Psychoanalysis, Tempering Passion, and The Environmental Crisis Crossroads
A version of this unpublished paper was presented at The Joint International Psychoanalytic Conference in Florence, Italy, August, 2014.
Anthony Rankin Wilson, MSW,
The more-than-human refers to not only biological organisms like frogs, ferns, and humans, but includes the surface of the planet and the portion of the atmosphere and the subsurface that is capable of supporting life. We emerged from it; it did not emerge from us.
Before reading this paper, recall a significant experience with Nature, (the more-than human) including perhaps, experiences with other creatures, wild or domestic. Is there a passionate element to this experience? In addition, conceive of this experience as more than internal, and something parallel to what happens within clinical intersubjective space, where what is being experienced within us, and within our patients, also occupies a spatial third space...a “between”. Something occurs between me and this dog, that mountain, this oak. Allow this memory moment between you and the more-than-human to remain in background/foreground rhythm throughout your reading.
LANGUAGE
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. More of the answers I seek seem to flow from these elements than from my fellow humans or from language itself. Perhaps, “Truth, then, is not a match between my representations and the way things are. Truth is a right relationship between me and the world around me. Truth is an index...of the quality of relationship that a particular culture has with the land that it inhabits....” (Abram in Jensen, 2008, p.222).
POINTS OF ORIGIN
It is impossible to know the narrative points of origin of both my experienced connectedness to the more-than-human and my attempts over the past two decades to understand and reconcile, amidst the gathering evidence and news of the environmental crisis, what it means to practice as a clinical social worker, and relational, psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapist.
Was the genesis of my own environmental attunement a cross-generational transmission from my maternal grandfathers’ plant wisdom, a gardener by trade, who left the flooded vineyards of southern France in 1908 for the land of promise in Canada? Or was it through his daughter, my mother, who, when the time came to finally leave her home, lamented longest about the loss of her garden? Was it childhood’s endless days of play in Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River Valley, exploring the ravined body of the earth and getting my first visceral experiences of the soft relentless power of water as I stood on the banks, frightened of the urge to jump in and merge with the swift opaque movement of a river rushing from its’ birth in the Rockies? Was it while riding bareback, feeling the muscled spread of a horse beneath my young pelvis and thighs? Or in the preadolescent’s inter-species communication with my dog, who rarely tired of fetch and finding my eyes for the signal, “yes, we’re going for a walk”?
Was the ecopsychological narrative point of origin in the early 90’s when a patient brought his excitement at purchasing two jet skis and I wondered, unbidden, silently, what the earth made of that? My therapeutic allegiance to my patient and my allegiance to the more-thanhuman collided and left me confused, humbled, and disturbed. I knew the two jet skis he’d purchased, notorious for their capacities to pollute and disturb shorelines, were incidental yet symbolic in the larger scheme of the spreading environmental crisis. My clinical ear heard a depressively introverted man who was excitedly basking in a hard-won psychological achievement of creating conditions of play with others. My ecological ear wondered what the lake water and shore birds would say? Do I voice anything about my conflict? Does he notice enough of my disturbance for it to become a potential therapeutic relational opportunity? I kept the conflict to myself, did the requisite mirroring, believed I left my patient relatively unscathed, and stumbled into sessions over subsequent years with more patients who voiced environmental concern through their narratives and dream content.
What do we analysts and psychotherapists of this besieged world feel and do when a patient presents a denied, or disavowed and antagonistic relationship to a collapsing ecosystem? What price our extreme privileging of solely human concerns? Dare I wonder, as a 21st century clinician, that if I do not address the both/and of my patient’s choice, am I participating with him in several simultaneous destructive delusions: the delusion of individualism where “humans are essentially isolated rights holders, fully separate” (Moore, 2012, p. 7) and forever in conflict or competition; the delusion of “dualism, which opens a deep crack down the center of creation” (Moore, 2012, p. 7), animated humans on one side, and the inanimate material world on the other, only there to serve our needs; and the delusion of “human exceptionalism...we are special in some way, [and] able to exceed natural limits” (Moore, 2012, p. 7). In psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe’s edited compilation, Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2013), Michael Rustin describes such philosophical views as “structures of feeling” (Rustin, 2013, p. 196) .
