Film & Culture: Introduction. The Human/More‐Than‐Human Relationship

It is time for us to tell a different story about our relation to other animals—a story that positions us and them as part of a vast network of interconnected beings. As climate change alters and destroys the natural habitat of many species of animals on this planet, forcing new migrations and unprecedented encounters between human and non-human animals, the need for us to exist as respectful co-habitants is increasingly urgent, if they—and we—are to survive. We can no longer afford the myth of human supremacy that has enabled us to use the planet and its other inhabitants as resources for our appetites. That story—the story of our dominion—has enabled humans to treat others without regard to ethics, understanding, compassion, or dignity. That story has fostered a damaging binary between “man” and “nature”, the effects of which have traumatized the psyches and diminished the lives of other animals and, thereby, impoverished the human soul. There is an uncomfortable emerging consensus, not just among animal lovers and pet owners, but also among neuroscientists, that animals are feeling, experiencing beings. The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness (2012), put forth by a consortium of brain scientists, recognizes that non-human animals have consciousness, albeit perhaps a consciousness qualitatively different from our own. While there is deep resistance to the implications of this research, the evolution of ecopsychology and trans-species psychology signals a growing awareness among western scientists and healers of the dire need for a new paradigm. If we can begin to loosen our reductive association of animals with “instinct”, practitioners of analytical psychology are also theoretically well-equipped to nurture new relationships between humans and more-than-humans by virtue of our commitment to deep listening in service of that not-yet-conscious understanding which demands to be known. The three reviews in this Film & Culture column tell a different story about our relationship to our animal others. In her review of My Octopus Teacher, Mary-Jayne Rust explores a filmmaker's longing to “find his way back” to a connection with nature; “a longing”, Rust observes, “that is shared, perhaps, by many in our modern world.” The filmmaker becomes the student of an unlikely teacher: an octopus, who instructs him in how to attune to the temperament, environment and needs of his other. “Through his practice,” Rust notes, “he comes to feel a part of a place rather than a visitor.” Rust reflects on the movement of consciousness around our historically inflated role in the ecosystem and highlights deftly the critical healing and rejuvenating effects for humans of a more sensitive and devoted attention to other life forms: “Reconnecting with our biophilia, our deep love for the earth, gives us strength we need to take action to protect what we love.” Michelle Cooper reviews Kindling, a collection of poetry and art by Lynnea Ryshke that emerged from the artist's time working on an organic farm in northern Europe. Cooper observes the transformative influence on her own psyche of reading and dwelling with Ryshke's sensitive pen and brush strokes. Although the farm on which she labours is not one of those (factory) farms known for its abuse of animals, Ryshke's relentless attention to the detail of the animals’ experience in the captivity of their humans shreds the veil of dissociation between us and the others we keep and use for food. “Can we dream of and walk together toward a world where we see animals as ‘kin’ rather than ‘kindling’?” Cooper asks as she meanders poetically and lovingly through Ryshke's methodical and aesthetic catalogue of the tortured psychological and physical lives of these others whose sentience is systematically banished from awareness. Cooper wonders about the cost to humans of our disconnection from both other animals and the shadowy truth of our commodification of living beings: “What will become of our personal and collective body if we continue to treat animals—and ourselves—this way?” In my review of the film Grizzly Man, I explore the complex question of an appropriate relationship to other predators, in this instance the bear who, like the human, is an occasionally predatory omnivore. Sifting through the layered roles of the director, Werner Herzog, and the filmmaker and “grizzly man”, Timothy Treadwell, I reflect on the documentary's representation of the psyche of a man who, like the filmmaker of My Octopus Teacher, longs for communion with and instruction by nature, alongside its framing of the Alaskan brown bear as part of the fabric of “primordial wild nature” that the director casts as threatening, foreign and not to be touched. While his documentation of Treadwell and his at times erratic behaviour contains psychological insight, I maintain that Herzog misses the nourishing and edifying character of Treadwell's relationship to bears, “just as he fails to recognize the emotional capacity and cognitive intelligence of other animals.” Could an essential aspect of the human animal's psychological and evolutionary development involve a de-emphasis on the individual? To continue to individuate as a species, might we need to approach that which is not us with an attitude of surrender and receptivity, in order to find therein both kinship and our place within the larger ecosystem of earthly life? These reviews ask the reader to live with this question.