Summary of "Disorganisation & Sex" with Jamieson Webster

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Cassandra Seltman
Guest: Jamieson Webster
Book: Disorganisation & Sex (Divided Publishing, 2022)
Date: November 17, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode delves into Jamieson Webster's collection of essays, Disorganisation & Sex, which investigates sexuality as a radically disorganizing force in psychoanalysis, institutions, and culture. Host Cassandra Seltman and Webster explore the relationship between patient and analyst, the limits and possibilities of psychoanalytic institutions, the meaning and action of transference, and the evolving landscape of sexuality and gender.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature and Composition of Disorganisation & Sex

• Essays over Argument: The book grew out of a collection of Webster’s existing essays, shaped by her publishers rather than a central thesis. The theme of the “disorganizing force of sex” emerges as a connective tissue throughout.
  • “My publishers actually chose the title Disorganisation & Sex ... they saw this theme emerging ... in terms of the disorganizing force of sex and the way that this impacts psychoanalytic training and the way we listen to patients and the critique of culture. So I have them to thank. It wasn’t me.” (03:10)

2. Writing Style: Blurring Analyst and Patient Voices

• Webster intentionally blurs the discourse between patient and analyst in both her clinical work and writing, arguing that the analyst’s perspective is always informed by their own experience as a patient.
  • “In a way, I try not to separate them so much, insofar as being a patient is so intrinsic to becoming an analyst.” (05:11)
• She questions whether analytic writing should cater to specialists or be more publicly accessible, ultimately preferring a mix: “I sort of begin to assume a certain kind of knowledge on the part of the public and also distrust thinking that analysts have any particular knowledge in general.” (06:13)

3. Psychoanalysis and the Collective

• Webster grapples with psychoanalysis’ relevance beyond individual therapy, confronting criticisms like Preciado’s regarding its normalization and gatekeeping tendencies.
  • “Is there something that psychoanalysis has to say to politics or the social or collective forms? That’s not just critique, that’s perhaps contributing to fixing things.” (07:46)
• She underscores the need for psychoanalysis to move beyond critique and to meaningfully engage with collective, political, and artistic spaces.

4. Critique and Vision of Psychoanalytic Institutes

• Webster draws on Lacan’s critique of institutional rigidities, advocating for radical openness, interdisciplinarity, and breaking the hierarchical model of training.
  • “Psychoanalytic training is based on an experience of analysis... analytic institutes, above all else, should understand that transference needs to become an interesting radical working relationship, and not just in the interests of sedimenting power and institutionalizing forms of knowledge.” (10:08)
• Discusses international models, such as Laplanche's research society and experimental US groups, but insists no one has achieved true institutional openness.
  • “Even if you create a more diverse and eclectic set of knowledges, it doesn’t mean that you’re experimenting so much with what it means to be a candidate and then an analyst... I just don’t know that we’re there yet.” (13:00)

5. Transference and Institutional Stagnation

• Webster and Seltman discuss the unexamined transference towards institutes and how institutional practices both venerate and weaponize transference.
  • “Transference is used with reverence, on the one hand...as a way of dismissing people...both of these are a problem.” (15:26)
• She articulates the creative potential of transference for disruption and renewal, warning that institutes often suppress such forces, leading to bureaucratic stagnation.
• Memorable quote:
  • “The institutes just start to go into this mode of ruthless bureaucratic bureaucracy, like organizing for the sake of organization...trying to move all the disruptive forces to the outside. Which is why the most interesting candidates who are trying to disrupt things often get severely punished by institutes—which we all know.” (19:45)

6. The Role and Limits of Action in Psychoanalysis

• Webster explores the psychoanalytic act, grounding it in unconscious connections, slips, and “half acts.” She emphasizes the analyst’s responsibility to wait for unconscious action to emerge rather than react punitively.
  • “Psychoanalysis gives us a model of this, of these half acts that analysis helps us seize as our true action that we don’t know.” (22:19)
• She contrasts this with institutional rigidity and the tendency to suppress ‘acting out’ in candidates.
  • “Why don’t we create a container and a frame for [radical pot-stirring, disorganizing education] and do what we do the best, which is to help them keep doing it and not stop them.” (26:17)

7. Case Example: Containing Danger and Death-Drive

• Webster discusses a challenging case ("Thea") involving risk and substance use. She emphasizes interpretation and maintaining the analytic frame, not ultimatums or punitive responses, in the face of analysts’ and institutions’ anxieties about death and danger.
  • “I’m not telling you not to do drugs, but I’m not gonna pretend as if they’re helping you breathe only when they’re actually stopping you from breathing, potentially and literally.” (27:22)

8. Endings: Analysis, Death, and Messy Closure

• Webster reflects on the “endings” in Freud’s famous case studies—ambiguous and unsatisfying, yet ultimately more honest and relatable than idealized conclusions.
  • “I wanted to run through these endings both for what was so wrong about them...but also talk about what was kind of beautiful about them, their failed endings...” (31:10)
• She connects this to Lacan’s principle of abrupt endings: embracing incompleteness over pursuing false totality.
  • “He felt like you could kind of operate under the illusion of the totality...as if we don’t know that the end is so unbelievably messy and that we disintegrate...” (34:22)

