Abstract

The following text represents my attempt at answering one of the fundamental questions of human existence: Who am I, as a living being, as a human, as a person, as an assemblage of identities and material-semiotic relations?

It is my particular affinity for the liquid, ever-changing element that has guided me to write this thesis, to follow the ever-branching river deltas of meaning, to find the watery bridges between science and story. In (re-)collecting my memories, texts, and drawings through the waters that have shaped me, I explore how watery relations can help in processing complex trauma. In thinking with autotheory, archipelagos and hydrofemimism intertwined with stories and memories, I explore what it means to me to be a human “self” with a heterogeneous identity structure. Every narrative presented in this thesis is therefore simultaneously internal and external, an attempt to re-narrate and refigure my psyche and humanity as a body of waters.

In this text, content and form mirror each other in intermingling waves, intertwining psychotherapeutic research, autoethnography, hydrofeminism, and art-making, embodied practices and the more-than-human. In employing a multisensorial, multimedial and multidisciplinary approach, I hope to honour the ways in which stories, memories, and knowledge take shape, consolidating traditional knowledge transmission via written text in a bound book, visual and olfactory elements into the archipelago of meaning I make in this work. Through the mingling of these elements in hydrofeminist bodies of water, I hope to help gestate hydrofeminist thinking and watery practice in therapeutic interventions. Where fitting, I will therefore borrow and reference narrative strategies that include combinations of sensory inputs, images, sound, touch, and smell.