Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)
50:19 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

You know what's smart? Enjoying a fresh gourmet meal at home that you didn't have to cook. Meet Factor, your loophole in the laws of mealtime. Chef-crafted meals delivered with a tap, ready in just two minutes. You know what's even smarter? Treating yourself without cheating your goals. Factor is dietician-approved, chef-prepared, and you-plated. Pretty smart, huh? Refresh your routine and eat smart with Factor. Learn more at factormeals.com.

Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Helena Wiesing, your host. Today I have the pleasure of talking with Jameson Webster about her newest book on breathing, Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Catapult. Jameson, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me again. So as our opening question, for our opening question, to the extent that we can know our intentions and motivations, what made you write this book?

Oh my goodness. Well, I wrote a piece called On Breathing for the New York Review of Books shortly after the pandemic, which followed two pieces. One was kind of early on just reflections on being a psychoanalyst during a plague. And then another one called End Notes, which was about my experience volunteering in the hospital. And then I wrote a piece on breathing.

And I, I don't know, I guess it was a question whether or not to expand this more than I had with my colleague, Patricia Garavici. We did a kind of like psychoanalytic survey of the literature together. But I think, I think having a baby brought a lot of, a lot to the surface about breathing that I wanted to revisit.

especially the extent to which, you know, there's all the imaginary and real breathing in labor. And then there's the question of the infant's first breath and cry. And then I don't, you know, a lot of the anxiety about children, you know, sudden infant death syndrome, which is mysterious and has something to do with just that the baby stops breathing, you know, either that they get smothered, but it's not entirely clear what the

What happens with that? And so parents so anxiously watch their children's breathing and you have this almost immediate connection to it. And then the breastfeeding, which is the first time that the baby has to develop a rhythm between breathing and sucking, right? And the sort of extraordinary connection.

both biological but also intuitive way in which that develops and seems to flow into like the first sounds that a child makes and plays with and it's funny because even having thought so much about it the other day I was looking through old videos with my daughter and

And I forgot that at a kind of later stage of breastfeeding, probably around six months, she used to make all these noises at the breast by blowing. So she'd be like, you know, sort of playing with the breath, you know, with her breath and with her sucking and with the noise making. So I just got very interested in how alive and rich it was to pay attention to this kind of a thing in the early life of a child.

And the question for me, psychoanalytically speaking, was like, where did all of this go? You know, how does this disappear from our awareness so much? And it's not even, I mean, you know, it's a very psychoanalytic question that it's an aspect, an intense aspect of early life.

that disappears. So even when you reflect on it as an adult, this somehow seems vanished. And, you know, with all of the like sort of wellness industry, attention to breath, or even like Eastern meditational practices, attention to breath, this whole wild and varied picture of it in early life and childhood didn't seem to be a part of that at all. And so I got interested in it as a psychoanalytic problem of a kind of amnesia.

And there's so much in all of that, so many pieces to it. And I mean, I think around the early, the perinatal phase there, you know, the early years of our children. Just to start on that one, I work a lot with the new parents in the perinatal field, new moms and parents. And reading this book was so helpful and illuminating for me because first

So there's so much anxiety working with the new parents around the breath and, and also the sounds of like the coughing and the sniffles and the breathing and with the feeding. And what was really helpful was this, like the psychoanalytic opening up to all these layers of anxiety and,

is that a lot of mainstream psychology wants to just kind of reassure on the surface level where obviously as an analyst, you want to go deeper. So it was such an interesting kind of going into the layers and you go into some, I mean, you get into all the stuff. I mean, mortality, the existential, everything, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think this was the adventure of it. And I'm, you know, I'm really glad I didn't just stop one at the piece on breathing, you know, which was in the immediacy of the pandemic, where there's the question of the fact that we share breath. And I was thinking about difficulties with breathing, you know, like asthma, and then, of course, what was happening during COVID.

