Scholarly Dialogues--formerly called Masterclass, is an open discussion and learning session where small groups gather together with important scholars in the field to discuss 1-2 papers from their body of work. The intimacy of the setting allows participants to be able to ask personal questions about the author's ideas and share some of their own reactions and thinking about the material. Papers will be distributed in advance to registered attendees.

The Forgetting of Breath

If I were going to distill my central claim in On Breathing (Catapult, 2025) it would be that, like sexuality and language, breathing is subject to repression. How else could we explain the extraordinary act of destroying the air necessary for human life, or the meanness that has infected society since a pandemic that showed us the intimacy of the air we share? There is also a largely forgotten terrain of thinking about breath in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine that points to the way breathing is entangled with psyche, sexuality, and embodied speech. From Rank to Ferenczi, Reich, Jung, Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, another psychoanalysis comes to the surface when light is cast on this elusive human drive.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the session participants will be able to:

Understand the history of breathing as a theoretical and clinical concept.
Think about the politics of breathing in psychoanalysis and the contemporary clinical moment.
Think about the relevance of breathing for thinking about anxiety and sexual conflicts.

Jamieson Webster, PhD

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York; she teaches at The New School for Social Research; and she is on the board and faculty of Pulsion: An Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics. She is the author, most recently of, On Breathing (Catapult, 2025) and Disorganization and Sex (Divided, 2022); Remains to be Read: On Jacques Lacan, with Marcus Coelen, is forthcoming in 2026 (Columbia). She writes regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books; and she writes a column for Cultured Magazine. 

Continuing Education: This program is available for 2.50 continuing education credits. Participants must attend 100% of the program. Upon completion of the class evaluation, a certificate will be issued. This serves as documentation of attendance for all participants. Psychologists will have their participation registered through SPPP, Division 39. APS and SPPP are committed to accessibility and non-discrimination in continuing education activities and will conduct all activities in conformity with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles for Psychologists. If participants have special needs, reasonable efforts will be made to accommodate them. There is no commercial support for this program nor are there any relationships between the CE Sponsor, presenting organization, presenter, program content, research, grants, or other funding that could reasonably be construed as conflicts of interest.