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Before I read this book, which I heard about not long after it was published in 2013, I thought it would turn out to be a worthy effort to apply psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary thinking to the nightmare subject of climate change. But it seemed that such a book would inevitably be doomed by the fact that no one who refused to “engage with climate change” would pick it up, much less buy it or read it carefully. And yet, who else would be the target audience for it? For this reason, I expected a reading experience of futility.
Then I read the book.
It consists of ten chapters, seven of them followed by brief commentaries. The chapters and the commentaries are written by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, scholars in the social sciences, ethics, and philosophy; climate activists, a former advertising executive, and a climate scientist. One surprising pleasure of the book is to see psychoanalytic theory (here mainly Kleinian) used to such good effect on a subject of such importance, including by nonanalysts. Reading this book, one would hardly guess that psychoanalytic ideas had long since been relegated to the dustbin of Western intellectual life.
The level of writing and thinking in most of the chapters is very high. (The one chapter which is an exception to this overall high level is corrected by its two commentaries). The writing evocatively shows connections between intrapsychic dynamics and the brute facts of climate change denial and, beyond that, indicates the baseline cultural attitudes that make accepting climate science difficult for so many.
For example, Paul Hoggett, a professor of politics and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, begins his chapter “Climate Change in a Perverse Culture” by citing Freud's late concept of disavowal to understand the fact that doubt about the urgent reality of climate change increases even as the evidence — in the form of ever more dire scientific reports — mounts. Disavowal, the state of simultaneously acknowledging and denying