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PODCAST

Ordinary Unhappiness

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now, featuring Abby Kluchin & Patrick Blanchfield

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

5:38

113: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part III Teaser

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/09/06

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Dan, and Patrick conclude their viewing of Sophie Fiennes’ and Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). It’s the last stretch of the film, the part where Žižek tries to bring everything together, and it thus gives Abby, Dan, and Patrick a chance to assess the Guide in its entirety. How compelling is the film’s grand unifying theory of subjectivit...

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111:42

112: Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy feat. Josh West

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/08/30

Abby and Patrick are joined by Dr. Josh West to talk about some remarkable developments in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in Australia. Josh explains to Abby and Patrick how the clinical trials he describes are better understood as an experiment in sustained psychotherapy rather than just testing a new drug, and how that experiment has profound psychoanalytic and psychodynamic salience. From the process of patient preparation to the details of “dose day” to the work of subsequent sessions ...

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4:52

111: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 5: Studies on...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/08/16

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick turn to the next of Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria: the story of Miss Lucy R. It’s a short treatment – nine weeks – and an even shorter read – fifteen pages – and so the story of this English governess haunted by phantom smells often goes neglected. But as Abby and Patrick explain, her case marks a key shift in Freud’s clinical practice (a...

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11:46

110: Wild Analysis: Sex and the City Teaser

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/08/09

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick mark the announcement of the end of And Just Like That... by giving it, and Sex and the City, a psychoanalytic send-off. From the durable popularity of the original series to the ambivalent comfort of hate-watching the spin-off, the two reflect on what made the franchise so influential, its role in the history of early “prestige TV,” and its pla...

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75:21

Bonus Episode: Jeffrey Epstein: Open Secrets...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/07/29

We’re happy to share In Bed With the Right's latest episode. Patrick sits down with friends of OU Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan to reckon with the Epstein case - what we know, what we don’t know, what we’ll never know, what we always already knew, and what all these contortions of anticipation, secrecy, revelation, and obviousness might mean. Listen to more In Bed With the Right here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight/ Patrick Blanchfield, “Suffer The Children,” in The Revealer: htt...

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86:31

109: Somatics, Politics, and Practice feat. Sumitra...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/07/26

Abby and Patrick are joined by somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” an...

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19:00

Episode 108: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 4:...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/07/19

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick examine the case study of “Frau Emmy von N.” From the perspective of both clinical technique and the history of psychoanalysis, it is primarily significant as an artifact from when Freud was still thinking in terms of associationist psychology and using hypnosis in treatment sessions. In terms of narrative, it seems, at least superficially, to b...

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4:25

Episode 107: On Abjection Teaser

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/07/12

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 and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of lan...

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94:09

Episode 106: Abortion, Agency, and Protest feat....

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/07/05

Abby and Patrick sit down with writer Hilary Plum to discuss her remarkable new book, State Champ. A novel at which the politics of abortion stand at the center, but far from a didactically “political novel,” State Champ gives the three an opportunity to explore a suite of deeply psychoanalytic themes and topics: from the gap between our first-person experiences of our bodies to the claims and restrictions made by others on our bodily autonomy; from the purposes of protest to our motivations ...

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5:51

105: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 3: Studies on...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/06/21

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to the first case study in Studies On Hysteria (1895). But while previously they examined the case of “Anna O.” as told narrowly by Josef Breuer on his own terms, this time they tell the story of the remarkable woman behind it: Bertha Pappenheim. They begin by addressing how the legend of a “hysterical pregnancy” came to overshadow ...

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110:00

104: Manufacturing Homelessness feat. Brian Goldstone

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/06/14

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 of common misconceptions about homelessness, the trajectory of these families reflects no errors or blameworthy mistakes on their part, nor...

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6:09

103: Ayahuasca and Climate Grief feat. Sarah Miller

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/06/07

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, hilarious and cutting, that sees Sarah, struggling with depression and grief, travel from wildfire-ravaged Northern California to the Peruvian Amaz...

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99:23

102: Reparations, Responsibility, and Climate Justice...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/05/24

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, philosophy, and more, and dramatically cuts through many of our moment’s thorniest debates over identity, responsibility, and political change. Together...

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9:57

101: Mailbag: On Pain, Learning, and the Problem of...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/05/17

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 thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frict...

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90:39

100: Mailbag: An Embarrassment of Riches

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/05/10

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 full of questions, fantasies, and desires from Ordinary Unhappiness listeners who have made the show possible. These include questions about therape...

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4:41

99: Wild Analysis: The White Lotus feat Sam...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/05/03

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 like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist fo...

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107:38

98: From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/04/26

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 Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have prolifera...

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3:38

97: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 2: Studies on...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/04/19

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, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, ...

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93:16

96: Mediating Motherhood feat. Hannah Zeavin

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/04/12

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 mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how th...

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5:34

95: Wild Analysis: Severance Teaser

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/04/05

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 Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (al...

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143 results

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