The International Journal of Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95:369–374
doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12185
Letter to the Editor On: Covington C (2013). Thinking about climate change: A review essay on Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives In: Weintrobe S, editor. London: Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis Beyond the Couch Series). Int J Psychoanal 95: 176–80
Dear Editors, It is required that Covington be responsible for giving a fair and accurate account in what she says about Weintrobe, S (2012) editor. Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. While she does outline some of the ideas in the book, there are places where she oversimplifies the argument and places where she runs the risk of putting forward ideas without giving the book’s authors credit for them. Indeed she hardly mentions most of the 23 contributors. Her understanding of the problem of climate change seems different from that of the book’s authors and indeed different from the climate science community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).1 This results in a slippage where the book and her review are not about the same subject. For Covington, climate change encompasses human-induced factors but also changes to the climate occurring over millennia.2 For the book climate change3 means historically recent global warming brought about by the rise in CO2e4 emissions caused mainly by our use of fossil fuels, and its effects. This meaning of climate change is accepted by world science, the IPCC and the authors of the book. Climate change, unless acted upon right now, will have serious consequences for current and future generations. A chapter in the book on the science by climate scientist Stephan Harrison (2012) usefully distinguishes for a lay readership what scientists are more certain (in a scientific sense) about and what they are less certain about. They are more certain that human-caused global warming is happening and less certain about modelling its effects. So far, climate scientists have underestimated the effects.5 This may well be because they, like politicians and the rest of us, are tending to disavow the seriousness of climate change.6 1
See http://www.ipcc.ch for the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report that came out in November 2013.
2
This is also a position taken by various climate change denialists.
3
Strictly speaking, ‘global warming’ refers to the long-term trend of a rising average global temperature and ‘climate change’ refers to the changes in the global climate which result from the increasing average global temperature. However, the two terms tend nowadays to be used interchangeably. For a discussion, see http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm 4
CO2e. e stands for equivalents, i.e. CO2e means greenhouse gases.
5
See, for instance, Stern (2013), Hansen (2009).
6
See Kevin Anderson on Swedish TV on this subject. He is Professor of Energy and Climate Change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester: http://www.svtplay.se/video/1480596/del-23 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
370
Covington says: Despite our optimism (that we will find new solutions to dwindling resources and new energy sources) we still have to accept that our environment is changing in ways we cannot control and can only partly predict, regardless of our own impact on this process. And, ultimately climate change makes us consider that the earth is on a trajectory that will absolutely and with certainty end in its death, albeit in multi-billions of years’ time, coinciding with the sun’s implosion. The exploration of planets that may sustain other forms of life in our universe is certainly driven by some collective awareness that we will most likely need to move on to greener pastures at some point in the future.
Here she vividly describes a way of thinking I have encountered in talking to some people, but the big issue – our own impact on the climate – appears minimized in her account. Climate change, if we take it seriously, does not “make us consider that the earth is on a trajectory that will . . . end in its death . . . in multibillions of years’ time”. It makes us consider that time is of the essence and emissions reductions need to happen in the short term. Indeed, if we do not confront our current levels of disavowal about climate change it may be rather Pollyannaish to be thinking about greener future pastures at all. One reason it matters that Covington uses climate change in this different sense is that it shifts the time-scale in such a way that the problem appears to need not to be taken so seriously; its urgency tends to disappear. Covington says: We have only partial control over the earth’s climate, sharing this with much more potent natural forces that could as easily bail us out as put us in a far worse bind. This is what is most difficult for us to accept and hardly referred to by the authors. By focusing so much on our destructiveness, is this a way of attempting to regain some illusion that we have more control over our environment than we actually do? If only we weren’t so destructive, then we wouldn’t be in such a pickle?
