Psychoanalysis has created a comprehensive system of understanding human experience without reference to how humans are situated in the web of life. We have not inquired into how we conceive of our relatedness to other organisms, our natural surroundings, or what we make of our dependence on the earth’s live interacting inhabitants and geochemical processes. Psychoanalysts are unprepared to understand what it will take to address the situation of a planet being altered: affected by the demands of a burgeoning population and an unsustainable extractive attitude
toward the natural resources of our common home. The challenges to humans with respect to our interaction with the natural world are not simply about climate change. Required is a broader inquiry into the psychology of our human relationship with the natural environment, addressing an external as well as an internal state of affairs. If we can more fully appreciate our linkage to the non-human aspects of the earth, then the changes to our planet will be our concerns, and we may be able to take preservative action.
I know almost nothing about the natural world. I’m writing this in a house surrounded by thousands of acres of forest. I can name one kind of tree in that forest—birch. Robins, sparrows, pigeons, maybe a hawk, crows, seagulls—that’s it on the aviary front. There’s a big pond here that may have some fish in it. I can probably recognize a trout but not a perch. Oh, yes, ducks come by, and once a heron.
I know, and feel, that all of this is very beautiful—its quiet, its permanence, its indifference.
There is snow now, a bright sun and sharp shadows. The trees are still. No wind at all. I also know nothing about wind, what causes it, what it is, why air moves. There are streams here, icy now, with water flowing underneath. I have only a faint sense of why the top alone freezes.
I’m not sure I belong here. I have none of the local vocabulary. A tiny bit, I guess, about as extensive as that of a four-year-old. Tree, snow, fish, bird, cold, wind, ice. A four-year-old.
But I’m 72, and live in words. Words swaddle me, give me form, hold me together.
What happens here, then, when I’m alone and pretty much wordless, is that I lose interest in my word-form. This is another planet, well, actually, no. This is the planet.
Here, in this house, with only about 50 useful words, finally, inadvertently, I find myself actually on it, that is, back on the planet.
After all, I was born on it. I remember being on it. It was gritty Detroit, but there was a vacant lot nearby and I found grasshoppers to catch and keep for a day in a mason jar with holes punched in its top for air. But then, slowly, without thinking, without ceremony, without anyone giving it a name, I moved, I shuffled along, I drifted, I left. I left the planet I was born on, and that was it, that leaving. Or maybe not, maybe it wasn’t me actually doing anything at all. Maybe I was moved, displaced, pushed, shown that elsewhere might be better. Maybe I was taken off the planet for my own good.
And elsewhere was better, wasn’t it? All the thinking, and wit, and power, and mad insight into myself and into others who, I can now see, had also been moved, displaced and pushed, from their original position on the planet to their current one, which, at most, for all of us displaced people, can be mapped as around or about the planet, but no longer on it.
Yes, and that “around or about the planet” was, and maybe still is, where I, and, I think, most of us analysts, located psychoanalysis—a discipline, a practice, devoted, from its origins, to “the demand on the mind for work as a consequence of its connection to the body.”
But what kind of body is that, really? Isn’t the body we think about really, usually, just, “almost” a body? A body known only by the demands it makes on our minds.
It’s certainly not the same kind of body, the same category of body, we think of when we see a bird, or a fish, or a deer. No, the moment we see those bodies, the ones we find in nature, we place them in relation to death and to dying. The body we see in nature is a body devoted to survival. The body we think of clinically is one that, while, of course, surviving, is devoted, really, to “satisfaction,” tension reduction, with “mind” its singular agent.
The human body oriented toward surviving—along with deer, birds and fish, the one really on the planet; that is, temporarily on the planet—we barely consider that body, neither ours nor our patients’.
So, what happens, to me, at least, when my vocabulary plummets and all I have to swaddle me are trees and snow and ice, my place changes—I return to the planet. And my mind changes—I return to being a creature conscious of surviving, temporarily.
On the planet now, but in the planet pretty soon. Not that big a difference, really, between “on” and “in”—there is great comfort in that.
When this happens, when I’m reminded of being on the planet rather than around and about it, my relations to psychoanalysis, to intelligence, to words, all change. I return to my original citizenship, to my original set of identifications, with the other citizens of the planet, the ones with very minimal vocabularies, the ones, who, like me, find themselves here, and, also, like me, need a lot of help.
