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In recounting the treatment of Lucy, one of the patients who figured in Studies on Hysteria, Freud reported asking her: “But you knew you loved your employer, why didn't you tell me?” She replied: “I didn't know—or rather I didn't want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again; and I believe latterly I have succeeded.” In a footnote, Freud added: “I have never managed to give a better description than this of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know at the same time.” He referred to this as “the blindness of the seeing eye.”1
When John Steiner took another look at Sophocles's Oedipus, he drew attention to the same mechanism. Oedipus, Steiner argues, both knew and did not know that he had killed his father and married his mother. By turning a blind eye, he evaded the truth.2 I use Steiner's interpretation as a starting point. It highlights the psychological work that must be done—and which cannot be done once and for all—if we are to draw the conclusions that flow from a realistic appraisal of the climate crisis.
I follow with three texts. The first, Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, appeared in 2016.3 An Indian novelist, Ghosh issued a short and wide-ranging indictment of a blinkered imagination—a failure to see what needs to be seen and the catastrophic consequences of that failure. The second is Daniel Sherrell's Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, published in 2021.4 In his part memoir, part love letter to an unborn child, Sherrell, a young American climate activist, resists the temptation to turn away from the anxiety and grief that goes along with living in the reality of climate change. The third is Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, which also came out in 2021 and became a major motion picture.5 (The connection between the two, aside from the title, is hard to discern. Nonetheless, it is a gripping thriller.) In an i