Jamieson Webster treats psychoanalysis not as a static body of knowledge but as something to be tested, stretched, and reimagined. A practicing analyst, she is also a professor, writer, and public intellectual whose work pushes the field beyond the consulting room. She has collaborated with artists, written for general audiences, and even performed in plays. In books like Conversion Disorder and Disorganization & Sex, she has interrogated what psychoanalysis forgets — whether it be Freud’s early fascination with hysteria or the unruly, disruptive force of sexuality. Her books — dense with associations and delicate sentences — resist the idea of psychoanalysis as a curative project; rather, they model ways of engaging with the unconscious as something that cannot be mastered but which must unsettle and transform.
In her latest work, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, Webster turns her attention to a dimension of psychic and bodily life so fundamental we often forget about it: air. The book was born partly out of Webster’s work in palliative care during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when breath — its obstruction, its mechanization, its absence — suddenly became terrifying. She draws upon the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of “atmoterrorism,” in which air itself is conceived of as a weapon in contexts such as gas warfare or the ecological destruction that renders whole environments uninhabitable. If traditional warfare targets bodies, atmoterrorism targets the atmosphere they depend on. For Webster, this opens up a psychoanalytic question: how does one live in a world increasingly defined by what she calls “pockets of asphyxiation”?
The book includes Webster’s own history with asthma, her training as a psychoanalyst, and her engagement with thinkers like Jacques Lacan, who speculated about a neglected “respiratory drive.” On Breathing may be Webster’s most personal book. It opens with the birth of her daughter — an event that “brought me back to an intimacy with air and breath that I had forgotten.” She unfurls the fragile world of an infant’s breath — the rhythmic sniffling, the held breath of sleep, the air-related games endemic to childhood: blowing out candles, whispering, filling balloons. At the same time, motherhood made Webster acutely aware of the precarity of air itself, as the next generation inhales a world shaped by pollution, climate collapse, and global health challenges. This attention to care — how we sustain one another in the most elemental ways — undergirds the book’s reflections on intimacy, dependency, and vulnerability.
Q: In 2021, you wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books about working as a psychoanalyst in palliative care, your personal history with asthma, and the broader crises of breath — from COVID-19 to racial violence to climate catastrophe. What drove you to turn some of the ideas from that piece into a book?
At the time I wrote the NYRB piece there was more I wanted to explore about breath in psychoanalysis and in philosophical texts more generally. I was also dissatisfied with the tone of a lot of the books I read on breathing that tackled the question through art, philosophy and religion — something too precious, where breathing and air become metaphors for everything: life, birth, death, the body, the environment, God. I wanted to find a different tone, and I wanted the specificity of breathing and air, something wild in it, to be conveyed through the writing. I also had the psychoanalytic intuition that it was a mistake to dissociate breathing from sexuality and to spiritualize it.
Q: One thing your book does really well is braid personal anecdotes — raising your children, practicing yoga — with broader theoretical reflections. How did you decide on this structure?
I’ve been writing this way for some time. I have also written about auto-theory (blending theory and autobiographical writing) and its deep link to Freud’s writing in The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I think the blending of genres has an important history in feminist and queer theory. Resisting the use of a supposedly objective voice in a text about something so intimate makes sense to me. In “The Laugh of Medusa” the French philosopher Helene Cixous called for a feminine style of writing that comes from the body and that essay – which was published in 1975 – is important to me. I also wanted to differentiate myself from any ties to the genre of self-help, which is hard as a ‘therapist,’ but which I thought could best be done with a literary bent, at least for my aesthetic sensibilities. This is a lot of REASONS. Perhaps I should just say this is the way I think.
Q: You note in the book that “psychoanalysis tries to locate what gets disavowed or ‘forgotten’; most notable are sexuality, language, and air — these infinite fields where we cannot centralize any sense of self.” Can you say more about this?
That’s my favorite idea in the book! And it’s what really brings everything together. I think the idea that we repress sexuality, especially childhood sexuality — even though we are suffused with its presence in our everyday life — is the great discovery of Freud’s that erupts from the idea of the unconscious and the meaning of dreams. Lacan’s great addition treats the trauma of language — we can’t hear ourselves speak, we forget that there are voices all around us and in our mind that don’t make us feel particularly well, and that we can barely catch up to the sense or meaning in it all. We forget that people misunderstand one another more than they understand despite overt signs of endless misunderstanding. The idiosyncrasy and openness of language, for Lacan, is intolerable. My modest contribution is to add air and breathing to this list of our forgettings — we forget our dependance on the air and how interconnected this makes us. We forget the fact that we are breathing. We also forget that speaking is breathing, and writing is closer to the unique rhythm of our breath than a notation system for communicating. James Nestor in his book Breath showed how all kinds of cures related to breathing have been forgotten decade after decade, as if we just can’t keep it in our consciousness.
