We call ourselves ‘human beings’, but we've lost our sense of being. We live in favour of doing, and the consequence of this is chaotic overspend. If only we could do with less and simultaneously be with more—but for that we would have to discover inner resources that we seem to lack. This paper explores some of the implications of this situation and proposes some partial solutions.
Heidegger (1967) sought to raise and invigorate the question of being, which he claimed had been lost from philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Ludwig Binswanger (1975: 149-181), applying Heideggerian philosophy to psychiatry and psychotherapy, applauded Freud for stoically situating us as Homo Natura, not subject to Gods but subject to Nature, but criticized his natural science project for ignoring the question of Being and spiritual life as the fundamental grounding of and for ourselves.
In our era, psychoanalysis has become a science of human relating. It is a brilliant means by which to enquire into the intra-psychic world, (especially through the transference), but is less sure of its footing regarding relations to Nature as a whole, though this may change with the publication of Sally Weintrobe's edited book Engaging with Climate Change (2012). Psychoanalysis views our antics with cool appraisal: we are wish-fulfilling creatures pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidant, who are mainly identified with ego structures whose very purpose is to defend against any internal and external threat. Therefore, external threats, which do not menace our immediate security, will in dreamy ways be dreamt away. We are ill-equipped to consider spatially and temporally distant dangers. Such dangers, threatening future people in times as yet unknown, and being no threat to our present survival, seem near to impossible for us to grasp.
By dispersing normative notions of biology, Freud differentiated drives from instincts, and the psychical qualities of masculine and feminine from the animal sexes of male and female. It was through studying hysteria—a condition designated as being of the feminine in whichever gender—that male and female as genders came to be distinguished from masculine and feminine as psychical qualities. Freud considered the life force to be sexual in nature, named it libido, and observed its course from the depths of the bodily unconscious. But he also considered libido to be masculine in either gender, thus consigning women, in their femininity, to positions of passivity. He made an enormous contribution to rescuing women, not from the male gaze, which they might well enjoy, but from its tyrannous version and from being sexually dominated. But he generated confusion as to the feminine position which might be seen not as passivity but receptivity. The thread running through this discussion is the lack of balance where there is a cascade of dominance: male over male, male over female, human species over Nature, and the consequent ill effects.
The sad consequence for men is to realize that it may well be from the nature of sexual difference that they are the gender that does the greater damage to the earth. This could be supported by studies on sexual crimes. Most sex crimes are by men against women, and by men against children, may be with women colluding. And most damage is done by men to the earth, may be with women colluding. The sad consequence for women is to realize that they are caught up in male ways of being, identifying with the aggressor, their own emancipation being too often seen as becoming more like men.
And these gender considerations might bear on the ‘natural’ scientific method. Francis Bacon did not actually use the phrases ‘torture nature’ or putting ‘nature to the rack’, often attributed to him. However, in a paper ‘The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature’ (2006), Carolyn Merchant, author of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), chases down the myth. She establishes (520) that Bacon did, in The Advancement of Learning, speak of ‘hounding Nature in her wanderings’), and in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum wrote ‘… she is put in constraint, moulded, and
made as it were new by art and the hand of man'. Bacon's procedure, to interrogate Nature under constraint, chillingly chimes with the then contemporary torture of women (and some men) to discover whether they were witches.
But the hounding and constraint of Nature still proceeds at full tilt in our own time, especially with our finding ever more ingenious and astounding ways to save us—or rather, our life-style—‘because we're worth it’. It is a question of the construction of subject and object: by subjecting Nature to our will, like a serial killer dicing and dissecting his victim, we turn it into a set of malleable objects. Just as men who want sex objects fear to face women as subjects who desire, so, in a cascade effect, our species dominates Nature, attempting to over-ride our fear of death.
