When: Saturday 8th June 2024
Time: 19:30 – 21:00 BST
Where: Westminster Quakers 52 Saint Martin’s Lane London WC2N 4EA
Abstract:
While Freud once thought of humour as suffused with jouissance – with sexual and aggressive tension – he later felt that humour was subversive and has the power to challenge the super-ego which fuels jouissance. Of all the unconscious formations, humour is the most social. We always write a joke for somebody. It is a site of shared wit, pleasure and play. And yet, there is no joke without an element of repeated violence; an eye for destruction. Through looking at moments in the treatment of an adolescent boy, I will map the transformation of jouissance through humour, repetition and violence.
Bio:
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of Disorganisation & Sex (Divided, 2022), The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
Site Members and Trainees can buy tickets at the reduced price of £15.
Tickets are available to buy on Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/humour-violence-repetition-the-case-of-a-young-boy-and-his-mother-tickets-866543935237