Conversion Disorder
Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis
Jamieson Webster
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Conversion Disorder
Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis
Jamieson Webster
About This Book
Conversion disorderâa psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestationsâoffers 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 themselvesâa 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 meaningsâin religious, economic, and even chemical processesârevisiting 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 continual 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 entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.