Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

On Breathing

From first moments to last rites, the air around us is not only essential to life but also carries our speech. So being silenced can feel like death.

End Notes: Palliative Care in a Pandemic

Many, in the early days, said the virus did not stop at borders, did not respect hierarchies, that it affected all equally. Covid-19 was democratic. We were deceived.

Psychoanalysis in Time of Plague

Jacques Lacan said that psychoanalysis had to be invented to deal with the strangeness of the human condition, not to fix it, but to expose that strangeness to itself. This is what feels so uncanny about doing psychoanalysis during a plague.  

Riding in Cars with Jacques Lacan

If Freud had a fascinating and symptomatic relation to trains, for Lacan, it was certainly cars. And he placed the car at the very center of his own analysis.

The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life

We do have a choice about whether to medicate and how we do so. I think we have forgotten this because of how easy it is to obtain pills, along with the pervasive idea that our problems are simply chemical or genetic. By elucidating some basic psychoanalytic notions, I hope to disrupt our blind passion for prescriptions.