I know quite a bit about the natural world and have become increasingly alarmed about the recent accelerated rate of change of our planet and our societies. As a scientist who has worked on the ecology of tropical ecosystems for 40 years, I have watched wave after wave of habitat degradation and species extirpation overtake natural environments around the world. I have seen this in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, the Amazon, Thailand, Myanmar, and in China. In my lifetime the chemistry of the oceans has changed, the vegetation covering the land has been radically altered, the composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been transformed, and the temperatures have increased across the globe. All of this change has occurred at rates unprecedented in the recent past. And the most remarkable fact is that all of this tremendous change to the planet is due to the actions of one species: humans. Our population has exploded from a few million individuals widely dispersed across the globe ten thousand years ago to over seven billion people today mostly concentrated in cities. After 4.6 billion years of existence. the planet is now in an era appropriately titled the “Age of Humans.”
Along with the changes in the structure and make-up of the atmosphere, the land, and the water, major alterations have taken place in agricultural practices and the use of natural resources, in the movement of organisms across and between continents, in the rates of urbanization, in the spread of new infectious diseases, and in the extent of societal conflict. At the same time, new levels of social interactions have occurred within and across cultures as we are deluged with new, far-reaching technologies. The degree of interactions, both positive and negative, between the environment and human cultures is unprecedented. No longer as a scientist can I view, study or understand nature in isolation from human influence. No longer can I go to a place in the world, no matter how isolated, and find biodiversity unaffected by humans. Although the earth and its ecosystems have always been characterized by change, the current rate and scale of these changes may be unparalleled at any time over the last ten thousand years.
The results of human actions are global in scale and geological in duration. My colleagues who study the atmosphere tell me the carbon dioxide generated during the early Industrial Revolution over two hundred years ago continues to warm the planet today. CO2 does not rapidly go away. The paleontologists down the hall tell me because of our extensive detrimental effects on the planet, a sixth mass extinction of life is currently underway and it is the only such global extinction caused by humans. Millions of years will be required for biodiversity to recover. The ecologists and conservationists with whom I interact tell me in the near future, because of these extensive alterations, the planet cannot return to some pre-human and natural state. Environmental change and degradation are serious and, if we do not act now, will affect our descendants far into the future.
A hundred thousand years ago, when humans began to evolve as a species, the earth was characterized by large-scale environmental fluctuations, including repeated ice ages and extremely variable climates. Life was not easy. Humans lived in small roving groups of hunter-gatherers. Then, about ten thousand years ago, these challenging and unstable environments abruptly ended and a relatively stable climatic period ensued. It was during this period of environmental stability that Homo sapiens developed the complex social interactions, economic systems, cultures and technologies modern humans experience today. Unlike the chaotic period of our early evolution, this recent ten thousand years of stability have not required us to adapt to large fluctuations of environmental change. Now, once again we are entering an age of instability due to out-of-control pollution, rampant use of fossil fuels, high levels of habitat degradation and unprecedented loss of biodiversity we have caused.
So we, as a civilization, are at a crossroads: We can continue to impact our habitats to the detriment of ourselves and other species, or we can reconcile our actions according to natural ecological processes to interact sustainably with the environment and its resources. The internal psychological forces that drive us to exploit nature and treat nature as our sole dominion, also deceive us into thinking we have unlimited control of these resources, which we do not. Ultimately, we must recognize humans have a place in nature and can coexist without overexploiting the physical, chemical and biological components of the earth. As presciently stated in 1949 by Aldo Leopold, “… a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Optimistically, we as a species may be able to learn how to control ourselves, face up to the situation we have created, and shift our behaviors just enough to reverse our destructive tendencies. However, even if we do not change our ways, we must recognize what history tells us: All species that have ever existed on the earth have become extinct. Whatever we, as one species, do in the next one thousand or five thousand years, whether helpful or damaging to our planet, we will eventually become extinct and other species will evolve to take our place.
“It is a strange and terrible moment in history. We, who ourselves are dependent upon it utterly, are laying waste to the biosphere, the thin, planet-encircling envelope of life, rushing to degrade the atmosphere above and the ocean below and the soil at the center and everything it supports.” (Michael McCarthy 2015)
In the wake of Donald Trump’s November victory a patient reported her daughter said she would no longer be able to consider having a child. She believes the administration’s policies regarding the climate will irreparably damage the environment. My son expressed the feeling that the world now is permanently changed, the future itself uncertain. Others expressed similar anxieties.
