BOOK REVIEW

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster

Some phenomena combine a simultaneity of omnipresence and subtlety. This is particularly true of breathing. A certain degree of distance from the continuous conscious experience of breathing seems necessary in order not to irritate the breathing rhythms that are essential for survival and to relieve our perceptual apparatus. Our attention is only focused on breathing when the regular flow of breath is disturbed or when there are abrupt changes in breathing frequency. At the same time, it is surprising that the subject of breathing has attracted so little psychoanalytical interest. Jamieson Webster, New York psychoanalyst and professor at The New School for Social Research, addresses this gap and examines the phenomenon of breathing from various perspectives. Based on the thesis that one of the main assumptions of psychoanalysis is the forgetting or repression of sexuality, she assumes that “we must add breathing to our list of amnesias” (p. 4) and even states that breathing is a “hidden navel in our field” (p. 20). For Webster, the pandemic and the birth of her second daughter, which brought her “back to an intimacy with air and breath that I had forgotten” (p. 3), were decisive factors in her preoccupation with the topic. 

And so Webster’s treatise begins with the infant’s first breath, the moment of the first assurance of its own autonomy and existence. The first breath is a first step toward individuation, as the infant is separated from the care provided by the mother’s body via the umbilical cord after birth. Breathing therefore forms a point of contact between subject and object, inside and outside. Following Winnicott’s ideas, the author traces the developmental lines of the infant’s maturation. She describes how the cry, as a modulation of breathing, enables survival and interaction. She illustrates how the root of all oral pleasure lies in the use of the lungs and air. Recalling René Spitz’s dictum that the baby sees with the mouth, Webster defines what it means to breathe: All the gratifying activities of sucking, babbling, singing, and crying are alloyed with the respiratory apparatus and air. This inseparable connection can also be found in further development. In psychoanalysis, the talking cure, speech is dependent on the modulation of breathing. The breathing and the air that we share with others is, on the one hand, in a position that connects us with each other and, on the other hand, as it is inherent in the act of birth, separates us from others. The connecting element is found, for example, in the act of speech, when the baby can be calmed by addressing the primary object, the breathing can relax and lull the infant into a peaceful state, which Webster refers to as “lung to lung” (p. 24) communication. The importance of language is central to her Lacanian approach, and she develops a figure of thought that assumes a close connection between breathing, language, and sexuality. 

Based on her own experience as an asthmatic and as a mother of an asthmatic son, Webster outlines psychodynamic considerations on respiratory diseases. The interactional moment she emphasizes can already be found in Winnicott (1941), who recommended further exploring bronchial diseases in their interpersonal dimension. Webster leads the reader to the considerations of analysts of the first generation: for example, she refers to Otto Fenichel’s assumption that asthmatic attacks—think of the call or cry for the mother in a performative guise—represent a longing for maternal protection, or Sándor Ferenczi’s hypothesis that asthmatic illnesses arise due to an inadequately caring environment. Webster builds on these ideas; according to Webster, asthma attacks throw the child back to an early being, a physical being, in the absence of an object. The references to the work of Maria Rhode (1994) on “autistic breathing” (p. 48), in which phenomena such as hyperventilation or loud breathing are understood as an autistic barrier against the other, are also extremely fascinating. This reveals an object dimension of breathing that relates to the Other; e.g., in which the object is excluded.

Webster reminds us that breathing phenomena were and are involved in a variety of neurotic symptoms and refers to the first patients of psychoanalysis, who developed swallowing difficulties, feelings of suffocation, and coughing tics. Nowadays, we experience the importance of breathing in anxiety disorders, with their high prevalence, and in a heightened form in panic attacks, in which the ability to breathe seems to be lost. 

Webster succeeds in explaining psychoanalytical concepts and theories almost casually and pointedly in her publication. For example, readers learn about Wilfred Bion’s conceptualization of projective identification and his reflections on the intrapsychic experience of the infant, Wilhelm Reich’s thoughts on breathing, or Otto Rank’s remarks on the trauma of birth (1924), in which the first experience of fear coincides with the first breath. Webster goes on to consider symptoms such as “vocal tics, hiccups, laughter, yawning” (p. 214), which make use of the breathing apparatus. The clinical considerations are interwoven with anthropological explorations and digressions on the history of the development of breathing. Of course, the book does not do without a consideration of “Eastern spiritual practices, yoga and wellbeing” (p. 107). With a critical distance, which is particularly directed at the profit-oriented exploitation of this practice, Webster reports on her own experiences as a yoga practitioner and introduces the reader to the basic assumptions of yoga.

