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A small number of Anouchka's Everyday Analysis pamphlet are still available here.
In climate psychology circles there seems to be a great deal of consensus around the idea that the antidote to climate grief is climate action. Of course no one’s so naïve as to think it’s an actual cure, just that it can help. Not only does it have the ring of common sense (admittedly a phrase that might make a psychoanalyst’s ears prick up) but it’s regularly recommended by activists and climate scientists alike, who lend the idea authority by speaking from experience. But what kind of action would be enough to make a difference, either to the individual or to the crisis?
To begin with the obvious, the problem is big, and any action one can take will inevitably feel small. The futility of even the bigger successes — say, being a part of the 2019 Extinction Rebellion protests that caused governments all over the world to declare a climate emergency — can make the prospect of further action depressing. Especially since XR have all but imploded and those same governments’ sense of emergency appears notably lacking five years later.
In psychoanalytic practice, one would be unlikely to dish out advice on worthwhile responses to the crisis, let alone having consistent, constructive ideas about it in private. The magnitude of the problem is at the very limits of thinkability and anyone engaging with it is liable to find themselves confronted by a tangle of contradictions and impasses. Is it wise to focus on the problem, or to pull back? Is there any such thing as a ‘healthy’ position in between? Is it worthwhile to analyse an individual’s unconscious attitudes towards such a real-world difficulty? And does any of that make it qualitatively different from any other area of psychoanalytic work? Surely we are always being asked to ‘cure’ people of things we ourselves suffer from, or being confronted by the perpetual nature of distress.
Within the world of activism we are also seeing a crisis around the idea of effective action. The discourse around climate change is becoming ever more fractured and non-uniform. There are those who believe the sanest response is to learn to accept the looming catastrophe and try to adapt, foregrounding ideas like ‘community’ and ‘care’. Further down the line, perhaps, are the accelerationists and members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement who invite collapse in the name of ripping open alternative futures. Then there are those who believe in tweaking political systems. Or exiting them altogether. Or that technology will save us. Or that the problem isn’t necessarily all that bad. The concerned, vegan, climate-marching, archetypal activist is only one voice among many, and this group appear to be splitting into those who still adhere to the idea of non-violent civil disobedience and those who are beginning to think we’ve been too polite for too long and that the lacklustre results speak for themselves. Each political position clearly echoes a subject position with regard to an object: give up on it, destroy it, conserve it, negotiate with it, fight for it, and so on. This isn’t to say that one’s attitude to environmental breakdown is somehow developmentally anticipated, just that it’s informed by forces deep at work in us, sometimes beyond our field of vision.
The last group of people — the anxious activists — are perhaps the ones most likely to present their climate-related suffering in therapy or analysis. But if they are already somehow ‘active’ what more can anyone do to help? Perhaps the beginnings of an answer might be found in questions around what it means ‘to act’ at all? Are all actions equal? Are some actions designed to dissemble — to mask helplessness? How might it be possible to help another person find the kind of action that would make a difference, even if only to them?
In ‘Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’ (1963) Winnicott writes about the ways in which an infant uses privation, frustration, and various shattering experiences — alongside more gratifying interactions — in order to construct a habitable world of good enough relationships for itself. If all goes well, thanks to this tangle of pain and pleasure, ‘the object changes over from being subjective to being objectively perceived’ (p.182); it can let you down but you can still love it. Your pathway through these experiences will literally be character-building. Of course nothing is set in stone — or at least, as psychoanalysts, we probably have to believe this — but our ‘character’ will inevitably be a huge determining factor in how we respond to the climate crisis, alongside other factors such as our social milieu, events in the world, our preferred sources of information and the ways in which the algorithm interprets our interests and desires (which perhaps provokes the question, ‘What is the object relation of the algorithm?’). Although one obviously can’t draw up anything like an organised, horoscope-like schema linking types of childhood experience to ecological engagement it might at least be helpful to develop more nuanced ways of thinking about why some people are waiting for Bill Gates to develop the technology that will save us, while others are supergluing themselves to corporate glass entrances in the desperate hope of forcing immediate change.
Regarding the climate crisis, and our responses to it, we might extrapolate from all this in two quite different directions...
In Timothy Morton’s book, ‘The Ecological Thought’, he develops the idea of the hyperobject in order to begin to rethink our relation to the environment...
Apparently Morton’s choice of term was influenced by Björk’s ‘Hyperballad’...
Where does that leave us with regard to climate action? Isn’t part of the problem that too many of us do rather Björk-like things in order to stave off panic — shop organic, ride bicycles, wear second-hand clothes?
In 2019, Extinction Rebellion burst onto the scene with a fully worked-out climate action manifesto...
Now we have a terrible situation in the UK where the standard advice on climate-related mental anguish is to act...
So is there anything else left to try? Perhaps the diverse permutations of our possible object relations can be helpful here...
Anouchka Grose is a writer and psychoanalyst practising in South East London. She is a member of The College of Psychoanalysts and The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, where she regularly lectures. She has been working one-to-one since 2003. Before that she ran writing workshops for people experiencing mental health difficulties. She writes about psychoanalysis, current affairs, art and fashion, and has contributed to The Guardian, Radio 4, and Resonance FM.