Abstract
If any book was ever a group creation, this is. Four editors, all members of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and nearly 40 authors, many also CPA members, bring thoughts emerging from their own unique experience. Each resulting short chapter, totalling just under 300 pages, presents a different examination and a fresh perspective about our responsibilities and ethics as therapists vis à vis our patient clients, and our planet. The book is an unexpected page turner, at times overwhelming. This is not one of those books where the introduction is just fleshed out in the remainder.
There is an idea that in a well-functioning analytic group there would be contrasting if not conflicting views. Even though the authors are from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, there are no deniers of the climate crisis we are facing. Beginning to read, I had some trepidation, had noticed my grasping at reports of good news where, for example, animals were rescued from the brink of extinction, trees planted, carbon captured, and comforting myself with existential musings along the lines of “. . .how it is, life is tough, always has been”. In January 2023, I heard one of the editors, Judith Anderson, outgoing CPA Chair, in her talk to the FPC (Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling), the graduate body of the psychotherapy training institution, Westminster Pastoral Foundation who spoke of “functional dissociation” to account for the ability to carry on, to live in the face of devastation. As an inveterate dissociator, I latched onto this and wrote about it in Contexts (Fogel, 2023). There is no mention of functional dissociation in this book, no getting away, as stated in the introduction, from the reality of ‘our collective apathy and continued inaction’ and from the anxiety which many, especially young people, identify as related to climate change. I have been pulled, uncomfortably but not unhappily, out of my bubble. This is, at root, a book about action which not only questions the generally held reluctance in the therapy and especially psychoanalytic world, to act, but goes further to advocate that we must not, ethically, collude with avoiding facing the crisis we all are in. The contributors to this book demonstrate in a variety of ways how we therapists can think about and do that. ‘This book’, write the editors, ‘calls the profession to account’.
Most therapists now accept that racism must be introduced into the consulting room. Sex, money and death remain shy visitors. The effects of climate change, already showing themselves to be unavoidable, must be recognised as forming part of what patient clients present us with . . . and, it is argued, must be brought into the room.
The book is organised into five sections. I am sorry not to name all authors (the Introduction is comprehensive). ‘The Trouble We’re In’ begins with a climate scientist and activist pulling no punches in summarising the impact of climate change on the external world, noting how ‘climate denial requires coming to terms with climate grief’. The theme of grief weaves through the book. Another thread is the inequality of the impact of the crisis depending where in the world you live. Remaining chapters outline the impact on our internal worlds, consciously and unconsciously. This is a book about politics and ethics from the start.
In the opening paragraphs of the second section ‘Systemic Understandings’, Steffi Bednarek draws a broad arc across the roots of psychotherapy in a ‘capitalist, patriarchal and colonial Western culture’, over the loss of the ‘more-than-human-world’ (David Abram 1997) and of community and of the ‘Mythological and Cosmological’. The arc lands with Jung’s collective unconsciousness and Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ relationship. Ideas like theirs could and should, she argues, be made more central in dealing with the ‘deep rupture we have torn between us and the world’. The section continues with further examinations of the power structures which hem us in. Gareth Morgan outlines an alternative framework to conventional pathologizing of human suffering; Fredenburgh and Milner introduce Processwork which draws attention to the entire context of our lives and world . . . and work in the consulting room. The final chapter questions another assumption—parenthood—and tells the background of the powerful stories recorded in
The third—central—section, Becoming a Climate Aware Therapist’ lies at the heart of the book. Caroline Hickman describes the anxieties of children and young people who are growing up hearing that the world is collapsing. She coins the wonderful term, emotional biodiversity to help them understand their feelings, too often dismissed. Trudi Macagnino asserts therapy is an eco-psycho-social endeavour and ‘this collective trauma . . . the context in which we are working’. Paula Conway’s vivid clinical vignettes signal a way of listening out for the communications behind ‘Climate Silence’. Garret Barnwell presents a case study of a manic response to the climate crisis analysed through a Lacanian lens. Panu Pihkala’s chapter is a painstaking scrutiny of different types and dimensions of climate grief, ‘a rational response to the reality of climate breakdown’ to which he applies familiar theories of grief and bereavement before concluding with a poignant and useful summary of recommendations for ‘therapeutic encounters’. Tree Staunton closes this section with focus group research leading to changes in the way therapy trainings in the Humanistic and Integrative College of the UKCP are now required to demonstrate the recognition of our interdependence on our environment and the natural world. She offers more, about ‘me/not me’, the body and ‘embodied knowing’.
The final two sections are even more groupish in emphasizing the context of our lives and work. Kelvin Hall’s chapter, Zone of Encounter, opens ‘The Ecological Self’: ‘encounter’ with Nature and how therapy might foster ‘present moment experience’, drawing on the work of Stern, Kohut and others, to manage the loss of home, of a ‘lost realm’. Nick Totton takes therapy outdoors and proposes Rewilding Therapy to cope with the feelings generated by the ‘news of climate change’, and to play a role in creating a new culture of human partnership with the earth. In a parallel to the idea that our body signals dis-ease to us, Davenport sees climate catastrophes as communications from our beleaguered planet and talks of ‘Interior Rewilding’ to change attitudes and actions.
More variations on the relationship between inner and outer worlds lead on to the widening aperture of the final section, ‘Community and Social Approaches’, where chapters focus on areas and methods familiar to a group analytic outlook: social dreaming, climate cafés and how to understand the organizational challenges of climate scientists. Jo Hamilton’s workshops and research detail the sharing and processing of emotions related to climate change, notably grief. The book closes with Chris Robertson, former CPA Chair, drawing threads together. He describes CPA’s Through the Door workshops where practitioners explore and experience the ‘tension between psychological reflection and political action’ and ‘Practices for an Emergent Reality’. He speaks of ‘a collaborative journey of being-with . . .’ and of ‘. . . the personal and collective . . . cultural unconscious’.
Interspersed are the ‘Voices’ of mostly but not all, young people who recognise their climate anxiety and have sought help. They were asked what they hoped for from therapists. These brief authentic notes punctuate the chapters and lend the whole an unusual immediacy.
There is no mention of group analysis but this is a book which profoundly recognizes the interdependency between what is internal and external to all life forms. There is much mention of silos and bubbles nowadays; tribal dynamics are the bread and butter of group analysis. This book is an invitation— no, an appeal—to all therapists to join together with patients and clients, individually and in groups, to work out how to live in this changing world.
In the middle of writing this review, news came that Donna M. Orange, psychoanalyst and philosopher, was tragically killed in a cycling accident. A prolific author, including of Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), she wrote the forward to Being a Therapist and her work is referenced by many of its authors. She was a scholar of Emanuel Levinas (her Levinas Dictionary is due for publication in 2025) and shared his tenet that it is each of our responsibility to be ‘my other’s keeper’. It seems fitting to dedicate this piece to her.