It may be implausible to refer to Nature as ‘she’ given that Nature includes both genders and is the source of both. Merchant (2006: 515) comments that, although in The Death of Nature she argued that ‘the subjugation of nature as female was …integral to the scientific method as power over nature’, she also advocated the removal of gendered terminology from the description of nature. Many cultures, however, have equated Nature with Mother earth, and consider women to be closer to earth and men to sky. So it is a matter of text and context. In the broadest sense Nature refers to all that is, the whole universe, as well as to our immediate biosphere, now under threat. A book of astonishing creativity which depends upon la Nature, la femme and la mère all being feminine nouns is Irigaray's (1999) The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, in which she taunts him for the maleness of his discourse on being and place. She opens out how he—and any he, and any she—is originally fluid in the fluids of the womb, receiving air and everything through mother, and after birth opens lungs to air directly. We bathe in this ocean of air which saturates us. But Heidegger's answer would be that we are creatures, like he in the Black Forest, who, if we are to find our Being, do so through belonging to and being in place and landscape. ‘Being-in-the-world is essentially care’ (Heidegger, (1967: 237), and if we are not grounded anywhere and do not belong, we are ill-placed to either give or receive care.
The word simulacrum (Baudrillard, (1983) has an easy meaning: an idol or something representing something. But there is a further, insidious meaning: when it simulates something that isn't really or substantially there. Bowing to an idol without any experience of the divine is an obvious example. But the idea reaches further still in our strange times: a photograph being a reminder seems to consolidate the object, even though it is a thin version of it, devoid of the thickness of experience. There are more and more films of less and less nature. Reality is what can be photographically replicated. We have entered the world of virtual and hyper-reality. ‘Money’ and ‘nature’ have become simulacra, hyper-real, endlessly reproduced replicas of what were their selves.
Baudrillard (1983: 29) points out that: ‘Capital has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such’.
We may think there is a vast difference between renegade bankers and us, but there's scant difference from the point of view of a sub-Saharan tribesman. We are caught in the consequences of conflating ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’, ecology referring to the inter-dependency of the whole web of life-systems, and environment to the world around us seen from our human point of view. In this era of the simulacrum, the simulated likeness, we confuse our environment with Nature's ecologies. Like a baby dependent upon mother whom it cannot yet perceive clearly, we unconsciously expect ecology to serve economics. Human development and progress are economically unsustainable if ecology is so burdened. So we have to make the transition to ensuring that our economics serve planetary ecology. Our extended and manicured human environments are not good for bio-diversity—and ultimately it is upon bio-diversity that we depend, not on our current simulacra.
We are fatally preoccupied with our own immediacies, largely to the exclusion of Nature as a presence in itself. We have largely lost the natural intelligence of indigenous peoples who live close to the earth, flexible in their turning from human-specific activity, into communion with nature, and back again. When I listen to many who say we need to consume less, and to respect the earth more, I wonder how are people to
achieve that condition of grace? We don't seem to have the cultural means.
Clive Hamilton, like many others, cites research which gives compelling evidence for the observation that the more connected we feel to the natural world the more concerned we are for it . Therefore, the profoundest and most sufficient cultural transformation would be to reconnect with Nature. But we may not want to connect with the natural world for fear of feelings of impermanence. Yet if we do connect we might feel less precarious.
We need to engage with the Cartesian split between our neo-rational, objectifying thinking and our physicality because our style of thought sets us apart from the rest of Nature, and our feelings (emotions and sensations) hold the potential for affinity with Nature.
Martin Buber's (1955: 3) distinction between the combined primary words I-Thou and I-It needs to be rescued from convenient oblivion. He begins by asserting that: ‘To man the world is … twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks’. The one primary word is I-Thou, the other is I-It where It can be replaced with either He or She. ‘Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It’. Primary words constitute relations—by being spoken they bring about existence. I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being; I-It can never be spoken with the whole being. When a man says I he refers to one or other of these primary words. With a threefold distinction of the spheres of relation—to nature, men and intelligible forms—Buber examines relations to an instance of Nature, contrasting objectifying processes with mutuality:
I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture… I can perceive it as movement… I can classify it in a species… I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law… In all of this the tree remains my object…
In considering the tree I become bound up in relation to
Page 119it. The tree is no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. [But] the tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood… Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of this relation: relation is mutual. (7-8).
