Abby and Patrick welcome journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone to discuss his new book, There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. A devastating and essential read, There is No Place for Us tells the stories of five Atlanta families as they join the ranks of an ever-growing class of Americans: the unhoused. Against the grain…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick are joined by one of their favorite writers, Sarah Miller, to talk about her new essay in n+1. Entitled “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” it’s a first-person narrative, at once understated and devastating, …

Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on the occasion of the new edition of his book Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Reconsidering Reparations is a magisterial work that ties together global history, data from economics and public health, philo…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thi…

Abby, Patrick, and Dan mark one hundred episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness! They start by looking back on the show’s run so far, and what they’ve gotten from engaging with psychoanalysis as a living body of knowledge, as a corpus of classic texts, as a way of seeing the world, and more. They then turn to the episode’s primary focus: a mailbag chock f…

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

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 Every…

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

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…

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 Ka…

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

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 …

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, thi…

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…

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…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan close out The Project for a Scientific Psychology - and the first volume of the Standard Edition - in its entirety! First, they unpack the key steps of Freud's quantitative argument" from the na…

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster to discuss her brand-new book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, out in March 2025 from Catapult. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that traverses clinical, social, and political domains while remaining firmly grounded in one of the most basic prerequisites for human life:…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott’s ideas about hate and aggression to work. What everyday situations, personal experiences, and institutional practices get clarified when we consider them as reflecting displaced f…

Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their close reading of Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” unpacking and tying together its three biggest arguments. First, there’s the connection Winnicott draws between the therapeutic encounter and childhood development: more than just an analogy, these two environments are directly connected, and in f…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan start close-reading Winnicott’s famous paper, “Hate in the Counter-Transference” (1949, originally delivered as a paper two years earlier). They start with its place and time, situating Winnicot…

Abby, Patrick, and Dan take up a topic that couldn’t be more relevant to the contemporary zeitgeist – aggression – as theorized by an unlikely source: the British analyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. What did this beloved and famously gentle figure have to say about aggression, and our taboos and fantasies surrounding it? Where does aggression …

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan get together for a looking-forward, looking-backward session surveying the year that was and assessing the year ahead. It’s a suitably ambivalent, Janus-faced assessment of political development…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick sit down with religious studies scholar and Reformation historian Nathan Rein to discuss Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). This is Freud’s first extended treatment of religio…

Abby and Patrick are joined by philosopher Simon Critchley to discuss his new book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. They discuss how, for Critchley, mysticism represents "a way of thinking about existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” Exploring the book’s survey of key figures and texts in the Western Christi…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for dif…

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious?…

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holi…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic p…

Abby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global. Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel c…

We're off this weekend, but here's a thematically appropriate episode from earlier this year. Come find us on Patreon for our recent political coverage, The Standard Edition series, and more Wild Analysis. We'll be back next Saturday. --- While Abby’s voice is still gone, Dan and Patrick take in a film on opening day and subject it to some wild ana…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan sit down for an immediate post-election processing session. They talk about time, change, what is or isn't "surprising," the difficulty of maintaining perspective, and how a psychoanalytic persp…

It’s the last installment of Gerontophallocracy 2024 before the election. Abby, Patrick, and Dan process the vibes both in The Discourse and here in Pennsylvania (chaotic and bad); reflect on Harris on Call Her Daddy versus Trump on Rogan; talk about forced choices, votes, and fantasies of voting; discuss complicity and lesser-of-two evilism from t…

Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel. Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solida…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their watch-through of Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.” They talk Tarkovsky and id-machines, Hitchcock and the impotence of male fantasy, Lynch and nightmares, films as dreams, …

Abby and Patrick welcome Sabrina Strings, professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, to talk about her new book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. The book is both a deep dive into the genealogy of western notions of "romance" - from medieval courtly love to Victorian mother/whore complexes - and a…

Abby and Patrick welcome Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov of literary magazine n+1. The magazine is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and marking this milestone with the publication of The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. Lisa, Mark, Abby, and Patrick engage in a conversation that ranges from the history of the magaz…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The key theme is proxies – candidates standing in for one another, gestures that say one thing while meaning another, scapegoats, displacem…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss the cult classic “Heathers” (Michael Lehmann, 1988). This coming-of-age satire offers them a chance to talk about high school movies as a genre, developmental milestones, and why grown a…

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness We set out to discuss the Eras tour film but got drawn into the broader cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. Along the way, we talk about the concepts of cathexis and the Big Other; our own embarrassing…

Abby, Patrick, and Dan welcome the incomparable Liz Franczak of TrueAnon! The topic is conspiracy theories, from real to imagined, documented to discredited, ludicrous to all-too-likely, and more. The first half of the episode is ground-clearing and working through some basic questions. They unpack the phrase “conspiracy theory,” tracking its shift…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan process last night’s Trump-Harris debate. They talk about the pleasures of domination, perverse and otherwise; the power of identifications over and against appeals to statistics; narcissistic r…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick are joined by friend of the show and returning guest Sam Adler-Bell! Together, the three process events in the US electoral landscape in the past month, focusing in particular on the selection of J.D.…

Abby and Patrick welcome Dan Taberski, creator of the brand-new podcast series Hysterical. They explore the genesis of the series and the challenges and rewards of confronting both the history and the present of “the H-word.” Tracking the trajectories of this famously “elusive neurosis,” Hysterical looks to episodes from colonial America to Belle E…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan continue their journey through the Project for a Scientific Psychology. They explore how the Project reflects recent developments in technology, and how Freud is staging an intervention into ong…

Abby and Patrick welcome labor journalist Sarah Jaffe – author of Necessary Trouble and Work Won’t Love You Back – for her first interview about her forthcoming book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. From the Ashes is at once a deeply personal narrative and a wide-ranging journey of searing reportage on the lives and struggl…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan get into the first part of Slavoj Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, directed by Sophie Fiennes). They consider one of the film’s core propositions – that cinema is an instruction in how and wha…

Abby and Patrick welcome Loren Dent, a clinical psychologist in the Lacanian tradition. The topic is psychosis, both as understood theoretically by Freud and Lacan, and also as experienced and encountered by real people in New York City, where Loren practices and where he has helped establish an innovative program of treatment and care. Starting by…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick power through COVID brain fog to process Sunday’s announcement and the past few weeks of relentless breaking news. What do times like these do to our ability to process time in general? What do the ti…

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2023 memoir Sink and a new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Set over the course of a single, chaotic day in a North Philadelphia hospital, Thomas’ novel unfolds across a multiplicity of geographies and timelines, and weaves together a dense network of human attachm…

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness The season is here. The time is now. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes (again). And to help navigate it all, Abby, Patrick, and Dan are launching a new series: Gerontophallocracy 2024. In this first in…