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Here is how she begins:
I am tired. Psychoanalysis makes me incredibly tired. I have spent a greater part of my time hating psychoanalysis. I can't read another paper. I want the whole thing to collapse. I see it teetering on the edge of its abyss, and think I'm done, it is done. And yet somehow I know that it could do nothing else—it is precarious, it has been from the beginning. What have I been hoping for? What did I expect? Apparently a whole lot. (p. 1)
Jamieson Webster, a newly minted psychoanalyst, and a teacher at Eugene Lang College and New York University, is disillusioned and disappointed. The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis is an audacious debut—Webster utilizes her dreams, memories of analytic training, and her encounters with intellectual idols to explore the nature of desire, and in so doing returns the subject of desire to the center of analytic discourse. She opens her book telling us she feels her hope has been betrayed. Already her tone is personal and confessional. Webster goes on to structure her book around three of her own dreams, not attempting to use them as illustrations—that would be pedantic and she knows it—but rather as “a provocation to thought” (p. xxiii). Blurring the line between memoir and theoretical psychoanalysis, Webster unblinkingly pursues an animating passion, a force that may reveal unconscious desire, something that may, for her at least, keep the edifice of psychoanalysis from falling down around her. The result is a new form of psychoanalytic writing, one that is not quite wholly intellectual memoir, nor strictly philosophic text, and yet is a hybrid of those forms that is able to speak of psychoanalysis from a different vantage point.
The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis may have been written at the Chelsea Hotel (at least that's my fantasy), for I can hear Leonard Cohen in the pages lamenting love and its eventual loss, crushed idealism, and how everything has a hole in it. Cohen would be welcome company for Webster's ot