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.
Disorganisation & Sex
Buy in
United States
or as an Ebook
978-1-9164250-9-5
13.9 × 21.6 cm
240 pp paperback
24 June 2022
Non-fiction
Psychoanalysis
£ 11.99
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.
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.
About the author
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.
Endorsements
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.
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.
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.
Press
- The London Magazine Jamieson Webster on Disorganisation & Sex
- Red Medicine Jamieson Webster: Sexuality, Psychoanalysis and Useless Organs
- The Oxonian Review The Relief of Sex: An Interview with Jamieson Webster
- European Journal of Psychoanalysis Book Review Essay: “Disorganisation and Sex” by Jamieson Webster
- The White Review Books of the Year
- Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour Jamieson Webster’s “Disorganisation and Sex”
- Literary Hub The Annotated Nightstand: What Anna Moschovakis is Reading Now and Next
- Spike Art Magazine Disorganisation & Sex
- New Books in Psychology Disorganisation & Sex
- Stillpoint Disorganisation and Sex—Jamieson Webster
- New Books in Psychoanalysis Podcast Jamieson Webster, Disorganisation & Sex (Divided 2022)
- Sublation Media Cancelling Sexuality (ft. Jamieson Webster)
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