It was an honour to participate and have the opportunity to share with the author —so greatly appreciated and admired by me— the following reflections and questions:

Deborah Levy says that every time she reads Jamieson, she falls in love with life all over again. Something similar happens to me: every time I read her, I fall in love with psychoanalysis again. And that, after so much time —and money— invested in this endeavor, is deeply appreciated.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what it is in her writing that I don’t find in other authors. Perhaps it’s her ability to connect deeply contemporary concerns with classical questions of psychoanalytic theory and clinic. In doing so, she offers novelty in repetition, pushing us to keep thinking.

It may also have to do with the fact that she puts her body into the text — deliberately. Or with something more formal: the way she weaves together clinical cases, autobiography, theory, following the logic of the text rather than a preexisting agenda.

The book that brings us together today, Disorganisation & Sex, reads to me almost like a manifesto. The red cover of the English edition, the exclamatory titles like “End Your Analysis!” or assertive ones like “Damaged Life,” reinforce that impression. Perhaps that wasn’t the intention, but I do think the book defends a particular way of doing psychoanalysis — and with it, its unique function and necessary place in the world.

Throughout the book, Jamieson returns to the proposals of Freud and Lacan regarding psychoanalytic technique and the analyst’s position. The patient is asked to associate freely: that is, to say whatever comes to mind without censorship. The analyst, for their part, practices abstinence: abstaining from giving opinions, advice, or rescue. They do not heal from a place of moral authority, but from its subversion.

To do this, the analyst must split their attention between the patient, their own self-restraint, and intellectual activity; they cannot indulge in narcissism. In Jamieson’s words: “The analytic position is one the analyst does not identify with or take it as equal to him or herself; it is merely a space occupied by the one who welcomes discourse, who supports a question but does not answer the question, leaving that answer to come from the patient.”

The analyst listens to the analysand’s speech, to their signifiers — but can only do so by silencing their own conscious knowledge and letting themselves be pierced by both the patient’s unconscious voice and their own. Interpretation, then, must be as surprising for the analyst as it is for the patient. As if it literally fell out of their mouth.

But Jamieson also points out what might prevent the analyst from sustaining this position: the desire to hold onto a place of prestige and power; affiliation with institutions that have their own interests; and —if I may add— the analyst’s own ideas about what constitutes a “good life,” or even their political inclinations.

Today, there is a great deal of discussion around the violences psychoanalysis has exercised —and sometimes still exercises— on those who dissent from the norm, especially the heteronorm. This is the context from which critiques like Paul Preciado’s emerge. But Jamieson writes:

“There is a great desire for psychoanalysis to be the site of collective transformation. I understand that desire: to want psychoanalytic change to work beyond the one-on-one relationship, beyond our impotent work, patient by patient. But I have my doubts that it can be more than that without degenerating into sectarian control, without losing the intensity created by time and singular listening, which are necessary for true transformation.”

With that in mind, I’d like to ask you a first question, Jamieson:

We know that many of the critiques of psychoanalysis stem from its complicity in symbolic and normative violence — especially toward sexual and gender dissidence — and that responding to these critiques often requires taking clear and affirmative political positions. However, a central part of psychoanalytic ethics has been precisely not to adopt a prescriptive stance on what is desirable or valuable for the subject, but rather to sustain the transference without directing it toward a norm.

(1) How, then, can psychoanalysis respond critically to these forms of violence without abandoning its structural commitment to singularity and unconscious knowledge? How can we sustain an ethics of abstinence —neither moralizing nor normative— without disavowing the social and political effects of the power position that analysts sometimes occupy or assume?

My second question, more clinical in nature, relates to what you revisit in the book about the beginning of analysis. Lacan said that analysis can only begin when the patient formulates a question — an implicit demand for analysis — and that preliminary sessions should lead to this point. You also cite Edward Glover, who claimed that people no longer ask questions, and therefore no longer truly occupy the position of analyst.

(2) Have you observed this in your own clinical practice? Do you think we find it harder today to formulate truly analytic questions? And practically speaking, what kind of question must be posed for an analysis to really begin?

I’d like to conclude the section on psychoanalytic culture by referring to the chapter titled “Solitude,” which I found especially beautiful. There, you reflect on what it means to be in training: the strange and demanding experience of occupying the position of analyst for the first time, of standing in that uncertain space between one’s personal history and the history of psychoanalysis itself.

You recount the path of Rosine Lefort, a patient of Lacan and a pioneer in working with young children diagnosed with infantile psychosis. The case of Nadia is central: a pre-verbal child with whom Rosine manages to open a fundamental process of symbolization, a separation that makes exchange and desire possible.

During this work with Nadia, Rosine interrupts her own analysis because she cannot sustain both processes simultaneously. And that interruption, far from being an abandonment, marks a gap that allows for the emergence of her desire as an analyst — just as the introduction of distance marks a founding separation for Nadia. Rosine’s invention of herself as a psychoanalyst becomes synonymous with the child’s cure.

You write: “If desire transforms into a desire for psychoanalysis, then it’s a desire we must let the trainees invent for themselves.” And you warn that when training becomes a set of prescribed rules, that desire is extinguished.

So my third question would be: (3) how can we envision an institution that, without renouncing the regulatory frameworks that are historically situated and necessary for practice, can also sustain that space of invention, of desire, and of solitude that training requires? How do we avoid institutional belonging smothering what is most alive in the analytic experience?

Finally, at one point in the book, you mention that one of Lacan’s least recognized gestures was separating the truth that emerges from Freud’s discovery, psychoanalysis, from the imaginary and phantasmatic component tied to Freud’s own desire. This made me think of the very birth of psychoanalysis —Freud’s self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams— where theory and personal experience are inseparably intertwined. Psychoanalysis emerges there as an embodied theory: thinking oneself means dreaming, writing, interpreting oneself.

Something of that also runs through your writing. When you write the appendix in Conversion Disorder, you get appendicitis; when you work on panic, panic dreams appear. The body responds, as if analytic writing could not avoid housing something of the Real. This brought to mind the notion of autotheory —a term launched by Preciado and made central by Maggie Nelson— and its commitment to conceptual elaboration infused with lived experience.

So my final question would be: (4) how do you think about the link between psychoanalysis and autotheory? What place does the auto-analytic dimension have in the analyst’s writing, but also in the subjective elaboration of the analysand?