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This essay provides a review of the book Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis , written by psychoanalyst and professor Dr Jamieson Webster. The review highlights core themes and arguments of the book pertaining to the centralization of the role of the body and affective life in psychoanalysis. The cultural history of religious conversion—and its interrelationship to medical conceptions of conversion developed by Freud—is also elucidated with respect to Webster’s key claim that psychoanalysis operates as a kind of embodied transformational experience. The affective life of the transference modality is also explicated; as is Webster’s proto-feminist approach to psychoanalysis, female sexuality and desire, and the cultural history of hysteria.
In its attempt to probe the depths of the human psyche, psychoanalytic practice rarely focalizes attention on the outer expression of the body as a gateway to the unconscious. This is an oversight of clinical importance, which influential psychoanalyst, Jamieson Webster, explicitly addresses in her book. Widely understood as the talking cure, contemporary psychoanalysis has largely evaded the somatic zone as a realm of therapeutic insight and intervention in favor of the discursive domain of language. Locating the pre-Cartesian link between psyche and soma, and the neuroscientific origin of the embodied mind, in Freudian thought, Webster confirms, however, that the feeling body has always been “one of the most important markers in psychoanalysis” (p.12). In Webster’s purview, civilization and its discontents have effectively been converted into “vacillations in the affective life of the body” (p. 14). The soma and its cacophony of elusive symptoms—ranging from “dizziness to loss of consciousness, to changes in motor or sensory functions”—reveal the vagaries of psychical repression, and also point to a realm
beyond the libido somewhat closer to the Lacanian real—the inscrutable realm of personhood, which