Who knew the hole was what Freud had in mind when he invented psychoanalysis and wouldn’t stop saying ‘sex’. Take a tumble into Wonderland with Dr Webster and decide for yourself what counts as real.
Never does the patient seem more ill than when they try to order associations into a logical tale. Classical analysis sees this in terms of a repudiation of sexuality: an attempt to avoid speaking from a place of desire. But why should psychoanalysis reduce everything to sex? If sex only ever achieves partial satisfactions, fragments of pleasure, its pursuit creates our subjectivity and our world. Disorganisation & Sex argues that the sexuality of psychoanalysis is not a reductive biologism, but an archaic remainder that cannot be colonised, endlessly disorienting meaning in our everyday lives. It is our proximity to this terrain that undoes our most tedious habits, and opens onto something revelatory.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books.
This book is a dare. By giving desire back to sex, Webster offers us a blueprint for talking about sex at a time when we’ve forgotten how to do so.
Putting her finger on the difficulty of sexuality, one of our savviest psychoanalytic commentators limns its impossibilities – but also its potential for inventing something new.
Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient.
trans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst.
While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study of French society in the 1960s.
Foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz.
Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.
Ivan Kats (1926–2008), naturalised American, worked as a translator, editor, teacher, publisher and journalist in France and the United States. He graduated with an MA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1969. In 1970 he founded the Obor Foundation, dedicated to the publication and dissemination of books to book-poor countries, which he directed until his retirement in 1996.
Lionel Bailly is a practising psychoanalyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale, an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, he is honorary professor at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He led the Sainte-Anne Hospital Centre’s biopsychopathology unit before moving to London in 2000. Bailly is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009).
Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalyst (member, British Psychoanalytical Society) and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She translated Françoise Dolto’s The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge 2022) and has edited two books on Lacanian theory. She works in the NHS and in private practice, and teaches and supervises psychodynamic/psychoanalytic practitioners.
