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A certain way of understanding human activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us. Should we not pause and consider this?
A reader of JAPA, finding little to intrigue an analyst in a topic often relegated to “applied psychoanalysis,” might wonder why the journal is reviewing Engaging with Climate Change, edited by Sally Weintrobe, and Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home by Pope Francis. Of what concern is it to the field of psychoanalysis that the climate is changing and that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, characterized by the dominant influence of a single species on the rest of the earth? Psychoanalysts have spent far more time thinking and writing about our internal worlds and our own creation, whether mental or artistic, than on the experience of our dependence on and kinship with the nonhuman environment. Psychoanalysis has a long-standing interest in the ways humans are not governed by rational understanding. We know that unconscious fantasies and anxieties shape and affect our relationship to the external world, but we have not devoted sustained attention to how these fantasies influence our experience of our integral place in the natural world. Over forty years ago Harold Searles (1972) wrote a pioneering and complex article suggesting that