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 discover

From its peculiar birth in Freud s self-analysis to its current state of deep crisis, psychoanalysis has always been a practice that questions its own existence. Like the patients that risk themselves in this act it is somehow upon this threatened ground that the very life of psychoanalysis depends. Perhaps psychoanalysis must always remain in a precarious, indeed ghostly, position at the limit of life and death?Jamieson Webster argues that the life and death of psychoanalysis hinges on the question of desire itself, bringing this question back to the center of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Pursued through her own relation to the field, she recounts the story of her training through the interpretation of three significant dreams, as well as her encounter with three thinkers for whom the problem of psychoanalysis remains crucial: Adorno, Lacan, and Badiou. In blurring the line between the personal and the theoretical, this book explores how one, through the difficult work of transference and reading, can live out the life of desire that tests the very limits of what it means to be human."

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.

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.

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.