Response to the Paper by Liz Bodycote: ‘Holding the Time: Whither the Meaning of Climate Breakdown for Child Psychotherapists?’

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I’m really glad for this opportunity to comment on Liz Bodycote’s courageous and ambitious paper two issues ago, and hope that the discussion of it in the pages of this issue might encourage some readers to go back and reread the paper – or indeed to read it for the first time if it passed them by. I think Bodycote’s paper is courageous in clearly naming and challenging our collective resistance as a profession to fully and openly articulating, in our psychoanalytic thinking, the irreparable damage we as human beings are doing to our planetary home. The paper is ambitious in its scope of considering the impact which climate breakdown and its collective denial has on our own and future generations. Bodycote extensively discusses political, philosophical as well as psychological factors contributing to our – at times unconscious, at other times wilfull – human blindness in this arena. I won’t attempt to summarise Bodycote’s complex lines of thinking here but will instead – as a colleague also deeply concerned about our human predicament on this earth – briefly offer some of my own eclectic associations and reflections as they occurred to me on reading.

I was very interested in Bodycote’s reminder of Michael Rustin’s suggestion (2002) to regard our consulting room as a laboratory for closely observing and exploring the nature and movements of the mind – within the stable and simple parameters of its bounded space within the analytic hour, where the therapeutic relationship takes place. Bodycote goes on to discuss the underlying philosophical, technological and political roots of our alienated (post)modern organisational lives under the spell of neoliberalism. In relation to the tragic loss in our human perception of our inextricable interwovenness with the living world around us, I found mys