And then I was sort of interested in with Patricia, the question of breathing as part of the drives or not part of the drives, like is breathing its own drive? Do we consider it along with erotogen, you know, erotogeneity more generally? Could it be one of the erotogenic zones, you know, along with the mouth and the anus and the genitals, the eyes and the ears?

Or why not? So we were in is breath an object. So this was like kind of our concern in that paper. But as I pushed in sort of in the writing of this book, I couldn't believe where it took me. And I think like so many memories of my own opened up.

And that was also part of the adventure. So I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't have gone that far with this book. And it was kind of astounding to me how many directions could be, could be gone. Well, I wonder if we could just talk about the COVID piece because I was struck by when I was reading it, I was struck by how fresh it still is and how we have just

collectively, we haven't even started to really process what happened. And maybe I have been, I haven't exposed myself enough to it, but it felt like to me the first time I really in the psychoanalytic literature was reading something that was like really going into sitting with the kind of madness of what happened, you know. And one of the things that struck me is

because this is one of the many journeys you go on, is the way that

COVID really brought into this, like the universality, like we, the, the, the trauma, the tragedy of COVID, we couldn't hold onto this illusion of like some kind of horrible tragedy or emergency being an isolated incident up against a general baseline because COVID was truly like universal, universal.

And it really struck me how hard it is for us to even go there. And it also makes a lot of sense that you draw on like Bion, Winnicott, of course, Lacan, Freud, like you really need the full buffet of inquiry, right?

to actually grapple with, in addition to your very direct lived experiences during the pandemic. And also the philosophers became really important and the ones who've tried to kind of conceptualize the question of breathing atmosphere and air as a

an issue in the 21st century, but also something that we can't remember. We can't like, we forget it. And there was a time in which one would take the atmosphere and air, let's say, as a background given, you know, not, not unimportant for life, but a background given and somehow pushing this is, this is Slutterdyke pushing this background into the foreground makes it an object. But the minute it's an object, it's an object to be destroyed or

Or it's an object that will be destroyed. Or it's an object of technology and human manipulation, which seems to be bringing it into a place of destruction. And so he brings up, of course, gas warfare and gas chambers and all of the technologies that go through the air from airplanes to bombs, etc.

And so on and so forth, meaning that we've completely conquered the air. And I, at the time of writing the book, hadn't seen this, but Freud also makes the comment that he wonders if the compensation for...

World War I and the economic depression was to finally conquer the air, which we see happens in World War II, which is pretty pathetic since he only really kind of like lived up to the beginning of World War II. So he's already commenting on that fact. But I, you know, it's interesting, like when I wrote the book, my editor, my main editor was from Peninsula in the UK.

And he was like, nobody wants to read a COVID book. So I don't, I really don't want this to be a COVID book. And, you know, it's there, but it's like certainly not the most central concern in it. But I just noticed this week that two of my favorite female authors, Maggie Nelson and Patricia Lockwood,

both have written COVID books that are coming out. And, you know, I just wonder, like, I know both of them are very fast writers. Their editors probably forced them to wait, you know, until now, as if we can only now kind of come back to it. So I think that that might be the case. And there were certainly moments in working on the book, like when I was thinking about Lauren Berlant, who, you know, her thoughts on cool optimism are much, much, you know, pre-COVID.

obviously, but they seemed so unbelievably relevant because part of what she talks about in Cruel Optimism is that like, as we sort of create a moral crisis around something that is a universal entanglement for everybody, and we make it certain people's problems that they have to solve, like, I'm sorry that you have diabetes and your diabetes led you to be particularly vulnerable to COVID. Like, that's not my problem. Like you should have

you should have controlled things better and like not understanding that diabetes is within a web of interrelationships of what we've done to certain people with like food deserts and lack of healthcare and so on and so forth.

that we try to isolate it. And we try to blame people for these entanglements that are actually what are allowing them to live. Their optimism is that, for example, in being able to eat and at least share the pleasure of eating with family in an impoverished situation, they will suffer the diabetes. And there was some aspect of this that felt very present to me with COVID, not just the stockpiling of ventilators. You know, oh,