One patient said, “We are not sure whether we will die of a nuclear winter or a flood.” As psychoanalysts, we might say some of us are in identification with the earth now, feeling the lack of protections extending to it also include us. We do know something about the awful psychic predicament that results when reparation is not possible. We must listen to the reverberations of the social world in each of our patients, and we likely feel similar reverberations in ourselves. How can we as psychoanalysts take this up, address the various complicities in each of us, along with the very real fears that are mounting? We have to sort out the threats of annihilation inside from the accurate reading of an annihilating (external) other, while making sense of our annihilating internal others at the same time. And where is affirmation? The love of the earth, the possibility of repair, of care. Another patient talking about the current political moment was saying that just looking up at the sky, the vast encompassing sky, provides comfort. This same patient was talking about her daughter having her feet in dirt, climbing rocks, being outside, and her hope that this foundational relationship with the earth will carry her, will be in her, throughout her life. Surely this is something I believe in—that feet in the dirt, a connection to the earth is something that can and does sustain us.
But now I suppose I have a sense of a cruel parent in charge, a parent who denies reality and the need for stewardship. With this, we see a pronounced disregard for the natural world—a person in charge of the EPA, for example, who denies the reality of climate change—and a more pervasive and insidious assault on those truths we have held to be self-evident. This seems like an important convergence: People are feeling that in turning their backs on the realities of the environmental crisis, the administration is putting future generations at risk. The continuity of the earth and of ourselves is linked. For those of us feeling at risk there is no denial of climate change, or even denial of the deleterious human impact on the natural world. And yet, for all of us, for each of us, probably there is some as yet unnamed individual connection with our dependence on the biosphere, on ecosystems, and a certain indifference and taking so much for granted. As much as I love being outside in nature, as much as I love the ocean and the mountains and the silence of snow, I think it is incumbent upon me to ask how do I participate in this lack of care, how do I deny my own relationship with the natural world, my place in nature? What are the terrors at work in recognizing my place in what is called the web of life?
A Voice from Detroit speaks about the enormous comfort that eventually he will be not on the planet but “in it.” But this is a state of mind that comes only out of accepting the limits of time and mortality, a state of mind we as psychoanalysts recognize can only come from a great deal of psychic work, work that entails facing our limits, facing death and its inevitable grief and loss. One can feel nature’s vastness and its indifference to us, and rather than experience comfort, feel instead a kind of hatred regarding one’s smallness, one’s insignificance, relatively speaking. That we all degrade back into the earth can feel like a comfort but equally can lead to fear and to a pushing away of all the related realities—our dependence on the earth and its ecosystems for what it provides us. This leads to denial of our smallness and our place in the much wider scope of the natural world. Our actual interdependence with the earth’s non-human species is a feature of our smallness and rather than acknowledge this we exert our own wishes for control. Human indifference leads to exploitation, the pillaging of forests, the excessive fishing of oceans, overreliance on the material yields of the earth without acknowledging the cost of what we have taken, and without thought for giving something back.
I live in New York City, but the other day I was driving in the Midwestern spaces of the United States. I drove past vast fields of yellow maize, endless plains of gold, and I felt a strong sensation of sadness simultaneously for the country I love and for the earth I love, a deep sense that each—for different and overlapping reasons—is in peril. Our current political moment demands our careful attention as does the state of the planet. The usual attitude that someone else is taking care of things, however fallacious that notion is, is no longer possible. We Americans must take care, we
must protect truth and our own fundamental values, and this intrinsically includes safeguarding the natural world. We psychoanalysts must find a way to address this, in our practices and in public life.
An aspect of Charles Darwin’s genius was his willingness to resist the pressures to extoll human exceptionalism, bolstered by the idea of uniqueness of humans in God’s eyes. In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin suggests there is a promising area for new researches in the field of psychology, “the acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” In 1859 Darwin was aware that natural selection affected not just anatomy, but cognitive and emotional capacities in an organism. Recent studies in animal behavior reveal deep aspects of sociability and complex relatedness that occur in our primate relatives. There has been considerable scientific and social resistance to acknowledging such affinities. Freud understood the narcissistic injury that the discoveries of science could evoke, leading to all manner of denial or disinclination to explore the ramifications of the breakthrough in knowledge. He specifically mentions the decentering caused by situating humans as a species that evolved in adherence with the laws of natural selection and that remains in close relationship to the rest of the natural world. Our ability to recognize our dependence on the natural world for our existence is impaired by our wishes to be exceptional and dominant over our environment.
