ABSTRACT
‘People don’t care. The public is apathetic. If people cared more, or understood the threats we face, they’d be doing more.’ We have all heard this refrain, in one form or another. I am reminded of Freud’s reflections when he wrote about the splitting of the ego, ‘I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and self-evident or as something entirely new and puzzling’ (Freud 1940: 275). On one level, apathy is familiar and commonplace, as a way of describing a lack of response or action commensurate with increasingly urgent ecological challenges we have been experiencing and face in the future. On another level, when we explore apathy through a psychoanalytic lens, the picture changes quite dramatically, and becomes altogether more complicated.