And what of another patient’s murderous encounter with a local endangered species of snake that later grew into an enlivened therapeutic exploration of his fear of my reaction to his violence. Insight illuminated how he had become like his father, smashing spontaneous instinctive movement that threatened the stability of a controlling, rigid but fragile, volatile self? Was the tipping point arrival more with another patient’s dream of disappearing forests and how she had to experience the forest before it was gone, while I simultaneously considered metaphor and symbol... as well as the possibility that Earth might be speaking through her dreams?
FURTHER NOTES FROM THE CROSSROADS
Whatever the origins, let’s begin with when I first experienced the Columbia Icefields in Canada’s Jasper National Park. I remember, at 10 years of age, the massive ice sheet shattering my conceptions of perspective and proportion, as the Rocky Mountains did upon first sight. The cool air emanating from the mottled muscle of ice chilled my mid-summer skin and sent shivers deep into my imagination. Like I’ve experienced many times in natural environments since, the twin states of enveloping fear and awe, mixed with the urge to flee such immense presence, arrested me in an unforgettable memory moment. While writing this paper, yet another report emerged of this retreating glacier which “is in danger of completely disappearing within a generation”(Graveland, 2014). This seemingly immutable environment, that resides in memory as an anchor of experience to the Earth and my place within it, is disappearing. And the accelerating rate of that change frequently evokes my solastalgia (Albrecht, 2007), a feeling of homesickness while still at home.
In May 2014, The Glove and Mail reported that “Child psychiatrists, psychologists and educators say they’ve seen an escalation in the anxiety levels of todays youth, who are constantly exposed to doomsday talk about the destruction of our planet...and an uptick in climate-changerelated anxiety in parents with younger children” (MacDonald, 2014).
A patient’s dream: “I dreamt that global warming was happening now, not 100 years from now. I felt a kind of passive resignation that this big thing was happening and I could do nothing about it.” Should this dream content only be interpreted as “metaphor for something else on a more abstract level” (Bernstein, 2005, p.xv)?
An analyst colleague tells me that “...if I were still in analysis I don’t think I would bring up my feelings about the environmental crisis. It is what it is. I feel terrible and overwhelmed about it. So why wouldn’t I talk about it? Maybe I’m ashamed of my feelings. Maybe there’s guilt that I would talk about my concerns but then just jump on a plane and fly off to all the places I do. I’ve never thought about that. Unless I knew my analyst was thinking about it. Maybe I would talk about it then. And maybe I’d bring it up in the context of something happening between me and someone else about the crisis, like a recent experience with a family member who said that my concerns about the Alberta Oil Sands were nonsense. I had to break off the conversation because I was so agitated...”.
In April 2014, a 74 year old woman patient wondered if her longstanding sense of unease was being amplified by a collective anxiety about climate change that somehow no longer seemed to her like “science fiction.” She asked me if I thought climate change was “real”. She reported that my straight-forward “yes” eased her anxiety, knowing that she was not the only one feeling this way, that she was not “crazy”, and that now there was a place to talk about it.
Does passion play any part in the creation and denial, or disavowal of, our environmental predicament and humanity’s seeming rush to extinction? Will passion play a role in addressing it? How will clinicians accommodate to the growing ecological, political, and cultural presence of the environmental crisis in the session room? Will our theory and practice welcome or run from this challenge to examine the interface of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and disturbed natural systems? Perhaps “the concepts of nature, culture and mind can never really be positioned as distinct entities, separate from one another” (Jordan in Rust/Totton, eds. 2012, p. 137).
As far back as 1972 in his selected papers, Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979), American analyst, Harold Searles, wrote that “the ecological crisis is the greatest threat mankind collectively has ever faced” (Searles, 1972, p. 228). And 40 years later in a Psychology Today blog, Intersubjectivity theorist, Robert Stolorow, wrote, “We must renounce destructive narcissism and oblivious denial, embrace generativity, and face up to our apocalyptic anxiety before it is too late for the safety of future generations” (Stolorow 2012).
