Jamieson Webster introduces reader time and again to the moment that inaugurates desire, including the desire for psychoanalysis. She recapitulates the major philosophical questions implied by psychoanalytic practice and shows what captures readers' attention, and what remains enigmatic.

From its peculiar birth in Freud's self-analysis to its current state of deep crisis, psychoanalysis has always been a practice that questions its own existence. Like the patients that risk themselves in this act - it is somehow upon this threatened ground that the very life of psychoanalysis depends. Perhaps psychoanalysis must always remain in a precarious, indeed ghostly, position at the limit of life and death?