The Brooklyn Rail

It is a story that would be unbelievable if it were not true: a pilot who worked on aeronautical oxygen regulation for high-altitude flying invented the first reliable, mass-produced ventilator because he recognized a commonality between the wings of a plane and the alveoli in our lungs. A man of the air, in every sense. He lost his first wife because severe bronchitis damaged her lungs; his third died in a plane crash. But his invention saved his stepdaughter’s life when she was born premature. His name was Dr. Bird (yes, Bird!). It reads like a fable about chance and fate, repression and obsession—life, death, air, breath, all here. It is a fitting story for the author and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster’s new book On Breathing, which seeks to recognize breath as central to psychoanalysis, arguing that “if one of the main claims of psychoanalysis is that we forget sexuality, I think we must add breathing to our list of amnesias.”

There is, for her, no getting around breathing in psychoanalysis, even as it is forgotten. Say anything, say everything—Webster calls this psychoanalysis’s “fundamental rule.” Psychoanalysis is “about speaking” and speaking, in turn, “requires the modulation of breath.” It is also, to her mind, “closer to poetry than narrative—especially if narrative is used in service of explanations. In psychoanalysis at its best, the basic forms and sounds of language feel fluid and ephemeral, never quite solidifying into anything like my story, single and permanent.”

This book, then, is an exploration of what it might mean to think about breathing psychoanalytically, proceeding more impressionistically than argumentatively, more poetically than narratively, following many conceptually linked currents. Her tone is calm, even as she describes crises. She draws on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, among a host of other psychoanalysts and philosophers. She recounts the stories of patients’ struggles with breathing: a heartsick patient driving herself mad tracking her breath’s synchronicity with her heartbeat; a psychotic patient asking for new lungs—modulators of breath, and so of speech—to quiet the voices in his head; a hoarder with a dust-filled, stifling apartment and a penchant for auto-erotic asphyxiation. She details her own evolving biography of breath: the daughter of a pilot, often abandoned in favor of the air, she developed asthma as a child, then went on to deep-sea dive, practice rigorous yoga, provide palliative psychoanalysis during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her father, for his part, was the son of a man who fell through the air to his death. “Is it so surprising,” she asks, “that a large part of this story of breath is about the troubled relationship between a father of the air and a daughter on the ground?”

But as much as this is the story of Webster as her father’s daughter, it is the story of Webster as mother. The book opens with her observation that “having another child brought me back to an intimacy with air and breath that I had forgotten,” attributing her remembering to her daughter’s “love affair with air”—with bubbles, blown kisses, balloons. “Air,” she writes, “is so palpably visible in the life of a child: at once written into the most indelible children’s stories, and the medium through which they’re received. How have we forgotten the air?”

“I’ve come to see breathing as a hidden navel in our field,” Webster writes. This navel, this hidden center, is a reference to Freud’s suggestion that repression “was merely a false bottom under which there was an even greater unknown. The place where we encounter this false bottom he called the navel, as if to suggest that the greater unknown was always at root the maternal body, from which we have never fully separated ourselves.”

It is the first breath that marks us as individuals—our first breaths are our first independent acts, outside of the maternal body—but also as imbricated in the world—in, as Webster puts it, the “air we all share.” “How radically porous we are to the air,” Webster observes, the same as saying we are porous to other people. The repression of breath enables us to think of ourselves as more free than we can be, more autonomous.

The forgetting of breath that Webster posits—a forgetting of air, and of our communality—enables us to blithely make breath unbreathable, life unlivable. Webster recounts the history of psychoanalysis as one of a struggle to speak freely (“the only freedom that psychoanalysis raises up”), but she also sketches a history of the present as marked by “violence and loss that is increasingly being marked by pockets of asphyxiation,” from the climate crisis’s toxic skies, to the Black Lives Matter protestors’ cries of “I Can’t Breathe,” to the filling lungs of those who died of COVID-19. “This is the breathing hole I keep finding myself in,” she writes, “bouncing between the psychological history of free or constricted breath, and a history of violence against breath and air.”

“I can’t help but notice the turmoil that seemed to arrive at the very moment that breathing was thrown into question,” Webster writes, referring not only to the pandemic but also to “the political situation in the United States, our asphyxiating history of racism and police violence, climate catastrophe, all amid renewed international wars. It’s as if the body and environmental threats were directly translated into the political arena and made explicit.”

Again, unimaginable: on the day I sat down to write this review, an airplane and a helicopter crashed in the air above the nation’s capital.