Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their adventure through Lacan’s mirror stage! They reprise Lacan’s parable of the mirror-besotted baby and tie together the many threads – theoretical, clinical, and philosophical – woven through it. They walk through how Lacan musters evidence for his argument using both cases of pathology (i.e. psychosis) and “normal” dreams and fantasies, and how his situating of alienation within the ego puts him at odds with other schools of psychoanalysis, specifically th...

43: The Mirror Crack’d: The Mirror Stage, Part III

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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...

43: The Mirror Crack’d: The Mirror Stage, Part III

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