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The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis




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 of questioning - 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?

In this book, Jamieson Webster argues that the life and death of psychoanalysis hinges on the question of desire itself, and attempts to bring this question back to the center of psychoanalytic thought and practice. The problem of desire is pursued through Webster's own relation to psychoanalysis, as 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 central: Adorno, Lacan, and Badiou. In blurring the line between the personal and the theoretical, this book not only offers a novel interpretation of the philosophical and psychoanalytic meaning of desire, but also explores how one, through the difficult work of transference and reading, can live out the life of desire that tests the limits of what it means to be human.