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Donna Orange, a psychoanalyst and assistant clinical professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy is an internationally recognized teacher of psychoanalysis and humanistic ethics
and the author of more than 10 books on ethics, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis written over the past 35 years. Her most recent book, Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2017), addresses what she persuasively calls “the climate emergency” and is not only an exploration of the responses to the growing environmental emergency, but a strong and urgent call to action. Orange makes a powerful argument that our culture at large and each of us personally need to become aware of the dangers, challenges, and ethical demands associated with the climate crisis. She emphasizes a need for “a radical ethics” drawn from Levinas, grounded in the responsibility for the suffering other. Orange states, “I believe that only a radical ethics of the fundamental worth of every human life will make the difference we need in the climate crisis” (p. 120).
This relatively short book (147 pages) provides us with an effective and illuminating discussion of the climate crisis and its resulting massive social injustice. Orange writes with warmth and compassion; her book both sounds an alarm and explores why we have difficulty heeding it, addressing our deeply human tendency to avoid engaging with issues that are frightening, overwhelming, and inconvenient. Psychoanalysts engage with human suffering on a daily basis in their offices, and Orange calls upon them, upon us, to step out of the comfort of these offices and to actively assume responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere. Emerging from climate unconsciousness requires each of us to allow ourselves to be touched by the immense human suffering that climate change is already causing, and to understand our responsib