Wasted and Bombed: Clinical Enactments of a Changing Relationship to the Earth

Abstract

Are changes in the relationship to the natural environment expressed in our psyches? I explore that question in this paper. Carefully considering clinical material of some young adults suggests that aspects of obliterative drinking and dissociative materialism may be enactments of a changing relationship between people and their ecosystems. Psychoanalysis, anthropology, and human geography support the idea that the psychological object field expands far beyond the parental relationship and that this expanded field can also importantly affect psychological behavior. Three cases are examined through a lens that recognizes similarities between the commoditization of natural resources and wasteful behavioral enactments.