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SOME PHENOMENA COMBINE A simultaneity of omnipresence and subtlety. This is particularly true of breathing. A certain degree of distance from the continuous conscious experience of breathing seems necessary in order not to irritate the breathing rhythms that are essential for survival and to relieve our perceptual apparatus. Our attention is only focused on breathing when the regular flow of breath is disturbed or when there are abrupt changes in breathing frequency. At the same time, it is surprising that the subject of breathing has attracted so little psychoanalytical interest. Jamieson Webster, New York psychoanalyst and professor at The New School for Social Research, addresses this gap and examines the phenomenon of breathing from various perspectives. Based on the thesis that one of the main assumptions of psychoanalysis is the forgetting or repression of sexuality, she assumes that “we must add breathing to our list of amnesias” (p. 4) and even states that breathing is a “hidden navel in our field” (p. 20). For Webster, the pandemic and the birth of her second daughter, which brought her “back to an intimacy with air and breath that I had forgotten” (p. 3), were decisive factors in her preoccupation with the topic.
And so Webster's treatise begins with the infant's first breath, the moment of the first assurance of its own autonomy and existence. The first breath is a first step toward individuation, as the infant is separated from the care provided by the mother's body via the umbilical cord after birth. Breathing therefore forms a point of contact between subject and object, inside and outside. Following Winnicott's ideas, the author traces the developmental lines of the infant's maturation. She describes how the cry, as a modulation of breathing, enables survival and interaction. She illustrates how the root of all oral pleasure lies in the use of the lungs and air. Recalling René Spitz's dictum that the baby sees with the mouth, Webster defines what it me