“It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” (opening words) The Doomed Earth Catalog, David Wallace-Wells

Our human woundedness has spilled over extravagantly into the body of Earth. In these times of ocean and climate change, of the sixth major extinction event, and of the accumulating scientific and on-the-ground evidence of human caused ecocide, I am preoccupied by the intersection of human woundedness and the woundedness of our planet’s web of life.

The Environmental Crisis Through a Psychoanalytic Lens: Knowing, Denial, and Vulnerability

The interplay of minds, patient and analysts’, is an “…act of shared creativity [that] involves the patient inseminating the analyst’s mind with an unprocessed emotional experience that the analyst transforms into a thought reverie…

In keeping with current clinical interest in multidisciplinary themes of expansiveness and constraint, this article utilizes abridged narratives from interviews conducted in 2012/13 by the author with analysts and analytic psychotherapists regarding their personal and clinical orientation to the environmental crisis.

I enter this exploration of passion and the interface of the environmental crisis, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, with many more questions than I do answers. Answers, as possible signifiers of truth, appear to come more in these days from the air I breathe, the water I drink, and from the land, however far beneath my concrete city it lies.

Theoretical, Clinical, and Environmental Implications

Psychoanalysis is slowly awakening to the reality of the environmental crisis and its’ disavowal of humanity’s embeddedness within, and dependence upon, the other-than-human world.

I am more poet than scientist. I am more drawn to the spaces between things than the things themselves. I have the eye of a lone wolf yearning to be part of the pack yet suspicious of the conventions and confinements of belonging. All of these potential blind-spotted tendencies permeate the following pages.

This paper is intended as an introduction and as a reference resource.