Ecopsychoanalysis
represents a major step forward in attempting to think about the relationship
between psychoanalysis, ecology, 'the natural' and the problem of climate
change. It is our very embeddedness in a matrix of relationships between mind,
nature and society that makes it so difficult to see what we are doing and to
feel its consequences, so that to think in ecological terms becomes very
problematic.
Psychoanalysis has
always subverted dominant notions of a coherent, ordered known and conscious
self. In the same way climate change tells us that nature can be manipulated
disordered and attacking, rather than a benign stable backdrop to our lives.
The very ground of our existence is troubling us deeply, even persecuting us
for our desires and behaviours. What does psychoanalysis have to say about
climate change? How can it shed light on our response, or lack of response, to
the threat? Can eco-activism itself be seen as an unreflective acting out of
unexamined desires and prejudices? Psychoanalysis at its best holds up a mirror
to the self and the society around it. Harold Searles (1960, 1962) pioneered
psychoanalytic approaches in this area with his seminal work on the nonhuman
environment. Dodds contemporises psychoanalysis by placing it within a complex
nonlinear web, part of a much broader set of ecological relationships and
ideas.
Showing himself to
be a 'nomadic scholar' of the highest order Dodds both draws on relevant
psychoanalytic ideas to explore the ecological terrain, and points out its
limitations in remaining, in spite of all its advantages, fundamentally a
psychology without ecology. By drawing upon the geophilosophy of Deleuze and
Guattari and current thinking in complexity theory, he puts together an exciting
and very interesting argument (or arguments in a rhizomatic form) for how we
may approach this current crisis. He doesn’t shy away from the problems
inherent in a romanticization of nature which if left unchecked threatens to
turn it into a Disney theme park. He asks, as other have started to do in the
field of ecocriticism (Morton 2007), whether we need an ecology without the
idea and projections of an idealised ‘Nature’.
No one group will be completely
comfortable in his ideas. The growing field of ecopsychology will be reluctant
to give up on long held notions of nature and indigenous wisdom. Since humans
first manipulated their environment they have been making species extinct, yet
the current human driven mass extinction is not going to be answered by
linguistic games or by imagining a benevolent Gaia which can be pacified
through ritual. We need new forms of thinking and being. Many psychoanalysts
will also be unhappy giving up their love of structure and the linear, although
the inherent nonlinearities in psychoanalytic practice and theory would find a
much more appropriate home in these new ideas than the outdated 19th
century models of science it still so often clings to. Scholars of Deleuze and Guattari will
argue that they opposed psychoanalysis on nearly every point so may be deeply
sceptical of any project which involves bringing these two fields together,
although in many ways this move may be necessary to more fully develop
Guattari's ideas of 'schizoanalysis', especially as applied to the clinic.
Deleuze and Guattari clearly felt
psychoanalysis was important enough to require a detailed and often productive
critique, and they certainly knew a lot more about psychoanalysis than most
contemporary Deleuzians. Thus, in a maneuver some may find disorienting he
takes the important things psychoanalysis brings to the table, making
psychoanalysis strange to itself, but in ways which in the long term will help
it become more vital, more alive, and less weighed down with authority that has
dogged it since Freud’s radical vision emerged at the turn of the 20th
century. Dodds
attempts to play with what each approach has to offer in the sense of a
multiplicitus heterogeneity, an assemblage of ideas and processes, mirroring
the interlocking complexity and chaos of climate change itself and thereby
opening up new spaces for thought. What could be more Deleuzian, or rather
Deleuzo-Guattarian than that?
An
ecological psychoanalysis also helps us
begin to re-imagine therapeutic practice where we can start to create spaces
for thought that links to the earth. Deleuze and Guattari's ideas such as
assemblage, immanence, the rhizome and the body without organs do not invoke
static theoretical concept-objects in the traditional sense, as much as a tool
kit, itself both pragmatic and ephemeral, taking lines of flight and thought
and in so doing deterritorialising the toolkit into thought/earth spaces which
are then again retterritorialised into different forms and processes. Good
psychotherapy is all about process, not about 'Truth' and rigidified thought,
recalling Bion's negative capability involved in bearing uncertainty while
conducting psychoanalysis without memory or desire, and Winnicott's conception
of psychotherapy as a highly specialized form of playing. Ecopsychoanalysis
takes seriously the challenge of ecopsychology, and its call for us to move
beyond the narcissism of anthropocentrism in our thought and therapeutic
practice.
The problem with traditional ideas of ecology as it is defined within
positivistic parameters, is that it seeks the linear and structured processes
of known causal relations amongst things. The complexity of the natural world,
its unpredictable, fractal, and vital nature is
sterilised under a lens, the gaze of the scientist is only allowed to
see in particular ways, hence the need for nonlinear approaches has been most
strongly felt in the field of ecology. Couple this up with the quasi science of
mainstream psychology, which deadens off subjectivity and affectivity in all
sorts of ways in order for it to become known and understood and we have an
unfolding disaster of thinking. Bateson told us that we are making lake Erie
insane with our thinking (Bateson 2000), and that we need a new way to envisage
the ecology of mind. Hence the central claim of the field of ecopsychology,
which Dodds engages with constructively even while criticizing its unreflective
assumptions and idealizations, that 'ecology needs psychology, psychology needs
ecology' (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner 1995). This linking of thought to the
Earth is also strongly present in the work of Bateson, as well as Deleuze and
Guattari. Here, earth and mind are intertwined, folding back on one another in
a multiplicity of assemblages, becomings and lines of flight. Nature becomes
something both reassuring and terrifying, that ambivalent uncanny terrain that
psychoanalysis, despite all its faults, has made its own.
In Dodds' strange ecology, thought and
earth move together, become destabilized together, flow and erupt, thought becomes
multiplicity and is heterogeneous. By conjoining geophilosophy with complexity
theory, the book helps to develop the potentials in both, providing the
philosophy we need to help us think through the implications of this new form
of nomadic nonlinear science, and the science to develop the intuitive leaps
generated by philosophy. This creates the conceptual framework Dodds needs to
dislocate psychoanalysis, providing a new unheimlich home in which
psychoanalysis can think through what Dodds calls the ecology of phantasy.
The next ten years
are central to moving forward towards new forms of interdisciplinary writing
and research, and ultimately new forms of relatedness to the earth. The complex
interdependent web that climate change sets up between the three ecologies of
mind, nature and society, demands that we start be able to think, feel and act
in more ecologically complex forms. Ecopsychoanalysis calls on us to start
thinking at the precipice. We need to start being able to bear the ecological
thought and to re-vision the world and ourselves in nonlinear ways, mirroring
the strange ecology that swirls around us and threatens to destroy us, but
which, with all its beautiful complexity and chaos can, just perhaps, show us
the way out.
- Martin Jordan, Brighton,
England, December 2010
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