Matthew Oyer: Your first book was recently published, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation, and there are many things that are noteworthy about this book. The first is that it emerged from your dissertation that you wrote here at City. Its style is also very noteworthy as it is far from the typical academic discourse of the dissertation or of psychoanalytic theory as it’s usually disseminated, and it’s woven from three of your own dreams and from erotic transferences with three intellectual masters: Adorno, Lacan, and Badiou; and, in the end, you manage to write a book that you found in a dream. So, I wondered if you could tell us a little about your process of writing and how this book came to be.

Jamieson Webster: That’s a big question to start out with. I guess when I was thinking about how to talk about this question; it’s really hard to talk about why you write the way you write or how you write the way you write. It’s sort of like asking someone how they act or how they play music. So, the first thing I thought was that I could tell you some of the pressures I was feeling at the time, and that that might give you some idea of why it looks the way it does. Which was just that everything I was experiencing in graduate school and the questions I was asking about psychoanalysis sort of indicated to me that I had to write in some different way, at least just to fulfill what the project was, which was to question the place of knowledge in relation to psychoanalysis. And it’s tough because, for me, it was like, if you’re going to do this, then you have to embody it in some way. Just to write a pure discourse on the criticism of putting knowledge in the forefront of what psychoanalysis is about sort of goes back on the ethic of what you’re trying to describe. And then I thought, oh my God, I’m up to my neck in this project. What am I going to do? Can I pull this off? And it really felt like that. It felt like, it has to be the case that this has to be written in a different way. One, are they going to allow me do this, and are they going to see the fact that, if you take seriously what I’m trying to say, that it demands this? And I think I was on edge the entire time. I had no idea if I could pull it off.

And, how the dreams and, as you nicely put it, erotic transferences to three intellectual masters, how that came to shape it, just felt very organic in a way. I wanted to write about Adorno and Lacan. They were two people who I was deeply involved with. And there was something about the transition out from under a critical theory discourse towards psychoanalytic theory and a Lacanian lens, which was really about finding a way to let go of knowledge, and then to find a way to do that that made the most sense to the project. And I don’t think that my dissertation committee sort of expected what was the final product. I think they were with me on it, but they were looking at me like, “what are you going to do? Are you going to be able to pull this off?” And I think even in themselves there was some question of, are they going to let this happen? I remember thinking, “Oh God, does Lissa Weinstein think she’s going to get fired if she let’s me do this?” But, I’m so grateful to them, and I think they really let me have a kind of freedom with it, which is what I wanted, and I wanted the book to speak to some sort of freedom of psychoanalytic discourse.

Also, I was so tired of reading things for graduate school, which I’m sure lots of your colleagues experience, and just feeling the burden of that, like just reading paper after

paper, and the idea of a certain kind of lit. review, and a certain kind of research, which I had already done a lot of. I couldn’t bear the idea of doing more of that. So, I just sort of took off from that point of exhaustion, which is where I start the book, just being exhausted.

MO: When you’re exhausted, and when you sort of conceived the idea, did you find the style naturally, or did it sort of germinate over a long period of not knowing how to begin?

JW: I think it’s both. The natural part of it was I decided that everything that I was fighting against, which I often find is true about writing – you’re like it can’t be this, it can’t be this, it has to look like this, it has to look like this, I don’t like these things, I want something more like this – and you’re sort of struggling, and you’re fighting with yourself, and somehow you then contain that within the act of writing itself. It’s not that you’re going to resolve those disputes, but that you realize that having those disputes is a condition of the writing that has to be because otherwise you’re waiting for them to resolve before you begin, and you never begin. So, eventually you start to write in your dilemma, from within your very dilemma. And I think the quote that I had sort of stumbled upon that allowed me to do that was from Blanchot, which is in the dissertation, but it got cut in editing out of the book. But Blanchot said something like, you have to be allowed to be weary, you have to be brought back to a place where you’re permitted to be weary. Like this is the condition of writing; this is the condition of possibility. And I think that that did something to me; like this is where you are going to begin, and this is where you’re going to develop your style and your question.

MO: It’s almost poetic that it ended up getting cut because the book itself is sort of about being totally immersed in something and then having to let go of it, or maybe that’s not what it’s about but it’s something important that happens in the book.

JW: Sure.

MO: It seemed to happen in the way that your process is similar to your content. I also was wondering in the way you just spoke, you said you wanted to write about Adorno and Lacan, and you didn’t mention Badiou; and there’s a different tone in the book when you’re speaking of the former two. Could you speak a little about that?

