It’s hard to describe On Breathing, a new book from psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. It’s the sort of writing that resists being tidily packed into a genre. Mostly, it’s deep, important, and beautiful thinking expressed clearly—the kind that makes readers think deeply too. Jamieson’s fast-moving ideas are centered on and linked through breath, which is life. But the book doesn’t stay still on one note, or one link. It’s so wide-ranging, it begs readers to pay attention to take in her full intent.
Jamieson, a mother, tackles her feelings about parenting in this fraught era of global warming, writing in her pages, “I know that many feel guilty for having children in an age of climate breakdown and so much social strife. My daughter had to take her first breath in this world? This sentiment, the psychoanalyst in me says, is a failure of desire. We must still find the way to want to hear what they will say, to know that there is, while we are here, something left to say, something that hasn’t yet been heard. Our eager anticipation means there is still a world.”
It’s worth reading that at least twice.
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We had the opportunity to ask the climate author questions about reading, writing, hope, indulgence, and other big human themes in On Breathing. Here are her thoughtful answers.
Who are your favorite climate authors?
My answers are probably a bit anachronistic, coming from psychoanalysis and philosophy. I love thinking of Freud’s lost text A Phylogenetic Fantasy as a text about climate catastrophe where he imagines humans facing the Ice Age and becoming neurotic and trying to ignore reality through magical thinking.
There is also the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi’s text Thalassa, where he develops the idea that we all regressively want to return to the sea. It marks a before to our forced evolution on land where we had to breathe and engage in sexed reproduction that meant the domination of one half of the species, where mixing of gametes took place inside of bodies, being without the water whose function it was to mix. We dream of a more fluid relationship between humans and with our environment. Something about our neglect or even destruction of the air makes sense here. Also, that we may end up getting what we wish for—i.e., being underwater again.
Some of the philosophers I look at in On Breathing are Peter Solterdijk’s Terror From the Air, Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air, Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Ben Ware’s On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End. My absolute favorite text is from my friend Elissa Marder, The Shadow of the Eco: Denial and Climate Change.
Why did you choose to write a book about climate?
There was a moment when surveying the losses that have taken place in my limited time on this planet felt breathtaking. I remember the coming into awareness of the idea of endangered species when I was young in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the World Wildlife Fund stickers you would get in the mail and put on your windshield. It feels like Jacques Cousteau just revealed to us the richness of sea life and it’s all almost gone. This is personal.
Professionally, I work with children, adolescents, and young adults, and their sense that the world has been destroyed is so palpable.
What do you go without as a result of the climate crisis?
For psychoanalysis, the question concerns our relationship to consumption and satisfaction, getting outside the cycle of buying and buying and buying. You must change your relationship to it. I’m much more ascetic than I used to be in general. It took me a minute to catch up to my millennial friend’s distaste for Boomers and their self-serving excesses.
What do you still indulge in despite the climate crisis?
Travel. I keep wondering if that will change. Something doesn’t feel right anymore as a tourist, like it’s all disaster tourism or denial tourism. But living full-time in New York is hard. You have to leave.
What are your greatest climate fears for the future?
Mostly I fear the psychic chaos as we enter a long decline where the impact of climate change will be uneven and sometimes at a real distance, as it is now for many, but anticipated and watched. Real chaos, tragedy, and hardship often rally humans, and take them outside their minds. But the real interpersonal violence will be in the interregnum born of quiet desperation.
What does hope for the future mean to you? Do you have hope, or what’s your current state of mind when it comes to the climate crisis?
In so many of the authors that I have read, what is strange is to confront the fact that “hope” doesn’t help us confront climate catastrophe. We need an emotion that is more sober. Not a lot can be hoped for from human beings, according to some. We don’t make a lot of progress as a species. We have technological progress, and while technology performs modern miracles, it is often at the expense of nature and only serves to increase the unhappiness of humans. Are we so happy living longer, for example? Has our knowledge on how to prolong life amounted to taking care of these lives that we prolong?
So, something feels off, to say the least. Think about hoping that technology will advance in such a way that helps us with the climate problems that we have created through technology. And yet how can we not hope for some kind of advance? Perhaps one can place hope on the side of nature, its anarchic processes, its independence, indifference (nature doesn’t hope), and so its will to continue in a new form.
Which talent would you most like to have that could help the climate movement?
Patience with unreason. I know, I’m a psychoanalyst… I still find it hard.
In a changing world and climate, where would you most like to live?
I still dream of living by the sea somewhere and knowing it. Tidal ranges. Inhabitants. Colors. It’s in my dreams every night. It’s my childhood in Miami. I understand with the shifting of water levels this is precisely what we must abandon. I feel like I’m clinging to the last vestige of a dream that is already lost.
Which is harder: writing a book or fighting for clean air and a better climate?
Hands down fighting for a better climate. You won’t get to see the outcome of your work in your own lifetime. It’s a real commitment.
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