The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis is the first clinical psychoanalytic training to introduce the teaching of environmental perspectives into its curriculum. The original brief for this dialogue was to explore the issues arising as a result. However, it soon became clear that it was difficult to think about teaching in this area without thinking about the implications for psychoanalysis itself—including its history, its clinical context and its relevance in relation to climate activism, the more than human world and processes of environmental change or degradation.
We therefore each wrote a short piece on why we want to teach environmental perspectives in psychoanalytic training, after having been deep in dialogue for several weeks, and the introductory section is consequently informed by the edited extracts of the email discussions that follow. These took place between October 2011 and January 2012. Contributions are introduced with the initials of the participants, Joe Suart (J.S.), Adrian Tait (A.T.) and Margot Young (M.Y.)
J.S. Including environmental concerns on the teaching provides an important angle from which to investigate fundamental psychoanalytic principles and practice. It also presents an opportunity to consider a compelling cultural phenomenon and the specific qualities of this particular apocalyptic vision: what are the aspects of our cultural context which, when working in concert, result in the presentation of this issue and its articulations? For example, governmental policies to reduce CO2 emissions are being disregarded in the attempts to keep Europe's economies growing. Accepted economic wisdom is that growth is essential for human societies to improve living standards. The moral responsibility to improve living standards thus conflicts with a moral responsibility not to manipulate ecosystems, destroy other species and put future generations at risk. Around this conflict are constructed theories and arguments seeking explanations and proposals for future action.
The narratives we are building demonstrate that ‘climate change’ does not only reside in the ‘real’ world, but is also a cultural phenomenon. How we formulate what ‘climate change’ is, the apocalyptic visions that surround those formulations and the reactions to both, are responses located in a very specific time: now.
Psychoanalysis can also usefully investigate whether our various narrative structures are helpful in addressing this situation, or whether, being implicated by the very same constructs that have led to the present crisis, they are of little use.
Is it so difficult to think about and understand the current situation because we have to redefine our position in relationship with the non-human and do not yet have the narrative structures with which to understand this utterly different way of making sense of our experience?
What are we are talking about when we talk about ‘climate change’? What does it mean to say that ‘climate change’ is being ‘denied’? Is it real? What is being employed in these definitions of reality? This is difficult to think about and maybe we are struggling towards a different set of thoughts with which to do so. Margot links this with trauma: that which drastically intrudes because mental mechanisms are not available with which to make it into something the mind can handle. The stripping away of our illusions is only traumatic when we do not have the mechanisms to make mental sense of the results of that disillusionment.
So, questions I am interested in asking include: to what extent does the issue of climate change constitute a trauma provoking psychic defences of denial? If so is this trauma constituted in the event, or in a deficiency of the thoughts with which to make sense of it? What aspects of psychoanalytic theory impede our thinking about this issue and what may other ways of thinking about the dynamic unconscious have to offer?
What does it mean when we say that climate change is traumatic? Floods, droughts, hurricanes are terrible and devastating events. But climate change is mostly an idea which can be construed in various ways. The real event has not yet happened to us, so we can carry on as normal. Or the real event has already happened and, since positive feedback mechanisms are already in play, we will encounter the direct experience of the consequences at some point in the future. Or reports
of climate change are oracular interpretations concerning both future and past events, the trauma of which is constituted in the failure to resistor avoid their actuality.
My understanding is that for Freud, the event becomes traumatic when it is connected up with the repressed unconscious desire. Freud's reading of Oedipus Rex led him to conclude that the reason the story is so compelling is because it provides a mechanism by which each member of the audience can abreact the libidinal energy that has been detached from their repressed incestuous desire, so that the connection is not consciously made. Following this the trauma of climate change would be that to recognise it, would mean reconnecting with the hitherto repressed desire to attack the mother. Working through the trauma would be to seek ways of reparation rather than continuing to split off one's destructiveness, locate it in ‘nature’ and read ‘nature’ as now attacking back.
However historically and culturally appropriate Freud's reading of the Oedipus myth may be, its universal ahistoric applicability is debatable. Primarily it serves to establish the system of meaning generating symbols called psychoanalysis and while promoting ways of tolerating extreme distress and of minimising our destructiveness, the value of its analysis is undermined by this claim to universality.
A.T. When teaching this subject for the first time, I saw my tasks as
(i) to introduce myself (i.e. try to be clear about where I'm coming from);
(ii) to introduce students to a range of thinkers in this area;
(iii) to have a go at cross-referencing the perspectives and topics of these thinkers;
(iv) to highlight the importance of a psycho-social perspective;
(v) to use the theme as a point of access to some key psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. pleasure and reality principles, narcissism, defences against anxiety, omnipotence, loss and mourning).
