Review of My Octopus Teacher

Taking her own lead from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Straus, and Gendlin, phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke (1999) suggests that in our own efforts to understand animal others, we take up an interactive modality of what she calls “improvisational comportment” in which we engage ourselves with the animal other in moments of consummate reciprocity. She observes that “for Merleau-Ponty (1995/2003), the human–animal relation is not a ‘hierarchic’ one characterized by the ‘addition’ of rationality to a mechanistically conceived animal body, but a lateral relation of kinship, Einfühlung, and Ineinander among living beings…” (Behnke, 1999, p. 99). Behnke suggests that “we speak from within our life among animals—from shared situations in which we and the animals co-participate, from the lived experience of interspecies sociality where it is not just I who looks at the animal, but the animal who looks at me” (p. 100). When in My Octopus Teacher the nature photographer finds himself encountering a very young octopus, the octopus in turn reaches out to him, risks it’s life to explore his body with its sentient tentacles, feeling, tasting, communicating all at once. The exchange between man and animal here is as intimate as two hands clasping each other—what Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) has referred to as the reversibilities of the flesh: our bodies understood simultaneously as touching/touched wherein we “engage each other like gears.” To illustrate the impact of this film on the most recent group of students taking the authors' classes on “Ecopsychology” and “Environmental Films,” they present these excerpts from several students’ weekly journals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)