I would doubt any of the authors in the book would harbour illusions of control about the climate. However, humans are now the main contributors to the enhanced Greenhouse Effect. Anyone seriously disputing this is out of step with world science. Covington’s sights are set on other horizons than the book’s authors who remain focused on the problem of human-caused rising emissions in the short term and how to engage with this in the current political and cultural climate. Here is an example where Covington runs the risk of not giving credit for points she raises. She says: One of the pitfalls of arguing for recognition of climate change is that nature itself becomes romanticized. Humans are demonized while nature is the innocent victim that must be protected and is without its own destructiveness. In her essay, On the love of nature and on human nature, Weintrobe claims: ‘As children, we love nature spontaneously, naturally and fiercely, with our bodies, all our senses and with an engaging curiosity. Nature seems not yet to have lost the quality of a ‘there-ness’
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
371
that greets one. . .’ (p. 201). As a child, . . . I loved my family’s garden . . .. (but) my most vivid memories are of seeing the bloodied body of a man rescued from the ocean . . ., of seeing the after-effects of hurricanes. . ., Although I enjoyed nature’s fruits, I was also terrified of its destructive power.
Here is what I say immediately before the paragraph Covington quotes from page 201 of my essay (Weintrobe, 2012a): Genuine (non-idealized) love (of nature) is based on being able to tolerate very ambivalent feelings. Our ambivalence includes our mixed feelings towards a nature that can fill us with love, awe us with its beauty, terrify us with its power and cause us much discomfort. We can have feelings of hatred as well as love for nature. I suggest the deepest source of our ambivalence towards nature is that it gives us life but also brings death. Freud (1913a), with his characteristic courage to face that which fills us with dread, noted the problem of feeling grateful towards a Mother Earth that gives us life and then takes it away.
Mine is hardly a romantic view. Now, Covington is not exactly saying that I am romanticizing nature and that she is putting a corrected unromanticized view. But she does encourage this possible impression. And, what I say is very similar indeed to some of what she says, but she does not reference that. Returning to Freud’s point about dread, climate change can fill us with dread and anxieties about survival, causing us potentially to veer between feeling hopeless and having an unreal sense of optimism. Psychoanalysts who have some understanding of these anxieties and defences are perhaps in a position to offer a form of containing small-scale leadership in these circumstances. On the subject of leaders, Covington says: There is nevertheless a repeated call throughout the essays for better leaders. Irma Brenman Pick argues that we need “realistic ‘parental’ leadership” when we feel vulnerable and helpless. Why is this so hard to come by?” (p. 137). But is it? Or are Pick and others at risk of idealizing the role of leaders? Pick fails to link the perceived failure of leadership to the very same unconscious dynamics that affect the politics of climate change, as if these are separate phenomenon. Even the most able leaders are subject to political and social forces beyond their control. Ironically, by reducing the problem of climate change to leadership, these essays highlight how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors.
Covington is clearly critical of the book’s discussion of the role of leaders. Criticism one takes on the chin. But there are a number of misconceptions in this paragraph. The largest is Covington’s suggestion that the book reduces the problem of climate change to leadership. It does not. This is a heavily reductionist reading of the book. Brenman Pick explores the theme of rapaciousness without responsibility. She notes we may choose leaders who embody this split-off part of ourselves. She says: Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Letter to the Editor
372
Do we at some level put or keep in place ‘leaders’ . . . also to carry both our unacknowledged moral self-righteousness and our greed – that is to say, to carry parts of ourselves that we find unmanageable, and which we cannot bear to acknowledge? And, because our ‘leaders’ carry split-off, unacknowledged parts of ourselves, we may become excessively vulnerable to their machinations and helpless to deal with their excesses, just as we were unable in the first place to deal with our own. (2012, p. 137).