I want to add that Winnicott's notion of the facilitating environment is central for me, both in the teaching / training situation as well as in early development or therapy. This is very much linked to point (i)
above. A teacher may impart something useful, but I'm primarily interested in what quality of presence a therapist will bring to the consulting room. So the most salient experience for me (particularly in contrast with some impressions of ‘defendedness’ I picked up), was when one of the trainees actually manifested the overwhelmingly distressing nature of the material we were there to consider.
This is a tough subject, for all of us I think. I periodically wonder about what is reasonable and realistic to ask of students at an early point in their involvement with psychoanalysis.
M.Y. For me this area has become inseparable from the thinking about the history of psychoanalysis. A reason for including environmental psychoanalysis in trainings is that the social and cultural context can no longer be considered separately from its ecological context. If the divide between nature and culture is artifice; if ‘nature’ does not exist except as a human creation, then the social and cultural, implicitly posited as the ‘other’ of nature, are themselves brought into question, including the position of psychoanalysis as a social cultural endeavour. Also the spatial context of consulting rooms cannot be assumed to be unchanging norms for psychoanalytic practices when environmental perspectives are introduced.
In this subject area it seems especially important to have exposure to the different and diverse positions that people take in psychoanalysis—and the implications of these for human / nonhuman beings and for psychoanalytical / activist beings.
A.T. This subject area is very challenging—it has been my prime focus of attention for four years now and only during this year, I'd say, have I had anything like an on-going sense of where my bearings are. Even so, I am still spending a lot of time keeping abreast of hard data, analyses and my own and others' working out and working through of what it means to us.
My hunch is that the climate and ecological crisis that's building—beyond reasonable doubt—is particularly difficult to engage with effectively from a post-modernist standpoint, because the latter is inherently
critical of concrete propositions—like the one I have just made! But as you all know, I am not steeped in post-modernism, so I have to stick with the word ‘hunch’.
M.Y. I agree that a postmodern position tends to be oriented towards cultural critique and therefore contends that contemporary rational and scientific conceptions of any kind, including those relating to climate change are social historically specific constructions. I can see that this would seem frustrating to say the least, (if not outrageous!) to some climate activists. The problem for me with this kind of ‘postmodern’ position (although it is actually a multiplicity of positions) is that it can assume a radical separation of the human from the non-human.
J.S. Yes, it's difficult. Actual death and what leads up to it are not open to critical analysis, whatever our attitudes.. For example, how we die in one sense doesn't really matter: we all die. In another sense it matters immensely and perhaps part of what makes up the mattering is precisely our culturally and historically inflected attitude, or rather relationship, to suffering, discord and death.
You can see that I think this is more about how we do or don't face death, than about how we manage our relationship with the environment—which is not of course to say that we don't have also to think about how we manage the environment.
A.T. Death is the result of bodily exhaustion or disease, lack of the necessary external conditions (air, food and water, shelter, company), suicide for egoistic, altruistic or anomic reasons (à la Durkheim), accident, murder. I continue with the thought that a lot of people are dying and a lot more people are almost certainly going to die, in a variety of the ways listed above (e.g. the epidemic of Punjabi farmers committing suicide) as a result of particular, definable aspects of human behaviour and attitude and their effect on the biosphere.
M.Y. For me death isn't separable from the intensity of life itself. Until it happens all I am facing is life—and suffering, loss and maybe even death are part of living. My relationship with my father was most alive to me (by far) hours before he died, perhaps because I was able to help
him with his suffering at the end. Of course I don't know how it was for him.
Is there a question about whether, underlying the view that humankind is destroying all that supports life, there is a notion that if we weren't messing up the planet that we could somehow evade death? Or conversely that we live the way we do, is both a death-creating and avoiding imperative?
A.T. I hope the rather personal nature of this reply won't seem out of place. What I feel moved to say connects, I think, with Margot's response. I'm sure there are important connections between the general subject of death (specifically, how each of us deals with it in life) and the irreversible death and destruction which our species is wreaking on the planet. I also agree strongly that the quality of our awareness of death has an important bearing on the overall quality of our lives.
But the two subjects (I am using this word in the colloquial sense) are, in my view, of a very different order, so the common ground, as well as the differences in significance, value and the emotions they evoke, need exploration. Let me give you two examples. For those of us who have children, it is a commonplace observation that the prospect of their continuity has a major bearing on how we feel about the prospect of our own deaths. When my first grandchild was born this year, I was conscious of two conflicting sets of responses, which felt irreconcilable: on the one hand an upwelling of joy, relief (the labour was very difficult—it would probably have killed both of them in earlier times) and wonder; on the other, grief, despair and fear that the world my grandson will inhabit is becoming a greatly degraded, more dangerous, unpredictable and unstable, also a more ugly place. Not to mention the fact that another birth, particularly in the rich world, adds to our problems.
