Breathing Under Preasure

In the 1940s, it was argued that cosmic consciousness could be achieved through the breath. All that was needed was a special inhalation technique—a kind of “total breath” long ago forgotten by humans but still exercised by animals. In one scholar’s words, “the human method of using nose and mouth alone is cause of loss of vigor and spiritual power. Anal in-breathing is the true mode of deep breathing; its very practice expands the soul, gives it power.”

Such talk inevitably elicits laughter and bewilderment—or at least it did for me. Coming across this passage in Jamieson Webster’s book On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, I’ll admit I was relieved to discover that these sentences were quoted from a 1946 article, “Cosmic Consciousness in Catatonic Schizophrenia,” by psychoanalyst Robert Clark. The champion of anal respiration was actually Clark’s schizophrenic patient.

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe 
By Jamieson Webster
Catapult, 2025, 272 pp., $16.95, paper

Before we dismiss his ideas as “the idiosyncratic musings of a crazy person,” however, Jamieson Webster cautions us not to forget “how many of us are on the search for the full-body total breath as a . . . phantasmatic mistranslation of Eastern breath practices.” On Breathing chronicles many similar quests for transcendence, including primal scream therapy, the extreme breathing exercises of Wim Hof, campaigns against mouth-breathing, and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s attempts to use accumulated air and “cloud-busting” to end an era of fascism, bad sex, and UFOs. Are these endeavors, extreme though they may be, really so far from the, by now, mainstream search for a liberated form of breath?

Webster, a psychoanalyst, writer, and New School professor, thinks not. Bringing together a century of respiratory philosophizing, On Breathing is a roaming inquiry into the central role breath plays in our anxieties, aspirations, and amnesias. It ranges from reflections on working as a palliative psychologist in hospitals during the height of the Covid pandemic to meditations on Freud and Lacan. And though the book does not defend a particular thesis, Webster’s reader is left with a clear cautionary tale by the end: Breath can undoubtedly be a vector for spiritual progress and psychological healing, but it can also serve as a screen onto which we project our fantasies and distract ourselves from the inspiration and expiration of this very moment. Glorifying the “full-body total breath” leaves us vulnerable to the belief that the way we are already breathing is wrong—not deep enough, not nasal enough, not attentive enough—and that a complete overhaul of our respiratory habits is in order. It also instills a conviction that transcendence lies elsewhere, something achieved once the body and breath have been restored to their pristine natural state.

The breath sits at the fulcrum of a specifically modern set of anxieties.

Webster’s ideal is not the cosmic respiration that Clark’s patient sought through the anus. Instead, she more modestly proposes that we simply remember we are breathing—inhaling and exhaling our way through discomfort. The fact that we so persistently forget that we are breathing fascinates Webster, because it betrays an almost universal amnesia of breath. Since the task of psychoanalysis is “to pry open our amnesias” and attend “to something we have forgotten,” breath is an ideal subject for psychoanalytic exploration. On Breathing sets out to uncover the many hidden manifestations of breath in our lives, which are bookended by the newborn’s first inhalation and the last exhalation before death.

Anyone who has tried to follow their breath, however, knows that it isn’t always easy to heed Webster’s advice. Breath ordinarily sinks slyly into the background of awareness, but, in certain moments, it can rush unexpectedly into the foreground, bringing with it a panicked confusion. After all, nowhere is breath more painfully manifest than in the experience of anxiety, which threatens to crescendo into overwhelm and hyperventilation. Webster writes that anxiety reveals “a closed claustrophobic loop in life: Anxiety causes a constriction of breath, and the constriction of breath causes anxiety. In the throes of an anxiety attack it can almost feel as though one has forgotten how to breathe.” She cites, with bitter irony, a study indicating that high schoolers who underwent mindfulness breath training were more likely to be anxious or depressed than their peers who did not, “as if drawing attention to anxiety simply risks breeding more anxiety and trying to learn to breathe was subject to too much resistance.”

Webster notes that the breath sits at the fulcrum of a specifically modern set of anxieties. She focuses her analysis on 2020, a year when breathing was transported smack-dab into the center of public discourse. While Covid made us agonizingly aware of the intimately shared nature of air and the vulnerability of our lungs, Black Lives Matter drew attention to the ways that structural racism asphyxiates the oppressed. “I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner’s dying words, became the rallying cry of a movement. Meanwhile, climate change threatens to render our air unbreathable, evoking apocalyptic visions of suffocation from smoke, floods, or toxic air.

