Ordinary Unhappiness Patrick & Abby
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- Society & Culture
A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now, featuring Abby Kluchin & Patrick Blanchfield
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56: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 10: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 1 Teaser
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan turn to one of Freud’s earliest and strangest works: an untitled “psychology for neurologists,” begun in shorthand on a moving train, which went unpublished until 1950. Grappling with the text in terms of its significance and genre, they explore how abandoned experiments and seeming dead-ends can still yield insight and how, when it comes t...
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55: What is the Pleasure Principle? feat. Rebecca Ariel Porte
Abby and Patrick welcome scholar and literary critic Rebecca Ariel Porte of Dilettante Army and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to talk about the key Freudian concept of the pleasure principle. Starting with Freud’s 1911 essay, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Rebecca, Abby, and Patrick probe the complicated question of what, exactly “pleasure” (German: Lust) means for Freud. At the end of the day, is “pleasure” simply the avoidance of pain, relative m...
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54: Wild Analysis: Challengers Teaser
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 a postgame analysis of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers”, a torrid tale of a trio whose shared passion is tennis – and who would rather spend their days on the court than simply go to throuples therapy. The conversation ranges from tennis to desire to how desire is the desire of the Other and what exactly that means. Alo...
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53: Broke Psychoanalysis: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic feat. Kevin Duong
Patrick and Abby welcome politics professor Kevin Duong to discuss his research on the history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-1958), an experiment in radical psychoanalysis aimed at providing free care to marginalized community members in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Bringing together American notables like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison alongside a colorful array of expatriate European clinicians, including antifascist partisans and refugees, the clinic sought to fuse Freud’s ca...
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52: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 9: Repression is a Scorpio: The Final Fliess Extracts feat. Christine Smallwood Teaser
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...
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51: Psychoanalysis and Gaza feat. Jess Ghannam
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...