I alluded above to the fact that medical knowledge and techniques have made childbirth much less dangerous and thereby rendered death less a part of life and I think that links to what you are saying. But the conflictual experience I'm describing seems to be between two levels of awareness. At the personal / family level, Eros and Thanatos come to mind, and feel to me more or less in touch, in this situation. Death has been defied this time.
The conflict for me is between this personal level of experience and the ecologically expanded awareness which I've been deliberately striving to develop as part of myself. The latter, by the way, can also be construed as an act of defiance (though I feel it to be an expansion of the capacity for concern), in that it opposes key aspects of the Enlightenment, even conventions of sanity, based on some definitions of boundary and ego. We share something there, albeit from different standpoints.
My other example is borrowed from Sandra White, one of the ecopsychologists whose work I included in my teaching for the Site SW this year. She identifies guilt as a general problem for ‘our generation’ in coming to terms with the destruction in which we're implicated Psychoanalysis means to loosen and resolve and so much therapeutic work takes place in relation to destructive burdens of guilt. All well and good, from the perspective of intrapsychic conflict, introjection and projection, etc. But White's point is that we don't, jointly or severally, know how to accept the responsibility we do share, though such a move might be the sine qua non, at a psychological level, in efforts to temper the cataclysm that humankind has unleashed.
J.S. Now we're at the off! In Permeability Hillman, (who died a few weeks ago), and McLean quote from Proust a passage about a character dying in front of a Vermeer with his perception heightened as if by his closeness to his mortality. They write of being permeable to an awareness of mortality, of death being at the ambiguous heart of all things, which is necessary to the vitality of imaginative life. I would probably say that the way we live is not death-creating but death-denying, which becomes, as you say death-avoiding, and so becomes deadly dull.
One if the difficulties of psychoanalysis that its founding myth, the Oedipus complex and the Castration complex, delineate human nature from within an enlightenment narrative. Then again, one of the advantages of psychoanalysis is that its fundamental premise, the conception of a dynamic unconscious, opens up ways of establishing narratives that can allow for the human individual or group to have neither sole agency over their effects nor sole responsibility for their own way of being.
A.T. Where I really take issue with you is in your assertion that the way we live is not death-creating. I realise that you have a perspective from which that seems true, but at the moment anyway, I feel unable to engage with it. My current thinking is influenced by Bill McKibben's most recent book, Eaarth—Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. The altered spelling stems from his meticulous analysis of the degree and acceleration (via feedbacks etc.) of destabilisation of planetary systems that is already occurring, meaning that the planet we now inhabit is already a radically different one from that which existed only a decade or so ago.
M.Y. I think that the contradictory position of psychoanalysis as being founded upon an enlightenment narrative and at the same time producing disruptions to that narrative is itself suggestive of how we might make ecological psychoanalysis. If we apply psychoanalytic ideas that are saturated in notions of progress, health, or self determination, or the more romantic notions of wholeness and unity—to our relation to environment, (which I think most existing psychoanalytic perspectives on environment to of greater or lesser extent do) we miss the opportunity that the radical heart of psychoanalysis offers.
And pathologising people for their denying attitude, for me, psychically reinforces a position of conformity which doesn't get beyond the way of thinking / being which got us into this situation, or fabricates an imaginary romanticisation of nature.
A.T. I like the general feel of what you say, though I probably need to check my grasp of the radical heart of Psychoanalysis. Something to do with the disruptions you refer to, I guess.
Sandra White, like you, insists that we mustn't pathologise denial. On second thoughts, maybe pathologising people for the denying attitude, as you put it, is a bit different, something like a condemnation with a heavy dose of splitting and projection. But, given our capacity as a species to reflect on ourselves, would we not agree that ecologically destructive behaviour is pathological, i.e. unhealthy, in the way that fouling our dwelling place is? Come to think of it, organisms above the sophistication of yeast seem to have got that one sorted. If so, then an inability to face / consider / address / alter such behaviour is, presumably,
also pathological.
Mary-Jayne Rust entitled her 2009 University of the West of England talk, ‘The Myth of Progress’, and my guess is that you broadly regard ecopsychologists like her to be romanticising nature. Is there scope I wonder for a fruitful dialogue between your culture of thought and some of the others, e.g. the psychoanalysts and / or ecopsychologists listed by Joe? This is a question I've been grappling with in the Climate Psychology Alliance project. Maybe we live on a Tower of Babel.
