Human among the more-than-human. Retrofitting Kohut for the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this speculative essay, I try to take seriously and psychoanalytically what many have diagnosed as a key dynamic in our age of the Anthropocene, namely narcissism. Because of the powerful paradigm shift and transformations his thinking inaugurated around narcissism, I turn to Heinz Kohut and those intersubjective Self psychologists who developed his theories. By expanding Kohut’s theories of selfobject ties to include a tie to the more-than-human, I attempt to describe a state that too many of us inhabit too much of the time. An archaic self craves safety in response to precarity, while a more stable self is aware of the possibility of a liveable permeability. I suggest that such self states need to be thought together with internal and external more-than-human surrounds. My hope is that these explorations may contribute to our ability to understand, explain and ultimately act on the disproportionate suffering some endure and some inflict on each other and the planet in the Anthropocene.