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The long disruptions of Covid-19 lockdowns together with the gathering pace of political and social global unrest provide fertile ground for catching up with cross-disciplinary literature, informing contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Notable at a time when news cycles crackle with the multiple infractions of United Nations member-states to the United Nations' (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Martha C. Nussbaum's clean and Spartan presentation in Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach (2011) speaks directly to headline imperatives across political, social, economic, and psychological domains, as human destructiveness degrades not only our relations with one another but also our relations to the biological and geological structures upon which we depend in this Anthropocene age.
Ethics scholar Martha Nussbaum is no stranger to psychoanalysis. In conversation with American Journal of Psychoanalysis Associate Editor, Benjamin Kilborne, she emphasizes
that psychoanalysis can help us, as nothing else can, to understand what it is to live the life of an incomplete being who relies on others. And, understanding that is the central task of ethics. To see how, beginning from an utter solipsism and narcissism, a human personality can acquire the capacity for concern, for responsibility, and for mutuality in love, gives ethics essential information, without which its normative proposals are incomplete (Nussbaum, in Kilborne, 2009, p. 270).