Reflections on Eating and Breathing as Models of Mental Functions: Food Breath “Minds”

The psychoanalytic vision of the primitive mind is largely modeled on digestive (and, later, reproductive) functions. For Freud, the primitive mind develops around its attempt to handle sense impressions related to hunger and feeding and partly identifies with the functions it tries to master. Thus, early thoughts or representations come to function analogously to aliment-excrement. They may be variously taken in, digested, and made part of the ego; remain undigestible; act as psychic poison, or be evacuated. For Freud, these mental operations followed the model of the reflex arc and were indirect ways of handling tension. According to this viewpoint, thinking acts as a kind of higher-order reflex geared toward pain avoidance and survival, tendencies which originally may be united but soon enter into frequent conflict (a “pleasure ego” bent on survival).

The psychoanalytic emphasis on a primordial “food” or “survival” mind reflects the more general fact that, where body functions are concerned, Western phenomenology has been almost exclusively preoccupied with appetite. The lack of importance given to the phenomenology of breathing is remarkable in light of its incessant presence and the sense of the numinous it has carried since ancient times (not only in the East). No body experience is more thoroughly permeating yet light of touch. Appetite, by contrast, often has an irritating quality which may or may not be pleasureable. When breathing is hampered, acute distress results, but usually it takes care of itself and, unlike appetite, is supplied with an outside source of gratification which is always there. The sense of self based on a normal experience of breathing is an unpressured sense of self not easily stampeded. It does not run after or get ahead of time but seems simply to move with it. For appetite, time is an irritant.

The experience of breathing provides the most continuously lived form for the ego's dual status of being both without and within the body: “I