J.S. One thing that is interesting is how our thinking gets channelled, and therefore apparently divided, into theory and experience. I am not sure this is a required distinction. Experience, to my mind, is very dependent on the mechanisms, or frameworks, that we make use of to try and turn the ‘raw data’ as it were into an understandable form. I remember the first time I experienced an earth tremor I had absolutely no way of making sense of what was happening. The experience lasted no more than one or two seconds. I then ‘realised’ what had happened and could make sense of the experience. But until I had done so, the house moving, what was supposed to be solid becoming momentarily apparently fluid. The raw anxiety maintained by the loss of hitherto reliable reference points is very destabilising: makes you mad. I could imagine what stories one might make up to explain the phenomenon if one didn't have notions of tectonic plates shifting. I only wish to illustrate how our theories structure and then provide the infill detail of how we experience our world. This is fundamentally important because it alerts us to the way in which we structure our experience of ‘reality’. Of course this has implications for what we mean by the ‘reality principle’, which I take at bottom to mean ‘there are limits’ and so our ‘omnipotence’ is a fantasy. I don't think the way we are living is ‘death-creating’, for example, because death is already inevitable.
Adrian's examples are very helpful in describing a fundamental dilemma: do I fight for my life, or do I let someone / something else live instead. For most of us most of the times we fight to live and fight for those we care about to live too. This is for me part of the difficulty with the notion of separating out desire / greed into good or bad, positive or negative narcissism, on the side of life, or, on the side of
death—which many who come from an British Object Relations tradition end up doing. This is true of Sally Weintrobe, Paul Hoggett, Margaret Rustin, Renee Lertzman, and Rosemary Randall; in other words, most of the speakers from The Engaging with Climate Change conference.
It is not that I disagree with these analyses. They fit with the theoretical tradition from which they emerge. It is not that I don't agree that human burning of fossil fuels has caused the massive change in the climate. I am also personally convinced by those arguments that say that the system is already into a positive feedback and will accelerate, no matter what we do with respect to future CO2 emissions. I share a fear for the future of the children. Thankfully my children aren't anything like as pessimistic as I am, although they are just as well, if not better, informed. For them, life is still there for the living! I guess my interest is how do we face what is coming? How can you prepare for something you have no experience of? We develop models and plans and conceptions about what to expect and how we should be behaving. How can we take care that we do not slip inevitably into a framework of thinking that shuts down our tolerance of what does not fit within the framework we have adopted? As we know, one of the ways that humans tend to behave when under pressure is to become more reliant on exclusive rules to define community membership—friend / foe; us / them—and these rules tend to be based on processes of identification, processes which privilege apparent similarity, homogeneity, unity, and penalize or persecute heterogeneity and lateritic. Mary-Jane Rust, for example, talks about the need to re-integrate what has been marginalized for that is the way to be healthy and have a non-destructive relationship with the world. It is not difficult to imagine how her discourse (and that of many commentators) of healthy / unhealthy could be mobilised to support mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, with us or against us.
What I wonder is what would it be like to shift the ground of our thinking more radically. What if we consider that what human kind is doing is not because we are pathological, ill, going against our true, good, and nature. That though some of it may be destructive, some perverse, some creative, everything that we do is done within a context far bigger and more dynamically intentional than we have so far imagined. Like the child hero of our developmental narrative, we think that what is happening is because of us. (Mummy doesn't love me because
I've done something, or am bad in some way, when in fact Mummy doesn't love me because she's following something else that is more interesting to her: the child has to be the centre of its world and to persuade its Mummy to concur because it can't easily learn to live within a social group without this framework). What if we consider that human kind is doing exactly what any and every creature would do: try to keep living and keep it's progeny living, in as great numbers and for as long as possible? What if this is the story that is being played out and we are coming to the end of our chapter? It's not my idea; it's the idea of the algae bloom. What stories will we tell ourselves to enable us to not be overwhelmed by the gruesome facts, the scale of suffering and the degree of exposure to that suffering? I often think of how people survived the medieval plague years—two thirds of the population of Europe wiped out—without becoming brutalized and brutalizing. I wonder whether part of what we fear is that when we are put under real pressure we will lose our compassion and become only destructive and cruel to each other.
I wonder whether one story we may tell, a story that can grow out of the radical alterity at the heart of psychoanalysis, is that owing to our knowledge of there being a limit, the Oedipus / castration complex, the existence of death, we can acknowledge the presence of what is other, (death at the heart of all things: what in a moral context might be considered as abnormal, unhealthy, sick), and can celebrate the liveliness that this centrally ambivalent tension establishes …
M.Y. In response to your question, Adrian by ‘radical heart of psychoanalysis’ I mean the notion that a human does not revolve around his or her own centre. The human being can never be a whole or stable entity, due to the psychic, social cultural and environmental (in the widest sense) forces to which s/he is subject. Furthermore, knowledge and reason have limits when it comes to experiencing what is ‘real’, if that is even possible. Psychoanalysis reveals this predicament, disrupts the ‘self’ and speaks to that which is beyond reason, and offers a means to at least approach the real (which might include death, loss and that beyond the human). Although I agree with Joe that we are not creating death any more than we are creating life, I do think we are creating loss, which can be unimaginably and unbearably painful.
