Max Cavitch: Kicking “Spot”; or, The New Psychomorphism

Lecture as part of the conference "What Is “Nature” in Human Nature?" at the Sigmund Freud Museum, 13.06.2025

Psychoanalysis is inexorably part of what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropogenic machine.” And while it remains the most sophisticated and comprehensive account of “human nature” yet devised, psychoanalysis has all but ignored two contemporary dimensions of what human beings are becoming: 1) our increasing awareness of the human animality that the “anthropogenic machine” seeks to exclude; and 2) our increasing evolutionary resemblance to the intelligent machines we are creating. My paper explores a case of what I call “interloping,” by which I mean the effort to manage and understand the often messy and confusing breakdown of established boundaries between the categories human, animal, and machine. This case is drawn from the field of robotics, where the old Cartesian mechanomorphism (the view that nonhuman animals are merely reactive machines) has received a new and consequential “kick” from the creation of sophisticated canine robots – robots with whom many humans have formed strong attachments. These attachments inevitably draw on the archaic experiences of early childhood, when we have a much less secure sense of the difference between the animate and the inanimate. Indeed, Freud has shown us (e.g., in his work on “the uncanny”) that we never develop a wholly secure sense of such a difference. Yet no simple analogy can be drawn between the mechanical dolls of Freud’s era and today’s AI-robots. The difference between them approaches the ontological, which suggests that such attachments and our feelings about them can’t be encompassed by a complacently anthropocentric psychoanalysis. It suggests that even scientific experimentation is becoming more like a complex mode of interpersonalism, where affective bonds can flourish even as traumas accumulate, and where solidarities can emerge even as cycles of assault and retribution continue. The difference, in this case, comes down to a man kicking a robotic dog named “Spot” and to the ethical conundrums raised by that kick.

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty affiliate of Penn’s programs in Comparative Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He is also a founding faculty member and current Co-director of Penn’s Psychoanalytic Studies program, as well as the Founding Editor of the blog Psyche on Campus—winner of the 2022 “Award for Excellence in Journalism” from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles on American and African American Literature, Cinema Studies, Poetry and Poetics, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is also the author of two scholarly monographs, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025); the editor of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023) and (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024); and the co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT Press, 2016). His latest book, Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance, is forthcoming from Punctum Books.