Case by Case

by Jamieson Webster, Patricia Gherovici

Freud’s ‘talking cure’ and its offshoots are more widespread today than ever. But as the divisive issues of our time grow more urgent, a contentious question persists: must psychoanalysis remove itself from politics altogether in order to be effective? Or is it inherently political? Specific disagreements about how clinicians should or shouldn’t engage with imperialism, violence, race, and gender identity point to the broader question of where politics is situated in our psychic life. Is it on the periphery – a symptom or displacement – or right at the heart of the matter? In this timely book, psychoanalysts Jamieson Webster and Patricia Gherovici examine the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and politics through a sequence of case studies, exploring the many ways in which the political enters the consulting room. Ranging from Freud’s early cases confronting homosexuality and race, to idiosyncratic analyses anticipating recent conceptions of neurodiversity, to the effects of colonial and racist violence in family history, the authors illuminate how the political shapes our relationships to power, normativity, and identity. These historic cases are prescient of the political dilemmas confronting us today. Rather than dismissing psychoanalysis as irrelevant or reducing it to a vehicle for political positions, Case by Case makes a galvanizing and challenging argument for what psychoanalysis can reveal about our political selves – and how it might transform them.

180 pages, Paperback

Expected publication October 13, 2026

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.