JW: Yeah, it’s interesting that you picked that up. I mean I was struggling with the Badiou because it felt like an afterthought – which in a way it was because he was someone who came to me later and came to me in the process of writing the dissertation, and who I started to get really, really interested in, and who I met and spent some time with… but I needed a third. I don’t know why I needed a third. And I think that the two, Adorno and Lacan, were a much more emotional struggle, and they have a lot more to do with me personally, and there is something about Badiou, that it’s about what you can do having come out the other side. And I remember saying to David Lichtenstein, who was on my committee, I was like, “Is it just an afterthought? Is it a problem what happens with Badiou?” And I think he re-contextualized it for me as important because there is a

way in which Lacan makes something possible, makes a certain kind of thought possible, and it was nice because, on a more autonomous ground, I go in and sort of wrestle with Badiou a little bit.

MO: That’s great. I’m going to go on to the next question. So, in addition to the distinctive style of your writing, you’ve also contributed writing and performance to unusual forums for a psychoanalyst, such as Cabinet Magazine, the Cordoza Law Review, the Tate Museum, and by organizing the upcoming funeral for psychoanalysis, which I guess will be over by the time anybody reads this. Does this have anything to do with you’re uncertainty about the future of psychoanalysis, and is this part of an effort, as you wrote, “to breathe new life into its corpse”?

JW: I think so. I mean, again, it’s like one of these things that comes out of boredom, or anger, or desire to do something. And I can’t write for journals; I’ve tried; I’ve done my versions of it, but it’s something that’s just not fun for me. So, I’ve just been trying to do things that are maybe a little bit more performative, maybe in different contexts because you have to think about the audience in a different way, things that are less professionalized, which is a really big deal for me. Being a professional psychoanalyst bugs me; I don’t like it very much.

MO: Can you say more about that?

JW: I told someone that I felt sometimes that what we do is treated like being a refrigerator repair man, and I don’t know if not wanting to be that is a narcissistic sort of pushing back, but I just don’t think that’s what we do. It’s tough what we do, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not work, but psychoanalysis is so much bigger than that for me – which doesn’t mean I don’t take completely seriously the clinical aspect of it, and the day to day grind that we have to do in the work that we do – but Freud was bigger than that. I mean, he’s about taking what you hear from your patients and the work you do every day and universalizing it. You have to always make that move from the universal to the particular and from the particular back to the universal. If anyone taught me that, it was Aprés Coup and Paola Mieli, who I know you interviewed. And so I sort of need a wider discourse to work with, so I can escape from my practice into something where we can speak more universally about what this means, and then to go back to it. And the more professionalized sphere doesn’t give that to me. I think it does for other people, but it doesn’t do it for me.

And I also, you know, a lot of the things you mentioned from the Tate, to Cabinet magazine, and whatnot are collaborative works. So, I work with my husband, Simon Critchley, and I worked with my colleague Ben Kafka for the Cabinet piece; I work with my colleague Patricia Gherovici. And I really love collaboration. I think it’s great. It sort of stretches you in different ways, and it makes you think differently, and you run up against your own limits in interesting ways, so that’s also one of the reasons.

MO: Yeah, I suspect it can be lonely being a psychoanalyst and being with patients all the time and not having anybody you work with in that more collaborative way.

JW: It’s really lonely, which is something probably I didn’t expect, especially when I was a graduate student because you’re at City, and you’re running around, and there are always people everywhere; but when you’re in private practice, you’re in your office all day long, and you’re really very, very alone. You’re not who you are when you’re with your patients; I mean you are who you are, but you also have to be a thousand different things to them or hear about who you are in a thousand different ways, and that gets very lonely.

MO: That just made me associate, so this isn’t a question I’ve thought about much, but when I was researching to do the interview, I did come across that you have an interest in fashion, and the association I made is that it’s not just lonely, you can’t really be yourself; you can in some ways, but you have to maintain a certain neutrality and blankness that they can project onto. I’ve talked to many people in the program who find it weird to not be able to dress the way we previously dressed or act in certain ways we previously acted. I don’t really have a question formulated, but how do you deal with that loss of self that seems to be inherent in this work in some way.