Keene (2012), an author in the book, also discusses the way in which leaders may serve the function of carrying for us unacknowledged parts of ourselves (p. 149). And, he goes into ways that with the best will in the world leaders may get caught up in unconscious group dynamics (p. 150). I draw attention to the danger of idealizing leaders and also the danger of leaders believing that the led expect them to be ideal and may think therefore their job is to spare them pain rather than help them face reality. (I look at this in relation to the problem that our leaders are not talking to us squarely about climate change or acting on it). Steiner, another of the books contributing authors, in a discussion of a paper by Hoggett, quotes Monbiot (2010) on leadership: “We indulged in a fantasy of benign paternalistic power . . . that, . . . decent people would take care of us. They won’t” (2012, p. 80). Several authors in the book do raise the importance of having good enough leadership to tackle climate change and help people face painful change (see Brenman Pick, 2012, p. 136; Randall, 2012; Keene, Lehtonen and Valimaki, 2012; Weintrobe, 2012b), a different issue to authors having idealized expectations of leaders. If Covington wants to assert that some of the authors are in an idealizing frame of mind, she needs to give the evidence. The book goes into the issue of misplaced idealized expectations of leaders and Covington does not acknowledge the work by the authors on this subject. Authors in the book recognize that leaders are subject to the same unconscious factors as the rest of us (for a nuanced discussion of this see in particular the chapters by Keene, and by Hoggett (2012) on how our disavowal takes shape within a perverse culture of disavowal). The issue that leaders are subject to political and social forces beyond their control is raised by Keene in particular, and Hamilton gives a powerful analysis of how the evidence from science on climate change “threatens the existence of powerful industrialists, compels governments to choose between adhering to science and remaining in power . . . and shatters the post colonial growth consensus between North and South” (2012, p. 18). At the Radical Emissions Reduction Conference (RERC) held at the Royal Society in London in December 2013 climate scientists, experts in transport, shipping and energy, economists, lawyers, journalists, sociologists7, psychologists and more, from the UK and around the world by video link, all said the same thing: we can achieve the carbon reductions we need 7
Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and one of the book’s authors, was a speaker at RERC.
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
373
to avert climate catastrophe. We already have the technical knowhow and the means. It must be done right now. This is how it can be done, across all areas. It will be very difficult. But of course knowing something can be done is not the same as that it will be done. The issue is psychological will, and here psychoanalysis does have insights to add to the insights of other disciplines in the human sciences to further our understanding. Covington ends by saying: ‘Ironically, by reducing the problem of climate change to leadership, these essays highlight how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors. Do we now need a follow-up volume to ask what psychoanalysis can learn from other disciplines in order to think together about this question and the question of what to do in greater depth?’ As already said, Engaging with Climate Change does not reduce the problem of climate change to leadership. Do the essays show “how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors”? But, the essays do not seek to encompass them. As I say in the preface: In inviting these particular authors to contribute, I was inspired by two beliefs: first, that psychoanalysis has an important contribution to make towards understanding people’s engagement with climate change and, second, that an interdisciplinary exchange is vital to further this understanding.
I hope analytic colleagues will read the book and contribute their ideas to an area where we have much to contribute. Sally Weintrobe Institute of Psychoanalysis, 112a Shirland Road, London, W9 2EQ, UK E-mail: [email protected]
References Brenman Pick I (2012). Not I: A discussion of ‘The myth of apathy: Psychoanalytic explorations of environmental subjectivity’ by Lertzman R. In: Weintrobe S, editor. Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Covington C (2013).Thinking about climate change: A review essay on Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, Weintrobe S, editor. Int J Psychoanal 95: 176–80. Freud S (1913). The theme of the three caskets. SE, 301. Hamilton C (2012). History and climate change denial. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 18. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Hansen J (2009). Storms of my grandchildren. London: Bloomsbury. Harrison S (2012). Climate change, uncertainty and risk. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 228. Hoggett P (2012). Climate change in a perverse culture. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 58. Keene J (2012). Unconscious obstacles to caring for the planet: Facing up to human nature. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.)
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
374
Letter to the Editor
Lehtonen J, Valimaki J (2012). Discussion of the difficult problem of anxiety. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 51. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Monbiot G (2010). Climate change: It was fun while it lasted. Available from: http://www.guardian.co. uk/commentisfree/2012/20/sep/climate-change-negotiations-failure Randall R (2012). Great expectations: The psychodynamics of ecological debt. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 100. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Steiner J (2012). A discussion of climate change in a perverse culture by Hoggett. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 80. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Stern N (2013). I got it wrong on climate change. It’s far, far worse. Available from: http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos Weintrobe S (2012a). On the love of nature and on human nature. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 201. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Weintrobe S (2012b). The difficult problem of anxiety in thinking about climate change. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 45. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.)
