Environmental Melancholia

Psychoanalytic dimensions of engagement

Renee Lertzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317916932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In this groundbreaking book, Renee Lertzman applies psychoanalytic theory and psychosocial research to the issue of public engagement and public apathy in response to chronic ecological threats. By highlighting unconscious and affective dimensions of contemporary ecological issues, Lertzman deconstructs the idea that there is a gap between what people care about and what is actually carried out in policy and personal practice. In doing so, she presents an innovative way to think about and design engagement practices and policy interventions.

Based on key qualitative fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted in Green Bay, Wisconsin, each chapter provides a psychosocial, psychoanalytic perspective on subjectivity, affect and identity, and considers what this means for understanding behaviour in relation to environmental crises and climate change. The book argues for a theory of environmental melancholia that accounts for the ways in which people experience profound loss and disruption caused by environmental issues, and yet may have trouble expressing or making sense of such experiences.

Environmental Melancholia offers a fresh perspective to the field of environmental psychology that until now has been largely dominated by research in cognitive, behavioural and social psychology. It will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and sustainability, as well as policy makers and educators internationally.

Part I
Why psychoanalysis matters

Chapter 1
Introduction

Fox River, January 2008. (Photo: Ned Dorff.)

We lived right on the river. I have a tendency to be emotionally attached to the seasons as far as the river goes. I will, when the springtime comes, I will be in a better mood, when I see the river ice is off. When it’s open. Because it opens from the center out, and that was, an old girlfriend told me that. She says, you know how much happier you get when the river is open? I know when you have seen the river is open, because you are in such a better mood. And I’m like, oh, that would make sense … I never been one to think it’s better in some other place than what is here. Because I think it’s got a lot of great things around here.

– Howard, Interview 1

Over the past two decades, working as an environmental communications professional across government, public and private sectors, the question of how to mobilize the public to effective environmental action has been ever present. It is often articulated differently according to campaign or initiative, but the underlying assumption that people do not care enough to act remains the same. So the quandary persists: how do we motivate people to care more? Nonetheless, to date, no sector has produced an effective method for changing people’s behaviour toward environmental conservation, protection and restoration. This study, therefore, begins with an alternative premise for framing this foundational problem. Rather than trying to motivate and inspire people to act, which sets us up to push against a tide and which frames our work as persuasion, I take as a starting point that people already care a lot but may be caught up in complicated dilemmas or ‘tangles’ that make action hard to take. Thus, our job becomes recognizing the care and concern that exists and creating conditions to optimally support the expression of such care. As Aldo Leopold has written, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” (Leopold, 1949). Psychoanalytic insight combined with psychosocial research offers us this capacity and set of tools.

In this book, I propose that there are vast reserves of creative potential for addressing ecological challenges but that they are ‘tied up’ in complex psychic negotiations. Rather than positing a gap between affect and environmental action, I show how unconscious processes, such as ambivalence, loss, overwhelm and sorrow are missing factors in much of environmental communications, advocacy and campaign work. Moreover, the assumption that what people care about will naturally translate into actions is erroneous. On the contrary, studies show that how much we may care about something does not necessarily translate into our actions, particularly in the newly emerging behavioral change fixation (Pink, 2011; Heath & Heath, 2010; Kahnemann, 2011). Furthermore, underlying drivers of behavior are not isolated to the individual. We produce, share and co-construct our unconscious negotiations of highly charged issues through our conversations, stories, advertising, intimate dialogues and public media discourses (Norgaard, 2011; Lertzman, 2012b; Shove, 2010; Kahan, 2009; Billig, 2002).

A critical place to start is by investigating how loss and mourning, when unattended to and unresolved, contribute to what I call environmental melancholia. Environmental melancholia is a condition in which even those who care deeply about the well-being of ecosystems and future generations are paralyzed to translate such concern into action. Applying psychoanalytic understandings of the workings of ambivalence and loss can be one of our greatest resources when examining environmental engagement and reparation. This may seem counterintuitive because emotions like sadness, loss or despair are often seen as antithetical to fostering environmental advocacy and political action in general. In fact, environmental educators and advocates often worry that people will become immobilized by despair and are consequently often torn between transmitting the ‘real story’ to people or inspiring them through an array of solutions. In a climate increasingly fixated on discourses of hope, we tend to avoid difficult emotions and instead provide people with possible solutions and feel-good stories. However, psychoanalytic thought recognizes that ambivalence, loss and anxiety can impede our capacities for concern and repair. Rather than an exclusive focus on solutions, a psychoanalytic approach views loss and ambivalence as psychosocial ‘achievements’ not to be avoided but integrated for more authentic modes of engagement with a dynamic, uncertain world. This includes our collective capacities for generating the solutions needed. However, we must begin with the fundamental recognition of how ecological threats, including climate change, occasion unprecedented psychological and social tensions, conflicts and emotions.