Psychoanalysts are familiar with the experience of relating unconscious to unconscious below the radar of interpersonal awareness, in the transference matrix body-self to body-self, through projective identification. This direct, almost shamanic, I-You relating is in contrast to when someone is merely talking to us about someone or something absent. I, addressed merely as an abstract reference point, am not You to that other, and neither is the speaker wholly present. Our relationships with each other, insofar as they are teleologically driven, lack the open, direct ontological grounding of the I-You relation—and even more so do our relationships with the creatures and elements of the natural world lack grounding in the I-You relation.
Freud (1900) realized that remembered dreams tend to be so bewildering because latent dream thoughts have been subjected to internal censorship in the context of the dreamer's memories and unconscious. Also, that the remembered dream carries traces of unpalatable wishes and impulses which can be rediscovered through the processes of free association and interpretation. His theory is that dreams are disguised fulfilments of distorted wishes, due to processes of condensation and displacement, subject to conditions of representability, especially in visual narratives—ultimately in the service of the pleasure principle. Although this is not a theory adequate to the sheer imaginal creativity of dreamt material on the one hand, nor to the terrifying range of nightmares due to trauma and anxiety on the other, it constitutes a remarkable set of insights.
Grotstein (2009: 733), whilst acknowledging that Freud's discovery still occupies a fundamental position in psychoanalysis, considers that it is Bion who has developed it most. What follows is dependent on Grotstein's paper. He writes that Bion (1992) focussed on the process
of dreaming itself, not only as a phenomenon within the envelope of sleep, but as something that occurs throughout the day as well as the night and serves the reality principle as well as the pleasure principle. In order for wakeful consciousness to occur, dreaming must contain the day residue, and transfer it to the system of the Unconscious from the system of Consciousness for it to be processed and transformed and returned to consciousness through the selectively-permeable contact barrier. Dreaming, consequently, allows the subject to remain awake by day and asleep by night. Thus dreaming is an ever-present invisible filter that overlays much of our mental life, and is a form of thinking that normally involves the collaborative yet oppositional (rather than conflictual) activity of the reality and pleasure principles, as well as of the primary and secondary processes. Grotstein says that Bion conflates Freud's primary and secondary processes into a single binary-oppositional structure that he terms ‘alpha-function’, a virtual model that corresponds to the in-vivo activity of dreaming. In this theory dreaming is a process, a background function which enables us, unless we are psychotic or too stressed, both to wake up and to fall asleep. Bion conceived of dreaming as a ‘curtain of illusion’, an ongoing dreaming in us, day and night, enabling us to process raw experience into something manageable.
This ‘curtain of illusion’ or ‘filter’ is the critical idea for this section of my essay. Regarding the functions of dreaming, Grotstein writes that:
(A) Dreaming helps preserve the distinction between sleep and wakefulness by modulating the level of emotional arousal or stimulus overload through the transformation of raw, impersonal proto-emotional stimuli (beta-elements) into tolerable, personally meaningful, and ‘mentally digestible’ alpha-elements… (B) Dreaming effectively diminishes the subject's anxiety by supplying a soothing wishful narrative (‘curtain of illusion’); and (C) by editing; thus dreaming serves as an active ongoing: (D) filter (an ‘emotional immunity frontier’, as it were) for sensory overload from internal as well as external stimuli ((1992) 738).
He writes (739) that dreaming is thus a selective grid to sort out and prioritise the data it processes, and to escort emotional Truth into awareness.
