Critical Theory and Its Challenge to Psychoanalysis: Response to Katie Gentile’s “Kittens in the Clinical Space: Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies Transcorporeal Becoming”

In my response to Katie Gentile’s “Kittens in the Clinical Space,” (this issue) I address the early twenty-first century critical theory and the works of indigenous knowledge that Gentile references in the challenge she puts to psychoanalysts to think beyond human privilege, its relationship to racio-specieism, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. She suggests that psychoanalysts instead consider what she calls the human-more-than-human assemblage. In doing so, Gentile not only argues for the inseparability of the human from the more-than-human; she also argues that the clinical space be understood in the terms of this assemblage. In further expanding Gentile’s argument, I introduce the technoecological. A technoecological perspective is necessary, I argue, in order to recognize the other-than-human agencies or capacities of the animal but also those of the environmental and the technological. As the technoecological contributes to a refashioning of the social, it also needs to inform psychoanalytic thinking and practice—a welcoming of Gentile’s intervention.