We have thousands of ventilators. Like, we'll be okay. When that we didn't know that whether that was necessary. And even as it proved to be less necessary that people could breathe without ventilators, we were still obsessed with the machines. But also the ways in which,

The testing and the vaccination became the absolute focus. And then we stopped addressing people's lives. Right. I mean, there's so many things looking back that we could have done for children so that they weren't in Zoom school. You know, we could have created some ways for them to attend school. I mean, I was very lucky because my son died.

I found out that an early college was running in person because it was a small school. So they bubbled the school and he got to attend school in person during COVID. And I think it saved his life.

If his last years of high school, his first years of college had been in Zoom, we're only now sort of understanding the destructive effects of this. And I see a lot of teenagers and they talk about how they have had no experience of transference. You know how important it is that you fall in love with a teacher, you fall in love with something that a teacher is saying. In person, it's certainly not going to happen on Zoom when everyone has their screen, their little boxes turned off on the Zoom screen.

Or some kids weren't even in Zoom school. They just got assignments in the morning and then they submitted them by email or whatever. And so he got to be in person and be in class in person. But that's rare. Yeah, the way that, you know, COVID, because it's certainly not just a COVID book, far from. But the experience, that piece about your experiences of COVID, just really, just, it's like this awareness

opening up this kaleidoscope of so many things. Like one of the things that comes up around the whole COVID is like how much it just revealed our struggles as humans, our ambivalence, our frustrations with each other, you know,

and the way that freedom is this impossible concept. I appreciate it the way that you talk about freedom. We tend to talk about it as this nice, beautiful thing, but in your exploration, it really shows how freedom is just completely impossible. There's one quote where I felt like I need this on a tote bag. You say, freedom as a private luxury is misanthropic.

Which just nails it so much because you talk so much about this, like the big dilemma of like the freedom, this and the fantasy of like the freedom, the fresh, the big breath of the individual where you can feel breathing space. But it's an illusion. And again and again, you show how we just are thrown into this illusion. And I was really struck by that expansion of,

I'm in an American, a particularly American, at least at this point in time, uh, delusion that's becoming a nightmare. Uh, and I, you know, I think that this, I think, you know, I grew, I'm like a child of the nineties, you know, and it was like rock the vote time. Um, and you know, we believed in this, we believed in freedom and the American dream and, um, free speech and, uh,

I don't know. I think we're really running up against the limit. So I, you know, French psychoanalysis in particular always linked freedom and madness. And I was like, what's their problem? And then I think COVID showed it to me in a way that I like somehow couldn't understand because of, I don't know, I drank the Kool-Aid or whatever.

And, and Freud always said this, you know, and I always sort of saw it as like a semi ironic jab where he says, he says, we were probably the most free before civilization, but we weren't in a position to enjoy it because we were so under threat. And he says civilization always means less freedom, not more.

And his whole question was, certainly there's the case that one needs to vie for greater equity for certain portions of a population that suffer unnecessarily or they suffer because of repressiveness within a society. I mean, for example, women in relationship to sexuality at the time that he was working.

But he says that there's a neurotic hatred of civilization and what it requires of the individual to sacrifice. And this he was naming the desire for freedom that you can't have within civilization.

Build a routine with Ollie that supports your wellness needs, like getting your daily vitamins and minerals with Ollie's Multigummies, or keeping your mood upbeat with all the vitamin D in Hello Happy. Give your gut health some support with probiotics, and wake up feeling refreshed after taking Ollie's sleep. Do wellness on your terms. Find Ollie at a Walmart or Target near you, or at Ollie.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

My watch says we've gone three miles. This app is like having a personal trainer. Yeah, but those apps collect a lot of your personal data. Aren't you worried? Really? That's creepy. How do I stop that? You should go to privacy.ca.gov to learn about your privacy rights and get on the best path to protect your privacy.

