On being surrounded by loss

Is it legitimate and helpful to deploy concepts such as paranoia, hysteria or melancholia outside of the consulting room to understand social, cultural or political phenomena? Renee Lertzman makes a convincing case for just such an approach using the concept of melancholia in order to understand various forms of environmental inaction. She insists that it is too easy to dismiss such inaction as ‘apathy’ but invites us to consider the complex psycho-social processes at work when we face the damage and loss humankind inflicts upon ‘mother earth’.

Lertzman has been involved in environmental communications for many years and her frustrations with the rationalist approaches that dominated this field led her to undertake her own doctorate. Her study is based upon research in the heavily polluted Fox River and Green Bay area of Wisconsin where she carried out fieldwork and in-depth qualitative interviews with a sample of adults, many of whom had lived in the area before it became industrialised and environmentally damaged. What is fascinating is that Lertzman explicitly uses a psychoanalytic lens to understand her interviewee responses. She also used therapeutically informed methods of undertaking interview research. These methods (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009; Hollway & Jefferson, 2012) involved open-ended interviews, alive to the complex defences and positionings that occur in the interview space. Rather than a single interview Lertzman often returned on several occasions to continue the dialogue with her respondents over time.

Her starting point is Freud’s classic exploration in Mourning and Melancholia where he distinguishes between the work of mourning and working through and, on the other hand, that ‘crushed state of melancholia’ (Freud, 1917, p. 248) which is sometimes complaining and clamorous and sometimes quiet and pining. Remember Freud himself has the social dimension of this phenomenon in mind when, right at the start of his essay he notes that whilst the loss may ref