Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)

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Feb 20, 2025

Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst in NYC and author of 'On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe,' dives into the significance of breath amidst societal turmoil. She intertwines personal experiences—from being asthmatic to her role as a palliative psychologist during COVID—with psychoanalytic insights. Webster tackles themes of anxiety, the illusion of freedom, and the importance of communal breathing. The conversation also critiques modern communication's noise and explores mindfulness as a remedy for modern existential crises.

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ANECDOTE

Breathing and Babies

Jamieson Webster's experience of having a baby deepened her interest in breathing.
Observing her daughter's breath play during breastfeeding highlighted its forgotten richness in early life.

INSIGHT

COVID-19's Universality

COVID-19's universality challenged the illusion of isolated tragedies.
It exposed our struggle with collective trauma and the limitations of individual solutions.

INSIGHT

Freedom's Delusion

The pursuit of individual freedom, especially in America, is becoming a delusional nightmare.
The pandemic highlighted the conflict between personal freedom and collective responsibility.

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A 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.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as, many psychoanalytic publications.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor in the Somatic Psychology program at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

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