You think they could help us get up this next hill? One step at a time. Californians have the strongest privacy protections in the country. Go the extra mile to protect your information. Learn more at privacy.ca.gov. And I think I took this as ironic and realized that it wasn't ironic, it was real. That it was an ongoing and continually real neurotic problem.

that we really saw loud and clear when the freedom, the fight for freedom during COVID was the freedom to spread death at will by not having to wear a mask as if that was some infringement, whatever, on our basic freedoms, which is crazy. And this conflict here about civilization, I mean, I think...

you cover so many of the kind of big pivotal moments in psychoanalytic history and as it relates to world history. And the whole Freud and Reich conflict comes up here. And you mentioned that, I mean, we've talked

which is always so rich because in it you know to be honest the history of psychoanalysis is a history of ruptures right i mean yeah full of ruptures but but but you describe also like like like as much as we can be fascinated with reich right like the problem was that he you know he was like holding on to this the fantasy and and we just now we can see like freud was like

No, like this is going to be a shortcut. Like it's not, it's a bypassing. And there's one question you have that I feel like just kind of captures this and also kind of in a way the whole spirit of your book. You ask, what is the difference between breathing that acknowledges loss and breathing that phantasmatically denies it?

This question just feels very important. I wonder if you could speak a bit to that. Yeah, there's so many great case examples where the question of breathing, breath holding, breath spasming happens.

is like right there at the point of loss and wrestling with loss. I mean, you can think about this in like a very sweet but real way when children want to hold their breath when they pass the cemetery, which is either apparently out of respect for the dead or in fear of them, that you're going to breathe them in. Yeah, and then even just the question of letting a breath go, which is very important for Winnicott.

is already like a recognition of loss that you take something in and then to expel it is already to be sort of in contact with the question of letting go, which for him is why asthmatics, for asthmatics, it's not a question of letting

not being able to breathe, even though it feels that way, it's actually a problem letting go of breath. So the asthmatic is actually holding their breath and they won't release it. They won't lose it. So it's already a question of a relationship to fear of loss under threat. And

The phantasmatic sort of denial of loss and loss of freedom because of interdependence started to interest me, especially in the history of psychoanalysis. And Reich is its hero. Yeah.

In a negative sense. And he really is the psychoanalyst of the air because it's not just that he was interested in breathing and he wanted to get out of the talking because he didn't think anymore it was going to affect the sort of armoring of the individual and he wanted to go right for the somatic and the way to do this was through breathing.

you know, really intense breathing and muscle spasming. So, you know, he wanted to go right there. And, you know, of course, breathing is the diaphragm is something that spasms to an extent. So he is interested in that, reaching that place. And then it was, you know, it went beyond that in terms of, you know, him being a psychoanalyst of sexual revolution, him being a psychoanalyst that was fighting fascism.

the communist psychoanalyst, and then finally the psychoanalyst who was going to cure cancer and was going to control the weather and was going to defeat UFOs. So, I mean, it starts with breathing and then it goes into outer space, literally. And, you know, I was like, how does this grow this delusional? You know, how does it grow this phantasmatic at the same time that I think one has to appreciate in

In Reich, probably the largest promise that any psychoanalyst has ever made, right? I mean, he's going to cure everything, right? And, you know, you have to push this up against very, very sober Freud and his minimal offer of common human unhappiness. Ordinary unhappiness. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and also we see it also in the way that like again and again, we see like magical thinking around breath. And you also go into that and explore. And I mean, of course, there's we can acknowledge the importance of breath, like in all the kind of spiritual traditions and the importance of that.

