ABSTRACT
The more unconscious we are of the destructive aspect of our psyches, the more violent we become. Since we are largely unconscious of how the non-human animals that feed us are “harvested” in factory farming processes, we have lost an important aspect of our “humanity”—our connection to nature, in the indigenous sense, and the ambivalence necessary to mark and check our destruction of that which is not us, but which nonetheless supports us. Our work as analysts in this situation includes helping mourn the loss of the psychological limb we have severed in order to become “civilized”: animal being.
