Sick, Sad World: Holism and Less-than-human ThoughtdissertationsShalloe, HarpercreatorCopjec, JoanAdvisorWeinstein, DeborahReaderHui Kyong Chun, WendyReaderBrown University. Department of Modern Culture and Mediasponsor2025ix, 232 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025thesesThis dissertation stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and holism in their theoretical and therapeutic guises. It queries the curious allure of systems thinking for contemporary wellness culture and critical thought, demonstrating that these seemingly disparate domains meet in an undiscriminating embrace of concepts like complexity and microbial community that authorizes an understanding of ecological entanglement as an a priori ethical, political, and therapeutic good. Against the increasingly common sense that shifting our attention away from the individual or the part and toward the ecosystem, the relation, and the whole will automatically put us on a path toward better politics, it argues that holism is wholly unsuited to the pursuit of common well-being. To contest the ascendency of relational harmony as the horizon of personal and planetary healing, it proposes that psychoanalysis throw its lot in with trans studies, as two discourses poised to insist on the ineradicability of negativity and the queer potential of non-relation. It offers the psychoanalytic concept of the not-whole, developed at length in Jacques Lacan’s later seminars, as an urgent reminder of the unassailability of antagonism on the levels of the subject and the world. Through theoretical exegesis and textual analysis, it suggests that the paltry communalism of holism is laid bare by holistic health culture, an ideologically dubious response to the failings of biomedicine that positions optimal wellbeing as a personal responsibility and a superegoic imperative, and that obscures the truly systemic causes of chronic illness by recasting individuals as ecosystems unto themselves. With its attention of the social etiology of symptomaticity, the irreparable rupture of sexuation, and the ethical challenge of non-relation, psychoanalysis helps deliver a crucial rejoinder to the pursuit of self-optimization (the holism of wellness culture), and to the dogma that contesting the differential distribution of life chances depends on our appreciation of a larger whole (the holism of critical thought).healthPsychoanalysisHolismEnglishRPB20250707