But like you also trace some experiences of like how easily we slip in to that sacralizing of breath. And one of the things I think is really fascinating is that, I mean, not surprisingly, of course, with your background and what you work with, you're like, well, if we're going to talk about breath, we're going to talk about speech and language. And there's something about the way that you talk

Bring us into like, think those together that I think made it clear for me, like both how, you know, why we are so tempted to fall into the idealizing and sacralizing breath.

and also how much it's a dead end. It's almost like this, like the way that this is a problem in somatic psychology of just like flipping the Cartesian where it's the body becomes on the pedestal and the mind is like the kind of pathetic problem, right? So can you talk a bit about how, of course, there's the topic of speech and language on the topic of breath?

I mean, that was the most, that was the most important move for me to make. And I'm always laughing because I think people see the title and they think that I've turned into like a yoga wellness person, but they don't know. They don't know where this book goes. And so I, you know, that was the place I was trying to

wiggle myself I think the entire time that I was working on the book and was really to get to the question of language and obviously this is important to me with Lacan and I hadn't realized when I was working on the book I knew I was going to go there and I do owe a lot to Franco Bifo Berardi he wrote a book on breathing very very early with the first murder of Eric Garner the first sort of instance of I Can't Breathe and

And he talks about the fact that we are going to, in times of late capitalism, need a new rhythmicity to deal with this chaos. And he said we need some homeopathy, we need poetry, we need to mess with our bodies or something to sort of figure out how to live in this new chaos where we're not going to be able to breathe.

And that was already in 2013. So, I mean, I sort of knew that I wanted to go one towards not the natural breath, not the authentic breath, not the free breath, but the question of breathing in catastrophe and chaos. And that this also had something to do with language. I mean, he invokes poetry and what, you know, how poetry, you know, is so close to embodiment, but it's still within a world of representation. And I wanted to think about this with the fundamental rule.

And what surprised me, though, in the writing of the book was how close the amnesias of psychoanalysis, if I was going to put them together, because for me, it's sexuality for Freud. It's language for Lacan.

And I think breathing also. And these three are tied together. I mean, they are like a beautiful knot of amnesias. And if there's any amnesia in psychoanalysis, it's because there's no natural rhythmicity. It's not like a constant throughout our life, like repression affects it. And the question of the body can't organize it into any kind of unity or like seamless functioning. So it itself has like a kind of off-center relationship to our life.

And so you can't do anything but form an absolutely singular relationship to it. Your sexuality is only going to be your sexuality. Your language has to be your language, your style, your way of speaking, your representational world. And I think your breathing is the same. It's not, you know, we're not all going to find the one magical breath together, but we're going to have to form our own relationship to breathing.

And so there was a question of evoking all of this at the very end of the book. And I wanted both like the chaos of the natural world and the chaos that we fear now that we've sort of fucked with it irreparably to be there. I wanted the chaos of language and I wanted the chaos of breathing to be very present at the end of the book.

Yeah, and it helped me really expand, you know, this idea of, like, the way coming into language is not a walk in the park. And I always struggled with that, like, this way that it's, like, the abstract. But it's kind of like you bring it into that language.

I mean, I have to say there's something about you grapple with the whole mind-body problem, so-called problem, without necessarily saying it directly. But there's something about how breath is right at the crux of not just the problem of being alive, but consciousness. I mean, you start from the birth trauma of understanding consciousness.

of that and then continue into the biggest, the fundamental rule of speech and what are the hopes that comes with speech with all its impossibilities. So, I mean, did this project make you hopeful or...

Or maybe not. Because I have a weird sense of reading this. I got both hopeful about certain possibilities for breath and speech, and at the same time, I got a little depressed. That's probably about right. I mean, I think...

I don't think that you can go one way or another, honestly. And I think at the very end, I said something like, we don't know where this speech is taking us. I mean, the rule in psychoanalysis is say anything, say everything that you can say. But you also find out how hard it is to say and how overdetermined what you have to say is.

So it's not an experience of freedom. And I think the encounter at certain points in analysis, although I think it's very hard to get here, I really think it's one of the most repressed aspects of the psyche, is how awful language is.

