Climate Tragedy and Anthropocentric Transference: Speciesism, Ontological Rift, and Psychoanalysis

Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, fumed “about Homer and Hesiod because they ‘ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings, adulteries and deceivings‘” (Grayling, 2019, p. 26). For Xenophanes, instead of facing our shame and guilt, we transfer it to the gods, denying, excusing, or even legitimizing our own foibles and failings. Xenophanes also wrote, “If oxen and horse or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen” (as cited in Grayling, p. 26). Flashing forward to the 21^st century and a more earthbound view, Timothy Morton (2017) writes, “The myths of the predatory law of the jungle and the alpha male (a now debunked view of how wolves organize themselves) are Feuerbachian displacements of human ideological capacities onto nonhumans” (p. 172). But it is not just myths about gods and laws of nature where we find projections or displacements. Philosopher Iris Murdoch (2001) rightly claimed that human beings “are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world” (p. 82). Murdoch believed as well that it was fair to ask philosophers what they fear because the elaborate constructions they concoct are birthed in the soil of anxiety and desire. In constructing psychoanalytic theories, what do psychoanalysts fear? What displacements or projections are embedded in psychoanalysis?

In this article I argue that psychoanalysis, with its roots in Western philosophies and Baconian-Cartesian sciences, produces, in part, an ontological rift between human beings and other species. This gap accompanies speciesism,1 subtly or overtly, which can be understood as anthropocentric transference. That is, we act as if other species are inferior, possessing mere use value if any value at all. We act as if there is