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Jamieson Webster
- Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City and teaches at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing(Peninusula, 2025) as well as Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022), Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine(Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as many psychoanalytic publications.
Sublimation and its Discontents: The Male Artist
Many artists remain phobic about psychoanalysis—wary of our supposed omniscience, our talent for over-interpretation, and the prefabricated grids of knowledge we are imagined to impose upon their work. What, after all, can we offer to a practice already in intimate dialogue with the unconscious, especially when that practice works? Yet the encounter between psychoanalysis and art remains crucial, perhaps now more than ever, if we allow ourselves to be taught by artists: about materiality and its containment or excesses, about iteration and compulsion, about caricature as a portrait of refusal, perversity, and new species of humor and compassion. These are not merely aesthetic matters; they mark the very threshold between idealization and sublimation, between the artwork as defense and the artwork as transformative. Drawing on several living contemporary male artist I have worked with—Caroll Dunham, John Currin, Ed Atkins, Joseph Yeager, and Jordan Wolfson—I will explore this edge. I am looking at how their practices unsettle analytic assumptions, expand our clinical imagination, and remind us that psychoanalysis itself must remain a mutable, contaminable, and creative form.
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Stijn Vanheule
- Stijn Vanheule is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical psychological Assessment at Ghent University since 2006. He is head of the Center for Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Ghent University and author of ‘The Subject of Psychosis – A Lacanian Perspective’ (2011), ‘Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited’ (2017) and ‘Why Psychosis is Not So Crazy’ (2024). He is Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst, member of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
Old love never dies: How Lacan revisited his Aimée case
In 1975, during a lecture in the USA, and amidst formulations that bypass his structural model of psychosis, Lacan returns to Aimée—the central case from his 1932 doctoral thesis—indicating that it is a case of erotomania. With this remark, Lacan alludes to his early engagement with Gaëtan de Clérambault’s psychiatric work, while simultaneously forging connections with his then ongoing Seminar XXIII. In this paper, I systematically explore how, in this and other brief remarks from the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan reconsidered the Aimée case, focusing on how these reflections can be read in light of his theory of sexual non-rapport and the accompanying problem of jouissance.
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Isabel Millar
- Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. Her first book, based on her doctoral thesis, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence was published in 2021 in The Palgrave Lacan Series and has received acclaim from major figures in philosophy, psychoanalysis, film theory and contemporary art including Alenka Zupancic, Lorenzo Chiesa, Todd McGowan and Jake Chapman. She is currently writing her next book Patipolitics for Bloomsbury Philosophy.
Severance: Temporality and the Patipolitical Mind