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I. [Nature] has her [sic] own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, excerpted from Cosimo Schinaia, “Respect for the Environment: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Ecological Crisis”
Historically, what has been referred to as nonhuman
has not fared well in psychoanalysis.
Freud himself teetered
on edges of ambivalence,
rubber, plant, ink, cartridge, blue, jay, black, cat, wolf,
theorizing the nonhuman as collections
of subordinate pawns
in the supremely human game of Oedipal development.