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Sometimes a book hits right in the stomach - for its unflinching courage and clear sight. This is such a book.
The book starts and ends with a quotation from a dream in The Interpretation of Dreams. A father, who has witnessed the death of his son, goes to sleep in the next room and dreams that the son comes back to him burning and cries: Father don’t you see I am burning.
The dream can be interpreted in many ways apart from the one Freud himself gives - here Zimmerman gives his understanding of it: Today our children and grandchildren cry: Don’t you see what is happening. Tellingly he quotes Greta Thunberg at Davos in 2018 pleading to ”act as if the house is on fire”. Do we hear them?
How do we who at present are the parents respond to this cry?
In the book the author describes responses from fiction and non-fiction and analyses why so much of what is being written about the present situation contributes to a form of denial instead of keeping us alert and helpful. And why is this denial so common? And sometimes so difficult to see through?
Blunt denial of what is happening is according to Zimmerman not the main problem. More hidden and more difficult to recognize is what he calls ”disarticulation”. It is a term borrowed from butchering that means ”separation of bones at the joint”. In this context it means texts that seem rational and common sense but notwithstanding takes the urgency out of the discussion - giving the impression global warming can be avoided if only … a bit more is done.
The situation is so threatening, the threat so overwhelming - where can we turn to find ways to live daily lives and still listen to ”the burning child”.
Zimmerman suggests that an understanding of trauma can be helpful. Normally we think of trauma as something that has happened in the past. The psychiatric diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorders defines it as a disorder that follows a life threatening event that cannot be experienced when it takes place and therefore is returning a