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Cosimo Schinaia's Psychoanalysis and Ecology is a text that both champions and seeks to clarify on the role of psychoanalysis in the unfolding global catastrophe of ecological destruction. This is, of course, a vital project: once again, the world's media proclaimed the 2026 Davos summit as the ‘last chance’ to avert a disaster which has already created irreversible devastation of planetary proportions. Rather than timely, it would be more accurate to describe Schinaia's project as untimely: it grapples precisely with the logic of deferrals, delayed responses and even the ‘deep time’ of ecological systems – a temporal dimension absent from much psychoanalytic theory, but which becomes strangely palpable in the painful disjunctions between living bodies and the accelerated rhythms of technology, consumerism and obsolescence, as well as ungraspable slowness of planetary loss.
The book's ambition is evident in its shifting scales of analysis. Across 10 chapters, Schinaia moves between global and intimate registers, from international climate summits – scenes clearly overdetermined by denial and disavowal – to clinical vignettes that demonstrate how environmental ethics may permeate analytic clinical practice. He surveys a scene of new psychosocial realities, particularly intensifying anxieties and steadily multiplying forms of defence – splitting, intellectualization, alarmism, conspiracy theory – which constitute the ‘new discontents of civilization’ (p. 5).
Any attempt to bring psychoanalytic theory and praxis into a deeper engagement with ecology necessarily confronts psychoanalysis' own long-held resistance to acknowledging nuanced forms of relationality with more-than-human entities and processes. Revisiting Freud's anthropocentrism in Civilization and Its Discontents, Schinaia attempts to go beyond fantasies of technological domination of nature, or animosity towards nature's persistent exposure of our illusions of mastery. Freud's own ‘romance’ with the Alpine and