The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation
Jamieson Webster
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 1855758997
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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that I find a way to slow down. This is an important moment. One must be fatigued. It is a necessary first step. It is a weariness that takes into consideration how radically threatened we are as a community. It is one that acknowledges the thrilling groundlessness of our work. Doing so, it forms itself around a question, not an answer. Mastery is thereby undercut (or so I hope) as the means of the social bond between psychoanalysts. Our own origin—as a question about desire, not mastery—can
away. Although it does not completely succeed in realizing this potential, the potential is experienced. This movement, Adorno says, shatters conscious experience of the self as ultimate and absolute. The sublime experience contains both the primal feelings of powerlessness—in Kant, weakness before natural beauty—and, the demonic feelings of omnipotence. The first is given back its existence in consciousness (as natural experience), as the second is stripped of its existence as consciousness (as
holds just as much for the solutions offered by philosophy, which, Lacan says, seems to search for a new ontology that is nothing short of a question centered on being in love as the love of being. For Freud, at the very least, the impasse is the impasse between love and desire. Psychical impotence, for example, is a psychic division such that “where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love” (Freud, 1912, p. 183). The tendency toward debasement in the sphere of love
this constellation that Leclaire iterates a series of consequences for psychoanalysis based on this reading of desire with Freud’s. I take these consequences as my own throughout this work and innumerate them here at the outset: To grasp what psychoanalysis imposes on us, then, as Freud never tires of saying, we still have to get rid of many prejudices. And P R E FA C E xxi especially here we must rid ourselves of two major habits: first, the way of considering the tension of desire on the
their particular truth therein. The problem of materializing or substantializing, rather than elaborating this truth can be seen in the example of Human Rights. At the very least, we begin to map the unstable identifications which force us all too fluidly to lapse between the positions of the omnipotent beating father, the victimized, beaten, but loved, child, and the “neutral” third party voyeur who cries out, “a child is being beaten!” What it is that can be found in truth that is shared