A New Thing Under the Sun

An urgent sense of the possible contributed to my pursuit of psychoanalytic training over a decade ago, back when CO₂ levels were still below 400 ppm. At the time, my analyst and my own analysis were introducing me to an unanticipated world of depth, beauty, and tolerable terror from which I rarely wanted to surface. At the same time, and still today, I was struggling to take in my lived experiences of marked changes in the weather along with a larger body of scientific research, which described climatic apocalypse in my lifetime. In my professional life—which spanned many years in the nonprofit sector as well as higher education—people were teaching, learning, and talking about smart, sustainable policies to reduce our carbon footprint, to mitigate and adapt. And yet, I wondered, what was everybody feeling? How were they sleeping at night? How did others handle what environmentalist Aldo Leopold described as “a new thing under the sun,” namely one species mourning the death of another or, in this case, the human species now mourning its own present and future?

Apart from those regular fifty-minute sessions below the surface, I did not know how to ask others about their interior lives or speak about mine on our rapidly warming planet. Then, and now, I sensed that analytical mindedness might make it possible to bring our interior lives, our psyches, into these discussions about mitigation and adaptation, about loss on unprecedented scales. Then—and now—I believed that doing so might help upend our contemporary era, aptly named “the Dithering” by cli-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson. There was no common language for grief, for dread, or for our lack of acknowledgment of something terribly new under the sun. As W.R. Bion reminds us in his 1957 essay on the “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities,” “problems can be solved because at least they can be stated whereas without [articulated speech] cer