Depth Psychology and Climate Change

The Green Book

Dale Mathers, Dale Mathers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000264470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Jungian Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Depth Psychology and Climate Change offers a sensitive and insightful look at how ideas from depth psychology can move us beyond psychological overwhelm when facing the ecological disaster of climate change and its denial. Integrating ideas from disciplines including anthropology, politics, spirituality, mythology and philosophy, contributors consider how climate change affects psychological well-being and how we can place hope and radical uncertainty alongside rage and despair.

The book explores symbols of transformation, myths and futures; and is structured to encourage regular reflection. Each contributor brings their own perspective – green politics, change and loss, climate change denial, consumerism and our connection to nature – suggesting responses to mental suffering arising from an unstable and uncertain international outlook. They examine how subsequent changes in consciousness can develop.

This book will be essential reading for analytical psychologists, Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, as well as academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies. It will also be of great interest to academics and students of the politics and policy of climate change, anthropology, myth and symbolism and ecopsychology, and to anyone seeking a new perspective on the climate emergency.

Part I

Things as they are

Chapter 1

An open letter to Greta Thunberg

Ann Kutek

My fellow Earthlings, do not ask what the Earth can do for you – ask what you can do for the Earth

Dear Greta,

For your single mindedness and determination on behalf of our planet, thank you. There is something gloriously harmonious in your call to action over this emergency which has wakened so many people of your generation and older ones, too. Despite the complacency and outrageous pillage all around, you and your contemporaries can raise a smile, and that is to me a sign of hope.

As I write to you, I am reminded of my much younger self and how gradually, over decades, I came to the awareness you evidently possess already. I remember thinking how would it be when I am much older and there will be all those thousands of youngsters who are fresh to the world and will need to come to grips with the legacy they confront? What would that legacy contain? It was just a flash in my mind, but then over time I became worried. I have undertaken an examination of some major milestones in my life. Perhaps we could each do this type of audit with benefit.

It started like this: as children we used to go and spend our summer holidays with our grandparents on their smallholding in Poland. In the late 1950s, it had become possible to cross the Iron Curtain from Western Europe. We were born and raised in London, but there in the countryside, near Wojnicz, it was like before the Second World War. Although we stayed in a big wooden house, a bit like those you have in Sweden, and they had electricity, there was no piped water indoors. You had to carry it in, ice cold in pails, from the artesian well outside, listening to the clanking chain and heavy metal bucket as it was wound down many metres to hit the water in the echoing pitch-blackness. If you wanted hot water to wash, you had to heat it on the wood-fired range in the kitchen which got going in the morning and was still warm at bedtime. The toilet was down the yard beyond the stable, right next to the dung heap guarded by a giant walnut tree. You had to watch you did not fall into the cow pats or worse still, fall through the great hole in the wide wooden plank which served as the seat in that dark smelly place full of cobwebs and creeping things. Toilet paper was an issue: often the shop in the village ran out (as did the whole country) and then there was just shredded newspaper. If you had trouble walking, as my grandfather later did, he used a bottle or a chamber pot and the help had to carry it down to empty in the privy. Can you imagine how hard ordinary life could be then in Central Europe? It is still so in many parts of the world today. In case you were wondering, there was no fridge, only a north-facing larder, off the kitchen. The only telephone there had been came in with the German Wehrmacht (army) in the Second World War when they threw the family out of the house. They took the cables with them before the Russians arrived to take over the building.

At harvest time, everything was done by hand, from scything, binding the bales with straw and then when they had dried off, piling them onto the horse-drawn cart before doing the back-breaking threshing on the earthen barn floor. There were no tractors or machines, and the bread we ate was spongy and grey inside a thick suede-like crust. With freshly churned butter, it was bliss and you could feel your insides applauding at the first bite. Then there were the fruit trees and soft fruit bushes. You had to wait. Some varieties were early, others late, but worst of all were the pears and walnuts. They only came into season long after we were back at school in England, so we had to make do with the previous year’s supply kept in the musty cellar under the house.

