A Psychoanalytic Pedagogy for Apocalyptic Times

When I was young, my family was gifted a cat by a family friend. This was fortunate for me, as I'd been begging my parents for a cat friend for a good portion of my short life. The first time I met this cat, he was on my parents' bed, pleasantly lying there. As I approached him and started to pet him at the gentle instruction of my parents, the cat started to make a sound— a low rumble deep from his belly that I couldn't place. I felt fear. I recoiled my hand, and asked, “Why is he growling at me?” My parents laughed and said, “He's purring! It means he's happy.” The soft cat was warm, then angry, then happy, in my little mind. But this has stayed with me. Now, when I face things that seem scary, I think: What if this scary thing is simply a house cat, a creature who needs some attention? What if I am fearful of something simply because I cannot place it or don't recognize it? Is this bringing up fear because it is new, and stirs my own anxieties of the mortality that monsters under (or on) the bed might bring?

I will get to the obviously Oedipal elements of this primal scene with my cat later. For now, I will say that I came to psychoanalysis out of a deep and lifelong curiosity about what lies beneath the visible, orderly, sensible, legible aspects of life. As the filmmaker Werner Herzog reminds us, “what would an ocean be without monsters lurking in the dark?” Psychoanalysis has offered me a way to face that which has been made monstrous by normative society. While psychoanalysis can be a praxis of play, when we play, as Lewis (2020) notes, we risk finding monsters: in ourselves, in others, in the social surround. “Play,” she says, riffing off Winnicott (1971), “helps facilitate the move away from a fantasy of omnipotent control of the object/external world and toward recognition and acceptance of the object's autonomous and separate existence in the external world. Yet it is always in-process, never a fully completed achievement, and thus it alw