This essay offers a psycho-spiritual and psychoanalytic meditation on the horse-human relationship as a nonverbal site of attunement, regulation, and meaning-making. Drawing on autobiographical clinical narrative, it explores how horseback riding became a medium for experiencing and reflecting upon embodied connection, mutual responsiveness, and contemplative presence. Encounters with horses illuminate forms of reciprocity that preceded and exceed speech, while also opening reflection on maternal attachment, separation, loss, and the emergence of selfhood. In dialogue with Freud, Winnicott, Piaget, and Buber, the essay argues that the horse-rider dyad may be understood as a lived analogue to central psychoanalytic concerns, including attunement, play, symbolization, and the I-Thou relation. The horse emerges not merely as metaphor, but as a sentient other whose responsiveness invites humility, emotional integration, and spiritual deepening. The essay ultimately suggests that sustained attention to the nonverbal-whether in relation to children with disabilities or to sentient beings-may enlarge psychoanalytic understandings of embodiment, intersubjectivity, and transcendence.
This article argues that the question of whether we are alone in the universe is a symptom of Western apparatuses that produce an ontological rift between human beings and other species. This rift comprises instrumental, ruling epistemologies that depersonalize other species, thus legitimating our indifference to their manifold intelligences and communications. The Western apparatuses that produce the rift can be understood in terms of a normative and historical unconscious, as well as the defenses of weak dissociation and projection. These defenses operate to secure a conscious and preconscious sense of existential significance while rendering unconscious the terrifying reality of existential insignificance. This analysis also provides a partial explanation for the sources of the climate polycrisis and the strong resistance to effective climate action. That is, dissonant subjects have an antagonistic relation to "nature," deeming all that falls under this abstraction mute and dumb (unintelligent).
This paper considers the relevance of personal names and the process of naming in relation to unconscious dynamics, implicit associations, cultural influences, and our relationships with our parents. Particular attention is paid to our associations with certain names, names in relation to the structure of the ego, and the use of names in clinical practice, with references drawn from current and historical psychoanalytic literature.