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12185
Letter to the Editor On: Covington C (2013). Thinking about climate change: A review essay on Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives In: Weintrobe S, editor. London: Routledge (New Library of Psychoanalysis Beyond the Couch Series). Int J Psychoanal 95: 176–80
Dear Editors, It is required that Covington be responsible for giving a fair and accurate account in what she says about Weintrobe, S (2012) editor. Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. While she does outline some of the ideas in the book, there are places where she oversimplifies the argument and places where she runs the risk of putting forward ideas without giving the book’s authors credit for them. Indeed she hardly mentions most of the 23 contributors. Her understanding of the problem of climate change seems different from that of the book’s authors and indeed different from the climate science community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).1 This results in a slippage where the book and her review are not about the same subject. For Covington, climate change encompasses human-induced factors but also changes to the climate occurring over millennia.2 For the book climate change3 means historically recent global warming brought about by the rise in CO2e4 emissions caused mainly by our use of fossil fuels, and its effects. This meaning of climate change is accepted by world science, the IPCC and the authors of the book. Climate change, unless acted upon right now, will have serious consequences for current and future generations. A chapter in the book on the science by climate scientist Stephan Harrison (2012) usefully distinguishes for a lay readership what scientists are more certain (in a scientific sense) about and what they are less certain about. They are more certain that human-caused global warming is happening and less certain about modelling its effects. So far, climate scientists have underestimated the effects.5 This may well be because they, like politicians and the rest of us, are tending to disavow the seriousness of climate change.6 1
See http://www.ipcc.ch for the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report that came out in November 2013.
2
This is also a position taken by various climate change denialists.
3
Strictly speaking, ‘global warming’ refers to the long-term trend of a rising average global temperature and ‘climate change’ refers to the changes in the global climate which result from the increasing average global temperature. However, the two terms tend nowadays to be used interchangeably. For a discussion, see http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm 4
CO2e. e stands for equivalents, i.e. CO2e means greenhouse gases.
5
See, for instance, Stern (2013), Hansen (2009).
6
See Kevin Anderson on Swedish TV on this subject. He is Professor of Energy and Climate Change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester: http://www.svtplay.se/video/1480596/del-23 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
370
Covington says: Despite our optimism (that we will find new solutions to dwindling resources and new energy sources) we still have to accept that our environment is changing in ways we cannot control and can only partly predict, regardless of our own impact on this process. And, ultimately climate change makes us consider that the earth is on a trajectory that will absolutely and with certainty end in its death, albeit in multi-billions of years’ time, coinciding with the sun’s implosion. The exploration of planets that may sustain other forms of life in our universe is certainly driven by some collective awareness that we will most likely need to move on to greener pastures at some point in the future.
Here she vividly describes a way of thinking I have encountered in talking to some people, but the big issue – our own impact on the climate – appears minimized in her account. Climate change, if we take it seriously, does not “make us consider that the earth is on a trajectory that will . . . end in its death . . . in multibillions of years’ time”. It makes us consider that time is of the essence and emissions reductions need to happen in the short term. Indeed, if we do not confront our current levels of disavowal about climate change it may be rather Pollyannaish to be thinking about greener future pastures at all. One reason it matters that Covington uses climate change in this different sense is that it shifts the time-scale in such a way that the problem appears to need not to be taken so seriously; its urgency tends to disappear. Covington says: We have only partial control over the earth’s climate, sharing this with much more potent natural forces that could as easily bail us out as put us in a far worse bind. This is what is most difficult for us to accept and hardly referred to by the authors. By focusing so much on our destructiveness, is this a way of attempting to regain some illusion that we have more control over our environment than we actually do? If only we weren’t so destructive, then we wouldn’t be in such a pickle?
