Know Your Enemy - Impossible Professions: Freud and Janet Malcolm (ft. Patrick Blanchfield & Abby Kluchin)

Sam joins Patrick Blanchfield and Abby Kluchin for a lengthy discussion of psychoanalysis, conservative minds, and Janet Malcolm — on their excellent new podcast, "Ordinary Unhappiness."

Duration: 1h 51m
Broadcast on: 06 Jul 2023
Audio Format: other

Know Your Enemy presents: an episode of Ordinary Unhappiness — a new podcast about psychoanalysis with hosts Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield.

Their guest? Sam Adler-Bell! In the episode that follows, we talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, thefts, and betrayals; the so-called “Freud wars”; and the internal politics of psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, they examine Malcolm’s famous claim that the task of the journalist is “morally indefensible” and its implications for the work of the analyst.

Further reading:

Sam Adler-Bell, "Janet Malcolm’s Dangerous Method," The New Republic, Mar 20, 2023

Sam Adler-Bell, "Succession's Repetition Compulsion," The Nation, Nov 10, 2021

Hannah Gold, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” The Nation, June 25, 2021.

Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1982)

— In The Freud Archives (1984)

— The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

For more Ordinary Unhappiness:

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

Hello, and welcome listeners to Know Your Enemy. I'm Sam Adler-Bell. My co-host Matt Setman is off writing important and devastating things for us all to eventually read, so I'm sharing a special episode with you all. A few weeks ago, I appeared on an excellent new podcast called Ordinary Unhappiness, which is a podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, and pop culture hosted by two great friends of this show, Patrick Blanchfield and Abby Cluchin. Know Your Enemy listeners will know Patrick from his appearances on our show to discuss guns and Freud, respectively, and together. And his wife, Abby, his co-host, is a brilliant philosopher. Their show is a total delight. I've listened to every episode, and it's just getting better and better. In what you're about to hear, Patrick and Abby and I spend some time discussing how psychoanalysis has come to inform my study of conservatism and the right, which will be interesting to the Freud-Pilled among you listeners. And then we also talk about one of my favorite journalists, who is herself very psychoent and politically informed, whose name is Janet Malcolm. So I think you're really going to enjoy this, and we'll get to it very shortly. As always, we want to thank our sponsors at Descent. One of the things they do for us is if you sign up on Patreon at www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy for $10 a month, you get a free digital description to Descent, which is a magazine we love and both write for. If you sign up at $5 a month, you still get access to all of our bonus episodes, which are good. Thanks, as always, to our producer, Jesse Breneman, to Will Epstein, who does the music for the show, and to Danielle, who's responsible for the lovely production of Ordinary Unhappiness, which you're about to hear. So enjoy this. We'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming that is episodes featuring Matt Sittman next week, but for now, here's me and Abby Cluchin and Patrick Blanchfield talking about right wing politics, psychoanalysis and Janet Malcolm, enjoy. People are always asking like, "Well, why isn't there a Know Your Enemy on the right?" Like, a very serious engagement with the left's ideas from a conservative perspective. And I think often we're kind of patting ourselves on the back about that, about like, "Oh, how open and curious and intellectually rigorous we are," like on the left that we have something like Know Your Enemy and that people want to listen to it. On the other hand, what I was sort of suggesting is that like, it's actually also kind of part of something that's both admirable, but also gets in the way, which I would sort of define as a fear that we're wrong, which conservatives often just don't have, or at least they disavow it with such expressive intensity that it isn't a part of their way of doing intellectual work. And there's something about that that's very liberal, of course, like the kind of idea of like, not a liberal not being able to take his own side and argument. But there's also something, I mean, I do kind of value that principle, if not politically, but like, intellectually. Like, fearing that you're wrong. And I do think that that psychoanalysis is somewhat allied with that principle too. One thing that has struck me about, I mean, I just re-listened to the depression episode. Yeah. I don't know if it was like preparation, exactly, but it was just sort of like, I wanted to revisit it on the heels of listening to the masculinity episode, which like, man, I have a lot of thoughts about that, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Transcription truncated.

Sam joins Patrick Blanchfield and Abby Kluchin for a lengthy discussion of psychoanalysis, conservative minds, and Janet Malcolm — on their excellent new podcast, "Ordinary Unhappiness."