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Is there a relationship between psychoanalysis and the environment? It was decades ago since the affirmative answer was evident. Nevertheless, we can think about why the psychoanalytic world has taken so long to react and why there is not enough work related to the climate crisis.
We can begin by imagining Freud in 1922, concentrating on the intrapsychic register, trying to work during the roaring twenties, while the deafening sound of the war that had passed and the one to come, of the nearby deaths, racism, destructive repetition, felt deadening. However, he had written “Beyond the pleasure principle,” where he proposed the death drive: an original sin that seems to give his theory the missing part. Our admired patriarch feels less vulnerable.
Fast forward. Klein's theory was interpreted by most Kleinians as a mandate to leave external reality out of the consulting room; any reference to what was not part of the patient’s inner world was “light,” psychoanalysis. It was a symptom when a patient talked about politics. If the therapist did so, he was not respecting the basic rule of the game: neutrality. Politics? Climate change? You don’t talk about such things in psychoanalysis; there are more profound things to deal with. External reality is ignored, denied or factored out.
Nevertheless, “there’s no such thing … ”
Winnicott helped the talking cure become a listening, seeing, and acting cure. He dared to leave the intrapsychic confines and discovered real spaces between realities: long tethered relational seeds found fertile ground. He marveled with what he found (and created?) between humans. Marveled and worried: he could hear the roar of bombers and could see the deafness of his colleagues.
More than one hundred years after Freud’s most influential articles, we deal with other confinements. We are reminded that divisions are fictitious. We are in the same boat; neither the human mind nor the world is separated into bits and pieces. The Relational turn has added cultu