Ordinary Unhappiness

Apr 12 2025 105 ep. 55 mins 505
Ordinary Unhappiness Podcast artwork

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

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96: Mediating Motherhood feat. Hannah Zeavin

Apr 12 2025 93 mins  
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, t

95: Wild Analysis: Severance Teaser

Apr 05 2025 5 mins  
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 (wi

UNLOCKED: 42: Wild Analysis: The President’s Analyst

Mar 29 2025 85 mins  
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness In a perfect pairing with our ongoing series on Lacan, we come in from the cold and go underground by watching Theodore Flicker’s neglected classic, “The President’s Analyst” (1967). James Coburn stars as a psychoanalyst drafted to s

94: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 1: Pearls of Suffering: Studies on Hysteria, Part I Teaser

Mar 22 2025 3 mins  
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Abby and Patrick begin the Standard Edition Volume II. Their first text is Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria (1895), specifically its opening sections. First, they unpack the layered and suggestive series of Prefaces to successive editio

93: On Emma Jung feat. Ann Conrad Lammers

Mar 15 2025 83 mins  
Abby and Patrick welcome Ann Conrad Lammers, a Jungian psychotherapist and the primary editor and assistant translator of Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, a brand-new volume from Princeton University Press. Going against the grain of traditional narratives that present Emma as a helpmeet to her more famous husband, this collection brings together for t

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