Jamieson Webster

Edited and collected essays by New York-based psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster.

Sex & Disorganisation

Simon Critchley

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from Hamlet, and most people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange,” and it becomes even more complex when considered closely. Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as it is a product of Shakespeare’s imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around “nothing”—or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, “it nothing must.” From the illusion of theater and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological interplay of inhibition and emotion, Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet’s melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play’s true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable. Avoiding the customary clichés about the timelessness of the Bard, Critchley and Webster show the timely power of Hamlet to cast light on the intractable dilemmas of human existence in a world that is rotten and out of joint.

The Hamlet Doctrine

Stay, Illusion!

Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body. Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.

Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis

Conversion Disorder

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Critchley and Webster consider the political context and stakes of Shakespeare's play, its relation to religion, the movement of desire, and the incapacity to love.

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Arguably, no literary work, not even the Bible, is more familiar to us than Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Everyone knows at least six words from the play; often people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange” and becomes deeply unfamiliar when considered closely. Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster consider the political context and stakes of Shakespeare’s play, its relation to religion, the movement of desire, and the incapacity to love.

Douglas Eklund

Rosetta Brooks

Published on the occasion of the spring 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs, and an accompanying exhibition—curated by Uklański—of works from the Met’s permanent collection, Piotr Uklański: Selects from the Met Collection, this book presents an in-depth examination of Uklański’s photographic oeuvre as well as images from the Met collection exhibition. ﻿A luxurious, richly illustrated monograph, Piotr Uklański: Fatal Attraction consists of images of works made by Piotr Uklański, as well as groupings of images of artworks selected by Uklański from the Met’s collections for an accompanying exhibition. Both exhibitions are based on the classical themes of love and death.

Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction

The author believes the discovery of psychoanalysis cannot be separated from Freud's self-analysis and the foundational act of writing about his own dreams. Now that the hype, the 100 years of excitement and building up of the institution of psychoanalysis, is in decline, the time seems ripe for a return to the question of the truth of the discovery of the unconscious. This book seeks to take up this crisis and return psychoanalysis to a discourse relevant to contemporary thought as a more personal story of what it means to become a psychoanalyst. The work is divided into three sections, each organized around a major thinker whose work is defined by a definitive engagement with psychoanalysis: Adorno, Lacan and Badiou. Each section is marked by a careful reading of these thinkers, attempting to deconstruct their understanding of psychoanalysis, including how this work has shaped the author's identity as a psychoanalyst.

Jamieson Webster

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