The basis for my opposition to pathologising denial is that the healthy / unhealthy dualism posits an idea of normality that I believe to be utterly impossible. The question is: how can there be a point or zone of ‘normality’? And who determines what that should be and through what authority or position of perfect knowledge can they lay claim to this?
For me it is a product of a type of classificatory diagnostic and controlling (clinical) thinking that is part of the a culture which demarcated the human (from the disavowed animal) and as such is anthropocentric. Methods of diagnosing and classifying along with the institution of various formations of normality have laid the ground for the fabricated and regulated self to be provided with material objects and fantasies which promise that ‘things’ make us real and whole (and this last idea is often well addressed within recent ecopsychological / psychoanalytic perspectives on environment).
I can't separate a pathologising culture from the consumption culture which we are critiquing. It provides inducement to regulate and monitor oneself. So I see environmentalism that encourages this further as still locked into a rationalistic ‘self’ oriented paradigm. That's why I like the idea of ‘queer ecology’, since it turns the idea of ‘nature’, human or otherwise, as being ‘normal’ on its head in the celebration of perverse diversity (and diverse perversity)!
Alongside this though, I also recognise an un-narcissistic desire is at work from within these perspectives, and within your own ecological passions, Adrian.
Joe, at the end of what you last wrote, I felt that you were starting to propose a de-anthropocentrised position—what I think we are both grappling with is what such a position might do to / with psychoanalysis. This is something I am unsure about, even if it is possible, but feel if it were so, it might be more to do with what the nonhuman does to psychoanalysis than what psychoanalysis can do for the environment!
To return to the death-creating question, while we clearly are not creating death itself—in another sense we clearly do act in a particular life and death ‘dealing’ way, in terms of our relation to human and non-human planetary others.
A.T. I feel a strong resonance here with your point about us not revolving around our own centre, though I think I'm using it in a different way. The way in which I'm using it, of course, is in the realm of omnipotence, the attitude of above-nature rather than of-nature. Sandra White speaks with what I would regard as a psycho-social focus and one which she herself places under the heading of ecopsychology. In her ‘Beyond Sacrifice’ (Seeing Futures conference paper, University of the West of England, ), which I used in the teaching, she says that, ‘The progress that has been made (in bringing climate change into public discourse) is currently being eroded by newly increasing levels of denial’. She continues:
[D]enial is a valid, innate psychological defence mechanism which protects us from what we cannot cope with knowing. Its onset is not a matter of choice and that is the crux of the matter. It is equivalent to bodily systems and safety reflexes which activate when needed without our knowledge or consent.
M.Y. Again there are certain aspects of the assumptions about human nature, and its being fixed or innate which I can't agree with. But in terms of what we humans actually do at this time, denial or disavowal do seem ubiquitous, woven into our psychic fabric, as Sandra White says, not under our conscious control. So yes, she and I would agree that it is counterproductive to pathologise denial no matter now helpless denial or disavowal can make us feel.
A.T. These strands of reasoning bring me to the conclusion that denial is both normal, in an important sense necessary, but at the same time, in this context, lethal … or at least an important link in a chain which has lethal consequences.
M.Y. I guess I prefer to say it is ubiquitous rather than normal, but agree that it is how we humans are now, but not sure I think it is necessary. Like you and many of your colleagues I also wonder whether it can be undone?
A.T. I know that this is only a partial response to your comments, and Joe's. I would love to go further with pathologising culture and consumption culture, time permitting. Or at least I think so! … I feel very confused about the issue of whether or not we are creating death. I end up feeling all at sea, or at a loss, with philosophical discussions of this subject, or rather when trying to engage with a system of thought which feels esoteric, and a part-foreign language, in a way. I have to go back to what I regard as basics, which I suppose does indeed depend on reason, albeit, hopefully in connection with intuition, bodily experience, instinct / drive, emotion and of course other people.
M.Y. I think the dialogue is very valuable and I intuit that both our ‘worlds’ will be enriched by it. As well as I hope the ‘real’ world. So I want to persist and work through the ‘language barriers’. I am taken with the idea of the ‘normality’ of denial.
I think we are bound to reason, we cannot avoid it—it is part of our thinking life and it can be extremely useful. As long as we don't imagine that when we reason we ‘make truth’. I think we might agree that psychically the thing that is actually ‘denied’ isn't necessarily that same thing as that we derive as being the denied thing from our reasoning e.g. effects of climate change. I think the response or lack of response to climate change and its effects might itself be ‘an effect’ of an existent psychic disavowal (or foreclosure) in relation to being / becoming human. So if we want to be psychoanalytic about what is happening I think we need also to be open to that which is beyond reason, that which is traumatic.
