Psychotherapy for end times

The broken connections between us and nature have left us feeling homeless in a world not only imperiled by multiple ecological crises and their political, economic, medical and social consequences, but also orphaned by the increasing turn to the allures of the digital world with its loss of place and embodied presence. In this context, this essay proposes that psychotherapy can be a place for homecoming in a fractured world. Exploring the key role of the grieving process in homecoming, I draw on my work in Jungian psychology, phenomenology, poetry and storytelling to show that our engaged, embodied presence with nature can re-mind us of the miracles in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and can open our hearts to the wonder, mystery, beauty and sacred dimensions of human life.

The Generative Politics of Presentism in Post-15M Spain

This essay revises post-15M movement political party landscape, emphasizing the intentional yet unusual use of the present within the New Left's organizing grammar. Against sectors of the traditional Left, who see presentism as a product of neoliberalism, I claim that in the post-15M conjuncture, the present constituted a battleground in the struggle for a dignified life. First, I focus on the Catalan left-wing nationalist party CUP's use of anarchist symbols to suggest that references to sabotage were deployed to disrupt parliamentary politics, forcing constant interruption. Second, I analyze Podemos founding member Iñigo Errejón's speech after the party's 2016 national election defeat, where his rhetoric linked the temporality of the present with anti-austerity protestors’ embodied presence. Last, I read the rise of neomunicipalisms as another iteration of presentism, aiming to politicize everyday life. To conclude, I advance that such material practices of “generative presentism” problematize presentism's assumed depoliticizing nature.

Compassion practices

Healthcare providers seek to access a power of sustainable, inclusive, and unconditional care and compassion for self and others beyond empathic distress, secondary trauma, and burnout. To support that goal, in this chapter, we present three compassion meditations that serve two purposes: 1) to empower the ability to be with your own difficult emotions and feelings in a healing way, and 2) to extend empathy and compassion to others with increasing sustainability and inclusivity. Providers can practice these meditations themselves and carry forward that practice into clinical work, both in their embodied presence to their patients and, if appropriate and beneficial, by explicitly sharing these practices with interested patients.

Evoking Embodied Presence: These Things, Songwriting, Filmmaking, and Borrowing a Performative Trick From Bob Dylan

Our performative contribution to the 2019 Special Interest Group in autoethnography provided an opportunity to consider the materiality of absence and presence. Using the film These Things and the research-inspired song that underpins the film, we explore how a 5-min multimedia performative act opened possibilities for solidarity and resistance, offering ways to include the absent other.

Vegan attendance: reading Gibbons’s animals

When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.

Introduction

The introduction presents the argument that Black queer individuals are injury-bound subjects: they are surrounded by the threat of injury. This focus on injury is an engagement of and movement away from Afro-pessimism, which foregrounds the social and epistemic ubiquity of Black death. The turn to injury emphasizes embodied presence rather than physical absence. The introduction asserts that desire and pleasure represent recurring ways that artists respond to the threats of injury queers face. Attention to how different bodies inhabit space, one way of understanding of the “politics of scale,” is a crucial analytic for making sense of queer experiences of spatialized injury. Desire emerges as a cultural response to such spatial differentiation and is imagined as a way to find freedom in restriction.

Spatially Distant but Emotionally Close: A Personal Reflection on Psychoanalytic Distance Training

Psychoanalytic training in countries with no accredited training program or official link to the international psychoanalytic community is possible only through technology. Serious controversies surround the legitimacy of distance training, based primarily on doubts about the efficacy of distance analysis. Curiously, in a discipline that prides itself on being a “talking cure,” an emphasis on the embodied presence of the analytic couple emerges in the literature over and over again. In fact, though, it’s through the use of language—and not through sight—that we achieve the aim of analysis. The information the analyst gathers from bodily presence is important, but even then the analyst’s job is to hear the patient’s unconscious communications. If an analyst, for whatever reason, is unable to hear the patient’s voice and unconscious communications, the analysis is bound to fail whether the patient is in the room or on the screen/phone. Being spatially distant poses no contradictions to psychoanalysis, as long as both parties—patient and analyst, supervisee and supervisor, candidate and instructor—are willing to listen, hear, and be heard emotionally.