Ordinary Unhappiness

Mar 08 2025 100 ep. 55 mins 487
Ordinary Unhappiness Podcast artwork

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

  Society & Culture  News
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


92: Gerontophallocracy 2025: The Primitive Accumulation Monster Dad at the End of History Teaser

Mar 08 2025 4 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness For the first time since the inauguration, our series metabolizing the ongoing chaos of American politics returns. That’s right: Gerontophallocracy is back! The topic is a certain grandiose deadbeat manchild patriarch who has succeeded in making him

91: Feminism, Antagonism, and Solidarity feat. Sophie Lewis

Feb 22 2025 97 mins  
Abby and Patrick welcome author Sophie Lewis to discuss her latest book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Together, they explore the history of a variety of feminisms, self-identified and otherwise, that can justifiably provoke anxiety and even rejection in those invested in feminism as an emancipatory concept and project. Their conversation r

90: Standard Edition Volume 1 Part 12: The Project for a Scientific Psychology Part 3 Teaser

Feb 15 2025 4 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan close out The Project for a Scientific Psychology - and the first volume of the Standard Edition - in its entirety! First, they unpack the key steps of Freud's quantitative argument" from the nature of "Q" to Freud's proposal of

89: Breath, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Jamieson Webster

Feb 08 2025 68 mins  
Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster to discuss her brand-new book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, out in March 2025 from Catapult. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that traverses clinical, social, and political domains while remaining firmly grounded in one of the most basic prerequisites for human life: the activity of breathing. In w

88: On Hate and Aggression, Part IV Teaser

Feb 01 2025 2 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott’s ideas about hate and aggression to work. What everyday situations, personal experiences, and institutional practices get clarified when we consider them as reflecting displaced feelings of hate? What do popular

Episode 87: On Hate and Aggression, Part III

Jan 25 2025 106 mins  
Abby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their close reading of Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” unpacking and tying together its three biggest arguments. First, there’s the connection Winnicott draws between the therapeutic encounter and childhood development: more than just an analogy, these two environments are directly connected, and in fraught ways. Second, there

86: On Hate and Aggression, Part II Teaser

Jan 18 2025 3 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan start close-reading Winnicott’s famous paper, “Hate in the Counter-Transference” (1949, originally delivered as a paper two years earlier). They start with its place and time, situating Winnicott’s work within the contex

85: On Hate and Aggression, Part I

Jan 11 2025 95 mins  
Abby, Patrick, and Dan take up a topic that couldn’t be more relevant to the contemporary zeitgeist – aggression – as theorized by an unlikely source: the British analyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. What did this beloved and famously gentle figure have to say about aggression, and our taboos and fantasies surrounding it? Where does aggression come from, and what is its f

84: New Year Vibe Check: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

Jan 04 2025 11 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby, Patrick, and Dan get together for a looking-forward, looking-backward session surveying the year that was and assessing the year ahead. It’s a suitably ambivalent, Janus-faced assessment of political developments, cultural milestones, new hobb

83: Religion and Neurosis feat. Nathan Rein Teaser

Dec 21 2024 9 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick sit down with religious studies scholar and Reformation historian Nathan Rein to discuss Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). This is Freud’s first extended treatment of religion as such, with a particul