Conversion Disorder: Bodies, Symptoms, and Anxiety

Instructor: Jamieson Webster, PhD

This is an online live seminar and participants are expected to participant in the live discussion. However, if the participant cannot attend the live session they may review and engage with the recorded lecture.

Schedule:

Day: Sundays November 6, 13, 20, 27

Time: 1 PM EST (New York Time)

Description: In the twenty-first century, the body is the arena for political contestation and political claims: who receives care and who is exposed to risk, who is excluded and who has rights, who is granted the privilege of life and who is left to die, perhaps un-mourned. Returning to Freud’s early thoughts on “conversion” shows a landscape where the question of the body is always tied to a demand for radical structural change, indicating so much more than simply personal pathos. The body was at the cross-roads of the individual and the social-historical, seen as a “somatic preserve” with a potential for revolt that fascinated, mystified, and at times, frightened Freud. “Conversion” was part of the very creation of the unconscious and was also the source of working through in psychoanalysis. 

When thinking of the classical image of hysterical symptoms many bear in mind the Freudian idea of translating these symptoms into language as a texture of memory, conflict, and wish. But what if the process wasn’t so uni-directional? What could an embodied psychoanalysis look like? What problems does this pose for the listening analyst? From Freud’s early definition of conversion, to his notion of the drive on the frontier of the somato-psychic, to Lacan’s distrust of knowledge exemplified in the symptom’s symbolic over-interpretation, and his focus on what he names jouissance, set-up in relation to anxiety, we will re-consider the centrality of the body in psychoanalytic process.