Illusions, Political Selves, and Responses to the Anthropocene Age: A Political-Psychoanalytic Perspective

If we conquer nature, we will find ourselves among the defeated.1

Freud, not without some grandiosity, argued that there have been three blows to human narcissism. The first shock was Copernicus, when human beings learned that we are not the center of the universe. The second jolt was Darwin, when we learned that human beings were part of evolution, like all other living creatures. Freud (1917) contended that human “megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house“ (p.285). What is intriguing about Freud's claims is that he assumes that these narcissistic blows involve all human beings. It is more accurate to say that these were shocks to the Western psyche. Another interesting aspect of his perspective is that, while these may have been moments of painful realization for millions of people, there does not seem to be much evidence that Westerners have changed as a result. Indeed, Western psyches appear to be remarkably resilient, not only in warding off these blows, but in continuing to operate with impunity with regard to three megalomaniac trajectories, namely, Western imperialism, capitalism, and nationalism.

Two possible explanations for this may simply be that core illusions of Western psyches remain untouched or unexamined because the political (and religious) apparatuses do not change and, therefore, illusions are maintained.2 For instance, the first two blows had zero effect in giving pause to the brutal imperialistic march of Western European nations and the United States in their colonial expansion during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, which is evidence that core Western illusions remained ensconced in Western psyches. A second explanation is that “blows” to the psyche are not confronted by direct consequences or realities that disconfirm the illusions. But this may be changing with the consequences of climate change in the