Open Space - December 2025: Two cats, a teacup and a pink water bottle: collaboratively writing our posthuman and psychoanalytic relations

Two cats, a teacup and a pink water bottle: collaboratively writing our posthuman and psychoanalytic relations.

 

Melissa Dunlop, Donata Puntil and Jane Speedy

 

The three of us recently collaborated to write a chapter bringing posthuman and psychoanalytic ideas into relation. In this chapter we looked for resonances, liminalities and points of departure between concepts emanating from psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy and theories of posthumanism, with a particular focus on how these resonances emerge and play out in our working practices as psychotherapists, each with our own ways of working. Together, through collaborative writing, we theory-make in the borderspace (Ettinger, 2006) where concepts, as yet undifferentiated, are beginning to crystalise in our minds.

 

In this open space session, we share some of our writing and, and invite you to think with us, or alongside us, about how the (more than) human might be discerned within our own interior landscapes and processes.

 

Biographies

 

We are three colleagues/academics/scholars/independent thinkers working with new materialism and posthumanism alongside other ideas and practices. We are also three psychotherapists who, despite being trained in different modalities, think in similar ways about the practicalities of our work. Together we engage in collaborative writing and are passionate about ‘doing academia differently’(Robinson et al., 2023).

 

Melissa Dunlop is a UKCP registered Humanistic and Integrative psychotherapist. She previously explored the relation between psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, and has since engaged in narrative, creative and embodied approaches in her therapy practice. In her PhD she used auto-fiction to explore contemporary understandings of human relations and psychotherapeutic processes.

 

Donata Puntil is an accredited Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, member of the BPC (British Psychoanalytic Association), a Lecturer in Psychotherapy at King's College London and is currently completing a Doctorate in Education on language teachers’ professional development with a particular focus on identity and life narratives within an onto-ethical-epistemological framework broadly grounded on Posthumanism, New Materialism and Autoethnography.

 

Jane Speedy is a narrative therapist, with earlier incarnations in psychoanalytic and humanistic practices. She sees herself primarily as an educator/facilitator and although recently retired was a BACP accredited psychotherapist for over thirty years. She worked in a variety of educational and community settings as a play therapist/ counsellor/ psychotherapist and psychotherapy researcher/educator. She is currently Professor emeritus in Education at the University of Bristol, and has a further practice as an artist

 

 

 

 

Robinson, S., Bristow, A. & Ratle, O. (2023) Doing Academic Careers Differently: Portraits of Academic Life. London: Routledge.