Overview

A gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe 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.

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9781646222414

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Reviews

""With its deep care and attention to the most elemental human activity and its strange flows and blockages, On Breathing is a beautifully crafted antidote to our age of chronic bodily alienation and anxiety."" —Josh Cohen, author of How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature ""When I read Jamieson Webster, I fall in love with life again. Her deep, calm, wild, and confronting intelligence leaves an essential human fingerprint on a time of fear and catastrophe. We all breathe within this book."" —Deborah Levy, author of Real Estate ""It is very unusual for a book to be at once so lucid and so evocative. In Webster’s hands, breathing becomes endlessly absorbing such that you end up thinking it really is the only issue, in life and then in psychoanalysis—one hiding in plain sight. An amazing feat."" —Adam Phillips, author of On Giving Up

Author Information

JAMIESON WEBSTER is a clinical psychoanalyst, professor, and New York Review of Books contributor. She is the author of Disorganization & Sex and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis.

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