JW: I think that you get back more of yourself, though, once you get out of grad school, and you’re not worried about what the director of your program is thinking about what you’re wearing. I mean you can tell from my office that you can push the boundaries of these things in a different way as long as you’re prepared to analyze them, and as long as you’re prepared to hear critically from your patients what they think about the things that become more obvious about you. I mean, you’ll hear about them anyway, which is sort of why I feel a little more leniency, like now I know how much aggression I can tolerate from them, and, just as you found what you found on the internet, they find it, and they find it ten-fold. So, you just have to be prepared for them to ring you across the boards for all of it, for what it means to them.

I mean, I love fashion. I was previously in fashion, and I have, for whatever reason, friends who all went into fashion. And there’s this rapidity to fashion that stands against the slowness of the analytic procedure. They constantly have to create. It’s always another season. And within these fascinating constraints, they have to push something through. So, I sort of love watching that parade, season after season. And, you know, Patricia and I just wrote something for The Candidate Journal on Alexander McQueen. And we’ve been thinking a lot about fashion and psychoanalysis. Patricia writes about gender, like Joan Riviere who writes that gender is a kind of masquerade, gender is something you do, that you put on, to a certain extent. We don’t believe it’s inborn completely. There are unconscious determinants, but gender has this outward surface. So, it’s not completely antithetical… And you guys can wear what you want.

MO: So, you’re message is that transference is hardier than that, and they will find how to project regardless of what you show?

JW: Absolutely. And, you know, it’s the analytic position, and you can maintain that in relationship to anything. It’s really hard to understand both what the analytic position is,

and then to experience the freedom that you then have around it because understanding that constraint widens the playing field. It took a long time for me to learn about this. And Lacan, for whatever reason, is the person who really taught it to me the best because I think he understood it more than anyone, which is why he can take the license he takes – at least this is how I’ve come to understand him – cutting the session, a certain kind of flamboyance that he had, you know he was a huge public intellectual so it’s not like people wouldn’t have known all kinds of things about him. But this laser focus on what it means to be an analyst and to listen from that place really can sort of widen things for you more than the typical perspective of the analyst who is neutral, and blank, and wears something bland that can’t be taken one way or another.

MO: Can you say a little more about the position?

JW: You know, it’s really about having your ear oriented toward the unconscious and knowing something about the unfolding of the treatment, in particular in relationship to the transference and, in particular, with respect to what it means to deal with unconscious fantasy or, as Lacan put it, “to traverse unconscious fantasy,” always to be pushing the patient deeper, and deeper, and deeper towards that point, and then dragging them kicking and screaming across it or watching them go on their own volition. And these other little things, these rules, it’s not that they’re not there for a reason – I think that they are there to sort of help people in the beginning – but once you understand how to hear a patient and to know that you’re going in a certain direction the minute the transference is there, that it’s going to go, it’s going to unfold, and you’re just trying to step out of the way as best you can, it has not so much to do with something like appearance and more to do with how to listen. You just have to listen, really, really closely to what’s being said, and what’s not being said, and how it’s being said.

MO: Ok. Along with the initial question of trying to breathe new life, do you think that through these unusual forums it is your intention to reach different people than are usually reached, and to what end?

JW: It’s good; it’s like a utilitarian question. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m going to reach a new audience. I think it’s good. It’s a good thing to not just speak to psychoanalysts. I mean, what is that? We’re just speaking to each other about this thing. So, for sure, I guess that’s important to me… I mean, there is this time that I’m obsessed with, which is 1960s, 1970s Paris, or Continental Europe, and psychoanalysis was a thing; you know it was really a thing. And it was present in literature, and philosophy, and in the public domain, and you had someone like Francois Dolto creating nurseries, you had people doing experiments in inpatient hospitals, so it wasn’t just this wild cultural thing attached to surrealism, you know, it was also experiments that could take place clinically, really stretching the boundaries of psychoanalysis. And then that would bounce back, and you’d have people who were asking, what is the relevance of this to political discourse, and then you’d have all these wild experiments in anarchism and Marxism, and really taking the insights of psychoanalysis and putting them to work, and working them in all these different spheres. And I just love that; it just feels so alive, and so generative, and so exciting… and it feels gone. So, the minute I hear something that I

can jump into that even smells of that, I suppose I go running at it, like oh let’s do this thing at the Guggenheim, or like, oh, Cabinet magazine is this great space where they try to experiment with art and intellectual life.

MO: So, that leads a little into the next question. In the book, you’re focusing readers’ attention frequently on the death, or the impossibility, or the castratedness of psychoanalysis as a necessary sacrifice for sublimation and the new. I guess I want to hear more about your vision for the future of psychoanalysis, not even necessarily the future as it stands, but what you view as a possible future, or what you would hope for.

