Against humanism: On therapy and the overhuman

Abstract

Transformation means changing shape, mutating; it is akin to metamorphosis. Most revolutionary projects of the past left the human unchanged and unchallenged. They often planned and described a better world in absolute terms without the ambiguity praised by Simone de Beauvoir as necessary in leaving the future open to active adaption and creative error. Most utopias never left the narrow confines of anthropocentrism, whose origins are in Christian ideology and which, for that reason, still perseveres in seeing the human as the centre of “creation” with all other living networks merely as context, backdrop, and footnotes to the human story. Psychotherapy too, whether socially engaged, relational, or myopically bound to neoliberal notions of private liberty, is restricted to obsolete notions of the human. But care of psyche requires a metamorphosis of the human, greater alignment of the self with the organism—an organism that is already (part of) the world, in rhizomatic contamination with the non-human. Psychotherapy implicitly invites a creative crisis that brings the human closer to what Nietzsche called the “overhuman”, a space where we can cultivate our vulnerability in relation to a sad, beautiful, and unfathomable world.