Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome psychoanalyst Tom Wooldridge, author of Eating Disorders, a new volume in Routledge’s Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis series. Tom explains how a psychodynamic orientation can help clinicians go beyond a narrow focus on labeling symptoms to thinking about eating disorders in terms of personality structure and individual meaning. He then walks Abby and Patrick through a suite of concepts, drawn from an array of analytic traditions, that are useful for thinking about and treating eating disorders: alexithymia, object hunger, Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the idea of a “rotten core,” and more. At once theoretically nuanced, accessible, and focused throughout on the need to provide effective treatment, Wooldridge's book provides the occasion for a wide-ranging conversation about the many ways that psychic distress manifests through our complex relationships to our bodies, food, gender, family, and more.
Books by Tom include:
Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction 
Tom Wooldridge, End the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder
Tom Woolridge, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males: An Integrative Approach
Tom Wooldridge (editor), Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak
Tom Woolridge, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past
More about Tom: https://www.tomwooldridge.com/
Additional texts cited include:
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity”
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. Find us online:
 
 http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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/OrdinaryUnhappiness
It’s a Very Special Gerontophallocracy episode! Abby, Dan, and Patrick gather around the dining room table to process the US midterms and, more broadly, to work through where they’re all at. It’s a conversation about hope and depression, cycles of triumph and disappointment, generational memories, caring for an adorable old dog, religion, and a whole lot more. 
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. Find us online:
 
 http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Just in time for Halloween, Abby and Patrick welcome video essayist and scholar Mariana Colín (aka The Morbid Zoo) for a wide-ranging conversation about media, communication, consent, the problem(s) of other minds, and more. What lies behind our fantasies about science, and in what ways can our narratives about new technologies merely reprise old problems – while also creating entirely new ones? What are the limits to what we can imagine, what we can consent to, and what media can represent back to us? If perfect communication and psychic transparency were possible, would that actually be a good thing – or would it be a living nightmare?  The three follow these questions by taking up some of Freud’s strangest work – his writing on telepathy – alongside David Cronenberg’s 1981 classic movie Scanners. It’s a wild and rollicking journey that we promise won’t make your head explode (at least not in the literal, bad way). 
More Mariana is here:
YouTube: (345) The Morbid Zoo - YouTube
Bluesky: Mariana Colín (@themorbidzoo.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Website: Mariana Colín (Page 1)
References include: 
Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (1921)
Sigmund Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” from New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)
Claudie Massicotte, “Psychical Transmissions: Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult”
Maria Pierri, Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Ferenczi, and the Challenge of Thought Transference
Maria Pierri, Sigmund Freud and the Forsyth Case, Coincidences and the Thought-Transmission in Psychoanalysis
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure
Roger Luchurst, The Invention of Telepathy
CS Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” 
Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia
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. Find us online:
 
 http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.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/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby and Patrick take up Josef Breuer’s final contribution to the Studies on Hysteria. The second-last-chapter of the Studies, this lengthy “Theoretical” essay is generally viewed by commentators as holding only historical interest. Yet it crystallizes the clinical preoccupations, philosophical questions, and favorite metaphors that Freud and Breuer shared – from recurrent analogies to state-of-the-art technologies (IE, electricity and telephones) to the relationship between ideas, the body, and states of consciousness. Moreover, as Abby and Patrick explain, this essay not only puts the character of Freud’s originality in context, but also showcases Breuer at his most sympathetic, including some striking reflections on Victorian sexual mores, trauma, and more.
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. Find us online:
 
 http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music

Abby and Patrick are joined by Elizabeth Cotton, author of UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health, and Linda Michaels of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), for a conversation about platform capitalism and datafication are reshaping psychotherapy, and how clinicians and patients can organize for safer, deeper care. From Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to practice-management companies, and more, Elizabeth and Linda unpack how an unholy alliance of players have together worked to standardize, automate, and monetize the work of therapy. As they explain, these developments – which are mirrored by trends in other industries – not only exploit gaps in existing mental health infrastructure in the US and UK, but pose unique risks to privacy, safety, and basic well-being. Against these tendencies, Elizabeth and Linda reflect on research from the Psychotherapy Action Network, which has found that people increasingly demand depth therapies and long-term relationships with human clinicians over symptom reduction and on-demand chatbot interaction. The result is a far-reaching conversation about technology, solidarity, and more.

References include:
Elizabeth Cotton, UberTherapy
The Business of Psychotherapy: Practice Management Companies
Holding the Frame in an Era of Corporate Care
Corporations in the Consulting Room 
When Talkspace Sued PsiAN and Me
What People Need and Want from Therapy
Psychotherapy Action Network
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. Find us online:
 
 http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.com
X: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Theme song:
Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO
Provided by Fruits Music