Q: How does Lacan’s notion of the “respiratory drive” help us think about the psychoanalytic imperative to “say anything”?
Lacan can be very systematic. If there was a fifth drive (oral, anal, gaze, voice) it had to have a bodily source, an aim (lowering tension), and an object. He wasn’t sure about whether there was or wasn’t a respiratory drive, but if it did exist he emphasized that it facilitated air — a foreign object that we must take in, accommodate, and develop a rhythm in relation to. He also pointed out that the locus of breathing activity includes more than just the lungs, the diaphragm is also involved, and the esophageal sphincter, both of which spasm and are involved in sexuality. I think if you put sexuality, breathing, and language together you have a fascinating picture of the psychoanalytic idea of “say anything” and how constrained it is as an act. The concept is absolutely foreign. This is very different from some liberatory motif or confessional idea of psychoanalysis! It’s both bound by the body and chock-full of historical repressions, and, I would add, its environmental not psychological. And yet, we have to try to say what we can say.
Q: You write elegantly about the sensual dimensions of breath, from infancy to adulthood. Thinking of Winnicott’s “holding environment,” how do you think early interactions with caregivers shape our lifelong relationship with breath and anxiety? Could you share your thoughts on how breath operates as a site of both intimacy and vulnerability?
Oh, thank you. I really wanted to evoke the sensual, sexual, alive, anxious, and even deadly aspects of breathing, that are nevertheless full of longings for tenderness. I was surprised how many memories came back to me of the way we play with breath, how many children’s games seem to reference breathing, choking, breath holding, respiration — and its presence in relation to babbling, balloons, whispering, reading out loud, singing. And many child analysts speak about it without explicitly centering it in theory or technical work, which again, is symptomatic of the fact that it is forgotten even as it’s discussed. I think, like everything in the caregiver child relationship, if it’s ubiquitous it’s important that it be considered rather than ignored, played with and not made a source of anxiety. And my feeling is that what threatens us, what evokes a powerful intimacy with the body and the drive, we often want to kill, suppress, or make disappear — and this is true about sexuality, about language (censorship), and I also think breath.
Q: How does the proliferation of “pockets of asphyxiation” throughout history complicate the psychoanalytic notion of a cure?
Attacking breath and air, attacking the body and sensuality, via pockets of asphyxiation in society – this modern form of violence certainly posed a new challenge for psychoanalysts. We can’t do a lot to mitigate that kind of social evil since we work individual by individual. But we can certainly attempt to help someone protect themselves a little bit better, and to be aware of these forces as they have and do play out in their life. I guess I’m thinking suddenly of Ferenczi’s paper, The Unwelcome Child and its Death Instinct, in which he treats asthma as a bodily diffusion in response to having not entirely been a welcome birth, as if the child slips into what he called “non-being.” The role of the psychoanalyst is certainly to welcome the child, and their death instinct, and whatever they need to bring of themselves.
Q: You invoke Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of “atmoterrorism.” Can you say more about this — how air transforms into a site of violence and control in both historical and contemporary contexts?
I love the Sloterdijk text! I found it a real revelation. The whole Spheres trilogy is astounding. While he’s interrogating the construction of space and atmosphere, globes, bubbles, and interiors he is also considering how we construct intimacy with one another and with our world. As he explains, the twentieth century marks a real shift. Air is forced into the foreground, made an object, taken over, controlled, designed. It becomes a primary source of terror and violence. So of course this is a story of airplanes, submarines, air raids and carpet bombing, gas warfare, gas chambers, gas masks, terrorism which attacks environments and not people, air conditioning, weather control, and finally pollution. Once you’ve read it, you can’t unsee it. And the idea that we are trying to ameliorate something so global and so violent with breathwork – it feels at times like an almost ridiculously impotent strategy.
Q: Has your experience as a hospital volunteer reshaped your understanding of dependency and resilience? Has working on this book changed the way you approach psychoanalytic work with patients, particularly those with somatic symptoms?
My work in the hospital, as I write in the book, caused me to realize that my prior conceptions of freedom and independence in an American context were delusional. Freud instructs that civilization only ever secures less freedom. I saw that in a new way in the hospital. Patients were berated for not being able to breathe because of crushing anxiety. The psychosomatic has been at the center of my work for a long time. My last book was subtitled Listening to the Body. And that experience in the hospital allowed me to become better attuned to the socio-political conditioning of the body. I understand freshly now that we have an obligation to reinvent our relationship to sexuality, language, and breathing.