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Are psychoanalytic theories expansive enough to apply to the BIPOC psyche with respect to the climate crisis, when both the BIPOC body and the earth serve as HOSTs for a parasitic white supremacist culture and capitalism (Moss, 2021; Wilderson, 2020)? When considering the historical context: Indigenous people slaughtered and displaced from their land, extraction of gold and fossil fuels, and slaves utilized for the extraction of land and for their black bodies, how do we interrogate this legacy and its current impact on BIPOC body/minds? Although we all live within a historical socio-political context of whiteness as a cultural construct and value system of competitive individualism and delusion of invulnerability (and dominion over animals, plants, and earth), this cultural history is also embedded in an economic system fueled by the joined exploitation of land and bodies of color thereby impacting the subjectivity of BIPOC differently.
A few months ago, I was asked to be a discussant for a panel on Climate Change. I was surprised as I had never spoken on the subject. I was informed that my perspective, as a Black analyst, would be valued surrounding the intersection of race and one’s relationship to the environment. Racial/ethnic location has historically been ignored or excised from the psychoanalytic discourse but given the current racial reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, this was one of many discussions I had been asked to weigh in on. My decision to do so was not without conflict.
Although I am aware of the climate crisis-rising temperatures, poor air quality and the need to reduce carbon emissions, I asked myself, “Who’s on my couch?” Environmental anxiety was not at the forefront of my BIPOC patients’ concerns, certainly not in ways discussed by white colleagues. Or had I not been “hearing” my patients’ awareness and/or anxiety about climate change? How were my patients speaking to their climate anxiety out in the open but unrecognized by me?