Articles Available Online

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s therapeutic craze These days, we prefer to treat our mental ailments with gluten-free diets, astrology as self-help, mindfulness apps, and big pharma, the latter of which Webster, a Freudian with a private practice in New York City, elegantly critiqued in The New York Review of Books last year To commit, as psychoanalysis asks of you, to multiple sessions a week for an indeterminate period of treatment, is so uncontemporary, it’s due for a comeback If anyone can make that happen, it’s Webster, who is taking an on-the-ground approach to psychoanalytic advocacy, regularly publishing, lecturing, and performing in local academic, art, literary, and even fashion contexts   At the last New York Fashion Week, Webster, alongside philosopher Chiara Bottici and Professor of Visual Culture Melissa Ragona, performed a panel discussion inspired by Batsheva Hay’s modest dress as part of the designer’s Spring 2020 presentation For the occasion, Webster wore a flouncy powder pink Batsheva frock; risking infantilising femininity, the look rather reaffirmed the analyst’s – and female – authority Ten months earlier, Webster donned a white clinician’s coat, clipboard in hand, for the ‘immersive theatre’ performance Sick! The Psychoanalytic Field Hospital Led by Webster and philosophical investigator Todd Altschuler, alongside poet, lawyer and performance artist Vanessa Place, this ticketed event invited participants to subject themselves to a realistically-abusive fictitious mental hospital hosted in a former limousine garage At the end, the audience of some eighty-odd patients were applauded by the doctors for having survived, as the hospital transformed into a kitsch tiki-bar Valhalla The play was a launch for Webster’s second book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation was her first) Webster has also co-authored Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine with Simon Critchley; Figure Out with Marcus Coelen; and has an essay in the John Currin: Men monograph   The cover of Conversion Disorder features a wisp of smoke on black, as if a