In psychoanalysis there have been explorations of distortions of self-experience and human relatedness due to autistic defenses including the use of aspects of the nonhuman environment as a protection from the strain and catastrophic experience of personal interaction. Much less attention has been given to the more enlivening and enriching aspects of relatedness to the non-human world that provide solace and extended otherness vital to differentiation. The living environment is located in the background of our existence and is often overlooked as an essential component to our ongoing sense of self. The ongoing quality of the natural world serves an important containing function for our anxieties about the meaning of our being, the relevance of our place in space and time, and the complexity of our relationship to the fact of mortality. We cannot exist without relying on nature’s resources, including the complex web of life, water, air, energy. The extent of the reliance of humans on the natural world can evoke primitive and menacing terrors, or something more relaxing and coherent, in identification with ongoing processes that extend beyond a human life span. To relieve ourselves of the challenges to our narcissistic superiority, caused by the awareness of our vulnerability and stature in relationship to the natural world, we may turn our attention to the marvels of human technological prowess and control.
In Biophilia, the biologist Edward O. Wilson poses a thought experiment. He invites us to immerse ourselves in a beautiful manmade environment, constructed to replicate serene skies, vast mountains, rushing waterfalls emptying into a deep pool of water sited in an exquisite, harmoniously landscaped and peaceful valley. However, not one element is alive; it is a plastic creation. Wilson recognizes profoundly the nightmare this ersatz natural setting creates:
Where are we? If the ultimate act of cruelty is to promise everything and to withhold just the essentials, the locality is a department of hell.…Without beauty and mystery beyond itself, the mind by definition is deprived of its bearings and will drift to simpler and cruder configurations. Artifacts are incomparably poorer than the life they are designed to mimic. They are only a mirror to our thoughts. To dwell on them exclusively is to fold inwardly over and over, losing details at each translation, shrinking with each cycle, finally merging into the lifeless façade of which they are composed.
Wilson is describing the claustrophobic state of affairs that develops internally if we cut off our emotional and knowledge ties to the natural world. A human made environment is not the same as a setting where the otherness and separateness of the natural world with its own trajectory and beauty is acknowledged. The living otherness of a natural system allows the full humanness of a person to emerge. Knowledge of our relationship to the non-human environment is essential for our sanity, as in its absence our contact with both internal and external reality is diminished. As psychoanalysts, we have paid little attention to this aspect of life. Like many other people, we have set ourselves apart, alienated ourselves from our ancient coherence, and a vital aspect of our psychic equilibrium. Just as we have been able to tune into communication beyond words, opening ourselves to emotional knowledge that is primitive and complex, we may be able to attend more closely to how each person interacts with the natural world. We will have to interrupt our tendencies to disregard aspects of the terrain that are unfamiliar and bring to bear our disciplined capacity to listen, understand and value the unconscious phantasies that structure our experiences with the natural world.
With increasing urbanization, technological surroundings, and the ubiquitous presence of virtual reality, more of the natural world is experienced as a green blur. Earth is treated as other and to be controlled rather than embraced and valued in its own right, or as a cherished expansion of ourselves, a vital respite from human strains. There is much to be gained by reawakening our ties to our earlier selves and our dependencies on the complexity of life around us. As psychoanalysts we are highly tuned to observe the details of internal landscapes, but interdisciplinary explorations
with biologists, natural historians, artists and poets may enhance our ability to understand the strength of our ties to the external landscapes. We can attend more closely to the encounter, and to the actual impact of our behavior on the workings of the planet. A passage from Thoreau’s Walden illustrates such an awakened state of mind:
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the wood, this sound acquires a vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept…. There it came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound and therein is the magic and the charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
Here, Thoreau is portraying the enrichment of being that encompasses the details of the natural environment. The vibratory hum of pleasure results from relaxation into embeddedness in the natural world. There is an openness between the bell and the echo and the wood-nymph, dependent on the wind, the trees and the listener. In such a state of mind, kinship with the non-human world does not pose a threat to one’s integrity, instead it enhances one’s sense of self. If we can extend our experience to encompass something larger than ourselves and also tolerate diminishment, then we can find a way to tend to the world for which we are responsible.