Human among the more-than-human. Retrofitting Kohut for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

In this speculative essay, I try to take seriously and psychoanalytically what many have diagnosed as a key dynamic in our age of the Anthropocene, namely narcissism. Because of the powerful paradigm shift and transformations his thinking inaugurated around narcissism, I turn to Heinz Kohut and those intersubjective Self psychologists who developed his theories. By expanding Kohut’s theories of selfobject ties to include a tie to the more-than-human, I attempt to describe a state that too many of us inhabit too much of the time. An archaic self craves safety in response to precarity, while a more stable self is aware of the possibility of a liveable permeability. I suggest that such self states need to be thought together with internal and external more-than-human surrounds. My hope is that these explorations may contribute to our ability to understand, explain and ultimately act on the disproportionate suffering some endure and some inflict on each other and the planet in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• archaic precarious self
• Erysichthonic complex
• more-than-human selfobject tie
• permeability
• safety

Acknowledgments

For their enormously helpful, constructive and supportive comments, I am grateful to Marcia Dobson, Barbara Easterlin, Noa Heiman, Michael Melmed, Hattie Myers, Penelope Starr-Karlin, Anthony Wilson and two anonymous readers. My thanks in particular to Peter Zimmermann for his ongoing willingness to introduce me to Kohut’s theories and their astonishing, healing possibilities—this essay is dedicated to him.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ My use of the term “Anthropocene” refers to the usually deleterious, large-scale effects human beings have had on the global environment, particularly over the last 300 years. See Crutzen (2022).

² https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=narcissism&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnarcissism%3B%2Cc0. Accessed April 12, 2022.

³ See for example several of these writers’ contributions in two of the major volumes on climate and the psyche to have been published in the last decade: the 2013 collection edited by Weintrobe (Engaging with Climate Change. Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives) and the joint publication in 2022 by Hollway, Hoggett, Robertson and Weintrobe (Climate Psychology. A Matter of Life and Death). See also Allured’s outstanding talk (2020) given at a panel on “The Ecological Hazards of Human Narcissism”. My own work on “an environmental orientation,” I now realize, describes a narcissistic dynamic, without naming it as such, in terms of disconnection from the more-than-human (Kassouf, 2021).

⁴ Two important examples of analytic minds moving toward narcissism without shaming include Emily Schlesinger’s fascinating reading of narcissism and the more-than-human in The Sopranos (Schlesinger, 2022) and Rebecca Weston’s remarks on eco-fascism, urging more relatedness to the wounded (and wounding) self (Weston, 2022).

⁵ From a phenomenological perspective, among others, I recognize that my use of the term “self” may sound like a reification, or in the words of Stolorow and Atwood (2016), a “metaphysical illusion”. I would agree with Stolorow and Atwood, as well as Anthony Wilson’s ideas (2012), that our “experience of a self” may more accurately capture what is meant by the term. As should become clear, I view the “self” as well as many other analytic terms such as “ego,” “id” and “superego”, as fluid, permeable psychic realities that cannot be easily expressed in language. Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter’s statement on pornography may hold just as well for the self: it is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

⁶ “Human” as an adjective recurs throughout Kohut’s writings. For some examples in works used here, see Kohut (1972, 1977, 1982, 1984). For a particularly strange mix-up of human and more-than-human, see Kohut (1982, p. 397—note 1).

⁷ Butler (2020, pp. 43, 48, 54). See also Butler (2016a, 2016b). While I agree with Butler’s call to recognize our interdependency as underlying our precarity, I will shift the emphasis from interdependency, which suggests separable beings, to permeability.

⁸ Kimmerer (2013, p. 154). Wilson offers further examples of what I would describe as empathic permeability in his Research is Ceremony. Indigenous Research Methods (2008).

⁹ Brickman (2018, pp. 181; see also pp. 173–175). Brickman is building on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the “archaic illusion” (Brickman, 2018, p. 93).

¹⁰ Other scientists who inform my thoughts include Gaia theorists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, as well as Vladimir Vernadsky’s work on the biosphere and noösphere. See also Wray (2022, pp. 177–180).

¹¹ Contemporary examples of this division can be found in Ballew and Omoto (2018), Bethelmy and Corraliza (2019), Dean et al. (2018), Gandy et al. (2020), Hollway (2022), Jordan (2009), Kettner et al. (2019), Yang et al. (2018), and Zhang et al. (2014). For the ways in which this split relates to colonial domination, also within psychoanalysis, see Brickman (2018, pp. 87, 117, 230).

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Notes on contributors

Susan Kassouf

Susan Kassouf, PhD, is a licensed psychoanalyst and a candidate at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). She has written and presented about climate change and psychoanalysis, founded the Steps on Sustainability Committee at a pre-pandemic NPAP, and participates in several study groups grappling with environmental degradation from an analytic perspective. She has also translated works by and about Erich Fromm. Prior to formal analytic training, she served on the faculty in German Studies at Vassar College and worked in the non-profit/philanthropic sector for almost two decades.