In Gratitude: A Non-utopian Response to Roth and Santostefano

Abstract

Roth and Santostefano have usefully expanded the dialogue about the environment's role in psychological functioning. Santostefano offers a clinical approach that utilizes landscapes in reworking trauma. Roth cautions that a utopian perspective falsely dichotomizes natural and cultivated into bifurcated categories of good and bad that were the underpinnings of Nazi purification. Further, such thinking neglects the role of desire in the conflicts of human nature. This reply builds on Santostefano and Roth to suggest that incorporating an environmental lens into psychoanalysis challenges the human condition to act willfully on behalf of its own survival.