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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

3:15

117: Experiences in Groups feat. Lily Scherlis Teaser

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/10/04

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Dan sit down with writer and performance artist Lily Scherlis to talk about her new essay for n+1, “Experiences in Groups” (a title that does homage to Wilfred Bion’s influential 1961 book of the same name). They discuss Lily’s experience at the 2024 Tavistock conference, the meaning of “group relations,” and the fantasies it can generate for those comm...

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90:16

Bonus Episode: Martyrdom, Mourning, and the Legacy of...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/09/29

Abby and Patrick share Patrick’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast, hosted by friends of Ordinary Unhappiness Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Patrick, Matt, and Sam process last weekend’s televised memorial service for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The three unpack this overdetermined spectacle with an eye towards questions of theology, politics, narrative, affect, gender, and more. More Know Your Enemy here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy/ Have you noticed...

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97:38

116: Writing Panic feat. Michael Clune

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/09/27

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Michael Clune to discuss his new novel, Pan. It is the story of Nick, a teenage boy living alone with his divorced father in the 1990s Midwest. Precocious but troubled, he begins to suffer from panic attacks, obsessional symptoms, and more. Nick’s voice narrates these and other experiences with rich texture, yet his internal monologue steadily pushes the reader to question where and how the tumultuous life of a normal teenager ends and pathology be...

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7:40

115: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 6: Studies on...

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/09/20

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick read the shortest, strangest, and arguably saddest entry in the Studies on Hysteria – the case of “Katharina.” This case history sees Freud on Alpine vacation and approached by a local girl suffering a shortness of breath and episodes of anxiety, symptoms that have nothing to with altitude and everything to do with sordid goings-on in her family...

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82:15

114: Fashion and Psychoanalysis feat. Valerie Steele

Ordinary Unhappiness ·

2025/09/13

Abby and Patrick welcome Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, to discuss her new book, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, and the exhibition of the same name that opened this week. What does “fashion” mean, and why are so many psychoanalysts and cultural gatekeepers so resistant to think about the topic critically? How do society’s codes of dress reflect logics of identity, especially when it comes to ...

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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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128 results

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