Sexo e desorganização

Explosante

by Jamieson Webster, Simone Campos (Translator)

Esta obra da psicanalista Jamieson Webster é a um só tempo reflexão psicanalítica sobre sexo e reflexão sexual sobre a psicanálise. Ao longo de dezoito ensaios, a autora deixa claro que sexo, em psicanálise, não se restringe a um ato biológico bem delimitado, mas abrange todo um campo anárquico de desejos, inesgotável por todas as tentativas de constrangê-lo, colonizá-lo ou significá-lo.

Webster declara: o sexo desorganiza; agora cabe a nós descobrirmos a que tipo de organização podemos aspirar de modo a ainda deixar espaço para a desorganização, a confusão e o mistério. “Psicanalista”, segundo ela, “é quem assume o fardo da desorganização e tenta, a todo custo, fazer algo diferente de fazê-la desaparecer”, mas para reafirmar esse compromisso histórico é preciso repensar radicalmente a instituição da psicanálise hoje e se abrir para as incontáveis variedades de prazer e desprazer que se apresentam na clínica, nas palavras e no silêncio do desejo de cada analisante.

Reconhecer a fluidez da sexualidade, respeitar a desorganização inerente ao inconsciente e ajudar a transformar o sofrimento sintomático do sujeito é a tarefa audaciosa que Jamieson Webster atribui aos psicanalistas, trazendo para o diálogo figuras como Lacan, Freud, Preciado e Adorno, além de casos clínicos da própria autora e da história da psicanálise.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Philosophy, Psychology, Sexuality

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2025

About the author

JAMIESON WEBSTER is a psychoanalyst based in New York. She is a founding member of Das Unbehagen, a collective of psychoanalysts working outside of institutional affiliation; supervises clinical psychology graduate students in the doctoral program of City College; graduate and member of IPTAR. She has written for Artforum, Apology, Cabinet, the Guardian, Playboy, Spike Art Quarterly, the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. She is the author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2018); Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013); and The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011). With Marcus Coelen, she is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan.

Reviews

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

unsurprisingly the 1 page case study of the 28 year old gay man was incredibly illuminating for me

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very generative book to read at the start of a family vacation

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Para quem estuda a teoria queer, pensar em sexo e desorganização é o básico. Então esse livro me chamou atenção, porque pensei que poderia encontrar algumas noções disruptivas sobre a sexualidade humana. Não vou dizer que não achei, mas que foi muito aquém do que eu estava pensando. Apesar de não achar que, Jamieson Webster se apoia de forma hardcore na psicanálise, de Freud a Lacan, usando os dois com garra e insistência. Trata-se, então, de mais um livro sobre psicanálise que pretende romper com ela, mas se aferra a ela. Nesse ponto ele foi decepcionante. A parte final do livro é a melhor delas, quando começa a falar sobre a "evolução" da assexualidade biológica para a sexualidade biológica e como isso foi um trauma para gerações de seres vivos que repercute até hoje, inclusive na sexualidade masculina. Essa sim, é uma ideia transgressora e desorganizadora, mas não veio da autora e sim do contemporâneo de Freud, Ferenczi. Aqui sim, eu vejo um potencial disruptivo, mas que a autora poderia ter ampliado e ido mais longe nas suas analogias. Uma pena.

[Marije de Wit]

‘Patients seem to identify with some part of the apparatus of culture, civilisation and the organisation and administration of life. While all of these parts might be present in every patient to a degree, something comes to the foreground as a primary structure and possibly primal identification. This is the picture of the social that I have from the consulting room and what is in it that is damaged or damages in a precise way: the machine, the seduction of power, the conditions of precarious life, the body and its regulation buy technology and medicine, the sado-masochism of the law and abject life, and the endless attempt to construct a form for sex and gender under the constraints of misogyny and the absorption of the family into capitalism. In this, is there a new type of human being? One that consumerism and the culture industry had bested? I don’t know. The picture, in and of itself is, for me, ruthless enough. Ruthless, in particular because of the fact that the choice of identification, what Lacan at one time called the ‘choice of neurosis’, is not a choice at all. It is a choice that is made for you, a result of a set of contingencies surrounding your birth that lead in one direction or another. From this, one has to invent a solution in order to be able to live, a solution that then contributes back to a world that will go on making choices for others that you can’t make good on. Damage directs us to this unpayable debt that we inherit as an ethical challenge, not just as a question of pedagogy and culture, social change and social activism, but also the continuing life of psychoanalysis itself.’