I think there are links between the desire for a feeling of control, omnipotence and the experience of selfhood. I think the difference is that I come from a psychoanalytic perspective where lack of integration is intrinsic to ‘self’. I would see attempts to form or integrate ‘self’ as reiterating an ‘above’ rather than ‘of’ nature attitude.
A.T. The business of us not creating death begins to look like a matter of semantics to me. I agree that we do not create death in the sense of inventing it, but we can and do create conditions that cause it.
This leads to questions of accountability and law. I think and hope that it meets you somewhere when I bring in an example of what I see
as the fluidity of the broad psycho-social context in which we're operating. The environmental lawyer Polly Higgins, author of Eradicating Ecocide is campaigning to name and define such activity, have it established in international law as a crime, with sanctions that are by some measure proportionate to the offence. This would be a game-changer in terms of the accountability of multinational corporations.
A psychoanalytic critique of Polly Higgins' project is that it represents an idealized and / or omnipotent version of the superego. What you say about reason not making truth strikes me as really interesting. I am not sure what its implications are, when it comes to the body of philosophy or of scientific knowledge. The distinction between psychical and scientific truth seems relevant. Can you expand on what the existent psychic disavowal / foreclosure is, in relation to being human? My other question is: what trauma and whose, are you referring to, in this context? Thanks again for your effort to help me understand your way of looking at things.
J.S. I would like to respond to what you are both saying, without getting too diverted by my own associations and thoughts. I am very glad to be part of this conversation, if somewhat overwhelmed by the many directions an email conversation can take all at the same time. I am currently sitting in my hut in the darkness, wood burner burning, wind and rain blowing around outside, wind-mill spinning away—it makes me think of what unstructured thinking is like: maddeningly rich.
Returning to the notion of creating death: yes in a way we do because we destroy and kill to such an excessive degree that it becomes self-destructive. This does seem pathological. However Adrian's gloss on death, ‘The result of bodily exhaustion, or disease, lack of necessary conditions …‘, places death in a necessarily polar-conflict with life, as if one would exist without the other. I think of the Fisher King myth and wonder about those polar opposites and whether in fact death is rather a necessary part of there continuing to be more life. On the level of ourselves and our loved ones we resist this, but an ecosystem depends upon it, so does a community and maybe so does the psyche. What stories would we tell if we were not always trying to avoid death?
Polly Higgins' project is an interesting development of extending intemational
legal rights to the environment but it is also disturbing to me. Perhaps because I suspect that laws like this tend to serve the rich and powerful and that it would end up being used not to protect the voiceless (both human and non-human), but big business. The many environment and labour protection laws already in place are routinely flouted but perhaps if transnational companies could be prosecuted under International Law the worst excesses might be prevented.
This development concerns the demand ‘to do something’ for the establishment of mechanisms of accountability. The relationship between this field and psychoanalysis is very problematic: how should the ethical enquiry of psychoanalysis be translated into recommendations for moral actions? The danger is that difference gets pathologised, and suffering becomes equated to sickness and the process of healing mutates into following instructions on how to be healthy. Psychoanalysis then gets drawn into a moral / political credo. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy on Radio 4 recently identified the two diseases of ‘the will to purity’ and ‘medicalisation’ which, working together, lead us to totalitarianism. There is the risk of these being apparent in psychoanalytic thinking too.
Psychoanalysis is also an evolving work which can help us understand and tolerate ourselves, others and the suffering that comes with being alive. The psychoanalytic and eco-psychology papers I have read offer ways of making sense of the various reactions to the ‘news’ of climate change, providing explanations of why and how we got into this position. I echo Adrian's thoughts that this may help us catch up, bear and survive the necessary mourning entailed in the profound disillusionment concerning our omnipotence over the world. The thinking they provoke may also be part of the process leading to a mitigation of the problems our actions continue to cause. Perhaps this process will be developed by psychoanalytic thinking moving towards a theorization of the subject less indebted to Freud's reading of Oedipus and consequent egocentric models of human relations, and more open to a multi-centred understanding that would incorporate a plethora of differences (and subjectivities) under the umbrella of ‘the individual’. This might then open the way to the inclusion of the non-human subject in its own potentiality, not simply as a ‘symbolic’ carrier of human attributes. Writing this, I am reminded that this is what some Jungian and
post-Jungian thinking has always proposed. Perhaps this is an aspect of what Adrian puts so eloquently when he hopes for ways of ‘utilising the cracks in our dominant cultural narratives when they trouble our clients, in a way that encourages a widening of the imagination’. Perhaps the Site Southwest training will be part of the process of expanding those cracks to allow new narratives to emerge, or help us to recognise the emergence of new meaning generating systems of thought which will be appropriate to the coming times. Maybe our current crisis is not only at the level of the real: the raw experience of changing climatic conditions, but also at the level of myth: the systems by which we understand our selves and our experience are running out of narrative power since they no longer provide us with an image of a future that is in any fundamental way different to what has already brought us to this point.