When we expand our views out from the clinical two-person system to include the planet from which we emerged as a species, the mind can retreat; and the heart can tighten in contemplating this scale of consideration. We may be reminded of our Cartesian clinging to the persistent myth of the isolated mind that disavows our “absolute dependence on the physical environment, [and] kinship to other animals...” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1992, p. 8). Our 21st century fragile bubble of comfort, safety, and faith in a predictable future, may be threatened. We may be confronted with our “top of the food chain” narcissism.
I have been part of that generation of analysts and psychotherapists that have seen the field of psychological focus broaden from the encapsulated mind-bound interplay of Freud’s ego, id, and superego to the systemic paradigms of family and social systems theory. This expanded perspective includes Intersubjectivity Theory and Relational Psychoanalysis and their focus upon the human dependency, from the beginning of life, “on creating patterns of mutual regulation and recognition with the other” (Benjamin, 2009, p. 457). Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ paradigm of subject-subject relationality that “creates a vital, alive world” (Benjamin, Toronto lecture, 2014) stands in contrast to the subject-object paradigm which still echoes through our thinking and practice and promotes the vision of a “dead, destructive world where the object is ongoingly destroyed” (Benjamin, Toronto lecture, 2014). This shift was paralleled in the early 90’s by Ecopsychology which stretched the view out to recognizing the planet as animate and therefore having it’s own perspectival awareness. The “recognition of intentions and feelings of one by another [as being] the crucial building blocks of attachment and all subsequent...engagement” (Benjamin, 2009, p. 457) speaks as much to our relationship with the more-than-human as it does to our relationship with others of our own species.
I am proposing that Stolorow’s (2012) call to renounce destructive narcissism, embrace generativity, and acknowledge anxiety requires that we analysts and psychotherapists extend our clinical considerations out to the more-than-human within which we are embedded. This is difficult for it is our “very embeddedness in [the] matrix of relationships between mind, nature, and society” (Jordan in Dodds, 2011, p. xiii) that may occlude our ability to see and think about what we’re doing, and feel the consequences for the air, land, water, other creatures, and ourselves. However, are not these very capacities for perspective, for intersubjective reflection, for acknowledging relational consequence, and for imagining possible futures, all highly valued by contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and potentially helpful to individuals and professions transitioning out of the myth of the isolated mind? Is it animistic reductionism to wonder whether the air and oceans are signaling their imperative to be related to more as “subject” and not “object” through the symptoms of the crisis? Is climate change a version of the return of the repressed? (Abram, 2012)
THE CRISIS
The scientific and on-the-ground evidence of our ecological crisis has been accumulating for decades. A New York Times editorial, “Running Out of Time” (The Editorial Board, 2014) stated: “...The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], composed of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists, has issued three reports in the last 7 months, each the product of up to six years of research. The first confirmed what has been known since Rio [climate summit in 1992]: global warming is caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels by humans and, to a lesser extent, by deforestation. The second, released in Japan three weeks ago, said that profound effects were already being felt around the world, including mounting damage to coral reefs, shrinking glaciers and more persistent droughts, and warned of worse to come - rising seas, species loss and dwindling agricultural yields. The third report.. maybe the most ominous of the three...[stated that]...annual emissions of greenhouse gases have risen almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century...[and] the key finding: The world has only 15 years left in which to begin to bend the emissions curve downward. Otherwise, the cost’s of last-minute fixes will be overwhelming” (The Editorial Board, 2014, p. A20).
Consider as well, that it is not well known or accepted by us terrestrial creatures that every second breath we take comes by way of the ocean’s plankton, creatures that are at the base of the planet’s food chain and produce half the oxygen in the atmosphere (Mitchell, 2009). The plankton are now threatened by sea water more acidic than its’ been for 55 million years, largely a result of the rate and volume of fossil fuel carbon-based gases which humans have poured into the atmosphere. These gases are reacting chemically with a warming ocean to produce carbonic acid. Scientific consensus is that oceans carry the “switch of life” (Mitchell, 2009, p. 10). In other words, if most life in the oceans were to die, life on land would follow. But not the other way around.