JW: It goes back to what we were already talking about in terms of the analytic position and how that constrains you, but also what it makes possible. I sort of feel like… I really learned that from Lacan. I was thinking about this question in terms of what image do we have of the analyst. And I don’t know that many theorists who give you an image of the analyst, and Lacan throws them at you over and over again throughout his long career: the analyst is castrated, the analyst is a masochist, the analyst is silent, the analyst is a dummy, the analyst is, as you put it, stupid as a cabbage, which you picked up, and he keeps trying to tell you a little about this place you’re put in by virtue of being an analyst. It’s a position that… like all of these images sounds confined, or they feel wounded, or somebody who has the whole world beating down on them, and they have to just be able to take it – and that’s true, I mean that’s certainly true about what we have to do – but there’s also this other side of it, which is that, Lacan says, you have to understand the desire of the psychoanalyst, and that’s what all these images are also about. So, because you accept castration, it means you have a certain relationship to desire because desire is essentially founded on loss or an impossible grief for something you can’t have. And this is incredibly freeing, this idea that it’s really this hinge, that there’s a pivot between castration and desire. And your desire is really just for psychoanalysis, is for the psychoanalysis to continue, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how confusing it gets, no matter how little you can know the future, you can’t know the direction that it’s heading; you’re going to stay on this line, and it’s going to be purely on the basis of your desire and nothing else. And he means that absolutely seriously. This is all that you have as an analyst. And, if you take that seriously, then you can see the affirmation in it: yes, this is all you have, this is all you ever have. And I guess I see that as a future. I see that as the only way to have a future, which is part of the idea of having a funeral. If we can take this on, then psychoanalysis isn’t dead, but we have to understand something about death. And we were talking about this before you hit the record button, but people were threatened by the funeral, and I’m always surprised at my surprise because I write about these things knowing full well this is a possibility, but then when the possibility comes, I’m like, “What do you mean they’re offended?” It’s probably this lingering hysteria. But they really took it concretely, and took it as an offense, as if saying, “But there are psychoanalysts, there’s always going to be psychoanalysts,” as if I’m saying anything different from that… So, the future is a future of desire.

MO: Along those lines, in your book and in a recent presentation, you discuss Hamlet. At one point in the book you say, “Mourning is the pivot between narcissism and desire.” I take it that’s why you’re so interested in Hamlet. I know you’ve probably talked

yourself out about Hamlet, but I wondered if you could say a little about Hamlet and this relationship between loss and desire, lack and desire.

JW: I’m up to my ears in Hamlet because I’m actually writing a book with my husband on Hamlet, and we finished the first draft yesterday.

MO: Oh, congratulations.

JW: Thank you. It was a lot of work, but when you get from point A to point Z, it’s really, really nice. But Hamlet is great because it’s the negative image of what we were just talking about. I mean, he’s someone who Lacan showed me is completely bereft of desire, and is melancholic rather than able to mourn, which means he doesn’t know what he’s lost, and he doesn’t know how to figure it out, to begin that kind of work, and his desire turns into narcissistic rage – and, in particular, one that is fixated on his mother as the sinner, the consummate sinner, the one who has violated all the laws of propriety. One of Lacan’s Seminars that’s the most important to me is The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which is Seminar VII, and I had spent a lot of time with that and then sort of pulled back and realized that he had written about Hamlet the year before in an unpublished Seminar. And it’s amazing because you can already see this path where Antigone is going to be the heroine for him: she’s someone who lives her desire unto her death, without pity, without fear, for an absolutely singular desire and love for her brother who can’t be replaced, and, on that basis, this object is not replaceable, and her love and her mourning will be centered on that. And Hamlet is the perfect negative image of Antigone. And you can get into all kinds of fascinating debates about the difference between the ancients and modernity, and the ways in which this played out in philosophy and even played out in psychoanalysis because this was a very important distinction for Freud, who also says that in Oedipus trilogy you see your desires manifest and suffer the consequences for them – meaning Oedipus who kills his father and sleeps with his mother – and Hamlet is more what we know now, repression and the negative effects on character in the form of inhibition, symptoms, and anxiety. And I love that Lacan sees that; he sees that we go from Oedipus to Hamlet, but now let’s go from Hamlet back to Antigone, and she’s sort of the secret future of Oedipus, in particular in that she’s this female figure, this very, very powerful female figure who is going to fight authority. She says, “My laws are bigger than your laws,” to Creon, like, “I follow a divine law rather than your laws for men, these earthly laws.” And that, also, you could see the position of the analyst: we, no holds barred, have to stick to a certain kind of law, which is that you have to keep analyzing, you have to keep going. That’s why constraints that come in – you have to do X, Y, and Z on the basis of state laws or regulating bodies – are a real problem for psychoanalysis because we have to invent our rules on the basis of what we understand a psychoanalysis to be with every single patient. So when you try to set the frame in advance, you’re destroying something that’s fundamental to what we have to do… I don’t want to get you in trouble.