Five years after the pandemic, many of us prefer not to dwell on 2020, opting instead for forgetfulness. One of the ingenious elements of On Breathing is the way Webster brings so many of our overlapping crises back to breathing, and links our collective amnesia about 2020 to our personal forgetfulness of breath. In an effort to undo that amnesia, Webster transports her reader straight back to the center of the crisis: the early-pandemic ICU. She recounts rituals of hand-scrubbing and undressing at the front door, scenes of PPE overflowing hospital trash cans, and facilitating WhatsApp calls to patients in induced comas so that loved ones could say a last goodbye.

We are still in the fallout of 2020, grappling with what it means to breathe when our air is existentially endangered and brutally politicized. During the pandemic, many responded to the threat of air by hoarding it (stockpiling respirators), privileging their right to freedom over everyone else’s right to breathe. A similar dynamic may play out as the effects of climate change are increasingly felt. The challenge posed by the endangerment of air demands new and better responses than those that automatically took effect in 2020. On Breathing catalogs several attempts to think differently about the air on which we rely, from Luce Irigaray’s feminist critique of the “forgetting of air” to Achille Mbembe’s post-colonial proclamation of a “universal
right to breathe.”

Webster’s own view is perhaps closest to that of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whom she cites as reminding us that “whether we like it or not, the air we breathe inescapably connects us with others.” The myth of the “separate and enclosed individual” is undermined by the fact of shared air, which renders us intimately dependent on one another, and thus thoroughly vulnerable. Webster calls for “a return to intimacy,” that is, a way of thinking about breathing that insists on keeping our interdependence in the foreground, reminding us again and again of “how radically porous we are to the air that others breathe.”

Breath ordinarily sinks slyly into the background of awareness, but, in certain moments, it can rush unexpectedly into the foreground

This ideal of intimate, interdependent breathing stands in stark contrast to the pursuit of individual liberation through breath. Individualism, for Webster, is the fundamental problem plaguing New Age spirituality, which transforms breath into “a commodity sold as a means of curing 21st-century alienation.” The antiheroes of On Breathing are those who did just that: seek ever weirder forms of breath to transcend ordinary human suffering and to escape the predicaments of modernity. Anal breathing and cloud-busting, then, come to look like so many fools’ errands—fantasies of individual liberation designed to distract us from the real nature of our breathing: intimate, fragile, and interpersonal.

Webster joins a long tradition of psychoanalysts who treat aspirations to emancipation as highly suspect. She concurs with Lacan, who announced, “Je ne parle jamais de la liberté ” (“I never speak of freedom”), because he understood freedom as a “private luxury”—an individualistic achievement of total independence. Freud, too, found the psychological and spiritual promises of liberation extravagant, stinking of a selfish exceptionalism. Paradoxically, Freud also believed that the search for a sense of blissful, oceanic oneness with others amounted to a delusional denial of our separateness. Spiritual endeavors, for Freud, wrongly rebel against both our interconnectedness and our individuality in a paranoid quest for freedom that can easily tip into psychosis, as it did for Clark’s champion of anal breathing.

One might wonder what the goal of psychoanalysis is, if not some kind of liberation. Don’t we seek the talking cure to free ourselves of our neuroses? Freud thought that we should aim to achieve the “ordinary human unhappiness” that is the common lot of our species, a goal that Webster admits is “rather uninspiring” (to say the least). She hesitates between two ways of thinking: the more modest therapeutic objectives of Freudian analysis and the emancipatory aspirations of religion, which, admittedly, seem “grandiose” by comparison.

Webster points to a middle way when she proposes that “perhaps the quotidian could be seen as an achievement, and finding one’s way along the long, tortured pathway toward it celebrated.” True freedom, she suggests, comes when we drop the quest for liberation and forget our perceived unfreedom. As Webster puts it, “psychoanalysis attempts to allow the person to return to just being, and breathing” by letting go of their “collection of ‘lacks’ ” one by one. On Breathing helps its readers find that freedom, tempering our frenzied quest for easy breathing with a psychoanalyst’s dark, honest humor.