as an emancipatory concept and project. Their conversation ranges from nineteenth-century activists who saw the rights of women as entailing the right to own slaves to those whose visions of abolition were inextricable from logics of racist imperialism; from twentieth-century eugenicists to prohibitionists; and from today’s transphobic demagogues to the pinkwashing boosters of the carceral state. What are the lessons of these movements and figures, how do they reflect material and ideological struggles over social reproduction, and what challenges do they pose for the formulation of feminist projects? How, from a psychoanalytic perspective, can we interrogate our own libidinal investments in logics of exclusion, and balance our competing desires to identify and disidentify with others? Are there ways we can receive inspiration from, and claim to be in continuity with, problematic figures in the past, while also critically acknowledging their shortcomings? And above all, can we draw on those lessons to both meaningfully practice solidarity and face opposition in the present?

Enemy Feminisms is here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2440-enemy-feminisms

Abolish The Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation is here: https://lasophielle.org/writing/abolish-the-family-a-manifesto-for-care-and-liberation/

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family is here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/711-full-surrogacy-now

Sophie’s book tour dates are available here: https://lasophielle.org/

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