We’re happy to share In Bed With the Right's latest episode. Patrick sits down with friends of OU Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan to reckon with the Epstein case - what we know, what we don’t know, what we’ll never know, what we always already knew, and what all these contortions of anticipation, secrecy, revelation, and obviousness might mean.

Listen to more In Bed With the Right here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight/

Patrick Blanchfield, “Suffer The Children,” in The Revealer: https://therevealer.org/suffer-the-children/

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Twitter: @UnhappinessPod

Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness

Patreon: 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 somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” and other exercises to explore histories of “shaping,” undo habitual patterns of embodiment, address trauma, and cultivate a capacity to remain centered and present under pressure. As the three explore, what sets Sumitra’s approach apart from ostensibly “apolitical” or openly right-wing traditions is a self-conscious, critical awareness of power dynamics and different people’s varied relationships to historical oppression and their own bodies. Over and against “apolitical,” mystical, or openly right-wing tendencies of other practices, Sumitra’s vision of somatics is particularly attuned to the physical and psychic tolls of maintaining compassion, resisting burnout, and building relationships of solidarity with strangers. Rich with psychoanalytic resonances throughout, their conversation focuses in particular on the concept of the “transferential constellation,” which clarifies a great deal about the different dynamics between right and left mass movements, and casts many difficult experiences – whether in a consulting room, at a protest, or canvassing by knocking on doors – in provocative new light.

The Action Lab: https://www.actionlabny.org/

Art of Purpose fellowship application: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGsmA_TIm0/7-aSlMVivPoR4kHvJD-Hbg/view?utm_content=DAGsmA_TIm0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h12e5faa7a3#1

More on somatics and Sumitra’s work:

What is somatics?

Somatics in practice

Institutions Sumitra mentions include:

Generative Somatics: https://generativesomatics.org/

BOLD: https://www.boldorganizing.org/

The Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/

The Organizing Center: https://www.theorganizingcenter.org/

The tweet that started this conversation

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Twitter: @UnhappinessPod

Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness

Patreon: 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 examine the case study of “Frau Emmy von N.” From the perspective of both clinical technique and the history of psychoanalysis, it is primarily significant as an artifact from when Freud was still thinking in terms of associationist psychology and using hypnosis in treatment sessions. In terms of narrative, it seems, at least superficially, to be just another example of “hysterical neurosis” as encountered in the story of Anna O. Yet as Abby and Patrick discuss, the case of Emmy Von N. in fact suggests some pivotal shifts in Freud’s thinking, from a “subconscious” to a dynamic unconscious, and from performing interpretations to listening to patients talk in their own terms and along their own timelines. And the real story behind the pseudonym Freud gave to Fanny Moser, née Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart, the richest woman in Central Europe, is actually a wild tale of social scandal, intergenerational loss and reparation, and possibly even True Crime.

Sources include:

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives

Phillip M. Bromberg, “Hysteria, Dissociation, and Cure: Emmy von N Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6:1 (1996)

Henri Ellenberger, “A Critical Study of ‘Emmy von N.’ with New Documents,” in Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry

Else Pappenheim, “Freud and Gilles de la Tourette: Diagnostic Speculations on ‘Frau Emmy von N,’” International Review of Psychoanalysis 7:265 (1980)

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. Follow us on social media:

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness
Twitter: @UnhappinessPod
Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness
Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

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