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The collection begins with Andrew Fellows' paper, ‘Gaia, psyche and deep ecology’. In his paper, Fellows reminds us of Jung's prescient words: ‘the world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man’ (Jung , p. 303) and then lays out for the reader a theoretical scaffolding for linking mind and matter, psyche and Gaia, the human soul and the world soul. Fellows grounds our Jungian theory in his suggestion that synergies can be found between certain aspects of classical Jungian theory, dual-aspect monism, Earth System science and deep ecology which, together, offer a radical alternative framework to the current worldview of hubristic domination over the more-than-human-world. Fellows first explores these complementarities via the Pauli-Jung conjecture revealing qualitative correlations between the dynamics, structure and pathologies of our inner and outer worlds - the human psyche and this planet respectively. Second, he elaborates what he calls the ‘Psyche-Gaia’ conjecture where the comparable roles of ego in the psyche and of humankind in the Earth System, can be seen to link our modern monotheism of consciousness with the advent of the Anthropocene epoch. Third, Fellows applies Jung's stages of life developmental theory to our civilization, especially the mid-life transition, and points towards a possible adaptation through what he calls ‘frugal individuation’. The paper ends with parallels being drawn between Jungian individuation and the deep ecology movement - both offer hope of potential adaptation through connection with something larger than the human ego and through serving the ‘other’ instead of serving ourselves.
Joseph Dodds, in his paper ‘Dancing at the end of the world? Psychoanalysis, climate change and joy’, first explores the main psychoanalytic offerings into our understandings of the ‘human-nature’ relationship. He reminds us that it is our anthropocentric narcissism functioning as an omnipotent defence against both our seemin