[Livia Damaceno · Rating 5 out of 5]

penso logo sou (neurótica)

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realize this was a collection of essays, I had assumed it was one cohesive book with a focused topic. I was disappointed when I realized otherwise, but I suppose form mirrors content here. Jamieson opens with an essay on the anti-progressivism of psychoanalysis and what a cure might be when there is no telos, no prescribable image of health or normativity. When mastery is a fantasy always to be undone by unconscious desire. Major questions are introduced about what a fidelity to this disorganization could mean, politically, ethically, sexually, etc...

"What organisation is possible that allows for the place of disorganisation, messiness, difficulty? [...] Freud had the audacity to imagine a civilisation that could tolerate the sheer multiplicity of sexuality, the singularity of individual styles of pleasure and unpleasure, of which the psychoanalyst has the odd glimpse of clinical work. The psychoanalyst is the one who takes on the burden of disorganisation and tries, at all costs, to do something other than make it go away. We do so with no guarantee and at great risk. We do so having to test everything on ourselves first, knowing that where we falter, step back, we will never be able to lead our patients all that much further. Can't you almost envision a form of democracy that takes on this manner, this same weight of responsibility?"

The following essays always tend to come back to this, the bedrock of castration that throws us into particularity, the multiplicity of singular solutions to life, the creativity of always having to reinvent psychoanalysis anew. A favorite for me was the essay reflecting on Adorno's dream journals, looking beyond the deadlocks of paranoia and melancholia as reactions to the crises of the day towards the sinthome as a way forward that keeps fidelity to unconscious desire. In general my favorite moments were where Jamieson attempted to broaden the individual material into a historical context, moments diagnosing the cultural crises we are in the midst of, seeing these crises show up in peoples individual fantasies and impasses. The reason why I sometimes wish this was a book instead of a collection of essays is because just when a lot of essays feel like they are getting good they cut off. I would love a deeper development on her teasing insights into the relation between her clinical material and whats happening in the world.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think some of the finer psychoanalytic points were admittedly lost on me (esp. trying, at first, to think of this as one coherent book rather than it actually as a collection of essays), but it nevertheless feels like a hugely important defense of psychoanalytic desire, of desire that accounts for the Real and for the death drive (that exists in the world), of desire that is overwhelming and disorganizing, and for sexual desire as such. It acknowledges the reality of entrenched power dynamics inherent in and prior to any possible conversations about gender, analysis, and sex, without advocating for their repetition – simply that we must acknowledge their cultural significance (and the infinite presence of signifiers) in order to move forward at all, or whatever communal "progress" means, anyway.

[Eduardo Souza · Rating 3 out of 5]

eu não li todo o livro; li a primeira parte, depois salteei por alguns outros capítulos. para mim, neste momento, que ainda estou iniciando no estudo da psicanálise, foi bastante difícil. alguns apontamentos sobre a psicanálise foram importantes, principalmente na primeira parte, mas depois, começou a ficar quase ininteligível para quem não tem o domínio dos conceitos fundamentais – que ainda me parecem muito incompreensíveis – como gozo e transferência. por exemplo, o capítulo “o menino e sua mãe”, em que ela relata esse caso específico, perdi a maior parte do desenvolvimento que ela fala da importância do humor na dinâmica analítica.

dito isso, acabei deixando o livro de lado por ora. voltarei a ele depois, com mais bagagem.