Despite the science and extreme environmental enactments on the ground, individuals and cultures are being slow to believe and adjust. No surprise to those of us engaged in studying resistance and facilitating the processes of change. However, if we are to take the word “crisis” seriously, and there is increasing evidence that we ought to, then what is our role as psychotherapists and analysts, and citizens of the professions, amidst the unprecedented scale of the unraveling of environmental conditions that gave rise to and support our existence? How do we hold such large-scale thought in mind? How can we maintain constructive passion’s eager outreaching of the mind towards something when that “something” is a knowing “...that everything has changed...the awareness lurks there...[and] Until we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of awareness, we repress it; and with that repression we are drained ofthe energy we need for action and clear thinking” (Macy, 1995, p. 243).
As our patients either directly experience the crisis, or indirectly experience it through burgeoning media reports, I suggest that the environmental crisis is increasingly appearing in our sessions through symptoms such as escalating anxiety and guilt; paralyzing apathy and depression; dissociative arrogance; addictive consumption enactments; and identity and moral confusion. Clinical narratives will increasingly include overt references to the crisis. Weather, a ubiquitous and often symbolic conversation starter, may become laden with more literal meanings and affect.
It is important to note that it remains unusual for explicit environmental content and concern, mine or my patients, to enter the clinical space. However, it is becoming more frequent, like some artifice or “systematic denial of the world out there” (Hillman in Roszak, Gomes, Kanner, 1995, p. xx) is dissolving. I find myself asking the “second question” that sometimes softens previously frozen processes of articulation regarding environmental concern and experiences in Nature.
PERSONAL PASSION STRUGGLES
Two personal destructive passion narratives, and their resulting structures of perception and feeling, color my experience of, and my thinking about, the environmental crisis. Both permeate my clinical ruminations on what it is to be a psychotherapist in times of rapid ecosystem decline.
My paternal grandfather’s suicide in 1927 was a tightly kept secret by my father until the silence was broken in my mid-20’s. Is my occasional sense of apocalyptic doom more representative of a pathological accommodation that expects a “...scenario of catastrophic predestination...” (Brandchaft in Brandchaft, Doctors, Sorter, 2010, p. 152) than an experience and perception of a culture - and profession’s - denial or disavowal of what some call the current “ecocide” (Higgins, 2012, xi)? What balance is there between my passionately appropriate environmental curiosity and concern and my archaic structures that cry out into a parental vacuum, “something is wrong, but what is it?” What do our evolving clinical models continue to make “...invisible... or [relegate] to the background because it [does] not fit the theory” (Orange, 2010, p.5), and how might this trigger an earlier outrage at being kept in the dark?
The second narrative is one of dissociated incestuous acting out within my family of origin. Is my passionate outrage at the violation of boundaries and limits more about an idealized primitive merger and identification with the victimized forests and oceans than it is about an outcry on behalf of the earth and future generations? The more-than-human has served an implicit mirroring function for humanity, reflecting back our ontogeny and our earth-air-water-fire biologic identity, as well as being “the ‘mother’ of all holding environments (Winnicott, 1987) which contains all the others” (Dodds, 2011, p. 59). As well as signalling my own subsequent dissociated acting out of this incestuous legacy, does the anxiety and threat I often feel about the violation of limits, and subsequent retaliatory punishment, also link to the many ways I participate in my culture’s dissociative narcissism? For instance, the CO2 output (the greenhouse gas primarily responsible for ocean and climate change) of two return flights (my wife and I) from Toronto to Florence to attend the Seventh Joint International Conference on Passion in July 2014, was equal to 51% of the CO2 emitted for supplying our 3-story home with electricity for 7 years (calculations by Less.ca Gold Standard high altitude impact carbon offsetting, Oct./14; verified by Bullfrog Power, Oct./14)! Is unreflected upon air travel and structures of belief that fail to question air and water’s capacity to absorb unlimited green house gases indicate a blindness to Earth’s essential mirroring of our embodied self, and a disavowal of our utter dependency on this “mother of all holding environments” (Dodds, 2011, p. 59)?
