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Chair: Donald Moss
Presenters: Delaram Habibi-Kohlen, Luc Magnenat, Sally Weintrobe
The first speaker, Delaram Habibi-Kohlen (German Psychoanalytical Society), gave a paper through a successful teleconference, reporting a series of in-depth interviews conducted in 2011 with psychology students on the topic of “Dealing with climate change”. These interviews and their discussion are impressive illustrations of “how difficult it is to bear the confrontation with the climate catastrophe, and what twists and turns we make in our thinking in order to get out of it”. Some of these methods include: shutting off emotions through intellectualisation and cutting off connections with history or geography in order to isolate the climate crisis from its global context (examples given were that we lack precise forecasting tools, and climate crisis is a threat for some distant islands); refusing to think about its consequences for future generations, presumably in order to prevent guilt and maybe even to satisfy unconscious wishes for Oedipal revenge; and perceiving nature not as damaged by human action but in phantasy as a pre-Oedipal, unpredictable and revengeful mother. In Delaram Habibi-Kohlen’s words:
All in all, people waver between whitewashing (nothing is really so bad, people have always dealt with crises, technology will help us find solutions) and the feeling of being completely apathetic and dependent, helpless and having no power. In between these, one can find feelings of resentment and self-blaming (we don't deserve better/the others don't). A frequent way of dealing with this is to demand the necessary activity exclusively from the politicians, which also means that one can secretly continue to profit from one's own consumption advantages, even if one denounces them.
Luc Magnenat (Swiss Psychoanalytical Society) gave a more theoretical paper in which he suggested understanding the psychical dimensions of climate crisis in terms of a disorder of thought. He first pointe