A psychoanalytically inspired orientation to subjectivity and human experience addresses (and presumes) the capacity to tolerate multiple, competing desires, drives and wishes. This suggests by implication that any attempt to understand how people are making sense of ecological crises must take into account the probable misalignment between values and actions. To label mis-alignments as a ‘gap’ both perpetuates a myth of individual action devoid of social influence and perpetuates a (unitary) rational actor model of subjectivity. Based on decades of clinical practice and research, psychoanalytic thought offers a nuanced lens into how actual and anticipatory loss is managed and how individuals often defend against such loss by retreating into denial, projection and other related defense mechanisms. I argue that such topics clearly map onto contemporary environmental engagement and communications practices.

Environmental melancholia

Ecological degradation poses profound implications for all life on earth. Despite warnings from specialists and the tireless efforts of environmental organizations, a lack of engagement commensurate with the threats we face remains. Whether the focus is on political will, neurological circuits or consumer behaviour, theories regarding why humans are slow to respond to ecological problems abound. One of the most prevalent suggests that the greatest barrier to engagement with ecological threats is a lack of concern, care or interest. “People just can’t be bothered” is a phrase often heard in environmental advocacy circles.

This book is an argument against this common line of thinking and instead claims that most people care very deeply about the quality of life on the planet and the desire for future generations to enjoy a vital world. It argues this by showing that what people care about does not unproblematically translate into action. In fact, people can care a whole lot and still do very little because a deep sense of fear and anxiety underlie our concern for the future. And what we learn from psychoanalytic research and practice are the ways in which fear and anxiety can contribute to paralysis, defensive mechanisms such as denial, projection, splitting and dissociation. I argue that these insights are invaluable for our work in environmental communications, strategy, policy and engagement. For example, in specific regions like Green Bay where this study takes place, social identities emerge from industrial practices. Our economic stability and livelihoods, our cars, clothes, homes and food depend upon a largely environmentally degrading industry. A psychosocial approach – in contrast to a focus on values, attitudes or beliefs – addresses how people manage and negotiate conflicts, particularly concerning the things that matter most and which may be viewed as threatened. The question is not about a ‘lack of care’ but rather, as I explore in my interviews, where does the care or concern go? How it is channelled and expressed? Where does it live inside of us? In so doing, this inquiry sheds light on a complex and arguably richer picture than a myth of apathy can provide. This helps illuminate and deconstruct denial, political polarization and avoidance of coming to terms with how humans have severely impacted the planet – and what steps are required to restore, repair and create new futures. Coming to terms with how these issues are experienced and lived is a fundamental reframe that a psychoanalytic and psychosocial orientation can offer and arguably vastly expands our field of inquiry, investigation and what is knowable about the human engagement with our ecologically degraded world and selves.

What follows is an account of my exploration of these affective dimensions and how focusing the inquiry on sites of conflict, confusion, incoherence and inchoate loss can reframe how we understand environmental engagement (and the lack thereof). The study investigates how people may care deeply about the planet and its precious places, lakes and rivers, about the quality of air, forests and oceans, as well as about the other beings with whom we share such places, yet find themselves unable to act on this care and concern. I begin by rethinking certain assumptions about human subjectivity and foreground our capacity for contradiction and ambivalence, as well as our capacity for profound reparation when we access our creative engagement with our world.