MO: It does go into the next question in the idea of always desiring more analysis, and you talk in your book also about shame and humility, and you have a nice line where you say that your shame that you experience after sessions “pivots between ‘what have I

done?’ and ‘why in God’s name did that work?’” And this is where I think of Lacan saying the analyst must be “stupid as a cabbage,” you talk about the “process of vanishing,” and I guess I’m more Hamlet than Antigone at this point, and just feeling very uncertain all the time – this is not a question I have very well articulated – but, I’m aware of my lack of knowledge of what to do and how to do it, and I entertain the fantasy that it’s not always going to be like this, I’m not always going to feel like this, so how does one – when you’re advocating, Lacan is advocating that you do have to stay in this space of not knowing and just desiring more analysis – how do you find the courage and endurance to pursue this impossible vocation?

JW: The phrase you used when you sent me the question was “it will get easier,” which I totally understand, and I still have that myself. I ask senior analysts if it gets easier. But I don’t think it does get easier, or I’ve been trying to wrestle with what it means to ask for that. Again, it’s just desire; it’s just that you want something, you want something to not feel as difficult for you, or you want something to feel a little more grounded and steady, or you want to feel less thrown. And so, again, you can imagine the future where that question is just not a question anymore because that desire has gone somewhere else, but I don’t know that it gets any easier. I just imagine that that gets distributed in a different way somehow, into another desire, another wish for yourself in relationship to what it means to be a psychoanalyst – I wish I had more time, or I wish I could go back to when I was doing it at the beginning and say, ‘you should have more fun’. So, I don’t know if it gets easier, but I do really appreciate the struggles of being young in this work.

You know, Lacan wants to make possible, even though it’s antithetical, the idea that you could really accept the idea that you vanish, or that you experience a sort of wobble in the projector, where the frame shakes and you don’t know where you are anymore all of the sudden, at the same time that he constantly says, against that, that if you’re not taking a risk, you’re doing something wrong, if you’re not absolutely, in the moment, in your work taking certain kinds of risks, then what are you doing? And, if that’s the case, a risk has got to feel like a risk, in which case you’re going to feel anxious. You’re going to feel like, ‘oh my God, how can I do this, how can I have said that?’ So, I think both of those strands are there. He’s very funny; it’s the same thing with him also in terms of a question about meaning. So, you can also think of Lacan as somebody who really understood what it meant to listen, particularly because he has this idea of the signifier, which means you can hear some tiny little thing in the way someone says something and then watch how that expands this entire field of meaning for them that they didn’t know and that neither of you expected. At the same time, you have a Lacan who hates meaning, absolutely hates it; he’s just like, ‘oh my God, this could go on forever, this is going to be a delirious nightmare of the person pretending they’re going to interpret themselves, and they’re never going to leave; there’s never going to be an end to psychoanalysis’. And he sees this place where the analysis is this act of cutting, you’re just cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and whittling something down until, literally, there’s just silence, or there are just strings that have gotten retied and then, out, like out the door, go out the door, and maybe you live a life where you stop interpreting everything all the time. So, maybe that tells you something about the polarity that’s always going to exist in yourself, in terms of wanting to know more, having the

excitement and joy of what it means to open the field of meaning, but also that real need to put a lid on the pot, which is also something you have to do as an analyst: you have to turn down the volume on your interpreting machine, despite the fact that we had to spend a lot of time learning how to deal with meaning… Does that make you feel any better?

MO: Yeah, in a way in does. It does both: it makes me feel better in some ways, but the way that it doesn’t is the way that comes up not just in this vocation but in life, that it is kind of exhausting that desire just continues… forever.

JW: Forever.

