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The issues that concern ecologists and environmentalists lie within an interdisciplinary area that could be of considerable interest to psychoanalysis: both man's reparative and destructive forces are of capital importance to psychoanalytical inquiry. The environmental issue, with all the anxiety it evokes, has moved to the foreground only over the last couple of generations, whereas we must suppose that man's destructivity has remained practically unchanged (Rousseau's primitive innocence notwithstanding). Our forefathers, as we know, were responsible for the devastation of much of the environment, and yet an inquiry which accounts only for the destructive factors of human mind is bound to he insufficient.
Cirincione depicts man's capacity for destruction and his murderous attack on the ecosystem (including man himself) with such passion and concern that competing perspectives, such as the historical framework, the dispute over the ethics of scientific research and techonology, or the rather dated debate on the “two cultures”, seem to fade into the background. The picture that emerges is extremely black, due not so much to the author's assessment of the current situation (which, unfortunately, may be correct) as to the absence of hope, that is to say, the total cancellation of libidinal forces.
The author, who has broken ground in essentially new territory for psychoanalysis, uses the term “delusion of denial” to describe the means by which those who are indifferent or, worse, those who collude attempt to delimit and minimize the environmental problem. This point may also be well taken to a certain extent. But not to the extent that we should fall into another denial: the denial of reparative forces or, at least, of the existence of a struggle that is not necessarily dictated by self-illusion, Voltairean optimism or limiting “reformism”. The author of the present review holds that if it is possible to unravel a psychoanalytical thread from the tangle