Caring for Cryptids: Welcoming the More-Than-Human into Psychoanalytic Treatment

ABSTRACT

Cautioning that if analysts are to continue working virtually, then psychoanalytic theory and technique must be reconsidered, this paper describes the analyst’s profound experience of transitioning from working in-person to working virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic with Lila, a mixed race, trans adolescent. Although the analyst experienced Lila as difficult-to-reach when working in person, the shift to working virtually enlivened the treatment and allowed Lila to explore her early trauma, as well as aspects of her mixed-race identity, for the first time. Drawing on the analyst’s dream of a techno-baby alongside the work of Ferenczi, as well as more recent writings on technology and embodiment, the analyst argues that psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity must be expanded to include the more-than-human environment.

Acknowledgments

Aspects of the form and content of this paper were inspired by artist Harry Dodge’s more-than-memoir, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, as well as composer Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening. I’m grateful to them, as well as to Kelly Merklin, Karen Weiser, Kerry Downey, Stephen Hartman, Katie Gentile & Patricia Clough for the agile and imaginative conversations. Previous versions were presented in 2023 at Division 39’s Annual Spring Conference in New York City and the Ferenczi 150^th Anniversary International Conference in Budapest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Cryptids are supernatural creatures which some people report having seen, but scientifically, have not been proven to exist.

² Pelligrini and Saketopoulou (2023) deftly caution that as psychoanalysis engages further with other disciplines, which it must in order to thrive, there is real risk of “effectively cannibalizing” this material, thus “preserving the field’s structural stability” rather than opening or even, transforming it. “Psychoanalysis,” they potently write, “will need to let itself be screwed, and even to find pleasure in how it can get screwed up by such contact, so that it may become screwed differently, re-screwed through this encounter with other disciplinary domains” (Pelligrini & Saketopoulou, 2023).

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Notes on contributors

Kathleen Del Mar Miller

Kathleen Del Mar Miller, MFA, LCSW is a poet and a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. Her writings have been published in various anthologies and journals, including Adam Phillips’ The Cure for Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. She was the 2020 recipient of the Symonds Prize from Studies in Gender & Sexuality, where she is a co-editor for the Miscellany section. She currently teaches at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) and the Institute for Expressive Analysis (IEA).