9. Sex, Surgery, and the Materiality of Enjoyment

• Inspired by Preciado and cultural references (e.g., Cronenberg), Webster discusses contemporary preoccupation with surgical metaphors in sex and identity.
  • “Freud’s use of surgical metaphors and then his abandonment of surgical metaphors... Preciado also wants to bring back this kind of medico, surgical, biological, hacking stuff...the materiality of sex, that when we talk about sex, we are talking about a body, we’re talking about enjoyment and the literality of enjoyment...” (37:38)

10. Masculinity, Catastrophe, and “Genital Catastrophe”

• Webster explores toxic masculinity and Forensy’s concept of “genital catastrophe”—that genitals are evolutionary accidents, sites of nothingness, anxiety, and extinction.
  • “All our wishes and our holding ourselves together and idea of who we are and where we came from and where we’re going to go is at this place of nothing. So we have to identify with these ridiculous genitals...and he calls this catastrophe...genital catastrophe because it amounts to nothing.” (44:15)
• Connecting this to large-scale anxieties (e.g., climate change, extinction), she suggests society is turning away from sexuality as catastrophe looms.

11. Erotomania, Frigidity, and Polarization of Sexuality

• Webster asserts that, under existential pressure, sexuality becomes polarized: forced eroticism and inhibition co-exist, pushing people away from genuine libidinal connection.
  • “We’re both hyper connected and totally isolated. We’re both frigid and erotic...to be inside the psychoanalytic act, to be inside desire, to be inside sexuality is, is an overturning of that polarity...” (47:08)

12. Genitals, Preciado, and the Wish for Erasure

• Reference to Preciado’s “Contra-Sexual Manifesto,” discussing a cultural/artistic wish to erase the catastrophe signified by genitals.
  • “There’s a desire to get rid of the genitals because they are the sign of catastrophe. But I think the psychoanalytic stance would be okay, but we need to do that not as an erasure of catastrophe...” (49:02)

13. Current and Future Work

• Webster is writing about adolescence, Erik Erikson’s analysis of America, RV culture, abortion, and a longer piece on “breathing”—all circling questions of identity, movement, constraint, and basic drives.
  • “Erikson ... makes the brilliant statement that, like, we hate old people because they can’t move anymore. And he goes, but they solve this problem with RV culture...so brilliant and so weird.” (50:04)
  • “There was something this great wealth of infantile sexuality like teaching, passing, massaging, holding, caring, passing...” (52:24)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the role of the analyst:
  “The experience of analysis...gives you a sense of what’s possible, which is also why you have to go as far as possible, which is a big part of kind of what Lacan brings up.” (05:15)

• On institutional violence:
  “The most interesting candidates who are trying to disrupt things often get severely punished by institutes—which we all know.” (19:45)

• On the paralysis of endings:
  “We will not see the end of our projects, and we will not see the end of all of our goals. And it will be even more a coming to bear on the what was not done than the image of what’s done.” (35:15)

• On sexuality and social catastrophe:
  “For Forensy, this would 100% be all of us phylogenetically going back to something we actually already know. There already was climate change. In the climate change to come, we all went through somewhere in our genetic history, the ice age, which led to the creation of our genitals...” (45:52)

• On masturbation fantasies:
  “There’s farting, there’s washing, there’s massaging, there’s passing someone around and abusing them, but there’s no sex per se. And there’s very beautiful, fascinating uses of language in the masturbation fantasies that really feel encoded into it beyond the haver of the fantasy...” (53:14)

Important Timestamps

• 03:10: Origins of the book and meaning of the title
• 07:46: Psychoanalysis and the social/collective
• 10:08: Institutional critique (Lacan; training models)
• 15:26: Transference in institutes
• 19:45: Bureaucratic stasis and punishing disruptors
• 22:19: The psychoanalytic act and unconscious action
• 26:17: Pot-stirring and containing education
• 27:22: Drugs, danger, and analytic containment
• 31:10: Freud’s failed case endings
• 34:22: Messy endings and Lacan’s cut
• 37:38: Surgery, sex, Preciado, and materiality
• 44:15: Genital catastrophe and masculinity
• 47:08: Frigidity, erotomania, and modern sex
• 49:02: Genital erasure and Preciado
• 50:04: Current projects and the American penchant for movement
• 53:14: Masturbation fantasies and infantile sexuality

Tone & Language

The discussion balances analytic rigor with playful, poetic association—mirroring Webster's literary style and psychoanalytic methods. The exchange is frank, intellectually adventurous, at times self-reflexive and irreverent.

For Listeners

This episode is a must for anyone interested in the lived difficulties of psychoanalytic training and the cultural realities of sex, desire, and institutional power. Webster’s perspective is both critical and creative, offering a compelling vision of psychoanalysis as a space for disruption, creativity, and facing the messiness inherent in desire and endings.