Respect for the environment: Psychoanalytic reflections on the ecological crisis

ABSTRACT

This article takes as its starting point the way in which the relationship between man and nature is outlined in certain passages of Freud's work, in order to highlight how few psychoanalysts have addressed the intrinsic unconscious aspects of the relationship between man and the environment. We have to wait until the 1960s and 1970s for the reflections by Searles, with his references to the theoretical work of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott. Searles’ writings are a milestone in the analysis of individual and group defences in relation to the ecological crisis. Specific instances are provided by three clinical vignettes, which analyse some defensive moves in relation to the serious problem of lack of respect for the environment and concern about climate change. From the defensive move highlighted in the analytic relationship, mutatis mutandis, it is possible to highlight defensive moves on a group level, also observing how ecological changes may reorient psychoanalytic thought about the psyche and its dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment
• nature
• climate change
• separate collection of waste
• apathy

Notes

1 Freud quotes almost word for word a sentence taken from Hannibal by Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801–1836), “Ja, aus der Welt werden wir nicht fallen. Wir sind einmal darin” [Indeed, we shall not fall out of the world. We are in it once and for all], to challenge the primary nature of the oceanic feeling proposed by Romain Rolland.

2 Probably Lou Andreas Salomé and Rainer Maria Rilke.

3 Bion (1974, 218) dwells on the excitement which the primitive part of the mind feels in the presence of fundamental reality, highlighting the risk of apathetic intellectualization through scientific reduction: “I would like to be capable of being awe-inspired by a sight like the aurora borealis. I would not think that I had improved if I said, ‘Oh well, this is simply an electric display; it's an electric phenomenon’.”

4 In Underworld (1997, 89), Don DeLillo describes a similar “science”: “At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin versus aluminum. We did plastic containers, without caps or lids, on Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always the temptation.”

5 Revenants, replacement children, were common in Jewish families who experienced the Holocaust and were given the name of a dead relative as a replacement for them.

6 A famous slogan used in the 70s environmental protests had been “work, buy, consume, die!” It had been used for stressing the relationship between consumerism and the consumption of our planet.”

7 The last lines of “Die beiden Gulden,” a version by Rückert of one of the Maqâmât (sermons) of al-Hariri. Freud also quoted these lines in a letter to Fliess of 20 October 1895.