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Sally Weintrobe is doing an important thing in writing this book. She is taking the insights of modern psychoanalysis, and finding a popular style in which to apply them to one of the central issues, perhaps the central issue, of our times. There are undoubtedly hazards to doing this, above all the danger of excessive simplification of either the psychoanalytic ideas or the public issues, but unless we can find ways to do it there is the companion risk that psychoanalytic ideas, much needed in the wider world, will remain stuck in a professional silo.
Weintrobe is a well-respected figure in the world of climate change discussion. Her earlier (edited) book, Engaging with Climate Change, made a powerful impact when it appeared in 2014, and was shortlisted for the International Gradiva Prize for contributions to psychoanalysis (the title of which reminds us that Freud too felt strongly that psychoanalysis had an important contribution to make beyond the consulting room). Since then she has written and spoken widely and in many contexts on the subject of climate change and ecocide: the present book is the distillation of a great deal of thinking.
It is nowhere so powerfully distilled as on page 57, where we meet the distillation of the distillation. Speaking of James Hansen’s report on climate change to the US Congress in 1988, Weintrobe writes: “Its main import was that humanity was tasked with growing up psychologically.” That in a nutshell is the message the climate emergency conveys: if humanity cannot grow up psychologically, if we, the human population of the Earth, are unable to recognize the adult truths of interdependence and interconnection, our infantile responses will destroy us.
The central puzzle of “climate change” is that the issue is so obvious and yet so little has been done to address it. I remember my father, a soil research chemist, telling me in the 1950s of what he called the “greenhouse effect”, adding as a corollary: “and if we continue to industri