Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick bring a psychoanalytic lens to bear on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. As they explain, psychoanalysis offers tools for thinking both about specific political conditions and historical events and for reflecting more generally on the ways dramatic events can function politically and become “history” in the first place. Moreover, psychoanalytic concepts can bring together the perspectives of political economy, libidinal economy, and our own personal experiences to help us navigate overwhelming events and better track what’s new, what isn’t, what we need to remember, and what we’re encouraged to forget. To that end, Abby and Patrick take up psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan’s notion of the “chosen trauma,” a model for how episodes of mass trauma can become touchstones for defining group identity, and apply it to the events of 9/11, the “Global War on Terror” that ensued, and their ongoing legacy in our present. Toggling between artifacts of popular culture, military history, journalistic accounts, and more, Abby and Patrick reflect on how American society reacted to the trauma of 9/11; how political elites capitalized on the situation; how ideas of exceptionalism, innocence, vengeance, and even time and causality themselves were reconfigured; and how we’re still contending with the cultural and institutional consequences of those processes in the present.
Note: It has come to our attention that Dick Cheney is, in fact, currently dead, at least for now.
Texts cited include:

Patrick Blanchfield and Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Brave Moles and Hungry Ghosts” in The Revealer (September 2016) https://therevealer.org/brave-moles-and-hungry-ghosts-911-memento-mori/

Evan Simko-Bednarski, “Memento Mori,” https://www.simkobednarskiphoto.com/memento-mori

Vamik Volkan, “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity, in Group Analysis (March 2001) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/05333160122077730

Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East (2016)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241154/americas-war-for-the-greater-middle-east-by-andrew-j-bacevich/

Andrew Bacevich, “What I Learned After the End of History” (2025) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/learned-after-history.html

Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Donald Trump (2022) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/reign-of-terror-by-spencer-ackerman/

Spencer Ackerman (interviewed by Jordan Uhl) “"Terrorist": How ICE Weaponized 9/11's Scarlet Letter” in The Intercept Briefing https://theintercept.com/2026/02/06/spencer-ackerman-9-11-terrorists-ice/

Susan Sontag (et al), “Tuesday and After” in The New Yorker (September 16, 2001) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of-the-town

Jake Tapper and Bill Maher, “Bill Maher: The Salon Interview” (December 2002) https://www.salon.com/2002/12/11/maher_6/

The Brown University Watson School of International and Public Affairs' Costs of War Project
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/

Elizabeth Beavers, “Terrorizing Migrants: Five Ways Post 9/11 Legal Precedents Paved the Way for Anti-Immigrant Actions in the United States” https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/terrorizingmigrants

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
The Summer of Narcissism brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to Freud’s landmark 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” While the sexologists considered narcissism a niche sexual perversion occurring only among a small number of adults, Freud structuralized the concept into a broader model of universal processes of development and subject formation. Moreover, Freud argued that some kind of narcissism was necessary for any basic human capacity for self-esteem, and saw it implicated not only in comparatively rare pathological formations, but also in socially celebrated activities like parenting and falling in love. And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, while much of Freud’s essay hasn’t stood the test of time (especially in its homophobia and misogyny), his distinction between “primary narcissism” and “secondary narcissism” remains vital and has proven foundational for subsequent theoretical and clinical thinking about personality disorders, treatability, 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

The Summer of Narcissism journey brings Abby, Patrick, and Dan to late nineteenth century Europe, and to the revolutionary and controversial new discourse of sexology. Emerging at the intersections of medicine, anthropology, public health, education, and the legal system, sexology took up human sexual behavior not as a question of sin or theological denunciation, but as an object of scientific study. Introducing the field, Abby, Patrick, and Dan survey how various sexologists understood sexuality, sample the rich behavioral taxonomies they produced by way of reading from classic works by Richard Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and reflect on how sexologists’ work combined an emphasis on self-consciously secular scientific objectivity with explicit moral attitudes and implicit normative assumptions. The three also how explore how the sexological enterprise struggled with the implications of two core problems – the question of auto-eroticism (the ways people use their own bodies for sexual pleasure) and the question of orientation (the ways people’s sexual behavior does or doesn’t involve the bodies of others). And as Abby, Patrick, and Dan discover, it was precisely while trying to reconcile those problems that two sexologists summoned Narcissus into modernity, and named “narcissism” for the very first time.  
To support the Muriel Gardiners campaign at the Psychosocial Foundation for the Known and Elsewhere Collective, Parapraxis Books, and more: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/donate
Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation, including seminars, events, short courses, and therapy: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org
Learn more about Parapraxis: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/
Selected works cited:
Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study” (1898)
Paul Näcke, “Die sexuellen Perversitäten in der Irrenanstalt” (1899)
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1998)
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
The Ordinary Unhappiness journey through the origins of narcissism arrives at the early modern period and a Europe in full-blown crisis. It’s a world where the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church no longer holds sway, where political and market forces have created new communities and dislocated old ones, and where traditional familiar theological answers fail to satisfy ever-more urgent existential questions. Working their way through the history of the Reformation and the theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Abby and Patrick trace the contours of this world’s emerging conception of selfhood and its many anxieties over interiority, predestination, success, luxury, conformity, modesty, pleasure, and more. They then unpack the particular implications of how this new order views sexual difference, turning to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and her remarkable account of why “the thoughts of women ever hover around their persons.”
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 welcome writer, critic, and religion scholar Jack Hanson for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation about the politics and social significance of the contemporary Catholic Church. With Jack’s new piece in Harper’s, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival,” as a guide, the three put the accession of the Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV into the context of the Church’s complicated relationship with modern geopolitics, economic pressures, and technological change. From papal critiques of nineteenth century industrialization to the emergence of liberation theology in the Global South to the impact of Vatican II and beyond, Jack walks Abby and Patrick through the intellectual traditions and internal tensions that have shaped the Church’s attitudes towards the state, the market, and secular political ideologies. Going beyond headlines and reductive soundbites, Jack helps Abby and Patrick situate the contradictions of American Catholicism – embodied most visibly in the reactionary politics of figures like J.D. Vance – within a broader narrative of US imperial decline and crises of institutional legitimacy and moral authority. As a case in point, the three turn to the Pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, its provocative assessment of AI specifically, and its account of conditions of contemporary anomie more generally. What ensues is a conversation about desire, fantasy, technology, solidarity, and what it means to be human.
Jack Hanson, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Progressive Revival”: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/08/radical-reformation-jack-hanson-catholic-church-progressive/
Jack’s Substack, Phantom Heresy: https://phantomheresy.substack.com/
Jack on Magnifica Humanitas on the Know Your Enemy podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OZialymsdMglvaEdujzx2
More by Jack on the Catholic Church:
“The Text That May Be Key to How the New Pope Thinks,” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pope-leo-xiv-rerum-novarum-socialism/
“Last Rites,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/10/20/last-rites-death-penalty-catholic-church/
“Mamdani’s Newest Ally: The Catholic Church?”: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mamdanis-newest-ally-the-catholic-church.html
“The Heresy of Americanism,” https://newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-americanism
“The Post-Francis Church,” https://yalereview.org/article/pope-francis-death-future-catholocism
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