In the first few pages of On Breathing, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster remembers a patient who responded to a bad heartbreak by obsessively tracking her breathing against her heartbeat. In forcing herself to think constantly about something that under normal circumstances we do instinctively and thoughtlessly, the woman “drove herself half mad,” Webster writes. We are, as she puts it, meant to forget that we are breathing. Later, we meet another patient, a gay man who had suffered a long history of institutionalized sexual abuse and developed an affinity for autoerotic asphyxiation. The patient regularly used drugs, and deliberately increased his risk of contracting HIV by avoiding sexual protection. In Webster’s account, he was connecting breathing with danger and death. Sometimes, without entirely knowing why, she found herself whispering during their sessions. “It felt like … an attempt to find an unconstrained breath that wasn’t tied to death, asphyxiation or rage,” she writes.
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