Ordinary Unhappiness Patrick & Abby
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- Society & Culture
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A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now, featuring Abby Kluchin & Patrick Blanchfield
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59: Gerontophallocracy 2024: The June Debate Teaser
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...
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58: Wild Analysis: The Idea of You feat. Anna Shechtman Teaser
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...
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57: “Do More Crosswords!” The Sexual Politics of Language feat. Anna Shechtman
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, ...
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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...
Customer Reviews
Thank you a, p, and d!
I never review anything but I must say - I have not felt this intellectually stimulated in forever. Thank you so much
mostly really good
Great content on left politics and psychoanalysis, which provides entry points for people well-versed in this field and those with new interest. Episodes with guests tend to be the strongest, if only because they are more likely to minimize randy and/or twee and/or self-indulgent digressions by the main hosts. I got annoyed enough that I stopped listening for a while. But the majority of the content is so smart that I’ve just dealt with the annoying tangents by fast forwarding through them 2-3 times per show. So: highly recommended if you’re prepared to do that (or just more a patient person than me).
Gaza
Where’s the analysis? I’m a psychiatrist trained in the psychodynamic tradition. I kept waiting for the guest to say something that was not a product of common sense and psychology 101. On your show, which I do like, people smuggle a lot in under the umbrella of psychoanalysis. I think you should acknowledge that or press guests to show more of a link between their work and analytic principles and practices. Thank you