Animals as the Symptom of Psychoanalysis Or, The Potential for Interspecies Co-emergence in Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

Harold Searles urged psychoanalysis to incorporate animals and the nonhuman environment within the clinical space, claiming we ignore the nonhuman at our peril. But as Searles outlined, our relationships with these nonhuman entities is fraught with ambivalence. This paper details some of the ambivalences within Searles’ writings, including the ways he both described and seemed to enact defenses around human exceptionalism on the one hand and our chaotic merging with the world on the other. Searles described this conflict as occurring not only within the family romance but also shaping our relationships with the nonhuman objects and animals in our environment. In this light, polluting the Earth, according to Searles, is an unconscious act designed to foreclose the future for our progeny whom we unconsciously hate and envy. Integrating Searles’ conflicting ideas with current work on the nonhuman in cultural studies, this presentation explores the ambivalent dependence of the human on the nonhuman, the co-emergence of these categories and subjectivities, and ways to consciously link these areas of experiencing in our clinical and theoretical work.

Notes

¹ Psychoanalysis usually unreflectively describes eating animals as an indication of psychological health, whereas vegetarianism is still often seen as an indication of an eating disorder or repression of oral aggression (see Raz, 2017). The practice of eating animals is never analyzed as a manifestation of murderous oral aggression that requires reflection. Even in pieces on global climate change (see Lifton, 2017, for instance) psychologists seem to disavow the fact that meat production is actually the largest contributor to greenhouse gases. Environmentalist psychologists cannot seem to make conscious the most dangerous behavioral practice for the planet—factory farming of animals as meat. This huge absence indicates a profoundly rigid, stubborn, and defensive clinging to the ideals of human exceptionalism and our fantasies that our violently destructive and murderous approach to other species on the planet do not need to be reflected upon or changed.

² “The dog may be considered a descendant from a totem animal used by man in his development and useful to him in the process of civilization” as it functions to sublimate unconscious forces that are “incompatible with the civilized state of man” (Heiman, 1956, p. 584).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Gentile

Katie Gentile, Ph.D., is Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). She is the author of Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-destructive Survival and The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies, in Psychoanalysis and Cultures, both from Routledge. She the editor of the Routledge book series Genders & Sexualities in Minds & Culture and a co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.