February 1, 2025
Psychoanalyst Webster (Disorganization & Sex, 2022) explores our complex, contested, and communal relationship to breath and air in the thoughtful, poetic On Breathing. We pay close attention to breath at the very start of life, listening for a baby's first cry as it emerges from the womb, and at the end, the so-called death rattle. But Webster, drawing on her own life experiences and many of the major thinkers of psychoanalysis, argues that we have a kind of amnesia about breathing in the years between. She reflects on the spaces that require us to pay closer attention to breath: the ICU, where ventilators help patients survive; the practice of yoga, with all its attendant issues related to Orientalism and appropriation; parenthood of infants, when we listen closely for any interruption of breathing; the breathing practices of free divers--about whom Webster notes, "They break world records. They also often die." Through closer attention to the practice of breathing, Webster believes that we can rebuild broken and fractured connections with our bodies and with each other.
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March 1, 2025
Breathing as both biological necessity and metaphor for human interconnection. Presenting both insightful and challenging prose, Webster, a clinical psychoanalyst and an author (Disorganization & Sex), carefully examines breathing through multiple lenses, beginning with vivid detail of giving birth to her second child before weaving through her experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, and a Covid-era palliative care therapist. The book's thematic sections ("First Breath," "Anxiety," "Asphyxiation," "Last Words") create an intellectual framework for exploring these interconnected experiences, although sometimes struggling to maintain their connecting threads. While her strong foundation in psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freud, provides depth to her analysis, it occasionally overshadows her original insights. The text moves between personal narrative and scholarly discourse, creating a complex intersection of lived experience and theoretical exploration, though at times other writers' thoughts compete with her own voice. The author's most compelling moments emerge when she connects theory to direct experience, particularly in her thoughtful reflections on providing palliative therapy during the pandemic and her nuanced observations about losing and regaining the capacity to speak. Her exploration of Eastern spiritual practices, while self-conscious, raises important questions about cultural appropriation and authenticity. The narrative boldly attempts to bridge personal memoir with academic discourse, achieving moments of profound insight even as it sometimes gets tangled in its theoretical underpinnings. In examining our relationship with breath in an age of climate crisis and pandemic anxiety, the book offers valuable perspectives on how personal and collective experiences of breathing intersect with broader social and environmental concerns. Though its dense theoretical framework occasionally obscures rather than illuminates its core insights, the work succeeds in highlighting the often overlooked significance of this most fundamental human function. An ambitious meditation that struggles under its theoretical burden, never quite finding its natural rhythm.
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