M.Y. I like the images you send of your physical and imaginative ‘worlds’—the texture you offer to this virtual meeting. It feels like we are meeting in ‘other places’.
In response to your asking me Adrian to expand on what I mean regarding denial and trauma, if denial is part of our makeup, then when something is happening, on a physical level, which you could call ‘real’ (and here we might mean climate change) the denial which is seen as arising arises in relation to that ‘real thing’ may be arising psychically as a denial of some other ‘thing’, from another ‘scene’. So I am suggesting that this is traumatic really in the sense that Freud saw the primal scene as foundationally traumatic and denial-creating. For a Freudian, what is denied or foreclosed is trauma that just cannot be assimilated from that primal scene, posed in terms of the recognition of sexual difference and fear of castration—the trauma of which becomes a structuring force in the psyche and a source of symptoms. So Freud saw the child's witnessing of the sexual act as traumatic, which is associated with becoming human in the sense of being part of being of inevitable initiation into the human social familial context.
I would differ in emphasis with this Freudian position in that I would see the primal scene as ‘laying bare’ literally the artifice of the notion the ‘human being’ altogether. Freud does make reference to the ‘animal’ nature of the primal scene, but he emphasises sexual difference
and always with the assumption that there is a ‘real’ difference between the human and the non-human, which I do not accept. There are assumptions that we have language, and animals don't. We know about death and they don't. (As Joe points out, if we do know about death, then we spend an awful lot of our time here pretending we don't). Maybe they know more about the cycle of life and death than we can allow ourselves.
For me the assumption of our being ‘human’ is a profound denial or foreclosure in and of itself, and may be invoking traumatic loss. So I don't think we can separate the psychic failure to address climate change—from our constructions of ourselves as human, with the implication that there are those ‘others’, who are not human. One thing this construction facilitates is another ‘real’ scene of denial, which Derrida draws attention to, and of which I know you are both well aware—the ‘human’ animal's creation and administration of industrial scale ‘non-human’ animal manufacture and slaughter.
This ties in with the discussion about Polly Higgins and the idea of enshrining in law the notion of ecocide. I feel so deeply torn by this. In the same vein, in Zurich an animal has a legal (not Human?!) right to representation of their interests by an attorney in court. Switzerland recently voted against extending this across the country. I find myself wanting the ‘non-human dispossessed’ to have a voice, wanting that ‘justice’ but like Joe I am sceptical about whether we can, through our all-too-human institutions, have a clue about what we really create when we do this kind of thing. Perhaps it is better then not acting, not fighting to protect the ‘other’ from damage and pain caused specifically by our dominant position. These kinds of agendas are emerging more clearly. I also agree with Joe that we cannot translate psychoanalytic knowledges and practices into moral prescriptions or we undermine the capacity psychoanalytic enquiry does have for shedding light on who we think we are and why we do what we do. What you say about suffering being turned into sickness for me goes to the heart of where psychoanalysis goes wrong.
J.S. Like Adrian, I have always found the issue of the Primal Scene difficult to get my head around: like many people, I find the idea of my parents fucking tricky. Freud's explanation of why this is tricky rests on
the assertion that it represents my unconscious desire to kill my father and take his place, thus re-evoking the killing of the primal father by the primal mob. This event, instituting both the incest taboo and the repressed unconscious, establishes the basis on which civilization rests. The primal scene for Freud therefore is concerned with the difference between humans and animals, but the difference is in the constitutional effect of primal repression. This in a sense brings us towards Margot's suggestion that the primal scene lays bare the artifice of the assertion that we are different to the animals, because this distinction is dependent upon accepting Freud's reading of the Oedipus myth.
A.T. So far as I can recall, we haven't yet explored the question of a link between trauma and denialist narrative. Leaving aside the more obviously cynical, exploitative (unlike Margot, I would add Paul Hoggett's word ‘perverse’) attitudes, narratives are interwoven with identity, and any move to discredit a core narrative brings with it the threat of trauma, hence Sandra White's argument about the ubiquity (to use Margot's word) of denial.
Thanks for the reminder that apocalypse is an important subject in all this. My thoughts on revenge come under this heading and of course Lovelock features large in Hoggett's ‘Apocalyptic Imagination’. But in my view, the subject needs taking further. Is there, for instance, a cogent narrative along the lines of a culture war between those who are drawn (presumably unconsciously) to apocalyptic visions and those who dismiss them out of hand as ‘climate porn’ or, ironically, efforts at domination, control, intimidation. The old saying that, ‘In war, truth is the first casualty’, accelerates an already real human and ecological tragedy, via impasse. This is a different scenario from that of deferred action but there is a deferral of sorts going on.