But there is a problem here with regard to information about global warming and loss of eco-habitat, and their obviously horrendous consequences: dreaming might not escort emotional Truth adequate to our dilemma; it might merely provide a wishful narrative. What kind of truthful dreaming can we manage, when we read or hear that climate trouble is brewing, but feel and perceive little consistent evidence of the fact? Insofar as we want to wish away painful realities until we can do so no longer, we are at our absolute existential limits in allowing preconscious and subliminal collaborative alpha function between pleasure and reality principles regarding climate trouble. If Bion's dreaming function soothes us while the situation worsens, it is because we let in too little uncomfortable data. It is time to wake up: to let in more detailed, uncomfortable data, so that our dreaming has more opportunity to thicken the curtain of illusion with narratives more adequate to reality.
Freud (: 26n.) postulated the ego as ‘a mental projection of the surface of the body’. It follows from that that the id is the interior of the body, and the superego an agency which stops us from enquiring into that interior. As a result of that prohibition the interior physical processes come to be perceived as disgusting, doing horrible things and full of unseemly impulses. We preen the exterior and stay as far away as possible from the interior.
Deploying Bion's notion of dreaming as background function—subliminal, preconscious—sifting and massaging the plethora of experience into something acceptable, I suggest that, because we prefer culturally to be separate from Nature and from our bodies' interiors, and are caught up in the collective human narcissistic bubble of merging and competing egos regardless of Nature, our dreaming, our ‘curtain of illusion’, is too far forward from our bodies, in the domain of the ego. Thus do we seek to maintain estrangement from Nature and from our bodies as part of Nature. By trying to be cultural artefacts, simulacra of ourselves, we resist the emotional depths of grief and fear which close observation of eco-loss would expose us to.
Air can neither be bought nor sold, so is of very little interest to capitalists. Exactly what Chief Seattle said in reply to the President's offer for a large area of Indian land is a matter of translation and conjecture. But that he spoke from the wisdom of his heart is not disputed:
The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.
Breathing is a lost or undeveloped subject in our culture. For example, Bion's fine paper ‘Caesura’ (1977) barely mentions breath, even though the caesura is that between our prenatal and postnatal existences. And Piontelli (1992) makes very little mention of those differences, or of breath at all. She describes breathing movements observed to take place in the womb, and calls them paradoxical because the foetal anterior chest moves inwards and the belly outwards. That way of breathing is paradoxical from our perspective, but congruent with foetal reality because breathing is accomplished through the cord, and only after birth do the lungs inflate. And for us, though the chest does not move inwards, the belly, if we remember so to breathe, still moves outwards.
In the East purification of the breath is the primary means by which to penetrate the matter of which we are made, and to cultivate its energies. There is some evidence that this is a lost subject in our culture, rather than one that never existed, in that the word ‘spirit’ firstly means breath, from Latin spirare, to breathe. To conspire is thus a breathing
together, and spiritual life firstly involves conscious breathing. Our first breath, despite our utter dependency on attachment figures, was the beginning of our autonomous existence when we entered the carbon dioxide oxygen cycle through opening our own lungs. In psychoanalysis too, breathing as a subject is not wholly undeveloped: Wilhelm Reich used breathing practices for accessing orgone energy (which led to bioenergetics), and everyday practice with people in panic involves paying attention to their lack and shallowness of breath.
Luce Irigaray (2002: 85) distinguishes masculine from feminine along lines of breathing. She suggests that men hold their breath less in themselves, and spend it more readily on instrumentalities, acting on the world. Women hold their breath more in themselves because they are implicitly preparing to breathe for two (whether or not that comes about). She proposes as a way forward that men and women each cultivate their own energies through practices of breath, so that the strengths and virtues of each gender may emerge fully, and they relate to each other more confidently across gender difference.