MO: Our questions so far have felt so organic, one thing leading to another, and this question is a bit of a shift. As you mentioned, last issue I interviewed Paola Mieli, and I asked her about the difference in a Lacanian and Kernbergian diagnostic system and, particularly, about her views on borderline pathology, and this is an interest of mine because I think we get a lot of the Kernbergian view at City. In your book, you describe how contemporary American psychoanalytic perspectives create a mirror between borderline patient and analyst, in which the phallic analyst must wrestle against her unconscious and counter it with his own strong ego, and you say, instead, you pledge “fidelity to weakness” and seek to locate the “borderline position of the analyst.” So, I liked that, and I just wanted to hear more about this “fidelity to weakness” and the unconscious that it sometimes seems has been lost in contemporary American psychoanalysis.

JW: Well, whatever Paola said is right. So, listen to her. But, for me, that work on the question of the borderline came out of my experience at City for sure. I really took arms against the whole borderline psychopathology discourse, and I guess what was the most upsetting to me about it was that it felt inherently moralistic. I could not find a way out of the feeling that there was a judgment that was being made about these patients from within that. Is it possible that there is a way to speak about borderline psychopathology without that? Sure. To talk about why it came up, and when it came up, and what’s that about, fine, but I have to bracket that and say that there’s probably all kinds of ways to talk about anything. I had to ask a question about what we are doing when we say this. I felt like what it was saying, or what I was reading about whenever I read about it, and also just my experience in terms of the way it’s used by clinicians in general, is that they just don’t like these patients, and they don’t like what they’re doing, and they don’t like how they’re doing it, and they don’t like how they’re saying it, and they don’t like how these patients make them feel, which is a huge part of it, obviously, in talking about the transference-countertransference with the borderline patient. But I felt that this was a real impediment. But, as is the way with the book in general, my sort of rage about this, which was a real rage at certain points, felt wrong also, like this is not okay just to go around and say, “You can’t do this.” In a way, that was to mirror exactly what was frustrating about the way that moral judgment comes through in the discourse on the borderline: they say, “You can’t do this”. So you have to find some other way. That was the snag that I felt: how to speak about this without joining the thing that I’m trying to speak against. So, that’s where this idea of a sort of fidelity to weakness and a fidelity to

the unconscious entered in, and it meant that I could not go down the road of arguing against borderline psychopathology except for maybe to say that what we have here are some real questions about the unconscious and our relationship to it, and she throws that at us maybe as much as the analysts who are trying to wrestle with these concepts do. How do we listen to the unconscious? How do we listen to it in the situations that feel the most difficult?

MO: And it seems like, in a lot of ways, not just in Kernberg but across a variety of perspectives, there isn’t the same attention to opening up the discourse of the unconscious with borderlines. We’re sort of warned against that, instead to build the ego and contain it, block it, stop it. And it’s presented as being dangerous.

JW: Something that’s going to get out of control.

MO: And it’s scary as a beginning clinician to have people telling you that it is dangerous. What do you do with that in your practice?

JW: It’s interesting what you’re saying about discourses that make you nervous. There are a lot of them. I used to teach Margaret Mahler The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, and my students would say, “I don’t want to have children anymore.” And I would think to myself, “What does it mean to speak about child development in a way that induces in its reader a sense that they don’t want to have children?” And it’s the same thing with what you’re saying about the borderline: something is created where you think, “Oh, I have to do something else because what I fundamentally believe in doesn’t work with this person, and I have to just control the situation.” What does it mean to have a discourse that makes you have to throw everything you believe out? And what is that going to make you feel about this patient? They are in this category where you’re sort of not doing the good stuff. “Could you please give me a not borderline patient so I could actually do psychoanalysis?” Whereas the question of, wow, she poses a really interesting challenge – and I use she because they tend to be she – they pose a question as to how to open up this discourse, but it’s got to be possible; let’s figure it out. That would be a way in which you don’t have to be so anxious.

MO: I was also thinking, and you make some mention of this in your book, about the decline of hysteria and the simultaneous rise of the borderline, and what you think of that. And also, there’s a stark contrast in the way in which Freud and Lacan both valorized the hysteric in some ways – you have to hystericize work with an obsessional – so, it’s just so different from the way borderlines are perceived.

