Breathe for Me

One way to explore these questions is to consider the life of the French philosopher and Marxist Louis Althusser, whose confusions around breathing proved horrifically tragic: He strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in I980. In the preface to his final book, The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, he opens with an explanation of the events that led to her murder: “… in the course of a severe, unforeseeable crisis that had left me in a state of mental confusion, I strangled my wife, the woman who was everything "in the world and who loved me so much that, since living had become impossible, she wanted only to die. In my confusion, not knowing what I was doing, I no doubt rendered her this ‘service’: she did not defend herself against it, but died of it.”

There were no signs of struggle, not even a bruise on her neck. Althusser was declared unfit for trial by reason of insanity and lost his academic position. The Underground Current, written in the ten years following his wife’s death, was dedicated to her: “For Hélène / without whom / this book/ in mourning.”

Althusser also worked on a memoir, The Future Lasts Forever, posthumously published. In a sense, this book was his theory of materialism—his groundbreaking adaptation of Marx’s science of the history of society—as applied to his own life, showing how the crisis that led to his wife’s strangulation was preceded by a strange series of chance events. After decades of manic-depressive collapses and sexual affairs by Althusser, he and Rytmann had found a new calm and happiness in their marriage. But during this period of peace, Althusser suddenly developed pains in his esophagus and difficulty breathing while eating. He underwent a much-dreaded surgery to alleviate the ulcers that caused the problems and then experienced a severe reaction to the anesthesia, plunging him into the worst suicidal depression of his life.

His doctors felt that his depression was akin to a biological shock, one that made him entirely resistant to treatment. At times, he was almost completely delirious. In moments of lucidity, he behaved like a panicked child, filled with dread. Rytmann grew desperate and suicidal herself. Althusser couldn’t stay in the sanitorium forever and once he was out, the couple cocooned themselves in their apartment, which Althusser described as a “womblike” place, protected from the outside world. “In essence it had a maternal ambiance, was like an amniotic fluid,” he wrote. But he knew that this retreat was dangerous for them; their mutual agony only escalated.

Yet another chance event: During this time, Althusser and Rytmann were seeing the same psychoanalyst. The situation came about because she had fallen out with her analyst, and Althusser begged his to see her. He agreed. When he decided that Althusser needed to be hospitalized again, Rytmann pleaded with him to give her a little more time. Then the couple stopped answering his phone calls. After a couple of days, he sent a telegram, which was found the day after her murder, mysteriously undelivered by the building manager.

As far back as Althusser could remember there was something about breathing, throats, air. He retained the indelible image of his grandmother shoving a pair of scissors down the throat of a chicken to cut its carotid artery; he remembered feeling horrible and ashamed to have seen such a thing. He tells the moving story of how he had been named for a dead man. This man was his father’s brother, and he had been engaged to Althusser’s mother. Louis Althusser the elder joined the air corps in France in World War I and was shot down in the skies over Verdun. “Above all,” Althusser wrote, Louis’ name “contained the sound of the third person pronoun (‘lui’,) which deprived me of any personality of my own, summoning as it did an anonymous other… It was him my mother loved, not me.” Whenever she looked at her son, she was looking through him to the long-lost uncle, and so, Althusser claims, she could never be satisfied with him.

Neither could the man who came to be his father—his parents’ marriage wasn’t a happy one. Recalling his childhood, Althusser remembers that his mother was “afraid of everything .… she always had a sore throat, as I did too until I went off to do my military service and got away from her.”

His uncle was always there, in “some infinite and imaginary sky” and the contingency of Althusser’s name “chilled and marked him” from his earliest childhood. The other Louis was both a fantasy (especially his mother’s fantasy) and Althusser’s reality. For this reason, he said, he included in his memoir events that weren’t real, that were hallucinations or wishful dreams.

The first was about men and air. Althusser admired his paternal grandfather, a poor farmer. Alone among his family members, this grandfather taught him to take pleasure in his body, not to be ashamed of it. (His mother had shown disgust at the earliest signs of his sexuality.) In the memoir, he recounted a time when his grandfather took him along on a trip to the threshing machine with a load of freshly harvested oats.

“The air was thick and unbreathable with oat and wheat chaff and men were coughing, spitting, constantly swearing, and shouting to make themselves heard above the infernal racket… Then, with the help of the wine which flowed freely into large glasses and down open throats, the first artless murmurings of a song were heard.”

He ends the story with a confessional thud: None of it took place. He never heard the group of farmers belting out a peasant song. He had only longed to. “I intend to stick closely to the facts throughout this succession of memories by association,” he wrote, “but hallucinations are also facts.”