In a talk in Bristol , she contrasted the Laws of the State (represented by King Creon) with the Laws of Nature (represented by Antigone). In Sophocles' play Antigone, Antigone's two brothers have fought against each other, one for the state and one against it, and have killed each other. Creon wants Polynices, who fought against the state, to be cast out beyond city walls without honour, to be eaten by vultures. Antigone wants both her brothers to be buried with equal dignity because they are equal in death, and only then would she marry Creon's son to whom she is betrothed. She buries Polynices outside the city walls, and for this crime Creon casts her out in turn.
By proposing that Creon represents the laws of the State and Antigone the laws of Nature, Irigaray implies that the feminine is closer to Nature. A (female) questioner objected to the phrase ‘the laws of Nature’ because Nature doesn't write laws, and Irigaray replied: If you don't obey them you die. But the questioner persisted: can you suggest another phrase? Irigaray replied, ‘Virginity?’ By this she meant to invoke the innocence and non-gratuitous nature of natural processes, however gruesome they may appear to us to be. She understands the Virgin Mary to have been a virgin in the sense of being pure in her intention.
Linking now to my earlier discussion of masculine and feminine as psychical qualities however engendered, I want to broaden the psychoanalytic insight by introducing Taoism, the fundamental tenet of which is harmony between yin (feminine) and yang (masculine). In his paper on Daseinsanalysis and Tao Psychotherapy, Erik Craig (2007), reporting on his visits to study with Dr Rhee in Seoul, South Korea, writes of vital interest there in the work of Martin Heidegger, in Daseinsanalyis, as well as in psychoanalysis, especially relational psychoanalysis. So I wrote to ask him whether in Taoism and Daseinsanalysis, Nature is evoked as in itself therapeutic.
I quote parts of his reply:
In return for the gift of being at all, Dasein [human being] ‘owes’ Being as a whole the favour of recognizing it, understanding it, shepherding it, if you will. Nature is, of course, included in what I am calling Being as a whole (i.e., all the beings of the universe) and, therefore, deserves our shepherding of it, as a ‘fellow being.’ I am not aware of this being talked about in therapeutic terms, however. Clearly, Medard Boss enjoyed nature, loved to walk, ski, water ski, etc. He even got Heidegger to join him on some down hilling and was quite proud of this. However, he never writes about it in terms of its therapeutic or health value, at least not to my knowledge. What was always clear was just Dasein's calling as a shepherd of being which includes all the beings we refer to with the term nature.
In Tao Psychotherapy, the situation is virtually the same. Human beings are part of nature, part of the universe, intimate kin, if you will, of every other being that exists. Dr. Rhee speaks often of enlightenment (Mahayanan) and the life of the bodhisattva as a way of being that ‘obligates’ us to care not only for human beings but all beings. Again, like Medard Boss, Dr. Rhee does not speak of our relationship to nature as a healing, healthy, or therapeutic thing. However, being in harmony with nature (wu wei) is, in itself,
Page 125seen as an enlightened way of being, a healthy way of being. The catch here is that one does not have to be in nature—if by nature you mean mainly forests, trees, wildlife, sea, etc.—to be in harmony with it. Actually, if you live in harmony with your own body, with your fellow human beings, and with the ‘laws’ of nature you are living in harmony even if you never even go for a walk in a park.
So both orientations (Dasein & Tao) emphasize the human being's understanding, appreciation, and protection of nature as a characteristic of healthy living.
Remedying this omission in psychoanalysis, we see that if we practise immersion in Nature for ourselves we become aware of its force and presences in and around us. Culturally we are averse to doing this. Education leads us out of our bodies, so we identify with superegoic injunctions against enquiry into them. Yet, through intentional cultivation of breathing, we can know our bodies directly and even feel the energies of the earth. We may become aware of what the Taoists call the ‘microcosmic orbit’, a circling of energy from the perineum up the spine and down the front, round and round. It begins by being imagined, and becomes more and more real. This practice in ‘micro-ecology’—circling and conserving energies within the body—encourages self-sufficiency, helping to defeat what Buddhists call craving and psychoanalysts call lack, which otherwise has to be filled by spurious appetites.