JW: Right. And Freud’s own hysteria. Freud in the letters with Fliess, you see he’s wrestling with his own hysteria, and he wouldn’t be able to have made the move that he makes just wanting to be the doctor who discovers the etiology of hysteria, without having this sort of enormous process of discovering it in himself, including his crazy theories that he’s menstruating out his nose, and everything that gets really weird in those early moments, and his own femininity, which you see absolutely in his letters with Fliess. I found this the other week. He says to Fliess in this letter where he’s saying,

“I’ve got to give up the idea that I was going to be the person who solves the mystery of hysteria. The memories, the traumatic memories, aren’t just coming in the clarity I had expected.” And he says, “Rebecca, take off your gown, you’re no longer a bride.” It’s hilarious. He posits himself as Fliess’s disappointed bride, in the moment that he’s so close to whatever the hysteric is about and the nature of fantasy. So, it’s sort of an extraordinary moment. And, I guess this idea that we have to find ‘the borderline position of the analyst’ was to say that something really interesting is going on here about how hard it is to walk this line, and isn’t this more about us and what we need to understand about our relationship to the unconscious than it is about any sort of diagnostic category per se. And if this is our challenge, if this is the kind of patient that is challenging us, then this is great because this is exactly what we have to understand, how to do psychoanalysis with them.

And I love them. If you don’t let them make you anxious, then they settle right into the work, and they’re great because they’re alive and they’re smashing things up, and I like patients for whom the desire is like all over the place rather than hidden down in a tiny crevice and you’re working so hard to get it out.

MO: If we have time for one more question, I wanted to ask a rather broad one, being that you are a City graduate, I wanted to ask you to tell us more about your general process of formation as a psychoanalyst, and about the ways that your training as a clinical psychologist did prepare you, how it maybe didn’t prepare you to become a psychoanalyst, also how you made your decision to continue at New York Psychoanalytic, and, in general, if you have any advice for City students as they look to their own formation.

JW: Yeah, I like this question. If you had asked me while I was at City if I was happy, I would have said no, but I look back on it very happily, but I guess everything is always like that. It’s great because in a way you have more freedom than you’ll ever have, which you don’t understand. When you start working, you’re working all the time, and it’s not that you guys aren’t working all the time, but you have the flexibility that you have as a graduate student, and I would advise you to maximize it: go to everything, do everything you want to do, write everything you want to write because now is a great time to set that in motion. And I did. I went and I took classes at the New School and I took classes through the Consortium, and I went to all the meetings at Aprés Coup, and the Waldorf, and I was at IPTAR, and I was doing research. And I was really just exploring, and it wasn’t as if I wasn’t completely anxious and having a hard time, but I was trying to figure out what this thing was that I was in the middle of trying to train for. It’s also a nice time to be in analysis because you have the time to go and to go often, and to do it simultaneously as you begin to do the work, and I think that that can be a huge opening, to have those two things intersecting at the same time. So, I do think that it prepares you to be an analyst. And, in fact, what I’ve said to lots of my colleagues who have graduated and they think, “Oh, I always wanted to be an analyst, but now I just don’t know,” is that you should really see the way that the work is preparing you to do that already. You know, Lissa Weinstein who was my supervisor for five years and David Lichtenstein who was my supervisor for five years, they never treated what we were

doing as psychotherapy per se: it was just analysis less frequently. I see it the same way. There is something different when you have a patient coming four times a week, – it’s just more intense, everything is hotter – but you’re doing the same thing, so you’re already on the path. The problem that you’re going to face is actually that you know too much in comparison to other people who were in programs that weren’t psychodynamic, who weren’t supervised by psychoanalysts. So, you’re going to be bored by the time you get into analytic training. I’m trying to figure out how to do something about that for graduate students because I don’t see why you should take Freud 101; you’ve already done Freud 101; you’re somewhere else.

But you do need to make that leap between sitting in the chair and facing someone, and sitting and having them lie down because it’s a mental leap too, just to know that you’ve experienced the difference between those two. When you’re in analysis, you’re probably lying down. And I know that feeling that I have to get there to that place where I’m doing what my analyst had done, and it’s a certain kind of crossing that’s important. And it’s more in your future than it can be right now.

My advice would be to really do what you want to do and to not be afraid of authority because – I know that you have these people who are judging you, and you have to graduate, and you have to get people to sign off on you as a psychologist, and you have to pass the test, and you have to get the license – but all of these are just hoops. And who is going to stop you? And the other thing you don’t realize is that you’re paying for your education, and you’re paying a lot of money for it, so you have more rights than I think you ever really understand because of certain transferences that take place when you’re a student. And so, you shouldn’t be afraid.

MO: Okay, thank you very much, Jamieson.