Such questions are necessary foils in my attempts to decenter from personal environmental passions.
PATHOLOGICAL PASSION
We are seeing a slow shift from modernity’s subject-object paradigm of World as idealized or exploited Other. This paradigm has flourished amidst an atmosphere, as mentioned before, of human grandiose exceptionalism - we are special and can destructively defy natural limits. This paradigm has also perpetuated an exclusive claiming of subjectivity - only we humans have consciousness and sentience. The slow shift is paralleled in the analytic transition from the scientific paradigm of objective observer to intersubjective participant. As contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy embodies a perspectivist and more contextual subject-subject systems paradigm, our disavowed destructiveness is more laid bare.
In a 2014 Toronto lecture, analyst Jessica Benjamin spoke of this fear of our destructiveness and the possibility that the accompanying anxiety may be one reason why it’s so hard to fully admit our subjectivity (Benjamin, 2014). No longer seemingly protected by the many masks of Cartesian objectivity, and seeking a more authentic, spontaneously measured relatedness with our patients, we are more frequently asked clinically to “create consensual validation of moments of injury that we cause by playing our part...”(Benjamin, 2009, p. 457). And I suggest that patients and clinicians are also increasingly asked to acknowledge their, our, disavowed destructiveness of the natural world “that we cause by playing our part” (Benjamin, 2009, p. 457).
Greed and its’ destructiveness is an aspect of one of the Stoic primary passions, lust (Wikipedia). This passion is often accompanied by arrogance. Analyst Sally Weintrobe writes how arrogance “is accompanied by a sense of narcissistic entitlement to exploit the other” (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 38). This “destructively narcissistic part of the psyche has gained the upper hand in a power struggle with the part that feels wedded to reality” (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 38). This is the territory of disavowal, part of a pathological organization that utilizes the quick fix (Weintrobe, 2013), “minimizing or obliterating any sense that facing reality entails facing any loss” (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 39). However, in the long term, disavowal fails to lower anxiety and instead, tension builds in the part that IS wedded to reality. As well, fear of retribution or punishment may rise in this part of the mind that minimizes and turns the blind eye (Weintrobe, 2013).
A 45 year old male patient speaks to me often about his still acted upon insatiable desire to buy multiple cars, new and used, and a variety of other vehicles, from boats to ATV’s. At the same time, he voices an obsessive concern with what goes out in his recycling and whether he’s removed the plastic tops from his milk cartons. His fear of retribution finds an easy projective target in my environmentally-minded self and it is only through our clinical dialogue that some relative safety and room for spontaneous self-disclosure and exploration has been achieved through the 7 years of his therapy. As he has been able to see and speak of the enactments of this split mind, and risked my judgments and abandonment, a less polarized self has emerged that is more easily satiated with less, and is more able to consistently maintain his own moral reasoning and genuine environmental concern. And it is an ongoing work-in-progress to keep track of the ways disavowal reasserts, escalates his anxiety, and amplifies his fears of my rejection and the retributions of a wrathful planet. I wonder how many more of my patients, and yours, are consciously or unconsciously struggling with similar effects of disavowal in an age of environmental crisis.
TEMPERING PASSION
We humans often project the passion-laden image of “mother” onto Mother Earth. Earth did give birth to our species. We do rely on Earth for food and warmth. We do transfer onto Earth variations of the “toilet mother” (Keene in Weintrobe, 2013, p. 146) who magically takes away the waste. Many of us in the developed world do assume that Earth will provide security now and into the future. We know that the child fears destroying the mother of finitude when faced with its’ own sometimes overwhelming frustration, dependency, and helplessness. We know that the sadistic urge to hurt sometimes results in conflict, shame, and guilt. Perhaps we feel some of this towards Earth. We do know ambivalence is ubiquitous in the maintenance of the self/mother system of mutual regulation. Perhaps our “dominant attachment pattern...to nature is one of avoidance and ambivalence” (Jordan, 2009, pp. 27-28). What would a secure attachment to the more-than-human look like?
