Ordinary Unhappiness

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan shake off the Holiday Syndrome torpor to continue our previous mailbag episode – including even more feedback from you! The over-arching theme is movement: what sparks different journeys for different people; the differing things we may find moving intellectually or emotionally; how public engagements with thinkers and traditions can variously move conversations forward or sabotage them from the outset; and more. They start by talking more about specific analytic thinkers, taking stock of listener responses to our (brief) thoughts on Jung and Jungians, and then turning to the exciting growth of research on Sabina Spielrein. Abby, Patrick, and Dan then turn to psychoanalysis in the arts. First up is the relationship between analysis and fiction, with topics including analysts who write fiction, the idiosyncratic genre of the case study as a kind of quasi-fiction, analysts in fiction, and what psychoanalysis suggests about our expectations of narrative movement or the lack thereof. Novel, short story, and nonfiction recommendations abound! Then the three turn to film, psychoanalytic film theory, and the stakes of using psychoanalytic thinkers and theory in other discourses more generally. Their conversation gets into everything from the pitfalls of jargon to anxieties of influence, constructive misreadings, bad faith appropriations, to what fidelity to texts and tradition means in the first place. How portable is psychoanalytic theory, and what gets lost – or gained – when analytic concepts move from use in one domain to another? Finally, they turn to yet a different sense of “movement” altogether to consider the relationships between psychoanalysis and anarchism. This involves a quick crash-course on the biography and theory of the brilliant and troubled analyst-anarchist Otto Gross, who practiced psychoanalysis as a kind of mutual aid and linked metaphorical inner revolutions with political outward ones, and our reflections on how thinking anarchism and psychoanalysis alongside one another raises provocative questions about our attachments to notions of hierarchy, individuality, institutions from the state to the clinic, and, above all, the meaning of “work.” We tried to publish the whole reading list for this episode (22 recommendations!) and went way above the word limit. Visit us at Patreon to get the whole list!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and scholar Jordan Stein to tackle a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that’s also a fundamentally slippery one: fantasy. What, exactly, are these things we call “fantasies,” which arise in a liminal zone between what we consciously, intentionally imagine and what seems to come to us, unbidden, from the unconscious? How do fantasies straddle the gaps between the real world as we understand it, scenarios we know to be impossible, and things we try, nonetheless, to envision otherwise? How is fantasy different from desire? And above all, how what does fantasy reflect our understandings of other people, living or dead, whom we may “know” only via the popular imagination, as cultural figures, and yet who come to play crucial roles in our own self-fashioning and navigation of life events? Jordan’s wonderful new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone, offers a perfect springboard for pursuing these questions, while also casting new light on the biography, oeuvre, and legacy of an artist whose ability to give literal voice to so many different characters and fantasies has few other parallels in twentieth century music. Abby, Patrick, and Jordan’s conversation ranges widely through Simone’s work, from her classic songbook standards to her transformational covers of singers as from Bob Dylan to Sinatra to the Bee Gees, and explores what we know, and what we can only fantasize about, her personal transformations, political engagements, and singular expressions of joy, loneliness, yearning, and so much more.Books by Jordan Alexander Stein: Fantasies of Nina Simone, Avidly Reads Theory, When Novels Were Books.A Spotify playlist for Fantasies of Nina Simone is available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6QUnsR5Pl8qbQ1jzqYLb0a Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ordinaryunhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @ordinaryunhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi’s “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies. Subscribe now for immediate access to Part II - on Freudian anthropology, the history behind Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism. Subscription also will give you access to our ever-growing backlog of Patreon-only content, including series like The Standard Edition (we're reading Freud's complete works thing together!) Wild Analysis (psychoanalysis goes to the movies), Gerontophallocracy 2024 (on the recent election and beyond), and much, much more!Articles referenced include:Cattell, J P.  The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available here. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music

Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby, Patrick, and Dan respond to your questions! They talk teaching Freud in high school and beyond, including how to approach teaching some of the gnarliest case histories (read: Dora), and debate what an analytic perspective can offer in grappling with communication dynamics in the workplace, especially across differentials in power. What does it mean for an employee “to be heard,” and how does that relate to what management can tolerate hearing – or substantively change? But above all, the three show they’ve heard you by talking a LOT about Jung and our resistances to him. This leads into a conversation about the allure of the occult (both in Jung’s time and hours), Western esoteric traditions, archetypes, alchemy, demons, and more. Note: we got so many great questions that there will definitely be a Part Two forthcoming!Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness  Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music