PhD Oral Exam - Katherine Ann Kline, Communication

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I stage an encounter between psychoanalysis and ecological thought. Specifically, I read contemporary relational metapsychologies—such as object relations and Bionian field theory—alongside new materialisms, speculative realisms, and object-oriented ontologies: approaches invested in more-than-human beings, systems, and processes. I approach this project from theoretical orientations that are often at odds. As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I was trained to centre my attention on human interiority and intersubjectivity; as a communication studies scholar, I am invested in ecological ethics and the disruption of anthropocentric thought.

Reading these fields together-apart (following Barad), I call into question psychoanalytic concepts like the “holding environment” (Winnicott) and methodologies of “containment” (Bion), opening my inquiry to relational, world-making practices that resist the human exceptionalism embedded in the psychoanalytic container. The figure of the hag guides me here (Duerr). She sits on the border-hedge between wilderness and civilization, defying the divisions that seek to keep worlds apart.

The title of this dissertation draws on Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971), which introduced the concept of transitional space—an “intermediate area” where reality and fantasy remain undecided. I take this idea outside the clinic, playing between psyche and materiality, epistemology and ontology, interiority and externality. My aim is to challenge psychoanalytic organizations of relationship and psychic life, and to re-entangle Winnicott’s space of play with phenomenologically rich, more-than-human worlds.

The dissertation opens with a mushroom trip, raising questions about the materials that mediate psychic life and giving form to radically different relational fields that emerge from fungalpsychic-somatic encounters. From there, I move into two major inquiries: spirit mediumship and dendrophilia. I explore how spiritualism was reckoned with at the advent of psychoanalysis, and how contemporary mediums engage entities that trouble enclosed models of mind. Dendrophilia—love of trees—allows me to examine how psychoanalysis has pathologized symbiosis with materiality, particularly through the construction of perversion and other deviant attachments.

Psychoanalysis, I argue, enacts a series of border operations between human psychodynamics and heterogeneous ecological entanglements. This project experiments at the edge of those borders to imagine an ecological disposition more attuned to the profoundly uncontained realities of a warming world.