Human Population Overshoot: The Disavowed Driver of Ecological Crisis

Humans cling to their exceptionalism, a mindset of omnipotence. This defensive conceit has sent us into ecological overshoot. I assess Freud's effort to de-center humanity, and describe subsequent psychoanalytic efforts to understand the environmental crisis. Psychoanalytic literature has indeed confronted the ecological crisis, but it usually targets climate change denial, over- consumption, and our perverse relationship to technology. Psychoanalysis, like the broader culture, seems at pains to avoid overpopulation. Moving to ecology, I summarize overshoot science. Growth in human population and consumption drive the triple-crises of climate change, resource depletion and biodiversity loss. Politics have undermined this scientific consensus. I then identify the anxieties overpopulation evokes and our defenses against them: disavowal, regression to part-object solutions, and omnipotence. We have good reason to deploy them. Overshoot brutally confronts us with limits and loss and the unwelcome imperative for reproductive restraint. Alert to these hard truths, psychoanalysis can objectively reflect on analysands’ wish for a child, analyzing both constructive and destructive aspects of the wish. Ecology, like the psychoanalytic frame, contains and limits us. And limits promote the maturational work of mourning.