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Starting with the second part of the book, titled “Asphyxiation,” the focus shifts from clinical explorations to embedding the phenomenon of breathing in the socio-cultural matrix. After the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, air underwent a caesura in the attribution of meaning, from a neutral and nurturing environment to a potentially death-bringing carrier. Breathing in and out was framed as a potentially lethal act, and the connection between air, breathing, and death, forced its way back to the surface of consciousness. Webster herself worked in a New York hospital at the time and describes the unbearable anxious-aggressive behavior of the hospital staff, who succumbed to the unreflected countertransference experience in the face of their patients’ struggle for air.

However, the signifier of suffocation in this part of the book is by no means limited to those affected by and the victims of the pandemic. Webster broadens the lens of observation to include the political situation in the United States, the prevailing racism, police violence, armed conflicts, and the climate crisis. 

The threat of COVID infection has made people aware of the limitations of their own freedom. Individually experienced restrictions, e.g., through the temporary curfews, which referred to the connection with others, consequently deconstructed the phantasm of individual freedom. How painfully this was processed, and how insufficiently digested, was shown in the regressive movements of COVID deniers and conspiracy theorists. Webster also analyzes the fentanyl crisis as “another epidemic of death by breathlessness” (p. 130), with the majority of people dying of respiratory failure.

The killing of George Floyd, with his desperate cry “I can’t breathe,” which was repeatedly quoted and remembered in the subsequent protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, is also an example of social asphyxiation for Webster. Floyd’s example illustrates how the universal right to breathe is denied, fed by racist motives. In view of the history of slavery and this perpetual racism, the example is certainly only one prominent example from years gone by. Suffocating or cutting off the air we breathe is a practice of warfare and is also found in the implementation of the death penalty. Murder through the use of gases reached its tragic climax in the gas chambers of German concentration camps. 

According to Webster, racist ideologies and actions, as well as the coronavirus pandemic, always take place against the backdrop of the climate crisis. She sees the climate crisis as “a backdrop of collective death by toxic air, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and smoke inhalation, as well as deaths by drowning due to rising sea levels, or excess rain and floods” (p. 134). Webster reminds us that we depend on trees and plants to produce the air that surrounds us and gives us life, and thus considers our relationship with the environment and what the Viennese psychoanalyst and philosopher Esther Hutfless (2023) calls the “more-than-human Other.” A relationship that must be repeatedly denied, split off, and is repeatedly exposed to massive attacks as the relationship to the nonhuman Other. In the denial of the crisis, as we experience it again and again, the denial of limitation, the desire and the illusion of limitless availability, as it is constantly nourished by capitalist systems and neoliberal ideologies, also breaks through. The aggression with which humankind confronts the earth and the atmosphere that protects it can only be understood as “suicide” or “ecocide” (p. 187). When Webster states an imminent “global asphyxiation” (p. 211), this unfortunately proves to be by no means a dystopian fantasy but rather a realistic future scenario in view of global developments. The man-made climate crisis will rob us of the last air we have to breathe.

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In my opinion, one of the strengths of the publication lies in the fact that the interweaving of inner and outer realities, the situating of the subject in sociopolitical spheres, conveys what she later formulates: “psychoanalysis does have a social aspiration” (p. 233). In her explanations, Webster repeatedly zooms out from an individual to a social level.

On Breathing is a truly exciting exploration and enthralling experience, not least because of the structure of the book itself. The book itself is reminiscent of a psychoanalysis; it is associative, at times almost erratic, but this is less confusing than it is appealing. In the end, a mosaic of the phenomenon of breathing emerges from the theoretical and narrative gems. In Freudian tradition, there are repeated borrowings from poetry and literature that breathe great vitality into the text. Readers with a background in psychoanalysis might complain that the theories are only touched on the surface in this way rather than having their complexity revealed. However, On Breathing is not a textbook. I am unsure whether Webster would even be interested in categorizing it. At a time when psychoanalytic work is increasingly subordinated to an academicized psychology, this work allows us to unite the in-between, between science and art, which can be understood as the nature of psychoanalysis (Kohon, 2019). This book can therefore be recommended to the general public and psychoanalysts alike. 

If we bear in mind that the translation of the Greek word psyche is “mind” and “breath,” we can only be surprised at the blank space in the psychoanalytical literary canon, as already noted at the beginning. Well; just as the unconscious itself, breathing also appears to remain “Other” in the Lacanian sense: “One can work with breath, but we will never master it in our lifetime” (p. 69). However, a successful approach is now available.

References:

• Hutfless, E. (2023). “Die unvollendete kopernikanische Revolution—Psychoanalyse und das mehr-als-menschliche Andere.“ texte. psychoanalyse. ästhetik. kulturkritik., 4, 7−28.
• Kohon, G. (2019). Concerning the Nature of Psychoanalysis. The Persistence of Paradoxical Discourse. London: Routledge.
• Rank, O. (1924 [1993]). The Trauma of Birth. New York: Dover Publications. 
• Rhode, M. (1994). “Autistic breathing”. Journal of child psychotherapy, 20(1), 25−41.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1941). “The observation of infants in a set situation.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22, 229−49.