Cassandra Seltman Talks to Jamieson Webster

As has been known to some poets for some time, psychoanalyst and critic Jamieson Webster's work, led "by her dreams and plagued by the ever precarious and existential position of psychoanalysis," as Cassandra Seltman notes before an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, "reads as much like poetry as it does scholarship." An excerpt from their conversation about Webster's new book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis:

Another question about the kind of architecture of conversion. There are a lot of sewing metaphors in the book. You utilize in the text sewing, suturing, stitching, quilting, which kind of evokes this movement of appearance/disappearance. And, as you say, the linking of nothing to nothing. Is conversion just the length of a stitch?

Probably more a tapestry. But I did really get taken with the stitch metaphor; also the image of Penelope who is stitching and unstitching at the same time. Lacan talks about the fact that inside the cave, at its deepest point, is where many cave drawings are found. It’s not where you can easily see them. And it’s something about marking the space that can’t be seen. So it’s not the stitches closing something together, but the stitch is something that marks absence, in a way. So I wanted to be wary of the healing metaphor of the stitching and try to find a different model for it.  I think that the other image in the book that the stitching is maybe in competition with is fire.

There’s the whole chapter based around the dream “Father, can’t you see that I’m burning?” I have this whole chapter on fire and the scientist and philosopher Bachelard. There is also the patient who got burned by fire. So I realized that it comes up a lot and it’s this question of harnessing the destructive impulses, rather than being about Eros which is more the stitching of things together, the synthetic kind of binding qualities. So, maybe it’s more of a life drive and death drive dynamic in the book...

Read on at BLARB.