At the heart of Tao is continuous investment in balancing our yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) aspects. Tao distinguishes yin as cool, slow, shadowy, receptive and nourishing; and yang as hot, quick, bright, assertive and expansive. Both are necessary and complementary aspects of Chi, the life force. In any of the necessary or desirable activities of everyday life, everything works better when yin and yang are balanced. When the full strength of the masculine receives deeply the empty strength of the feminine, it is more grounded in its own strength, and can give more in return.
Masculine seeks also hero adventures for itself, well away from the feminine. In the need for instrumental solutions there is plenty of opportunity for such adventures. But let's not be simplistic. Wind farms,
for example, have both a certain beauty and uncertain productivity. But on the downside are the side-effects, the vast lake and atmosphere of toxic waste created in China by the use of neodymium in alloy with iron and boron to make the most powerful magnets in the world, necessary for wind turbines—and for hybrid cars. A soulless proliferation of technological fixes will merely lead to further implausible demands on natural resources. If such instrumentalities are undertaken only in order to perpetuate our collective ecologically unsustainable way of life, they will make things worse in the end.
Whatever else, it is a change of orientation that is called for. Ask Lao Tzu. ‘The spirit of the fountain dies not. It is called the mysterious feminine. The doorway of the mysterious feminine is called the root of heaven-and-earth. Lingering like gossamer, it has only a hint of existence, and yet when you draw upon it, it is inexhaustible’ (Lao Tsu, ch.6). Travelling recklessly only in the masculine side of the equation, we will miss it—and be exhausted, instead of in the presence of the inexhaustible.
Despite that, our best efforts toward sustainability may not make the crucial difference. And, in reality, we need to find our enjoyments non-narcissistically in the ways of the body attuned to Nature, for then it is easier to embody the low carbon journey, consume less and establish our earthly integrity as a simple good in itself. To do so we have to undo much of our intellectual cultural heritage, and to do that we have to face down superegoic prohibitions against deepening our ‘curtain of illusion’.
Rosemary Randall (2009: 118), in a paper ‘Loss and climate change: the cost of parallel narratives’, has pointed out that:
Climate change discourses present two parallel narratives, one about the problems of climate change, the other about solutions. In narratives about the problem of climate change, loss features dramatically and terrifyingly but is located in the future or in places remote from the audience. In narratives about solutions, loss is completely excised. This
Page 127division into parallel narratives is the result of defensive processes of splitting and projection to protect us from the need truly to face and mourn the losses associated with climate change. Its effect is to produce monstrous and terrifying images of the future accompanied by bland and ineffective proposals for change now.
Her hope is that:
If we could allow processes of loss and mourning to be restored to public narratives with regard to climate change denial, energy could be released for realistic programmes of change. If we could engage in processes of mourning for present and anticipated life style losses, we may become more able to accept changes that threaten aspiration, culture, security and identity.
She bases her hope on experiences in the Cambridge Carbon Conversations she co-founded. This involves small support groups whose goal is to achieve major, personal carbon reductions. Emphasis is upon the emotional significance of making deep changes: on the pain, loss and grief involved, on threats to identity and status—and on the value for people of coming to feel ownership of, and finding their own way to, the changes we all need to make.
Influenced by her work, and by a collegial seminar series ‘All about relating’ that I lead in Taunton, I've begun research to enquire of people:
When do you feel estranged from Nature?
When do you feel connected to Nature?
Do you experience your body as part of Nature?
In recent years I have also introduced cultivation of breath into my psychoanalytic practice, as a fresh element, though I'm not practising a ‘breathing cure’ instead of a ‘talking cure’. This is part of a wider intention: to contribute to introducing breath into our culture. Breath penetrates the body's mass and helps us to enter more deeply and
consciously into our natural site. This deeper awareness might help us connect: masculine with feminine, breathing with being, and dreaming with our dealings with Nature.