1st Edition

Psychoanalysis and Ecology The Unconscious and the Environment

By Cosimo Schinaia Copyright 2022
    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    Cosimo Schinaia and Psychoanalysis and Ecology are winners of the IPA Climate Award! 

    This book presents the psychoanalyst with the question of how our enormously modified environmental conditions determine our subjective mental changes and vice versa.

    The gravity of the environmental crisis is amply clear and yet, in the face of such incontrovertible evidence, there is an emotional, more than cognitive, difficulty in comprehending the present reality and its future consequences. In understanding the collective imagination as permeating the individual one and vice versa, this book investigates this relationship of mutual co-determination between the individual traumatic stories told and experienced in the consulting room and the positive or negative environmental attitudes exhibited by patients. The pairing of clinical vignettes with dispatches from the collective imagination sheds light on the confused affective investments and anxieties that propel pathological defenses, such as negation, suppression, intellectualization, displacement, and disavowal. The final chapter concludes with notes on the role of hope in a damaged world and the importance of integrity within the psychoanalytic field and beyond.

    This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as anthropologists, environmentalists, and ecologists.

    Introduction – the role of psychoanalysis  1. Main steps to mitigate the climate emergency  2. Human beings and the environment  3. Freud and the environment  4. Psychoanalysis and the environmental crisis  5. Waste  6. Wastefulness  7. Light and noise pollution  8. From the individual to the social sphere  9. Work–health balance conflict  10. Servants of the future

    Biography

    Cosimo Schinaia is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the SPI and a full member of the IPA, working in private practice in Genoa, Italy. He is the author of several books and articles, including On Paedophilia (2010) and Psychoanalysis and Architecture (2016), translated in several languages. Psychoanalysis and Ecology is also available in Italian, French, and Spanish.

    "It is wonderful that the voice of a new psychoanalysis is appearing on the contemporary cultural, political and ethical scene, creating bridges between the inner and outer worlds that will hopefully affect our collective future. Cosimo Schinaia is an internationally recognized specialist in building these bridges: here, he explores with impressive effectiveness the difficulties of human beings in developing a realistic, integrated, harmonious and non-narcissistic vision of their relationship with the world in which they live. His analysis of the problem is broad and accurate, ranging from the 'deeply-micro' of individual subjectivities to the 'extensively-macro' of the mentalities of national and international communities; he also constantly and firmly includes an inter-generational perspective, aimed at the humans of tomorrow. This book is a highly specific, extraordinary contribution of psychoanalysis to the protection of the environment and the human species that lives in it with such frequent self-destructive lack of awareness."

    Stefano Bolognini, past president of the International Psychoanalytical Association

    "A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Training Member of the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis, Cosimo Schinaia is also a universal spirit who has published many transdisciplinary books in several languages. In Psychoanalysis and Ecology, he challenges the role of psychoanalysis in the urgent fight for the survival of our environment. Through many clinical examples from everyday life as well as from the Almighty economic trends that modify inexorably Earth’s landscape and vital balance, he analyzes the unconscious resistances of any human being to acknowledge the magnitude and emergency of the problem. But he also shows how psychoanalysis can help overcome both the denial and anxiety provoked by our present situation, to join forces and stop the disaster and heal our planet."

    Florence Guignard, Training and Supervising Analyst of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, founder of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis and founder and past president of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis

    "Using clinical examples and personal anecdotes to contextualise the theory and demonstrate its application beyond the consulting room, Schinaia emphasises the importance of not disconnecting ourselves from the 'material' of our inner and outer worlds... This book makes clear the depth of influence of a fossil fuel culture, both consciously and unconsciously, and is permeated throughout by a sense of grief for the destruction of our known worlds..."

    Jenny O'Gorman, review in Psychodynamic Practice