Jamieson Webster and Patricia Gherovici celebrate the publication of 'Case by Case: Psychoanalysis and the Political' with Rachel Connolly.

Freud’s ‘talking cure’ and its offshoots are more widespread today than ever. But as the divisive issues of our time grow more urgent, a contentious question persists: must psychoanalysis remove itself from politics altogether in order to be effective? Or is it inherently political? Specific disagreements about how clinicians should or shouldn’t engage with imperialism, violence, race, and gender identity point to the broader question of where politics is situated in our psychic life. Is it on the periphery – a symptom or displacement – or right at the heart of the matter?

Patricia Gherovici and Jamieson Webster examine the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and politics through a sequence of case studies, exploring the many ways in which the political enters the consulting room. Ranging from early cases confronting homosexuality and race to idiosyncratic analyses disentangling the legacies of state and colonial violence, the authors illuminate how the political shapes our relationships to power, normativity, and identity. These historic cases are prescient of the political dilemmas confronting us today.

Rather than dismissing psychoanalysis as irrelevant or reducing it to a vehicle for political positions, Case by Case makes a galvanizing and challenging argument for what psychoanalysis can reveal about our political selves – and how it might transform them.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of On Breathing (2025), Disorganization & Sex (2022), Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018), and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She teaches at the New School for Social Research.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (2010), Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (2017), and Bodies to Wear (2025).

Rachel Connolly is a novelist and critic. She has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian and many other places. Her first novel Lazy City won a Betty Trask Award.

The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

Tickets: £10 General Admission, £8 Foyalty Member / £20 Book and Ticket, inc. a copy of Case by Case: Psychoanalysis and the Political (RRP £15)

Venue: The Auditorium (Level 6) at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road*

*Please note that the Auditorium at Foyles is fully accessible from the Ground floor lifts.

Description supplied by the event organiser.