Introductory Thoughts

When I first broached the idea of a conference about ‘psychoanalysis and ecology’ it was met with enthusiasm tempered with a certain amount of incredulity from my colleagues. What has psychoanalysis - dealing above all with the subtle nuances of an intersubjective communication between patient and therapist - have to say about this global issue concerned with the physical environment? Such misgivings echoed a recurring argument about the proper domain of psychoanalysis as both a theory and therapy.

The problem (of the relation between psychoanalysis and cultural issues) is often couched in terms of the difference between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ as separate fields of enquiry. Even without resorting to the theories of group analysis or the psychoanalysis of institutions, this may not in fact be the case. Psychotherapy deals with the ‘social’ all the time in its strictly private and individual setting. Concerned as it is with the minutiae of an individual's life, psychotherapy in practice also involves something of the behaviour we engage in as a (unique, cultural) species. It is this behaviour which generates the ecological dilemmas which confront us, and about which psychoanalysis should have something to say.

According to Freud there are certain universals of what we might call ‘human nature’ which are expressed in our cultural productions. All cultures will have to find some way to negotiate the problems caused by the combination of our childhood dependence and infantile sexuality which results in the Oedipus complex; all cultures will have to find some ‘social’ mechanisms whereby primitive anxieties are dealt with; all societies must find some way to deal with the anxieties associated with procreative sexuality; and all societies will have means to regulate the impact of ‘other people’ on our essentially narcissistic economy,* and so on. In her introduction to the conference itself Hanna Segal discussed some of these mechanisms (see also Segal 1987, 1989).