Animals as the Symptom of Psychoanalysis Or, The Potential for Interspecies Co-emergence in Psychoanalysis

Harold Searles urged psychoanalysis to incorporate animals and the nonhuman environment within the clinical space, claiming we ignore the nonhuman at our peril. But as Searles outlined, our relationships with these nonhuman entities is fraught with ambivalence. This paper details some of the ambivalences within Searles’ writings, including the ways he both described and seemed to enact defenses around human exceptionalism on the one hand and our chaotic merging with the world on the other. Searles described this conflict as occurring not only within the family romance but also shaping our relationships with the nonhuman objects and animals in our environment. In this light, polluting the Earth, according to Searles, is an unconscious act designed to foreclose the future for our progeny whom we unconsciously hate and envy. Integrating Searles’ conflicting ideas with current work on the nonhuman in cultural studies, this presentation explores the ambivalent dependence of the human on the nonhuman, the co-emergence of these categories and subjectivities, and ways to consciously link these areas of experiencing in our clinical and theoretical work.