On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe

by Jamieson Webster

A gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastropheA few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Health

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2025

About the author

JAMIESON WEBSTER is a psychoanalyst based in New York. She is a founding member of Das Unbehagen, a collective of psychoanalysts working outside of institutional affiliation; supervises clinical psychology graduate students in the doctoral program of City College; graduate and member of IPTAR. She has written for Artforum, Apology, Cabinet, the Guardian, Playboy, Spike Art Quarterly, the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. She is the author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2018); Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013); and The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011). With Marcus Coelen, she is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan.

Reviews

[lalunenoire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jamieson Webster's On Breathing: Care in the Time of Catastrophe is a profound and intricate exploration of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and human existence in moments of crisis. Structured into four thematic sections—Breath, Anxiety, Asphyxiation, and Last Words—the book examines the fundamental act of breathing as both a biological necessity and a metaphor for the human condition. From Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud to Leo Bersani, Webster navigates the intricate relationship between breath, human consciousness, and existential vulnerability.

Breathing, the most basic and involuntary act, is the entry point for Webster's discussion. She considers it an essential life function and a symbolic process mediating between absorption and expulsion, self and world. Drawing on Leo Bersani's notion of continuous/involuntary rhythms, Webster frames breathing as an ongoing negotiation between external forces and personal identity, a dynamic central to her broader theme of organic dualism.

Anxiety emerges as a key element in this negotiation. Webster presents it as the experience of being at the mercy of forces beyond one's control—a reaction to the body's inherent fragility and the pressures of the external world—an inescapable awareness of one's mortality. Through Freud's pessimistic view of the unconscious and Lacan's concept of the Real, though only briefly touched upon, she articulates how anxiety reveals the precariousness of human identity, exposing the individual to an unresolved tension between receptivity and control, vulnerability, and agency.

This tension is a type of existential asphyxiation in which psychological burdens create a sense of restriction, preventing individuals from fully engaging with life. In dialogue with Wilhelm Reich's ideas on bodily constriction and Lacan's notions of the glance and the fragmented self, Webster deepens her inquiry into how breath—and its absence—can reflect our struggle with autonomy, existential terror, and the amorphous nature of being.

Here, Webster turns to the notion of last words and the relationship between language, death, and the final breath. In exploring how speech and breath intertwine, particularly in moments of profound loss, Winnicott and Sloterdijk's attempts to encapsulate existence and final surrender to the inevitable are noted as reinforcing the dual rhythm of absorption and expulsion that underpins the book's overarching inquiry into the nature of life and death.

Beyond these philosophical musings, Webster's work is one of narrative nonfiction that reflects on care, dependence, and the collective experience of breathing in an era of environmental catastrophe by interrogating the privilege of breathing in a world increasingly marked by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness. Weaving together psychoanalytic theory with her personal experiences and challenging the myth of individual autonomy, Webster emphasizes our fundamental dependence on invisible systems, one another, and the air we share yet so violently neglect.

Note: This review is of an advanced reader copy. All opinions expressed are my own.

[ve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say I almost gave up on On Breathing several times. But what I kept noticing, after closing the book, was how the idea of breath worked on me, unaware. It didn’t announce itself; it just kept showing up. My conscious mind wasn’t really absorbing much while I read, but my unconscious clearly resonated. It’s as if the book doesn’t so much argue a point as it quietly rearranges your attention while you’re not looking.

I keep circling back to Webster’s insistence that “freedom is separation as well as connection to others.” It unsettles the way we might normally imagine freedom—as though it were a solitary project. She calls the individual a kind of propaganda, keeping us trapped in the forgetting of our shared air. I try to remember this when the people closest to me annoy me precisely because of their closeness, and frustrate me at the same time because of our distance. There’s no perfect measure of closeness or separation; Eros, Webster reminds us, always causes mischief. But perhaps mischief is the point. Connection is not tidy. I enjoyed the reminder that our freedom and our dependence are not enemies.

Threaded through the book is a quiet feminism: “women are our containers of grief, our silent breathless screamers.” It’s a line that lingers, a reminder that breath is never neutral, that the politics of who gets to breathe freely—literally and metaphorically—are gendered as well as personal.

