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Joseph Dodds, Routledge, London, 2011, 238pp., £80 (hardcover), £19.99 (paper), ISBN: 978-0415666121.
In 1972 Harold Searles challenged the psychoanalytic world, suggesting that the lack of environmental thinking within psychoanalysis might be caused by destructive unconscious factors. Since his call for a psychoanalytic environmental debate, the psychoanalytic movement has remained largely silent, until Joseph Dodds’s recent response. In this review I will describe how Dodds understands the relationship between psychoanalysis and climate change, as well as how he sees complexity theory and self-organisation as adding to psychoanalytic understanding.
Dodds maintains that ‘the new nomadic sciences of complexity, combined with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, help to provide a framework … for thinking our way out of extinction’ (p. 183). He believes that the crisis of potential future climate catastrophe calls for the introduction of non-linear, ecological thinking to psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis into ecology; the environment is present but silent in psychoanalysis. Michael Balint, in The Basic Fault described ‘a harmonious interpenetrating mix-up’ (1989, pp. 67–68), where the object is taken for granted, just as we assume the ongoing supply of air. Psychoanalysis is essentially concerned with the internal world, including internal object relationships, and lacks a common conceptual framework for exploring the relationship of the individual and the group with the natural world, so it has disregarded environmental issues.
Dodds suggests ways of understanding psychoanalytic ideas and their relationship to nature and the environment. Freud saw civilisation as opposed to nature. Dodds draws on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (who was also a psychoanalyst) to show us the interconnectedness between the ecology of mind, the ecology of society and the ecology of nature; each is a world of infinite complexity. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who