I would doubt any of the authors in the book would harbour illusions of control about the climate. However, humans are now the main contributors to the enhanced Greenhouse Effect. Anyone seriously disputing this is out of step with world science. Covington’s sights are set on other horizons than the book’s authors who remain focused on the problem of human-caused rising emissions in the short term and how to engage with this in the current political and cultural climate. Here is an example where Covington runs the risk of not giving credit for points she raises. She says: One of the pitfalls of arguing for recognition of climate change is that nature itself becomes romanticized. Humans are demonized while nature is the innocent victim that must be protected and is without its own destructiveness. In her essay, On the love of nature and on human nature, Weintrobe claims: ‘As children, we love nature spontaneously, naturally and fiercely, with our bodies, all our senses and with an engaging curiosity. Nature seems not yet to have lost the quality of a ‘there-ness’
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
371
that greets one. . .’ (p. 201). As a child, . . . I loved my family’s garden . . .. (but) my most vivid memories are of seeing the bloodied body of a man rescued from the ocean . . ., of seeing the after-effects of hurricanes. . ., Although I enjoyed nature’s fruits, I was also terrified of its destructive power.
Here is what I say immediately before the paragraph Covington quotes from page 201 of my essay (Weintrobe, 2012a): Genuine (non-idealized) love (of nature) is based on being able to tolerate very ambivalent feelings. Our ambivalence includes our mixed feelings towards a nature that can fill us with love, awe us with its beauty, terrify us with its power and cause us much discomfort. We can have feelings of hatred as well as love for nature. I suggest the deepest source of our ambivalence towards nature is that it gives us life but also brings death. Freud (1913a), with his characteristic courage to face that which fills us with dread, noted the problem of feeling grateful towards a Mother Earth that gives us life and then takes it away.
Mine is hardly a romantic view. Now, Covington is not exactly saying that I am romanticizing nature and that she is putting a corrected unromanticized view. But she does encourage this possible impression. And, what I say is very similar indeed to some of what she says, but she does not reference that. Returning to Freud’s point about dread, climate change can fill us with dread and anxieties about survival, causing us potentially to veer between feeling hopeless and having an unreal sense of optimism. Psychoanalysts who have some understanding of these anxieties and defences are perhaps in a position to offer a form of containing small-scale leadership in these circumstances. On the subject of leaders, Covington says: There is nevertheless a repeated call throughout the essays for better leaders. Irma Brenman Pick argues that we need “realistic ‘parental’ leadership” when we feel vulnerable and helpless. Why is this so hard to come by?” (p. 137). But is it? Or are Pick and others at risk of idealizing the role of leaders? Pick fails to link the perceived failure of leadership to the very same unconscious dynamics that affect the politics of climate change, as if these are separate phenomenon. Even the most able leaders are subject to political and social forces beyond their control. Ironically, by reducing the problem of climate change to leadership, these essays highlight how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors.
Covington is clearly critical of the book’s discussion of the role of leaders. Criticism one takes on the chin. But there are a number of misconceptions in this paragraph. The largest is Covington’s suggestion that the book reduces the problem of climate change to leadership. It does not. This is a heavily reductionist reading of the book. Brenman Pick explores the theme of rapaciousness without responsibility. She notes we may choose leaders who embody this split-off part of ourselves. She says: Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Letter to the Editor
372
Do we at some level put or keep in place ‘leaders’ . . . also to carry both our unacknowledged moral self-righteousness and our greed – that is to say, to carry parts of ourselves that we find unmanageable, and which we cannot bear to acknowledge? And, because our ‘leaders’ carry split-off, unacknowledged parts of ourselves, we may become excessively vulnerable to their machinations and helpless to deal with their excesses, just as we were unable in the first place to deal with our own. (2012, p. 137).