Then there are the moments that veer towards the mystical: the baby Anna whose mother speaks her into breathing, the woman who softens her scoliosis through careful breathing exercises. Yet I was a bit disappointed in how surface-level these case studies felt; for instance Katharina Schoh’s “cure” is well known to have involved more than breath alone, and it verged on irresponsible to suggest otherwise. Still, these stories point to something real: the quietly transformative power of intentional breath.

Jamieson Webster never lets the magic eclipse the plain mechanics. The way our developing speech as a species put us at a unique risk of constantly choking to death, the unrelenting rate at which we must breathe, and the hiccup as the vestige of amphibians crossing from water to air. However magical the effects of good breath, it is still a physical process, one we can imagine being otherwise—and so perhaps we can also imagine it being better: less frequent, less fraught. I like that the book can hold both views at once, the mystical and the biological, without forcing a conclusion.

Another strand that stayed with me was the link between breath and lack. Webster explores the idea that the feeling of difficulty breathing can become the idea that one is lacking something. I find this compelling: that to lack air is to lack everything, and to lose anything can feel like a small suffocation. It captures the weird experience of knowing you can breathe fine yet feeling out of air, a bodily metaphor for grief and deprivation.

Webster writes that “as a species we really cannot gauge what is too much and not enough.” Everyone now feels they are falling short of the enjoyment they could and should be having. This idea of the “right amount” has been on my mind elsewhere—most recently while reading Butter—and I think it is lost in a culture that wants us to maximise something, usually surface-level enjoyment. Coming back to the breath is a way of coming back to the chaos underneath, to find balance and to live with the ambivalence of the world rather than hiding from it.

I admire is that Webster never tries to be tidy. She doesn’t hand us a manual for better breathing or a single grand thesis. Breath—like intimacy, like freedom—isn’t something you can spreadsheet into submission. If there is such a thing as the “right amount,” it is always shifting, always ambiguous.

This isn’t a book I’d hand to someone looking for a straightforward argument about mindfulness or a how-to on respiratory health. It’s for a reader willing to wander, to sit with half-formed thoughts and let them slowly become something, or be lost to time. If you like a book that lingers long after you’ve stopped reading, one that invites you to notice the air itself and the people sharing it with you, On Breathing rewards the patience.

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Originally reviewed here.

[Julia Coelho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Say anything, say everything you can say. And then silence of breath, abyss of air.


Perhaps the best psychoanalytic book I’ve ever read. Jamieson conducts us through reflections, theories, wonders, and dreams with such magical word and silence work. A true sorcerer.

I must confess it hit me very close to home. I too recently lost my father, worked in a hospital, witnessed the horrors of COVID-19, and feel asphyxiated by our age of catastrophes.

I don’t have kids, but I’m truly amazed by their birth through and on language. It was such a privilege to read her singular position on the welcoming of an infant into the world. It was also a surprise to find out how many passions we share, such as yoga, swimming, and diving (including freediving). To complete the coincidences strike, like her, I had asthma as a child and recognize in me a hysterical analyst.

But beyond those personal parallels, this book was truly a breath of fresh air.

How to explain that a book gives the feelings of a little girl at the beach, with feet rooted in the sand, kissed by the sea breeze and astonished by the movements of the sky?

Blissfully, we don’t need to.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me so long to read this I don’t know where I started. Maybe I don’t know her voice well enough, but I couldn’t find a point. Maybe it’s just a meditation. I’m glad for the white hardcover under the ugly cover. I drew a picture I quite like. There were sentences that were brief illuminations, even if lost among the rest. And I guess I do always think about breathing, every day.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars;

[Iza Cupial · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5

[karla melissa ramirez herman · Rating 5 out of 5]

es un libro muy interesante y lleno de sabiduría y me encanto mucho

[Lisa]

DNF

[Adam Brill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stylistically feels fitting of the psychoanalytic tradition. I enjoyed the content and found my attention wandering in and out. But when it hits it hits

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha encantado aunque tendré que releerlo para que permee del todo, para qué mentir.

[Josefin Kenrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

First psychoanalyst book so I’m not sure if I was the right audience. Some chapters resonated with me and others went over or around my head. Interesting concepts though!