I’m not a psychologist, a psychotherapist or a psychoanalyst. I wasn’t familiar with Ferenczi, whom Webster discusses in these pages through his theory of Thalassa. So I don’t want to try to explain a theory that doesn’t belong to my field and that I’m encountering for the first time.

I simply want to share what came up for me as I read these pages. One image in particular: the ocean.

We come from water. At some point in our evolutionary history, we emerged from the water and had to learn to live on land. In water, everything seems to mingle more easily. Boundaries feel less distinct. Bodies are immersed in the same element.

On land, we become more defined.

Webster writes a line that stayed with me:

“We want to go home, to the ocean.”

I don’t know exactly what this sentence means within the wider context of Ferenczi’s theory. What I do know is what it stirred in me.

It made me think about how many boundaries we create: between one body and another, between men and women, between one gender and another, between different skin colours, cultures and nationalities.

We need differences. I don’t think the point is to erase them. What I find myself wondering is why we so often need to turn difference into separation.

Perhaps these pages touched me because my own life has brought me very close to people of different identities, sexual orientations, cultures, backgrounds and skin colours.

To me, they are not categories. They are people I love, people I have loved, people who are part of my family and my life.

That is why I find it difficult to understand some of the battles we fight to keep defining who belongs where, who is allowed to be what, where one identity should end and another begin.

Then I come back to the breath, because this is the territory I know.

We came out of the ocean and learned to breathe air. We built houses, walls, borders, nations, categories. We gave names to our differences, sometimes to understand them, sometimes to separate them.

Meanwhile, we continue to do something incredibly simple.

We breathe.

The air entering my lungs is not mine. It doesn’t belong to my gender, my nationality, my culture, my sexual orientation or the colour of my skin. I breathe it in, it becomes part of me for a few moments, then I give it back.

What was outside comes inside. What was inside returns to the outside. The boundary exists, because my body ends somewhere and yours begins somewhere else, but it is not a sealed boundary.

We are constantly being crossed by something we share.

Perhaps this is what I felt while reading those pages. Not a desire to erase our differences, nor a desire to literally return to the ocean. More like a memory of a fluidity we may never have entirely lost.

We are individuals, of course. We are different. We have different bodies, different histories, different identities, different desires. Yet we are immersed in the same element, except that now the element is no longer water. It is air.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I find the breath so fascinating.

Every time I breathe in, my body reminds me that I can have a boundary without having to build a wall. Every time I breathe out, I return something of myself to the space I share with others.

Perhaps we don’t need to go back to the ocean. Perhaps, in some way, we never completely left it. We simply changed the element we live in.