Somewhere around here, your thoughts on the ‘real’ intersect. There are undeniable realities: that man drowned in Pakistan or New Orleans, this family died of hunger and thirst in a spreading desert they couldn't escape. How real does that make climate change? I'd like to hear more about the new set of thoughts needed to do the thinking… some time.
I'm not sure that we have really met on the subject of trauma. The primal scene, to me, is rather like birth trauma in that, however important these ideas are, they are generalisations which have not particularly
come to life for me in my clinical work.
These discussions have prompted me to start thinking about how and where trauma appears in the ecopsychological field. Rather unexpectedly, Lovelock's Gaia theory, derided at first, now has wide acceptance amongst scientists as a very useful explanatory and predictive model. I don't imagine that Lovelock would associate himself with an ecopsychological notion of a planet traumatised by human activity, or with Roszak et al.'s subtitle ‘Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind’. I do reckon that, like you Margot, he has a position that is neither caught up in anthropomorphism and sentimentality on one hand, nor in assumptions that our species is the only one to possess high levels of awareness on the other.
Returning to that event I witnessed during the training: it can, I think, be described as a hint of trauma (though not involving a loss in personal continuity of being), with the subsequent emotional and mental challenge of assimilating and integrating the experience, something in which the whole group, including myself, had a limited opportunity to participate. I see this as relevant to my rationale for having this ‘eco’ element in a psychotherapy training, i.e. preparing the next generation of therapists (and ourselves) for the consequences (that will come our way) of what is happening already in the physical world. For instance, I see the breakdown of some illusions about security. The training can make some preparation for the resultant feelings of guilt, anger, remorse, anxiety (particularly for those with offspring), even panic, with all the defensive ramifications of those feelings.
I now find myself thinking again about the importance of the Site Southwest as a country-based venture. What can it say that will be heard elsewhere? City-based trainings enjoy many obvious advantages and probably suffer no disadvantages, when it comes to the power of psychoanalysis to restore and develop inner resources and resourcefulness. But in terms of physical resources, the city-based institute is not well placed to reflect on Marie Antoinette's fatal myopia, the Versailles phenomenon, i.e. sucking in vast resources without awareness or concern for the real cost or consequences ‘out there’. The country, in some sense, may just be an extension of city life now (park / dormitory / larder), but there is real value in the distance and difference, for some of us. There are more opportunities for us to see that human life does not
operate in a self-sufficient system and perhaps to notice that sustainable life is cyclical, not linear.
Gaia? Marie Antoinette? Can I hear you asking yourselves if I've gone off my rocker, or at least into some realm that has nothing to do with the Site? The link seems to be revenge. Lovelock doesn't quite anthropomorphise Gaia into an angry mob, but I think he is suggesting that, as far as our experience of things is concerned, the planetary transition to a new hot state might just as well be that bloodthirsty mob.
I should stop soon, so I'll try to conclude. I see psychoanalysis as an evolving work that throws amazing light on our nature, with developmental and healing applications. The century and a bit since its inception have mostly been a time of apparently limitless human mastery over the non-human world and exploitation of less powerful beings. Psychoanalysis offers us, amongst other things, an understanding of how little mastery we have over ourselves and of how precarious a project ‘civilisation’ is. But now we are also beginning to see that some of what we took to be (glorious) mastery involves a process of destruction and self-destruction, i.e. a linear process in a system governed by cyclical rules.
Psychoanalysis, if it helps us to understand and tolerate ourselves and each other as subjects, presumably has the capacity to help us (i.e. itself and others) with the realisation that we are subject to much more in nature that we realised, or wanted to believe. This should enable us to support each other in ‘catching up’ with and adapting to the physical realities that are becoming increasingly apparent. That support may ‘just’ be micro-therapeutic, something along the lines of a mournful recognition that essential boundaries have been crossed, perhaps catastrophically. Or it may feed into a much wider psycho-social process that has the capacity to mitigate the difficulties we are still creating.
What of revenge? If we sink ourselves (literally and metaphorically), the multi-decadal time lags in the emissions-heating aspect of the climate system will be one of the reasons. Lovelock's title choice The Revenge of Gaia was, in my view, partly an effort to overcome this problem of cause-and-effect recognition, and to warn us about trajectories and consequences in terms that human beings can readily grasp. Such ploys don't seem to have much in common with psychoanalysis, but perhaps
there is something available to us, which is more in keeping with our culture. Something along the lines of learning to utilise the growing cracks in our dominant cultural narratives when they trouble our clients, in a way that encourages a widening of imagination about what concerns them.