From Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, pg 327:
By emerging into this world where he must breathe, first and foremost he is literally choked, suffocated. This is what has been called trauma – there is no other – the trauma of birth, which is not separation from the mother but the inhalation, into oneself, of a fundamentally Other environment.
See also Sloterdijk on our first precarious embrace of respiratory autonomy.