The memoir is the testimony of his self-interrogation after the death of his wife. Nothing in the book is meant as an explanation. Readers must draw their own assumptions. Althusser himself said he wrote the book from the blank space he entered after the murder, as he was never given the occasion to speak. He knew that the book would be published only after his own death, in an infinite and imaginary sky, with no one to answer for the tragedy that occurred—certainly not Althusser, who did not know what happened.

There were the opinions of psychiatrists and of Althusser’s longtime psychoanalyst. There were the stories that friends recalled, especially from occasions when they visited him in the hospital and he was profoundly unwell. The memoir speculates that he and his wife were in a folie a deux, a kind of altruistic-suicidal pact due to the pain that Althusser’s illness caused their marriage. Althusser recounts instances of the two pleading with one another about which should die.

He begins the memoir speaking of the fateful night: “Kneeling beside her, leaning across her body, I was massaging her neck. I would often silently massage the nape of her neck and her back. I had learnt the technique as a prisoner-of-war.” He describes moving his thumbs from the hollow in her breastbone across her neck, one going to the left and one to the right, in the shape of a V. “Hélène’s face was calm and motionless; her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, I was terror-struck. Her eyes stared interminably, and I noticed the tip of her tongue was showing between her teeth and lips, strange and still.”

While psychotics are said to possess little insight into their disease, the address to the reader in Althusser’s memoir, straight away, involves an intense questioning of self. He carefully notes his confusions and doubts. He measures the words of others, favorable or not, against what he feels he can say himself with any certainty. He tries to keep track of the lacunae, the gaps and blackouts in his memory. His recounting seems to be about seeking permission to testify to what doesn’t make sense in a life.

“One final word,” Althusser writes at the memoir’s end. “I hope those who think they know more or have more to say will not be afraid to do so. They can only help me live.”

In The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, Althuser writes about the importance of acknowledging chance, the aleatory and the unforeseen. “It is raining,” he says. “Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain …” In the vein of Epicurus and Lucretius, he speaks of the materialism “of the rain, the swerve, the encounter, the take.”

Taking a cue from this thought, I believe we need to become more interested in what veers off course, in order to understand better where we are and how we have gotten here. A single event can change pathways ingrained for millennia— forcing new directions, rewriting history. Materialism is not the exclusive property of natural reality, but is present in ideas, in language, in what can seem like abstract processes. Evolution is likewise not a linear process but a result of aberrations, glitches, hodge-podge montages of organs and environments and catastrophe amidst endlessly clashing forces and confusions. A better understanding of this might make us more open to chance encounters, alert to surprises, humble about what we can know and more curious about what might be revealed concerning our origins or potential futures.

The facts of any life are strange—material and ghostly at the same time, overdetermined and yet full of contingencies. Nothing can act as a causal explanation for what is a real breakdown. And yet breakdowns—life is full of them; many remain unregistered—often possess more logic than whatever passes for the course of a so-called normal life. “Catch them before they fall” is an idea espoused by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. A patient’s fear of breakdown, he proposes, is not apprehension about a future possibility but avoidance of an already accomplished fact. Catching the breakdowns before they “fall” means soliciting what they hold at bay, actively opening the breakdowns to look inside them for breakthroughs.

Amid the seemingly metastasizing threats involved in 21st century life, we must counter the wish to retreat to a womb-like-interior and instead venture outside, finding ways to be reborn to life. In Althusser’s tragic fate, there isn’t a trace of backward-looking sentiment. Certainly, there’s raw pain over what he did. But in the memoir I cannot find an instance of nostalgia or idealization of the past. The most romantic events, in fact, are the ones marked as hallucinations.

The book is a book of ordinary rain. We bear witness in it, as we do in our own lives, to patterns of erosion, lightning strikes, to the unavoidable force of certain winds. It is also a story of the air: its currents, dead pockets and gale forces. Something about the air reappears in spheres that are internal, private, domestic. This takes the form of choking, asphyxiation, the cutting of throats and voices. We see fantasies become reality, and we see reality evaded time and time again. The story is brutal, but it is undeniably filled with moments of extraordinary tenderness and care—a confusion in Althusser and Rytmann that feels like ours to bear.

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This essay is an adaptation of selections from On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, © 2025 by Jamieson Webster, forthcoming from Catapult in March 2025.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City, a teacher at the New School for Social Research and a regular contributor to The New York Times and many psychoanalytic publications. She is the author of Disorganisation and Sex (2022) and the forthcoming On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (2025).