Climate, Bion, and My Head in the Sand

Last August I traveled to California. I visited the Sequoia and the Kings Canyon National Parks. It was a majestic experience. Awe-inspiring thousand-year-old trees, spectacular vistas. Unfortunately, because of the wildfires, the air quality was so bad that I could not stop coughing. Leaving the area, I went on to San Francisco, where the situation was even worse. Eating out presented a dilemma: sit inside a restaurant, and risk COVID or sit outdoors and suffocate right away.

A few weeks upon my return to the East Coast I learnt, to my horror, that the fires reached Sequoia and put the trees at risk. Heroic efforts were called for to save them. In the end those trees survived as they did through centuries of endless disasters. What about next time?

I began studying Bion in the late aughts shortly after I opened my practice in 1997. I asked a former professor, the late Jeffrey Seinfeld to supervise me and a few months into our collaborative experience he suggested that I read Attacks on linking (Bion, 1959). I read it a few times. I cannot say that I understood much back then, but the text captured me all the same. I have been a disciple ever since. I heard Bion’s (1957, 1958, 1962; and other analytic thinkers,’ Freud’s most especially) injunction to accept life’s frustrations, tolerate the fluctuations of emotional life, and modulate rather than evacuate the horrors of one’s encounters with Beta. To process, to eventually have a usable psychic landscape. After years of psychoanalysis, I can do this in many - well, in some - areas but not so much when it comes to climate change. While I am a bit of a news junkie, I tend to gloss over reports of severe weather, floods, mudslides, wildfires, and the like. I find them frightening and depressing; they tend to put me in a miserable mood for hours if not for days.

Frankly, I’d prefer to keep my head in the sand, however destructive that may be. Another, perhaps less dismissive way of looking at my proclivities is to say that