“Focus on your breath”: Those four little words have become familiar shorthand for staying grounded during troubled times.
But as the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster suggests in her roving and philosophical new book, the fashion for treating breath as a self-care commodity — “a means of curing 21st-century alienation” — reflects a profoundly limited sense of what breathing entails. We do not breathe as isolated individuals, hermetically sealed off from everyone else.
In “On Breathing,” Webster offers a more expansive description: respiration as an act that, through the air we share, connects us to others. She points to how the pandemic brought this connection to the fore: “Never had we been forced to confront the stark opposition between the pursuit of individual freedom as America has so gloriously and so vainly defined it and the reality of nine billion inhabitants living and breathing in a shared atmosphere.”
Of course, confronting this fact is one thing; what we do with it is another. A question running through Webster’s book is why such obvious reminders of our shared vulnerability — whether because of Covid or climate change — have yielded so little by way of solidarity.
It’s a measure of the meanness of our political moment that people are turning inward, insisting on their right to endanger others while (ostensibly) protecting their own. A recent story about the current measles outbreak in Texas features a mother explaining her refusal to vaccinate her children in the starkest terms: “We’re not going to harm our children or [risk] the potential to harm our children so that we can save yours.”
Webster begins “On Breathing” with her own experience of becoming a mother for the second time, giving birth to a daughter 19 years after she had her first child, a son. She reflects on how an infant’s first breath is a sign of separation from the mother’s body; that cry, that first gulp of air, is “our first independent act.” But it is also a reminder of our helplessness, of our unbearable dependency on being cared for by others, that psychoanalysts say we spend a lifetime trying to forget. And so we take breathing for granted, “an autonomic function taking place beyond consciousness” — or else we try to bring it under our control. So-called pulmonauts dedicate themselves to the health benefits of breathing through the nose. Webster, who had asthma as a child, has since taken up the breath-intensive practice of deep-sea diving.
One thread of “On Breathing” is memoir. Webster developed asthma at the age of 5, when her mother left to go to medical school in the Philippines; her father was a pilot, which meant that he was away a lot, too. She remembers playing fainting games with friends; they would compress one another’s necks until they momentarily passed out. She now understands this as a way of experimenting with control and surrender, blurring the lines between helplessness and exhilaration.
During the first wave of the pandemic, Webster volunteered in the intensive care unit of a hospital. It was a time when intubating patients and putting them on ventilators was understood as a lifesaving treatment; only later would doctors learn that intubation could diminish a patient’s chance of survival. Webster posits that the misplaced obsession with procuring ventilators allowed us to put our hopes in machines instead of paying uncomfortable heed to the “necessity of mutual care” — or dependency on one another.
Breathing, Webster says, is “a hidden navel” in psychoanalysis. Not only is there the profession’s interest in a baby’s first cries, but there is also the fact that Freud credited Josef Breuer, a physiologist who studied respiration, with discovering psychoanalysis. And then there is the method of the “talking cure” itself. “Speaking requires the modulation of breath,” Webster writes. The analysand is offered a space to “say anything, say everything.” Instead of explanatory narratives, psychoanalysis yields poetic associations. She quotes the poet Paul Celan, who called one of his collections “Atemwende,” or “Breathturning.”
Much of “On Breathing” moves like this: Webster will begin with a concrete example and then trace a web of connections radiating outward. She recalls how the British psychoanalyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott called a mother’s care “the holding environment” because she provided “a container for the infant’s anxiety.” Too little care was neglectful; too much was smothering. The healthy holding environment needed to be “good enough.”
It struck me that breathing, as both subject and metaphor, offers a similar kind of holding environment for the reader. It’s both capacious and bounded: “The importance of breath is the way it always intertwines self, body and world.”
Webster is constantly making surprising associations. A recollection of her father’s death brings her to the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, who charged her male colleagues with being so fixated on the fantasy of an autonomous self that they succumbed to “the forgetting of air.” Elsewhere, Webster describes the common yearning for an “oceanic oneness” with the world — a return to the warm waters of the womb, free of friction and responsibility. “A dependence on air is a mammalian plight,” she writes. But Freud insisted that our limitations and the anxieties they provoked were something to be accommodated, instead of repressed. “This meant working in air, however difficult.”
Yet air can provide aeration, too. Webster’s seriousness of intention is matched by her lightness of touch, prying open spaces that usually feel closed. The breathturning of her book mimics the breathturning of psychoanalysis: “The basic forms and sounds of language feel fluid and ephemeral, never quite solidifying into anything like my story, single and permanent.”
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