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.
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.