The views from the veranda were spectacular. The ground descended 300 metres to the narrow main road and, beyond the fields and farms on the plane, was an enormous dark stretch of forest which filled most of the horizon. However, to the right in the distance were thin smoking chimney stacks, maybe 14 kilometres away in a place called Mościce. There they made what we call agro-chemicals, mainly for export to the rest of the Warsaw Pact. So, will you be surprised that one year when we arrived, our ‘summer nanny’ announced there was no longer any birdsong in the forest? We also heard lots of local people were ill with cancer or had died of lung disease since last year. These were the first alarm bells and earliest inklings I had that the smoke-spewing industry could be connected to collapsing biology. It made me want to weep for the spoiling and the insult. Eventually, my grandparents, other family members and friends all succumbed with the passage of time to frightening diseases, so all that ‘fresh air’ and wholesome food had not helped – but then, you have to die of something.

During those hot summer months long ago, two figures entered my life with lasting consequences. The first, I believe, will be no stranger to you, Greta. It was Pippi Longstocking (Lindgren, 1945): my aunt brought me a translation of Astrid Lindgren’s work, and no book had ever made me laugh out loud as this one did. Here was a really impossibly strong little girl living with a horse, on her own, with two friends next door, a boy and a girl, a lot like imaginary friends. She had a seafaring father – my father was also a sailor – and there was no mention of mother. Some of us do need a break from her. So, I figured there was no reason not to plan my life as independently as Pippi had done, and as you seem to be doing. At that time, I was not detained by what we would now consider politically incorrect aspects of the stories. The message was clear: girls can have their own special ambitions, just as boys are supposed to do. Luckily, I attended a mixed school.

The other figure was far more complex and is taking years to unravel. We were sitting round the table outside one evening with grandfather and visitors discussing things that go bump in the night. We mostly laughed it off, well the adults did, when Uncle Wacek, who worked at that agro-chemical factory, said: ‘not so fast; there is a psychiatrist in Switzerland, a serious researcher, who is looking into these phenomena and is prepared to see meaning in the sudden appearance of say, a white horse walking alongside you or the occurrence of unidentified flying objects in the sky.’ I did not catch the name of the Swiss doctor, or maybe Uncle Wacek did not mention it. Either way, this riveting contrarian view stuck with me ever since. Only much later was I able to identify the Swiss researcher as Carl Jung. He would have been alive, just, when this conversation took place – but more of him later. As for the white horse, our ‘summer nanny,’ a local middle-aged woman, told us how one autumn evening she was returning home from church walking the four kilometres on an unmade road in the falling dusk when she felt unease. From nowhere, a full-sized white horse came towards her, bridle-less, and walked beside her between the darkening fields until she reached a copse by her hamlet, when it branched off to the left and disappeared. She reached safety without further incident and felt appeased.

Back in London – this would have been the early 1960s – I heard of the disappearance, many years earlier, of an English officer, the explorer Col. Percy Fawcett (Fawcett and Fawcett, 1953). He went to the Amazon forest to look for tribes of indigenous people untouched by European civilization. He never returned from his last expedition, even though search parties were sent after him and there were alleged sightings. His fate remains a mystery to this day and it inspired me both to become a user of public libraries, now disappearing, and along with many others to think of the Amazon rainforest, especially the Matto Grosso region, as a last major bastion of nature with which Fawcett was so absorbed and which absorbed him. Today, as you know, the populist Brazilian government, under new fascist leadership, is bulldozing the vast area as fast as it can in the name of economic development and Brazil’s self-determination. It echoes the stirrings on a much lesser scale of certain European states, which also confuse collaboration in the name of survival and security for being ‘told what to do by foreign unelected officials.’ Strangely, these objectors to a common cause appear to be predominantly self-important men in leadership positions. Where are the women in all this? Mrs Rouseff, the elected president of Brazil, was recently removed for corruption by people at least as corrupt as she was claimed to be.

