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Analysts love stories: we listen professionally to them every day. Stories have five essential elements: a narrative (boy meets girl); a plot (and then…); a world (where it happened); characters, and a voice (the unique song of the narrator). Climate change is a deeply complex emergent story - like all disaster movies rolled into one. Here, I look at one of the characters in this story - the hero, in his cinematic persona as ‘the young white man who saves the noble savage’. Perhaps his opposite, ‘the wise old shaman woman who saves the white man’ is more appropriate as the archetypal force currently needed.
The science is simple: carbon dioxide forms a mirror in the atmosphere, rapidly dialling up the planet's temperature, wrecking ecosystems, causing wars and migration due to starvation. The inevitability of climate change floods us with existential dread (Rust 2020, pp. 15-29). Unquantifiable threats evoke primitive defences of the self - denial, splitting and projective identification - in individuals and in cultures and operate in the following manner: ‘there is no problem’; if there is a problem, then ‘it's all their fault’ (whoever they are); and ‘they made us do it!’ The shadow is projected onto the blamed other. I'll talk more later about the ‘tribe of climate change deniers’ and their racist roots in white patriarchy (Heglar 2022).
Polarized conflicts exemplify enactment of what Melanie Klein called ‘the paranoid-schizoid’ position. This analytic concept can be used to describe fundamentalists on the far right - and the far left. When climate change is all their fault (projective identification of the shadow), then nothing is our fault. This disempowers us so we dream of a rescuing hero. Perhaps, Tarzan will swing through the jungle and save us from them. Unfortunately, in this story,
them is us. First Peoples, Indigenous Peoples on the front lines of this disaster, never were ‘primitives’ as Jung called them. We may excuse h