And an experience of it that's almost unbearable. You know, like if you go and, you know, here's where like beyond comes up. If you go to like the most psychotic place with respect to it, even if you're not someone who hears voices, you have a sense of how brutal speeches, how violent, how incomprehensible, how we think that we understand what everyone's saying. And most of the time we have no idea what anyone's saying. It's just an illusion. Yeah.

And that navigating this at certain points in time when we feel the most menaced or we feel like we need to understand or we need to find like a mutuality, it's pretty terrifying. This is like right there. And, you know, as a psychoanalyst, you could say, well, it's good to know. Let's not live our life illusion. But I can't say that it's comforting to be in that experience and

At the same time that I do think getting in touch with that makes for a possibility of being able to play with language, being able to write, finding your own poetics, finding your own style and dictation, diction.

And having some feeling for what in language can't be locked down, for what in language shouldn't be oversaturated with meaning, for what in language, because of the violence of it, you want to work to ameliorate with your own play with language or the way that you use language to undo the trauma of language because you have no other means to.

Or maybe the way you want to stop adding more language to this world that's so full of it, especially at this moment. There's something strange. I mean, a piece just came out in book forum about, I forget the name of the book, but the guy was talking about the twittering machine. It's essentially about our phones, but the fact that we're in like a crazy experiment of writing, writing, writing, speaking, speaking, speaking at this moment.

It's hard to say now more than before, but it kind of feels like that. We don't call each other on the phone, and not everybody goes to psychoanalysis, but you are constantly living in a sort of chatter of discourse. Yeah, speeches become content, right? We talk about content for the online, that it's just reproducing speech as content.

Right. And you're in 55 text message conversations at any time. That's wild. You used to call someone on the phone and then you hang up. That's it. You have to call them again another time. And now it's like it's a it's a it's a constancy. So he was talking about this constant twittering. And there's some feeling that I had when I was working on the book about noise. And I got interested in noise because it's an aspect of pollution. Right. It's not just that we have pollution with substances, but we have pollution with noise. Right.

And this was very important to the philosopher Michel Serre. He says, we have hard pollution, we have soft pollution, and soft pollution also leads to hard pollution. And he was kind of looking at this cycle. And there's a place in Lacan when he's fed up with language, I think, at the very, very end of his life. At the very, very end, he said, there's something destructive about these signs and symbols that

and discourse that we send running around the globe. He says it's marking up the earth. And he didn't get to live into this hyper-digitalized version of it. Maybe he was foreseeing some of this, seeing where it was kind of going towards. You also talk about how modern technology is this always a double-edged sword.

Always so, so reflecting our own ambivalence. You also mentioned about the language. You mentioned we're still learning what we can do with speech, which I thought was really interesting because it's both like kind of sobering. Like you say, it's really heavy and difficult. Like we're just spinning into our massive amounts of speech production without necessarily like...

understanding what are we talking about. And it's, I mean, one of the things you also talk in the beginning, you have a section, you talk about anxiety and all the anxieties around this. And what was felt like a good kind of a grounding from the beginning is that you say, we can't just, anxiety, the answer is not to breathe the anxiety away. Like we can't just

Fix the phobias, like address the anxiety, put it away. Like that is not like the anxiety is going to return. It's going to find another way of channeling itself.

And I thought this was interesting because so much of when people talk about breath and breath work is all about it's the cure for anxiety. That's kind of common. If you just focus on your breathing, you'll cure your anxiety. It's very, very prevalent, that kind of watered-down version of it. I wonder, because you work a lot with anxiety in your work and in your writing, I wonder if you can speak a bit about this.

the way we want to just target anxiety all the time.

This President's Day, upgrade the look of your home without breaking your budget. Save up to 40% site-wide on new window treatments at Blinds.com. Blinds.com makes it easy with free virtual consultations on your schedule and samples delivered to your door fast and free. With over 25 million windows covered and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, you can count on Blinds.com to deliver results you'll love. Shop Blinds.com's President's Day Mega Sale last chance now for up to 40% off site-wide.

Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Critics are calling Shrinking one of the best TV shows of the year. This is going to be fun. It's an AFI Top Ten program of the year. In the therapy biz, we'd say trending upward. And it's now nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble. It's one of the hottest things I've ever seen. And Outstanding Male Actor for Harrison Ford. I do have a big ego. I'm aware your face takes up the whole cover of your book. Well, I wrote it, didn't I?

shrinking now streaming on apple tv plus oh my god i mean i you know i i appreciate the fact that we live in i don't know some anxious times and i think all the information honestly all the speech that becomes information on the internet is making people even more anxious um which is funny uh when it's except it's not funny um

So I think anxiety is like a new signifier, a new discourse at the moment. And everyone's talking about their anxiety. Of course, there's a study. This is so important. There's a huge mindfulness study in the US and I think Australia where they implemented mindfulness at school, which is basically like attention to your emotional states and then like the coping skills with the breathing and the mindfulness.

And it made, in the study, the students who took the class were worse than if you never took it. Because one...

Of course, the kids don't do it. They're just given this and they're left alone and they don't practice it. And if it's a practice that you want to do, it's like you have to do it all the time. You have to constantly manage your anxiety with breathing. Is that all we can do as a human being? And this is really what we want to ask people to do all the time.

And then you draw attention to something, probably exacerbate it, then tell them to control it. So all of the students were feeling worse at the end of this experiment. And that made a lot of sense to me, especially in terms of a lot of Freud's concerns about anxiety. And he said, anxiety actually has to be addressed on a social level.

If there's something in the social that's making people anxious, like they're fearful of their health or they feel for their future, they don't feel they have a safety social net. This is a social question. It's an institutional question. And what psychoanalysis is interested in is the way in which the human mind can transform anxiety into a specific symptom, right? Which is representational. It's not just complete physiological distress.

It's transforming the physiological distress into the discrete neurotic symptom, which gives the person a grasp on life at the expense of reality. But at that place where something is substituted on the level of the body with a representation and against reality, you can then analyze it and help them get to know reality.

the reality both of the traumas they've experienced and the realities that they want to avoid. But you can't do a lot with anxiety. And patients, you know, know this. They come wanting help with it. And you can't offer them medication unless you offer them sedatives. Like that's the medication that you can offer for anxiety is for them to sedate themselves and

And the question is for them in the work of analysis to work to the place where there's a transformation, which is you can't promise them. It's unknown to begin with, and it has to be something that they speak themselves towards. It's very hard work, actually. And there's a lot of the distinction that I make between what Freud called...

anxiety, hysteria, or sometimes he called it actual neurosis and the sort of neuroses proper hysteria proper, because, you know, it was the latter that he says was the place where we

see the real kind of embodied mind as opposed to the mind that's collapsing underneath the set of physiological pressures of anxiety. You're speaking here also about the importance of, you know, what I think we've got to call it relationality. And like, if like you say, the mindfulness is just administered as this isolated pill in a way, do this technique, like it just like

there. You just left on your own. You also include a couple of really touching vignettes, not vignettes, experiences from your work about the experience of discovering, like you say, the analytic work it requires. I mean, that's a shared work. And you say the hard work of speaking

speaking into yourself, your body. I mean, you also have some stories around yoga, because you've done yoga too, of like you say yoga teachers, like they can speak you into your body. And when I read that, I thought, well, I mean, maybe that's also what we can do, like what psychoanalysis can do. We can speak ourselves into our bodies in a way. But require, I mean, you cannot do...

analysis on your own, right? No, you can't do analysis on your own. And you can't do the yoga on your own. I mean, in the end of the day, I did like, you know, I sort of came down on the side of Ashtanga, if there's any side to come down on. But I was interested in Ashtanga just because, you know,

It's a practice that doesn't put a teacher in front of you visually and that also you memorize the postures and you sort of like rigorously have to go through them, which is very different from the classes where you're just completely dependent on the teacher. Yeah.