A final milestone in my pre-adolescent youth, was the publication in 1962 of a book by an American marine biologist, a woman. She was called Rachel Carson, and her shocking book, Silent Spring (1962), was on the front cover of the weekly children’s magazine I used to read and warned nearly six decades ago how, unless we took seriously our devastation of nature, there would come a day when birds would run out of habitat and food and would no longer sing to announce the arrival of a new spring. Do you think leaders of industry and politics or humanity in general have paid attention since? (See Atwood, 2012.) Greta, you know the answer yourself. The present response seems to be either to rush away from what is fearsome and uncomfortable and shout loudly against it or, rush into panic mode and shout at those held as responsible for the destruction of our environment. Neither is, in my opinion, a productive reaction to fear. Both rely on a balance of prevailing consensus or fashion and do not address what we each inwardly need to think our particular role and responsibility is in this collective crisis.

I am reminded of what US President John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, at around this time: ‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’ (Kennedy, 1961). Is this not an injunction each generation needs to be taught and consider in relation to the planet?

I remember reading philosopher Richard Wollheim on Freud’s distinction about man being a ‘horde’ rather than a ‘herd’ animal, albeit less so in advanced societies (Wollheim, [1971] 1981, p. 268). The significance for me was this played a part in my career decisions. My father was a businessman who developed a travel company with contracts for new train and bus routes before moving on to mass air travel. He was originally motivated to bring together families and friends separated by war or migration. However, it was only a short step to diversifying into the mass travel which we now call tourism. Perhaps to his disappointment, I opted against joining the family business and set out on a different path which crystallized only some years later.

At the age of 25, I rewarded myself for achieving a professional qualification with a trip to Peru whose highlight was to be an overnight stay in Machu Picchu – something I had dreamed of from the age of eight having seen at school a picture of the magical Inca mountain hideout. I wanted to experience it before hotel chains moved in to disgorge thousands of tourists, actually not so different from me. I had already worked in Africa and the Caribbean, as an overseas volunteer¹ and intern, but there in Peru, I became overwhelmed by questions like ‘what am I doing here?’ and ‘what justification have I for being here?’ They came from feeling viscerally disconnected from the surroundings, yet stung by the abject poverty in the favelas and in rural communities, then being showered with rocks in Cuzco while name-called as gringo and probably much worse. I felt ashamed of my idle looking. This exciting and fascinating journey was not without peril from abduction, illness and the hideous, often fatal, mudslides from the sides of vertiginous mountains, where precarious roads had simply slid down the valley. And there was the honed art of theft, with knives deftly used to strip back pockets off their moorings or plunged into bulging bags to cascade the contents.

I was ill prepared for this improvised adventure, with only two or three contacts and little useful language. I was equipped with the unwritten licence of Western privilege and the common arrogance of a baby-boomer. More by luck than good sense, I came away relatively unscathed, no doubt enriched and certainly resolved never again to be a ‘tourist’ in a struggling country, even though I saw myself as a traveller. The journey achieved its manifest purpose and other purposes which had not even crossed my mind, including: rats creeping over us as we slept in the open as they searched out the corn stuffed into our pockets; menus where the only dishes on offer were variations on guinea pig. There were unexpected joys, such as running into officers of the British army near the jungle and getting precise directions to an isolated elderly English missionary priest living two mountain ranges away, by the Apurimac, a tributary of the Amazon river, who welcomed us with open arms. Our only way to repay his generosity was to leave him a wristwatch, as his was broken. It found its way back to me a year later, a little dusty, in my office in Brixton, South London, through the byzantine, if Catholic, missionary network. As yet, I had not arrived at the notion of my own carbon footprint.

So, Greta, scroll on a few years and in midlife I changed career, or rather saw my earlier occupations in teaching and social work as part of the preparation for submitting myself for the arduous training as an analytical psychologist. Now, the Swiss psychiatrist I had heard about as a child assumed a new significance for my work and concerns as I began to study his ...