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 culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints about so-called “political correctness,” and in what ways is it different? Why do broad narrative...

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 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...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 perspective can help us navigate moments like these. Plus: what is "hope," actually, and what do we mean when we ask for it?Have you noticed that Freud i...

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 the depressive position; and more. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy an...

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, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very contingencies of family, community, and human life itself. Abby and Patrick talk with Daniel about ho...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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, and Zizek’s signature rhetorical style. Plus: does the impossibility of the sexual relationship mean that the inverse of the sexual relationship fin...

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 searing critique of contemporary ideologies of love, normative gender roles, practices of dating, and more. Strings takes Abby and Patrick on a jo...

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 magazine to the legacy of the Iraq War to the early dysphorias of the Trump administration to the contemporary publishing landscape and more. But at hea...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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, displacements, and more. They unpack how such substitutions can function to resolve contradictions and disguise continuities, involving not only the candidat...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 adults are so obsessed with media about teenage life (and death). The movie also gives the three a through-the-looking glass meditation on what’s cha...

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWe 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 childhood attachments to music; how the Eras tour is like Nietzsche’s eternal return; Swift’s self-narration about her relationship to praise, food...

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 over the twentieth century from a neutral term to a label redolent with scorn, dismissal, and even pathologization. They explore how this trajecto...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 rage in the face of symbolic castration; and the meaning of “libidinal economy.” They also get frank about abortion, nativism, and the grotesque stak...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby 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.Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the ascendance of Kamala Harris, and the spectacle of the Democratic Convention. Objects of psychodynamic-flav...

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 Epoque Paris to modern-day Iran, and tracks the stories of people from high school students in upstate New York to a prosecutor in Ohio to former CI...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, 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 ongoing contemporary investigations in the fields of neurology and biology. Working through key early chapters of the Project itself, they unpack how F...

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 struggles of individuals and communities. Sarah, Abby, and Patrick take on the overdeterminations of loss, grief, mourning, and memorialization from conte...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby 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 what to desire. This leads them through Zizek’s (and their own) interpretations of classic Hitchcock films, Alien, Blue Velvet, and beyond. More broadl...

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 tackling a basic question – what is “psychosis?” – the three chart Freud’s struggles to grasp psychotic phenomena, his messy efforts to make the n...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby 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 timelines of presidential campaigns, news cycles, and breaking stories do to our subjective experience of time and the other timelines that structure ...

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 attachments in all their pleasures and pains. The conversation ranges widely as Abby, Patrick, and Joseph discuss what “trauma” means in popular discourse...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessThe 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 installment, they outline the goals for the series, explain what the Goldwater Rule is and isn’t, and unpack how psychoanalysis can help us get some p...

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan are joined by writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman (author of the recent book The Riddles of The Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle) to unpack the dense knots of overdetermination and fantasy that make up the recent rom-com "The Idea of You" (2024). It's a world where Anne Hathaway is a 40-year ol...

Abby and Patrick welcome writer, academic, and cruciverbalist Anna Shechtman, author of The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, a book that’s part personal memoir, part cultural history, and part meditation on what it means to care about meaning in the first place. In typically overdetermined fashion, the three talk about the complex interweaving of language, sexual difference, and the vicissitudes of our appetites for food, clues, accomplishments, ...