Ordinary Unhappiness

Guest Jade E. Davis critiques empathy culture, discussing its flattening effect on suffering, demand for performative suffering, and the assimilation of the Other. The history of empathy is explored, along with the colonial gaze and contemporary human zoos. Davis highlights the limitations of empathy, the prioritization of visible trauma, and insincere empathetic efforts. Scholarly practices, Polynesian Cultural Center complexities, and the implications of judgment and standards in history are also discussed.

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn 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.Works referenced available on Patreon. 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! 484 775-0107 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn 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 holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi’s “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies.The second part of our Thanksgiving Special – on Freudian anthropology, the history behind (and of) Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism – drops Wednesday, Nov 22, just in time for your holiday travel.Articles referenced include:Cattell, J P.  The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available 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! 484 775-0107 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

Friends! This week we are on deadline and/or under a terrifying pile of ungraded papers, so we're giving folks a chance to enter the wild world of The Standard Edition with this freshly unlocked episode that tackles Freud’s earliest work, his personal and professional anxieties, and the complicated disorder(s) he and his contemporaries called hysteria. (Please join us on Patreon if you like it!) And for our Patreon supporters, a lot more Fliess is coming soon in the next installments of the SE, plus Wild Analysis on settler colonialism and Thanksgiving…Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn this second episode of The Standard Edition, we finally start doing the reading, tackling the first three texts in Volume I of the Standard Edition: “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin,” (1886), “Preface to the Translation of Charcot’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System” (1886) and “Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anesthesia in A Hysterical Male” (1886). We do some ground-clearing about the history of medicine and the various disciplines in which the young Freud sought recognition and met with frustration; sketch out Freud’s biography and the world into which he was born and came of age; and discuss the figure of Jean-Martin Charcot and Freud’s time studying hysteria with him at the Salpêtrière in Paris. We pay close attention to an early case study of a male hysteric and how it prefigures some of Freud’s later case studies. Along the way, we also talk about Freud’s history with eels, anti-Semitism, cocaine, hypnosis, and his lifelong habit of making best friends and breaking up with them. We offer a handful of sources we’re consulting, whether for general edification or for reference for anyone who might be embarking on this project alongside us. 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! 484 775-0107 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the latest installment of the Standard Edition, we begin the Fliess Extracts section of SE Volume 1 in conversation with novelist and literary critic Christine Smallwood. We discuss the figure of Wilhelm Fliess and what he meant to Freud; the history of the Freud-Fliess correspondence, only half of which survives; Fliess’s theories of noses, periodicity, and bisexuality; Freud’s anxiety about Fliess’s professional reputation and influence on his own ideas; Freud’s issues with condoms and coitus interruptus; and how Freud was thinking about categories like anxiety, depression, melancholia, and obsessional neurosis during this period.Articles discussed in this episode include:Young, Annie Riddington. "Freud’s friend Fliess." The Journal of Laryngology & Otology 116.12 (2002): 992-995: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-laryngology-and-otology/article/abs/freuds-friend-fliess/7F87416E73813F4EFEB9B46CB38B3D8BZucker, Arthur, and David Wiegand. "Freud, Fliess, and the nasogenital reflex: did a look into the nose let us see the mind?" Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery 98.4 (1988): 319-322: https://aao-hnsfjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019459988809800409Blum, Harold P. "Freud, Fliess, and the parenthood of psychoanalysis." The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 59.1 (1990): 21-40:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1990.11927262Have 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! 484 775-0107A 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 psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou and psychoanalyst and academic Ann Pellegrini to discuss their new co-authored book, Gender Without Identity. They talk about the genesis of the manuscript, from its beginnings in a painful case of child analysis to its distressing reception by psychoanalytic gatekeepers and “repressive forces within psychoanalysis itself.” They explore the difficulties queer and trans patients have faced in seeking psychoanalytic treatment; the resistances of institutional psychoanalysis when it comes to theorizing queer subjectivities; the struggles of queer and trans analysts themselves; and the implication of psychoanalysis in broader moral panics and political mobilizations against trans people. They discuss how theory is never just abstract, but bears upon urgent questions of care; the power and fantasies of rhetorical appeals to “protect” children; and how to conceive of gender as an experiment rather than an essential given or a predetermined teleology. Finally, Avgi and Ann offer a provocative approach to thinking about what trauma is and does, including questions of “traumatophobia” and the challenging ways trauma can be theorized and experienced in relation to gendered formations of all sorts.Gender Without Identity is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/gender-without-identity-ann-pellegrini/20606066Avgi’s recent book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/sexuality-beyond-consent-risk-race-traumatophilia-avgi-saketopoulou/18390655?ean=9781479820252Ann’s book Performance Anxiety: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/performance-anxieties-staging-psychoanalysis-staging-race-ann-pellegrini/9006711?ean=9780415916868Have 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! 484 775-0107A 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessAfter a long chat about why people like and dislike horror – and an excursion into our childhood fears – we tackle John Carpenter’s 1978 classic film Halloween. We discuss sibling rivalry, bullying, uncanny objects, stranger danger, the boogeyman, the many meanings of Michael Myers, why everyone is always on the phone in slasher movies, and cultural fantasies and fears about infantile aggression and cruelty.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! 484 775-0107  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/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. We discuss Steven’s singular career trajectory (from Saturday Night Live to The Village Voice to academia); the difference between “having” or “owning” a body versus being a body; why pandemics are never just about biology, but implicate social realities, shared fantasies, and libidinal economy; the notion of the “viral underclass”; the changing landscape of HIV/AIDS criminalization laws and the case of Michael Johnson, a young Black man prosecuted for the “reckless transmission” of HIV; the origins, myths, and baggage of the term “Patient Zero”; logics of scapegoating and moral panics; hierarchies of social vulnerability and human disposability, especially as they implicate questions of race, class, sexuality, disability, incarceration, and housing status; our relationship to animals and our calculi about who gets to count as human; ideologies about health and disease, purity and pollution, infection and risk; and how viruses can help us reimagine our conceptions of borders, boundaries, permeability, autonomy, and interdependence.The Viral Underclass is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-viral-underclass-the-human-toll-when-inequality-and-disease-collide-steven-w-thrasher/17086534Have 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! 484 775-0107 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/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe Standard Edition will be a regular monthly series going forward – and here’s the latest installment! Working our way steadily through Volume I, we discuss: A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism (1892-93); the Preface and Footnotes to Charcot's Tuesday Lectures (1892-94); Sketches for the "Preliminary Communication of 1893" (1940-41 [1892]); and Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses (1893 [1888-1893]). Along the way, we tackle a fascinating case study about hypnotism, feeding, and breastfeeding; will versus “counter-will"; tics, cursing nuns, imps of perversity, and The Little Engine That Could; why certain concepts catch on and others don’t; the brilliant Josef Breuer and his complicated relationship to Freud; early models and definitions of trauma; and a good Freudian reason for why you should always read the footnotes.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! 484 775-0107  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/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick take your calls and talk about dream interpretation, professional ethics, and visions of therapy for the world we live in versus the world we want to inhabit. (They are also unexpectedly haunted by the example of the fantasy of wanting to kill your boss.)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! 484 775-0107 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