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Chair: Donald Moss
Presenters: Dela Habibi-Kohlen, Luc Magnenat, and Sally Weintrobe
This singularly important panel addressing the environmental crisis was convened on the Saturday morning of the meetings. Donald Moss from New York City opened the panel with a most moving story of a teacher telling the Noah's Ark tale to her class. The children mostly listened attentively, except for one child, Joel, who screamed out, Where are all the bodies? “WHERE ARE ALL THE BODIES OF THE PEOPLE AND THE ANIMALS THAT DIED IN THE FLOOD?” Moss concluded that this child was asking a psychoanalytic question. “No dead bodies appear in his graphic version of the story of Noah, the indelibly standard theological/pedagogical representation of our – yes, our – founding moment. The narrative of this punitive cleansing by water yields only survivors – Noah, his wife, sons and their wives – and, of course, the earth's entire fauna, all coupled, erotically charged, each pair ready to procreate, to go forth and multiply, and refill the Earth with its original animal abundance. Following the child's question, where are all the bodies?, we are then required to ask: How have they been erased? Why have they been erased? What forces have led to their erasure?
The panel (somewhat uncannily!) addressed these problems – and helped us to think about the forces at work in generating the climate catastrophe – along with various ways of looking at and thinking about our own states of mind, and the demand on us as individuals, citizens and psychoanalysts, to respond to this crisis.
Dela Habibi-Kohlen from Germany spoke after Donald Moss. She discussed in detail a variety of “stories” related to a series of in-depth interviews she conducted some years ago that sought to answer the question of how people are dealing with climate change. She found those climate sceptics and those who believe that humans have an impact on the health of the environment, but neither seemed motivated toward i