Jamieson Webster, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019;  303 pp.)

In her 2019 book Conversion Disorder, practising Lacanian analyst and cultural critic Jamieson Webster takes up the titular concept of ‘conversion disorder’ as the thread through which to explore an entire history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the book, Webster tracks a wide range of psychoanalytic and philosophical meanings of the term ‘conversion’, drawing from her own clinical practice and from the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In these chapters, she reflects on the structure of the conversion symptom, the centrality of the body in analysis, and the importance of sexuality as both engine and cornerstone of the psychoanalytic project. The latter half of the book is less a critical genealogy than a meditative engagement with the desire for psychoanalysis, the status of analytic training, and Webster's own conversion from analysand to analyst. Bridging the two halves of the book are three exegetical chapters on conversion as a philosophical question in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault, all of whom are recruited as collaborative guides for the psychoanalytic project rather than critics located outside its terrain. Exquisitely written and generically transgressive, Conversion Disorder offers an extraordinary vision of the psychoanalytic past and present as they meet in the figure of conversion disorder.

It is a well-known story, and one which Webster retells, that Freud discovered the unconscious while working with hysterics who revealed to him the efficacy of the ‘talking cure’. The term itself was proposed to Josef Breuer by his hysterical patient Bertha Pappenheim, better known by her pseudonym Anna O, whose ‘phantom pregnancy’ and other conversion symptoms were an early testament for Freud and Breuer to the sexual link between conversion and the body (p. 290). In his early writing, Freud used the term ‘conversion’ and ‘conversion hysteria’ interchangeably to refer, in Webst