Ordinary Unhappiness

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

Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Abby, Patrick, and Dan dig into the realms of myth and fable to investigate the ancient origins of the Narcissus myth. As they discover, behind the skeletal form of the story (i.e., guy falls in love with his own reflection) are a multitude of versions, with some striking variations and suggestive throughlines. After cataloguing these, they turn to the primary source for the modern version of the myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reading that poem’s account of the doomed encounter between Narcissus and the nymph Echo as a story of impossible desires and intertwined destinies.
Texts cited include:
Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393925340
Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths
Malcolm Kenneth Brown, The Narratives of Konon
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri: https://oxyrhynchus.web.ox.ac.uk/

Pausanias, translated by WHS Jones et al, Descriptions of Greece
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
“No one leaves a star – that’s what makes one a star!” In the latest installment of Wild Analysis, Abby and Dan discuss Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. From Gloria Swanson’s masterful portrayal of faded starlet Norma Desmond to the film’s ruthless depiction of Hollywood’s love affair with youth and the very idea of movie magic itself, it’s a perfect opportunity for Abby and Dan to explore themes of celebrity, narcissism, and the tyranny of the image. Along the way, they talk psychic retreats, mirrors and the mirror stage, glamorous outfits, dead chimpanzees, and more.
References:
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
Nilofer Kaul, “Breaching the Frame: Psychoanalysis and Sunset Boulevard”
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 back returning guest Adrian Daub. The occasion is Adrian’s latest book, What Tech Calls Governing. A follow-up to his 2020 book What Tech Calls Thinking, an intellectual history of Silicon Valley and critique of tech culture, What Tech Calls Governing unpacks subsequent developments and continuities that go deeper than pundits’ loose talk of a “vibe shift.” Indeed, as Adrian explains, recent years have seen Big Tech abandon the rhetoric of not being “evil” and promises of progressive uplift in favor of a rhetoric of inevitability, brazen collaboration with right-wing actors, and vague appeals to half-baked “longterm” utilitarianism. Adrian, Abby, and Patrick reflect on the distinctively gendered aspects of these developments, from the public antics of high-profile tech titans like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to deeper logics of contempt for vulnerability and the celebration of dominance. Along the way, they explore questions of exhaustion, embarrassment, male homosociality, creepiness, narcissism, the indignities of middle age, generational anxieties, and more.

References include:
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Governing
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
Pre-order Adrian’s forthcoming book, Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now
Adrian’s podcast, In Bed With The Right
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Novalis, The Novices of Sais
Albert Burneko, “I Don’t Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys”
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
Kate Manne, "A Culture Hooked on Generative AI is a Culture that Misses Female Sycophants" 

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 landscape of modern narcissism continues – and arrives in the United States! In this episode, Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the work of Karen Horney, a figure who has variously been called a Neo-Freudian, a forerunner of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, a key player in a psychoanalytic “Cultural Turn,” and one of the first prominent psychoanalytic feminists. But as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explore, such labels fall short of capturing the power of Horney’s insights and the lucidity of her prose. Rejecting Freud’s misogyny and his biological account of drives, Horney developed a psychoanalytic approach that was thoroughly cultural and that emphasized notions of selfhood and identity. For Horney, “neurosis” (IE, non-psychotic mental illness and problems in living) reflected the ways in which an individual’s strategies for emotional survival, first developed during their childhood in response to distress in the family environment, could crystalize into maladaptive patterns for relating to both the self and to others. Horney thus saw “narcissism” as useful only insofar as the term pinpointed “self-inflation” as a defensive strategy that, as Abby, Patrick, and Dan explain, comes at a painful and alienating price.

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