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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s therapeutic craze These days, we prefer to treat our mental ailments with gluten-free diets, astrology as self-help, mindfulness apps, and big pharma, the latter of which Webster, a Freudian with a private practice in New York City, elegantly critiqued in The New York Review of Books last year To commit, as psychoanalysis asks of you, to multiple sessions a week for an indeterminate period of treatment, is so uncontemporary, it’s due for a comeback If anyone can make that happen, it’s Webster, who is taking an on-the-ground approach to psychoanalytic advocacy, regularly publishing, lecturing, and performing in local academic, art, literary, and even fashion contexts   At the last New York Fashion Week, Webster, alongside philosopher Chiara Bottici and Professor of Visual Culture Melissa Ragona, performed a panel discussion inspired by Batsheva Hay’s modest dress as part of the designer’s Spring 2020 presentation For the occasion, Webster wore a flouncy powder pink Batsheva frock; risking infantilising femininity, the look rather reaffirmed the analyst’s – and female – authority Ten months earlier, Webster donned a white clinician’s coat, clipboard in hand, for the ‘immersive theatre’ performance Sick! The Psychoanalytic Field Hospital Led by Webster and philosophical investigator Todd Altschuler, alongside poet, lawyer and performance artist Vanessa Place, this ticketed event invited participants to subject themselves to a realistically-abusive fictitious mental hospital hosted in a former limousine garage At the end, the audience of some eighty-odd patients were applauded by the doctors for having survived, as the hospital transformed into a kitsch tiki-bar Valhalla The play was a launch for Webster’s second book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation was her first) Webster has also co-authored Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine with Simon Critchley; Figure Out with Marcus Coelen; and has an essay in the John Currin: Men monograph   The cover of Conversion Disorder features a wisp of smoke on black, as if a

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Art

March 2013

Beyond the Mainstream and into the Digital

Vid Simoniti

Art

March 2013

Claire Bishop. Everywhere I go, some curator or artist wants to be rid of this turbulent critic.   In 2006...

fiction

September 2012

Sarah Palin Night

Agustín Fernández Mallo

TR. Michael McDevitt

fiction

September 2012

It was a Sunday afternoon, siesta time: my phone buzzed in my pocket. ‘Is this Agustín Fernández Mallo?’ ‘Yes,...

feature

January 2017

Take Comfort

Heather Radke

feature

January 2017

I. One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room. She moved...

 

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