ABSTRACT
Perhaps many psychoanalysts know the climate crisis better than I have done until recently. As a young backpacker, I came to love the forests, streams, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and to feel strip mining and clearcutting forestry as travesties. But I saw environmental devastation as something other people committed, and kept trekking, no, driving innocently along through life. Even when Al Gore worked so hard just after the century’s turn to convince us of the “inconvenient truth,” his message didn’t really penetrate or change the lives of many of us who spend our lives working with unconsciousness. Now it is nearly too late, and we must listen at our peril. But we listen backward: not only analyzing the unconsciousness: splitting, disavowal, melancholia (Lertzman, 2015), but also as in the biblical saying, and unlike most psychoanalysis, we reverse the listening sequence: “We will do, and we will hear,” in that order. This chapter begins to explain what we need to learn scientifically and to consider psychoanalytically, even while we start to act ethically. Justice allows us no time to evade at psychoanalytic conferences-where we meet in luxurious hotels in cities full of homeless people-or to theorize at leisure. Our brothers and sisters are starving, drowning and burning while we dispute. But 60 million refugees in the year 2015, together with tornadoes and floods, may reset the alarm clock.
