Jamieson Webster

On Breathing in Psychoanalysis

   December 7-8, 2024

Kinzie Hotel

20 West Kinzie Street, Chicago 

& ZOOM

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.

Seminar Title: On Breathing in Psychoanalysis

At the center of disagreements between Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank on birth trauma is a question of the process of leaving the uterine environment, beginning to breathe, and the experience of anxiety that is traumatic. Birth trauma places this knot at the center of the constitution of the psyche as a defense against what is overwhelming. This fight was also a fight over the origin of the unconscious, the place where the subject is given birth to—or not, or only with great difficulty—pointing to the vicissitudes of trauma or resilience. The idea of a wish to return to the womb, to undo trauma and anxiety, requires psychoanalytic working-through. This was where the greatest disagreements between Freud and Rank arose. 

Looking at their fight, one wants to ask why there was such a struggle to name and claim this Archimedean point? And what does it mean that this defensive core is tied to women as mothers? Rank is theoretically a proto-feminist, and yet, the stated universal aim to return to the womb is cause for concern. What does it mean that the maternal is seen as a site of trauma and regressive desire? How do women experience being this place? 

Freud, it must be said didn’t want to claim this point or knot—maybe he didn’t have to—but the sons certainly did. While Freud’s neglect of the importance of the mother and hyper-emphasis on the father has been visited and re-visited, from the angle of birth trauma I think we begin to witness something important concerning his efforts to move away from this battleground. Not to erase the mother, but to leave something Real there intact; to not tear it apart prematurely or claim this space for oneself. We will look at some of the thinking about breath and birth that has evolved in the history of psychoanalysis in Freud, Ferenczi, Rank, Reich, Bion, Winnicott, Fenichel, and Lacan.

Readings: 

Bion, W.R. (1978) Four Discussions with W.R. Bion London: Harris Meltzer Trust

Bion, W.R. (1980) Bion in New York and Sao Paulo and Three Tavistock Seminars. London: Harris Meltzer Trust

Carson, A. (1992.) "The Gender of Sound" in Glass, Irony, and God New York: New Directions

Ferenczi, S (1922) “Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality” (out of print)

Ferenczi, S. (1923) The Unwelcome Child and its Death Instinct

Freud, S. (1977). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Norton. 

Freud, S. (2012). The letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside psychoanalysis (R. Kramer & E. J. Lieberman, Eds.). Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Loraux, N. (1995) The Extperiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and Greek Man. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Loraux, N. (1998). Mothers in Mourning. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Orenstein, P. (2024) “The Teen Trend of Sexual Chocking” in The New York Times Opinion: April 25, 2024

Rank, O. (1929). The Trauma of Birth. Harcourt, Trench, Trubner & Co., LTD. 

Rank, O. (2012). The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis. (ed. E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sloterdijk, P. (2009) Terror From the Air. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Winnicott, D. W. (1975)  "Chapter XIV. Birth Memories, Birth Trauma, and Anxiety." The International Psycho-Analytical Library, vol. 100, pp. 174-193.