Kittens in the Clinical Space: Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies Transcorporeal Becoming

The use of service animals is exploding and humanity’s troubled relationship with the “nonhuman” is at the center of many viral contagions and climate change. Using a clinical case, this paper integrates Searles’ conflicting ideas on the “nonhuman” with current work in posthumanism and Indigenous studies, to explore the ambivalent dependence of the human on the more-than-human, the co-emergence of these categories, and ways to consciously link these areas of experiencing in our work. The case involves a patient with a profound history of violence and neglect. The tide of therapeutic action hinged on her adopting a kitten and the therapist’s knee-jerk response of fear for its safety. The kitten is situated at the center of a racist enactment between the white therapist and a Latina-identified patient. In this case, the kitten became an important actor and participant, engaging the patient and therapist to interrupt potential transgenerational patterns of violence. The paper proposes a theory of “tensegrity based dense temporality” as a way to better frame an assemblage of human-more-than-human subjectivities, that can bring new depth to concepts of transgenerational trauma, recognition, and witnessing, by experiencing the echoes of time and space in the clinical relationship and its human and “nonhuman” surrounds.