Analytic understanding of these tender human attachment and developmental challenges, that also have echoes in our relationship to the more-than-human, may be a tempering gift to our patients’ and to our culture’s task of facing the limit setting “ ‘no’ of nature” (Randall in Weintrobe, 2013, p. 98). As the reality of the environmental crisis crossroads is becoming “too obvious to be ignored, there is anxiety that damage is too great to be repaired...” (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 40). One of our 21st century clinical tasks will be the provision of “help, support and containment to bear the anxiety and suffering that insight brings... [amidst the]... anxiety that parts of the self will not survive change that now feels catastrophic and too much to face” (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 40). As well, perhaps our embodied awareness and clinical attention will also temper the attacks on thinking so dangerously characteristic of disavowal.
Freud thought that humans cannot bear too much reality all at once, and that accommodating reality may involve mourning (Freud, 1917). As we know, this mourning usually involves a stage of negating denial (“it isn’t true”); then anger; and if it goes well, acceptance of the loss and grief. But the scientific consensus is increasingly clear, the environmental crisis IS “true”, and as stated unequivocally in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest reports (IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, 2014), humans are the drivers of accelerating changes in the oceans and atmosphere. We no longer have the option of choosing between mitigation and adaptation. We are increasingly faced with the reality that our actions are destroying ecosystems that sustain us. How do we cope with our anger, shame, and greed when we acknowledge the effects of our destructiveness, especially those of us in the developed world? We can fatalistically rationalize the effects, as biologist Lynn Margulis stated, “the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out” (Margulis in Mann, 2012); and we can discount the future (Flannery, 2010) - we’re past the point of no return, so let’s party! Or, we can do the work of understanding the state of our changing world, face our responsibility for despoiling it, and confront our polarized images of an endlessly bountiful, forgiving, or vengeful Mother Earth who seeks retribution. And we, and our patients, can feel the guilt, shame, and loss, reducing our tendency to act out an arrogance that defies limits and containment. Can we dare to tolerate the narcissistic injury when our personal and collective incompetence, greed, and vulnerability is exposed? The tempering of such destructive passions as arrogant greed may determine whether we exercise enough of our uniquely human capacity for foresight and become more able to reimagine a sustainable future for ourselves and future generations.
This tempering, and the expansion of our thinking to include the more-than-human in our clinical considerations, is one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the 21st century. Psychologist Louis Berger in Averting Global Extinction: Our Irrational Society as Therapy Patient (2009) states it boldly, passionately, when he writes that in this age of environmental crisis a society “is healthy if and when it gives absolute priority to global survival, and does everything humanly possible to work towards that end; anything else it believes or does is pathological” (Berger, 2009, 92).
CONCLUSION
Passion and woundedness lead me to gather still seldom spoken gems of patient narrative that strung together may arouse clinical reconsideration and insight for this environmental crisis crossroads. A female patient begins a session: “I want to talk about the news of the melting ice caps and how that is freaking me out.” Another speaks of the conflict between her environmental values and her lifestyle after being offered a job in the coal mining industry. Another spoke of his belief that humans “deserve” such extreme weather events as Hurricane Sandy because of our narcissistic consumption of natural resources. A 25 year old man spoke of his outrage at the unfairness of inheriting a degraded natural world and a precarious future for he and his children.
Perhaps more than ever we need to honor with our colleagues, and patients, passion’s Latin root, “to suffer”... and truly undergo the experience of being at this crossroads. Could it be that an important role of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is “to help humans negotiate the complex and interdependent present, not by romanticizing the perfect ecological past nor predicting some future ecological catastrophe, but by bearing to stay with the temporal spaces of the complex present” (Jordan in Rust/Totton, 2012, p. 145)? This “bearing to stay” with our embodied acknowledgement that we stand HERE together - feeling the air move like breath upon our faces, alertness running up our spines, seeing the more-than-human see us - may make all the difference in the World.
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