Playing Cat’s Cradle with Ann and Julie: A Response to Pellegrini and Leavitt

ABSTRACT

Responding to the commentaries of Pellegrini and Leavitt (this issue), I focus my discussion on matters of form in relation to psychoanalytic writing and theory. Using Donna Haraway’s model for “thinking-with,” cat’s cradle, as a formal and theoretical device, I use the physical space of the page to play a textual game of cat’s cradle with Pellegrini and Leavitt (Haraway, 2016). Thinking-with Pellegrini and Leavitt, I engage with and extend their discussions of the troubled history, socio-political implications, and potential transformations of form in psychoanalysis, particularly as it relates to my use of ‘radical openness.’

This article responds to:

A Letter to Kathleen Del Mar Miller: Skin to Skin, Bone to Bone

Genre Trouble and the Poetic Risk of Form: A Response to Kathleen Del Mar Miller

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Del Mar Miller

Kathleen Del Mar Miller, MFA, LCSW, is a poet and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is a member of the Training Committee for the 4-year Analytic Training program at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP), where she also teaches. Her paper, “Working Clinically with the Skin’s Surface: Tattoos, Scars, and Gendered Embodiment,” received the Symonds Prize from Studies in Gender & Sexuality in 2020.