Vanishing acts: The crisis of our loss of kinship with the more-than-human world

In this paper, the author is arguing for the recognition of the implicit structural and emotional links between the development of mind and psyche and the more-than-human world. She suggests that it is because of this interpenetration that the uncanny experience of displacement anxiety and its effects on our capacities to think and make links is an under-appreciated aspect of our constant ‘forgetting’ of the building syndrome of our Earth’s symptomatology. She makes use of her own theory of ‘organizing gestalt’ and the thinking of Maturana, Ingold and Colman to offer a framework for the consideration of the uncanny links between what we know about vanishing biodiversity, broken ecosystems and the breaking down of previously integrated Earth systems and the breaking down of our ways of thinking about our relationships with the more-than-human world. She suggests that, taken together, such a framework feels remarkably akin to Australian indigenous ways of being in the world. Finally, she asks the question, what might it mean to think ecologically in our psychoanalytic work?