This book argues that in order to facilitate a viable, pragmatic politics of environmental advocacy, complicated psychological dimensions of contemporary industrial environmental issues must be attended to. This requires a willingness to interrogate the ways in which unconscious processes animate and inform our capacities for engaging with ecological threats. It also positions environmental engagement as a dynamic, often messy process of negotiating dilemmas, concerning how we constitute our everyday practices. In other words, engagement is not merely about how to get people excited about joining a green team or making ecologically friendly consumer choices. It is the character, texture and quality of how we choose to make contact with the awareness and implications of our industrial practices and how we negotiate our own deep investments in such practices. Engagement is about how we experience our own interrelationships in systems, including those we may not want to be a part of. I assert that inquiring into how such dilemmas are ‘made sense of’ is politically necessary, rather than a luxury reserved for the clinical consulting room or ecopsychology workshop. I would go so far as to say that separating psychological dimensions from environmental advocacy severely cripples our capacities for coherent and integrative environmental engagement and restorative practices (Searles, 1960, p. 4). To maintain such a separation is to participate in a fantasy that we can somehow evacuate the messy realms of human subjectivity from how we engage with ecological contexts. It also suggests a steadfast loyalty to the economic ‘rational actor model’ – long debunked – that presumes people change their behaviour based on facts, information and data.

The concept of environmental melancholia is inspired by Freud’s work on unresolved mourning (1917). It explores engagement through the lens of melancholia, wherein one may be ‘frozen’ or otherwise arrested due to lack of acknowledgement or recognition of what has been lost. In contrast to losing a person, for example, environmental loss can be far more amorphous, particularly in a culture that does not recognize it as valid.¹ Further, environmental loss can be “anticipatory” (Randall, 2009), insofar as we are mourning for loss that is likely to come. In this state, we may not have as full access to our capacities to engage proactively to restore, protect or repair and may find ourselves in a form of perpetual, unresolved mourning.

This book is based on research, based on in-depth interviews, conducted in 2006–2007 on the affective dimensions of environmental degradation among people living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the Great Lakes region of the United States. My focus was on understanding how local environmental issues, specifically relating to the waters of Green Bay as a tributary to the Great lakes, are experienced by those who may appear apathetic based on their relative lack of engagement with environmental issues. I explored how people emotionally responded to these issues. Did they feel anxious and concerned, or did they actually not care? Why were they not more involved in local efforts to protect, restore and repair the lakes and rivers?

I explored these issues from a perspective different from the ‘attitude-value gap’ discourse that focuses on the so-called disconnect between what people say and what they do. I also moved away from the concept of ‘barriers’ so prevalent in environmental research and communities of practice. Rather than presuming a barrier or lack of something intrinsic, I instead to pursued an investigation into what is present or even in surplus (Lertzman, 2008a; Lertzman, 2012a). This inquiry was based on my own long-standing fascination with psychoanalytic theory, my commitment to qualitative psychosocial research and the sense that environmental studies and psychoanalysis are not as disparate as one may presume. As I shall discuss, from a psychoanalytic perspective, there are no ‘gaps’ between knowing and doing or between valuing and acting because we are conflicted beings with high capacity for contradiction. Rather, the focus is on how conflicts and dilemmas are negotiated, made sense of, socially supported and ‘worked through’ towards greater alignment and behavioural changes.

Psychoanalysis and environmental advocacy have some striking things in common; for example, both are keenly concerned with the concept and practice of reparation – that is, to repair, to heal, to fix. However, how reparation is taken up and engaged across these spheres is quite different. For example, whereas the psychoanalyst may be concerned with unconscious and often painful processes involved in capacities for reparation, an environmental advocate may be more concerned with the quickest and most effective way for finding solutions (see Lertzman, 2012b; Randall, 2009; Weintrobe, 2013; Dodds, 2011). While this assessment is a bit crude, how reparation is engaged across these disparate disciplines is contrasting – but also complementary. Activists’ tendency for antagonism towards psychoanalytic modes of inquiry and reflection as a luxury must be tempered so that both modes can be seen as integral for a more effective environmental movement (Ward, 1993). I would go so far as to say that separating psychic dimensions from the environmental, and vice versa, severely cripples our capacities for coherent and integrative environmental response and restorative practices. To maintain such a separation inaccurately produces a partial psychoanalysis that historically ignores the biotic relations in which we are all embedded.

The concept of environmental melancholia presented in this book is premised upon the assertion that environmental threats involve a potential dissolution of traditionally held certainties, such as the availability of clean and fresh water, healthy soil and biodiversity. In this sense, environmental issues are situated as ontological issues that rupture our ground of being (Lifton, 1979; Nicholsen, 2009; Lertzman, 2008b). Dep...