Katie Tobin Disorganisation & Sex , Jamieson Webster , (Divided Publishing, 2024), 240 pages, £11.99 . .
You describe psychoanalysis as uniquely concerned with the singularity of the subject. I was wondering how Disorganisation & Sex illustrates this singularity in the context of sexuality and its discontents. The book is actually full of case studies, surprisingly, and they picked a lot of those elements out.
There’s also even a funny run through Freud’s five cases – like a kind of slapdash, like ‘let’s do all of them in five seconds’. It’s difficult as an analyst to write about patients and much older patients, but the idea was to show how we think about a case and it doesn’t really conform to the standard ideas of ‘this is X, Y, or Z with problem X, Y, or Z with solution X, Y, or Z’, to show you the wildness of psychoanalysis. I just presented here the case of the young adolescent boy that’s in the book to the British Psychoanalytic Society site.
I think it freaked them out a little bit. I mean, fair enough. One of the things I wanted to talk about was transference and how you navigate this in practice because it’s so fascinating to me but something I know relatively little about.
I mean, the ideas on transference are very varied between the different theories. I say one way to think of transference is what allows the patient to work; they hand something over to you that allows them to work on their life and on their unconscious. So that’s like a.