But I think the relational element is incredibly important. And, you know, I think Freud's also bringing that up when he says that anxiety is a social problem insofar as it needs to be addressed altogether. It's not something you can expect individuals to handle on their own. And society should be aware of it to the extent that anxiety can lead to...

um death heart disease you know so on and so forth in terms of the difficulties i mean the kinds of ways in which anxiety gives into depression which gives into dysregulation um

is a big part of the paper. It's also Ferenczi's position in his paper, The Unwelcome Child and Their Death Instinct. And the question of the unwelcome-ness, he had this idea that in his patients who had extreme physiological dysregulation, that they were in touch with something in...

their early life that said that they were not welcome into this world. It's a very beautiful point. And I think that it's not just like whatever the traumatogenic family, but actually this world, this world when you came into it didn't actually really care to take care of you, didn't like address your needs. And I think we're in a bit of a problem with this.

Especially at the moment. And you have an entire generation of kids that feel like the world doesn't give a shit about them, whether they live or die or survive or are able to make a living or go to school or, you know, have health care. And so what is this unwelcomeness doing to us? And how does this also sort of return in the real on the level of the question of breathing? And it's the fragility of the body that's always interesting to

to me, which includes sexuality a great deal. And I think the fragility of breathing

It's a very, very fragile organ, these lungs. And, you know, they have a fragile place in evolution, you know, as the sort of the last organ to develop in this, you know, crawling from the sea onto land or the last organ to develop in utero, in fact. Yeah, that's the thing the OBs are always worried about. It's like, get to that, like, is it week 37? Because that's where the lungs are.

they just get over that hump. So it's like, it's going to be much better because before that it's often a bit harder for them. You know, they have to need to go in the NICU. And so it's that threshold there of like, just get the lungs ready to handle coming out into the world. Yeah. Yeah. And Lacan's point that, which is so important that you take a foreign element into your body.

The air is a foreign element. And so you're developing this organ to survive the trauma of bringing the air into the body. And it was the foreignness of this I love because sexuality to the extent, especially with the diphasic nature of it, is a foreignness. And that the child also encounters the sexuality of the parent in their upbringing.

And language is foreign, even insofar as it precedes you before you're born and then you have to accommodate it into yourself. And then the air is foreign. So I love this otherness that was so present in this territory that I wanted to swim around in. Yeah. Well, um...

Yeah, James, and this was so fascinating. The book is, I mean, there's this through line of breathing, but it takes you many, many places, so many places to

And I could go on and on, but I don't want to take any more of your day. But as we often end with, what are some other, what's the next project? How have you seen this like point to future projects and other things you're working on?

I don't know. For the first time, I actually like sometimes I write something and I have like the next thing kind of in mind. And I have a three-year-old, so I'm very tired. So I actually like I'm looking forward to taking a break.

The Paris Review invited me to write a diary and in its like fragmentedness and need not have complete thoughts and can make it as short or long as I want. I'm really excited about this. And they said I could do it in like an ongoing way. Like I could do like part one, part two, part three over like the next period of time. So I think I'm going to do that. I'm just going to write a diary. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the diary certainly, you know, brings up this, like, the reverie, the reverie style that is very stimulating. So I'll certainly look forward to reading that. So thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Elena.

So it's a home equity loan? No, it's not a loan at all. There's no monthly payments and no interest charges ever. And you

can use the money however you want. We were able to redo our kitchen and pay off our credit card debt. Wow, Jack and I could really use this to finally pay off our old student loan debt. How do I get started? It's easy. Just go to their website.

Text EQUITY to 865-865 to unlock the value in your home and get up to $500,000 in cash with no monthly payments and no interest ever. Pay off debt, improve your home, add to your retirement fund. It's up to you. Text EQUITY to 865-865. Text the word EQUITY to 865-865. Text EQUITY to 865-865 now.