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Both this valuable article and the film it analyses provide a careful and optimistic sense of the potential for healing. The film depicts a psychic rejuvenation with nature. Simmonds's article applies the film narrative to psychotherapy. In the film My Octopus Teacher, freediver Craig Foster meets a curious female octopus in an underwater kelp forest off South Africa. Suffering burn-out and midlife crisis, Craig is reborn by what becomes a meaningful relationship. His visits to this dreamlike world become a daily ritual in one of many parallels Simmonds makes to a psychotherapeutic commitment.
Indeed, Simmonds emphasizes that the film can be read as an “evocative allegory,” to psychotherapy. She sees in the film stages of disintegration, learning key dispositions, followed by dreamwork and the mutuality of therapy. She persuasively brings in ideas from C. G. Jung, and W. R. Bion. For her the film enables reconsideration of ethical and existential issues around the therapist's power and the client's safety. Craig interacting with a vulnerable creature around very literal sharks demonstrates that therapists require faith in therapy rather than a blind belief that the clinician is always in the right.
The film's title alerts the audience to its singularity. Instead of a documentary about octopi, it is the animal as teacher. Craig learns to accept his own vulnerability in his growing appreciation of hers. The moment when the octopus unfurls an arm to meet Craig's finger is seen by Simmonds as comparable to the unknown psyche reaching out.
Throughout, the essay portrays Craig as the wounded consciousness. Whereas Simmonds first compares him to the wounded physician, he becomes
the one receiving therapy. Ultimately, it is the octopus who provides the healing encounters. In fact she is named as living symbol of canny and primordial intelligence.
It takes weeks of building up trust before the octopus reaches out to Craig. In the shocking midpoint of the film, there is a reve