The Asymmetrical Mirror: A Multi Method Approach to the Nonhuman Subject as Shadow and Self

Abstract

Animal Studies is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field that views animals as subjects rather than objects of inquiry, as well as investigates the social, literary, and cultural construction of animals (Gross & Vallely, 2012). While this field encompasses psychology, there is little psychoanalytic, analytical, or trauma-focused exploration of the psychological and existential defenses through which human beings maintain ambivalent attitudes toward nonhuman animals, and through which the persistent gap in social discourse around this subject is maintained. This dissertation not only argues that collective attitudes toward nonhuman animals hold psychological and spiritual significance for the human psyche, but also documents and suggests ways to heal these attitudes as forms of evidence for collective trauma and dissociation as a result of complicit violence to self and other. The dissertation is comprised of three independent articles: (a) a critical hermeneutic analysis of the role of psychoanalytic and analytical psychology in understanding conflicted attitudes toward, and psychic defenses with respect to, animals in industrialized societies; (b) a comparative analysis of emergent understandings of the shadow archetype in Jungian depth psychology and contemporary practitioners of an embodied spiritual inquiry (Ferrer, 2017) into the individual and collective shadow; and (c) a traumatological analysis of animal activism through the lens of liberation ecopsychology.