The Mourning Cloak

Works Reviewed. Webster, Jamieson. Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 303 pages.

Psychoanalysis, ever since its Freudian genesis, has been plagued by a certain categorical ambiguity; it touches on, and is set against, medicine, philosophy, religion, psychology, psychiatry, self-help, literature and so on. This ambiguity lends, perhaps, an aura of mystique to psychoanalysis, at the same time as it leads to a degree of suspicion being cast in the direction of the practice. Is this not an anachronistic endeavour; a cult leftover from the scientific enthusiasm of the early twentieth century? Even if Freud had witnessed some early successes in his career, the seemingly miraculous potency of the talking cure had faded during his own lifetime; today the task of the analyst promises “the perpetuation of pain more than its alleviation.” (1) The promise of pain, from someone in what purports to be a healing profession, is met with a degree of understandable suspicion. Is this not further evidence that Freud has been definitively proven wrong, and should be abandoned in favour of a more virile and effective approach. Cognitive behaviour therapy, for example.

Into this scene Jamieson Webster, a practicing analyst, launches her meditation on the possibility of psychoanalytic practice today, in her book Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. As the title suggests it is a return to an early problem of psychoanalysis, perhaps the original problem, that of conversion disorder, known to Freud under the name hysteria or conversion hysteria. She frames the discussion in terms of courage and patience. “Who has the courage for psychoanalysis anymore? Or, to put it another way, who has the time and energy in a world where ‘being busy’ is one’s raison d’être?” (1) More pointedly, she asks who has the courage to be an analyst in a world uninterested in the kind of change psychoanalysis has to offer. The implicit answer is, perhaps, that she does, and that in her reader she has found an audience sympathetic to the cause.

The anachronism of being an analyst holds, for Webster, a singular kind of value for the present time. “We may have lost recognition,” she writes, “but that does not mean we do not have a place, especially in a world that embraces the idea of being “mentally ill,” whatever that might mean.” (5) As a practitioner of an anachronistic vocation myself – an Anglican priest – some of the challenges are ones with which I am intimately familiar. The concern for alleviating suffering, along with the question of how one can possibly do this work with integrity. The conversion of Webster’s title has a definite religious overtone, and this is perhaps part of what drew me to the book. But only part. Religion, in the sociological sense in which it is often understood, is only one aspect of my work. The subtitle – Listening to the body– offered a far more compelling line of inquiry. The work of listening, in the face of terrible anxiety, is what takes courage. Listening to the body, in all of its singularity and suffering, when anxious collective fantasies threaten to overwhelm at every turn, takes singular determination, and it takes time.

Conversion, in the sense that Webster intends it, has to do with Freud’s discovery that it was possible for nothing more than speaking to alter the body and the psyche. At the heart of this word is, for Webster, the foundation of the psychoanalytic practice. It is a broad term, and pairing the word conversion with disorder denotes the limitation of the body as a medical object. Conversion disorder, according to the Medical Encyclopedia, is “a mental illness in which the patient exhibits symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.”¹ This is, clearly, dangerous territory, we are leaving the arena of medical expertise and entering into territories charted by other disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and religion. It is important, however that this turn, even when it touches upon the religious, resist the path of promise or pity. Webster does not mention conversion therapy, though it would offer an apt example of how the question of the body is cut short by the promise of a conversion from the kind of body that is to be pitied to the kind of body that is collectively accepted. This is not to be the path for the psychoanalyst. The uniqueness of the psychoanalytic cure lies, she writes, in its “courage for conversion without promise or pity.” (10)

There may be something of the beleaguered practitioner in this profession of courage, and I find the intransigence at once admirable and disconcerting. In my own perspective it is more admirable than disconcerting, since it is precisely the threat of collective anxiety that is resolutely identified, and refused. Perhaps Webster hopes to confront the spectres of psychoanalysis with the manifesto of its unique core; “a courage for conversion without promise or pity.”

It is a spare manifesto, and one which Webster deploys beautifully across a series of twelve chapters: Daybreak, Music of The Future, Father Can’t You See, Never the Right Man, I am Not A Muse, Coitus Interruptus, Three Visions of Psychoanalysis, How to Splinter/How to Burn, Forged in Stones, The Sliding of the Ring, The Analyst’s Analysis. At the heart of each chapter that manifesto is put into play through the act of listening to the body – the central act of psychoanalytic practice.

