Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Daybreak 2. Music of the Future 3. Father Can’t You See 4. Never the Right Man 5. I Am Not a Muse 6. Hysterical Ruinology 7. Coitus Interruptus 8. Three Visions of Psychoanalysis 9. How to Splinter / How to Burn 10. Forged in Stones 11. The Sliding of the Ring 12. The Analyst’s Analysis Acknowledgments Appendix Notes References Index

About the Author :
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York. She has written for the New York Review of Books, Artforum, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Her books include The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and Stay, Illusion! (with Simon Critchley, 2013).

Review :
[Conversion Disorder] masterfully integrates some pretty heavy psych theory into a surprisingly personal framework. Intellectually dense but definitively accessible, the book illustrates what it is that makes Jamieson unique. Conversion Disorder accomplishes a formidable task, for it is a book that speaks to readers who are making their very first forays into the study of psychoanalysis and to those scholars and clinicians who have long been thinking about the field’s most foundational questions, including hysteria, anxiety, the body and the training of new analysts. 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. Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways. Jamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder approaches the unscalable wall of failed sublimation that marks the problem of intensities that rise and fall without apparent events. “Through the question of affect, the body insists.” This is not affect theory in the usual critical sense—affect here means being affected, speaking to the kind of excitability that communicates beyond the scene. There’s beautiful writing here, giving us an account of the affective impasses of the symptom. As ever, Jamieson Webster's writing is provocative and challenging, inviting us to question the comfort zones of contemporary discourse. In her unique style, she combines a meditation on her own psychoanalytic practice with an engagement with clinical and conceptual issues that are relevant to all of us: anxiety, the body, desire, dreams, and what it means to listen to others. And, for the first time in psychoanalytic literature, there is an appendix about the author's appendix! Conversion Disorder is a wonderful book and a pleasure to read—each page sparkles with insight. What I like in this book is the frankness of the author’s self-presentation—with her doubts about her profession, her family background marked by separation, and her many readings of philosophers, all interesting, some surprising, like Bachelard, but always bringing something relevant. Webster displays a high aptitude for the kind of cultural and historiographic thinking about medicalized phenomena to which more psychoanalysts should be attentive.