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Joseph Dodds, Routledge, 2011, 238 pp., £80 (hardback), £19.99 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-415-66611-4
In 1972, Harold Searles challenged the psychoanalytic world when he suggested that the lack of environmental thinking within psychoanalysis might be caused by destructive unconscious factors. Since his call for a psychoanalytic environmental debate, until Dodds's response, the psychoanalytic movement has remained largely silent.
Martin Jordan describes Joseph Dodds in the book's preface as a ‘nomadic scholar’; he is training as a psychoanalyst with the Czech Psychoanalytical Society, and lectures at the University of New York in Prague. His book springs from an MPhil thesis. In this review, I will describe how Dodds understands the relationship between psychoanalysis and climate change and 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; the environment, he argues, is present but silent in psychoanalysis. Balint describes ‘a harmonious interpenetrating mix-up’ (Balint, 1968, p. 66), where the object is taken for granted, as a fish swims in the sea, just as we assume the ongoing supply of air. Psychoanalysis, lacking a conceptual framework for thinking about the medium in which we live, has disregarded environmental issues.
Dodds suggests ways of understanding psychoanalytic ideas and their relationship with nature and the environment. Freud, he proposes, saw civilisation as opposed to nature; Deleuze and Guattari see mind, society and nature as a continuum, separated only for clarity and convenience; Dodds shows us the interconnectedne