Keene (2012), an author in the book, also discusses the way in which leaders may serve the function of carrying for us unacknowledged parts of ourselves (p. 149). And, he goes into ways that with the best will in the world leaders may get caught up in unconscious group dynamics (p. 150). I draw attention to the danger of idealizing leaders and also the danger of leaders believing that the led expect them to be ideal and may think therefore their job is to spare them pain rather than help them face reality. (I look at this in relation to the problem that our leaders are not talking to us squarely about climate change or acting on it). Steiner, another of the books contributing authors, in a discussion of a paper by Hoggett, quotes Monbiot (2010) on leadership: “We indulged in a fantasy of benign paternalistic power . . . that, . . . decent people would take care of us. They won’t” (2012, p. 80). Several authors in the book do raise the importance of having good enough leadership to tackle climate change and help people face painful change (see Brenman Pick, 2012, p. 136; Randall, 2012; Keene, Lehtonen and Valimaki, 2012; Weintrobe, 2012b), a different issue to authors having idealized expectations of leaders. If Covington wants to assert that some of the authors are in an idealizing frame of mind, she needs to give the evidence. The book goes into the issue of misplaced idealized expectations of leaders and Covington does not acknowledge the work by the authors on this subject. Authors in the book recognize that leaders are subject to the same unconscious factors as the rest of us (for a nuanced discussion of this see in particular the chapters by Keene, and by Hoggett (2012) on how our disavowal takes shape within a perverse culture of disavowal). The issue that leaders are subject to political and social forces beyond their control is raised by Keene in particular, and Hamilton gives a powerful analysis of how the evidence from science on climate change “threatens the existence of powerful industrialists, compels governments to choose between adhering to science and remaining in power . . . and shatters the post colonial growth consensus between North and South” (2012, p. 18). At the Radical Emissions Reduction Conference (RERC) held at the Royal Society in London in December 2013 climate scientists, experts in transport, shipping and energy, economists, lawyers, journalists, sociologists7, psychologists and more, from the UK and around the world by video link, all said the same thing: we can achieve the carbon reductions we need 7
Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and one of the book’s authors, was a speaker at RERC.
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Letter to the Editor
373
to avert climate catastrophe. We already have the technical knowhow and the means. It must be done right now. This is how it can be done, across all areas. It will be very difficult. But of course knowing something can be done is not the same as that it will be done. The issue is psychological will, and here psychoanalysis does have insights to add to the insights of other disciplines in the human sciences to further our understanding. Covington ends by saying: ‘Ironically, by reducing the problem of climate change to leadership, these essays highlight how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors. Do we now need a follow-up volume to ask what psychoanalysis can learn from other disciplines in order to think together about this question and the question of what to do in greater depth?’ As already said, Engaging with Climate Change does not reduce the problem of climate change to leadership. Do the essays show “how limited our present psychoanalytic framework is in encompassing complex environmental factors”? But, the essays do not seek to encompass them. As I say in the preface: In inviting these particular authors to contribute, I was inspired by two beliefs: first, that psychoanalysis has an important contribution to make towards understanding people’s engagement with climate change and, second, that an interdisciplinary exchange is vital to further this understanding.
I hope analytic colleagues will read the book and contribute their ideas to an area where we have much to contribute. Sally Weintrobe Institute of Psychoanalysis, 112a Shirland Road, London, W9 2EQ, UK E-mail: [email protected]
References Brenman Pick I (2012). Not I: A discussion of ‘The myth of apathy: Psychoanalytic explorations of environmental subjectivity’ by Lertzman R. In: Weintrobe S, editor. Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Covington C (2013).Thinking about climate change: A review essay on Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, Weintrobe S, editor. Int J Psychoanal 95: 176–80. Freud S (1913). The theme of the three caskets. SE, 301. Hamilton C (2012). History and climate change denial. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 18. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Hansen J (2009). Storms of my grandchildren. London: Bloomsbury. Harrison S (2012). Climate change, uncertainty and risk. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 228. Hoggett P (2012). Climate change in a perverse culture. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 58. Keene J (2012). Unconscious obstacles to caring for the planet: Facing up to human nature. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.)
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
374
Letter to the Editor
Lehtonen J, Valimaki J (2012). Discussion of the difficult problem of anxiety. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 51. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Monbiot G (2010). Climate change: It was fun while it lasted. Available from: http://www.guardian.co. uk/commentisfree/2012/20/sep/climate-change-negotiations-failure Randall R (2012). Great expectations: The psychodynamics of ecological debt. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 100. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Steiner J (2012). A discussion of climate change in a perverse culture by Hoggett. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 80. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Stern N (2013). I got it wrong on climate change. It’s far, far worse. Available from: http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos Weintrobe S (2012a). On the love of nature and on human nature. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 201. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.) Weintrobe S (2012b). The difficult problem of anxiety in thinking about climate change. In: Weintrobe S, editor, Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives, 45. London: Routledge. (New Library of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Couch Series.)
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