In one of my favourite chapters, Three Visions of Psychoanalysis, she brings the philosophers Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Luc Nancy , and Michel Foucault into conversation with Freud. “The body is the unconscious: seeds of ancestors sequenced in its cells,” writes Nancy, and there is a resonance here with Freud’s enigmatic statement: “The psyche is extended, knows it not.” These three thinkers are resourced, in part, to undo the primacy of meaning and interiority in psychoanalytic practice. Webster is concerned that the themes of identity and interiority are concepts which have led psychoanalysis astray, and she wants to redefine the territory. Knowledge, for Webster, has become a sort of trap effectively reducing the body and its experiences to the realm of metaphorical language. Bachelard resists this reduction through his emphasis on the primacy of fire; a psychoanalysis of fire. Rather than moving from literal fire to the fire of the human heart, Bachelard goes in the opposite direction. The desire for knowledge and control, what might be spoken of as a spark of knowledge, leads back to real fire. “Through fire everything changes, and when we want everything to change we call on fire,” writes Bachelard. This desire for change, for conversion without promise or pity, is what Webster is after as well – to track the insistence of the body in and through language.

With Jean-Luc Nancy we enter territory with which I am more familiar, for what Webster draws from Nancy is the phrase, “this is my body,” in which she reads the insistent ‘this’ as at once comical and chaotic. “Sensory certitude, as soon as it is touched, turns into chaos, a storm where all sense runs wild. Body is certitude shattered and blown to bits,” writes Nancy. Given this shattering of certitude, how is it possible to say “this?”

This is where, for me, the psychoanalytic practice comes nearest the; Eucharistic practice of Christianity. “This is my body, broken for you,” says the Christ, and there is something inexplicably weird about it. How can the one whose body is broken say this is my body? It is a paradoxical injunction that the understanding has to wrestle with, and all too often attempts to domesticate by turning it into a simple metaphor. The body offers itself as the place where meaning occurs, and to place veil of knowledge and meaning back here is to make a judgment we are no capable of making. “The body is an urgency without knowledge, without judgment or value.” (191)

Following Foucault, Webster, takes us next into the madness of language unmoored from sense, wit the unsettling admission that, perhaps, ‘free association was always this mad exteriorization, this flight or fight for freedom as a radical passage to ‘the outside.’ Outside what? Outside the body, outside language. This part of the chapter was, for me, the most difficult to follow. Webster was positing Foucault as a limiting point, or oppositional voice to the psychoanalytic project, and therefore enshrining madness as the lack constitutive of the psychoanalytic project. This, at least, is how I read her. ‘Language is not the space of reflection; it is a mode of action,” she writes, and I am sympathetic to the sentiment. A certain interpretation of the Gospel of John even allows for this interpretation; in principio erat verbum. Those who have read me before, though, will know that my position on action is heavily indebted to the work of Maurice Blondel. Any scaffolding that references action without working clearly through it the way Blondel did is likely to be shaky, and Foucault has not done this work.

Foucault, through a rather facile opposition of law and sense to play and madness, pretends to a freedom that may be nothing more than the capriciousness of the will. The interplay between action and contemplation – and contemplation as a form of action – is obliterated in an action that seems already to know too much. An action, moreover that is dedicated not to freedom, but to annihilation. “Yes or no, does human life make sense?” This was Blondel’s famous opening line, and it echoes everywhere the project of existence is undertaken. Thought, to be sure, is a strange form of human play with deadly stakes, but a form nonetheless, and it is not entirely about control.

Throughout my reading, and throughout this meditation I have endeavoured to listen, to listen for the body not only in psychoanalysis, but in my own practice of pastoral ministry which is distinct, and yet somehow analogous. I have endeavoured also to listen as a reader, and whether or not certain prejudices or biases have prevented an accurate audition will be up to my own readers to judge. Or not, for the purpose of reading is perhaps not to judge, but to make space for the body that urgently insists, and that asks for words to do the impossible thing of becoming flesh.

1“Conversion Disorder” in Medline Plus available online at https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000954.htm . Accessed on June 11, 2019.