Nature is There All Along

Beginning with a clinical vignette involving bodily waste, shame, and shared vulnerability, this paper explores how Susan Kassouf’s concept of metabolism opens a broader reconsideration of psychoanalytic process itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Nature and contemporary field perspectives, I suggest that metabolism discloses the ontological field within which analyst, patient, body, and world emerge together. Rather than treating Nature as something external to analytic process, the paper argues that Nature constitutes the generative ground of embodied psychoanalytic experience. In this light, the analytic field may be understood not simply as intersubjective, but as a more fundamental field of lived depth in which human and more-than-human life remain inextricably intertwined.