Prologue

Kinship object is an attempt to actively engage and synthesize what we feel are our innate capacities for human thriving: to empathize with and love kin, which encompasses everyone; to possess selfhood in relation with otherness in such a way that elevates our interdependence, vulnerability, and wholeness; and making intentional choices to use our thinking apparatuses not just for survival of psychic threat, but as vehicles to opt for pathways which benefit the entire collective of sentient beings. (Koshkarian & Larralde, 2024a, p. 671.)

The kinship object construct (Koshkarian & Larralde, 2024b) was born one sunny morning at San Francisco’s Stow Lake, a venue within Golden Gate Park that co-mingles an internationally diverse array of humans alongside approximately 40 bird species, as well as reptiles, amphibians, coyotes, squirrels, insects, trees, and plants. An idyllic environment in which to listen to the podcast, This Interview with Richard Powers is a Special Gift (September 28, 2021, ), a conversation between Ezra Klein and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and environmental activist, Richard Powers, who had just released Bewilderment. A moment of luminosity ensued in which my yearning for a psychoanalytic response for a livable world converged with the splendor of the lake and its plant and creature inhabitants along with this reflection by Powers:

And I think what was happening to me … as I was turning outward and starting to take the nonhuman world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me, but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with. And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdepe