Attachment and denial on a sick planet by Jim Davis
The theme of our recent
United Kingdom Association of Transactional Analysis National Conference in Birmingham
was ‘Attachment and autonomy: celebrating psychological health’, but what
future is there for this without an attachment to other species, the lives of
our children, grandchildren and future generations, and a secure base in nature
and the ecosystem.
Kieran Nolan and I
ran a workshop entitled ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it but I feel fine: Denial, fatalism
and psychological health on a sick planet?’ and this article is another step in attempting to raise the profile of
climate change within our TA community.
In particular my focus is to understand climate change denial – of the
destructive impact of the human species on our very own habitat, which Pearl
Drego has described as scripty and suicidal.
From the mouths of ‘babes’.
Let’s begin with a
story, one which I think pretty much tells the whole story.
In February this
year everybody was commenting on the ‘wonderful’ sunny weather we were having,
with temperatures reaching 25 degrees centigrade. If this is global warming,
somebody said, then bring it on. Thankfully, not everybody thought like
this. A friend’s 18 year old daughter
disagreed, saying ‘it’s not wonderful, there’s something wrong!’ Meanwhile Greta Thunberg, only 15, had gone
from being a lone climate change protester with a placard on the streets outside
the Swedish parliament, to the inspiration for the Youth Strikes for Climate
movement holding over 500 events across 51 countries.
Their motto was:
‘we are going to change the fate of humanity whether you like it or not’. In response to this a UK government minister
for education reminded them that school attendance is compulsory, whilst a
recent 2019 debate on climate change in the House of Commons was limited to a
mere handful of MPs!
Facing the facts
I
had intended to begin this article by making
the case for the catastrophic nature of global warming and climate change
but I changed my mind, for two reasons.
The first is that, paradoxically, one of the key causes of climate
change denial is simply the experience of reading lurid descriptions of the
horrors of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, the effect on global warming,
and the consequences of species extinction, deforestation, fresh water
scarcity, rising sea levels, extreme weather devastation, soil erosion, areas
of the planet becoming uninhabitable, food and water insecurity, mass
migration, and social unrest. Are you still reading?
The
second, and major reason, is that the scientific case has already been made, and
now sits securely in the here-and-now reality of our Adult ego state. Suffice it to say that whilst only 26% of US
republican voters believe in human generated global warming the figure amongst
members of the American Meteorological Society is 96%.
Understanding climate
change denial: individual psychology
How
do we understand the fact that, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence,
so many people are either in denial about the potentially catastrophic
consequences of global warming, or are not doing enough about it? How do we understand the discounting of the
effects of climate change, at the levels of existence and significance –
primarily outright climate change deniers and those who believe it’s not a
problem, or at the levels of changeability and personal capacity – primarily
those passively believing nothing can be done? Some examples, both individual and collective,
of manifestations of this discounting are:
·
more IS
being done
·
the
environmentalists, the experts, are dealing with it
·
everything
will be alright in the end
·
‘they’ will come up with a technological
solution – we always have
·
if we get everybody to recycle it’ll be ok
·
numbing desensitisation
of ‘climate porn’
·
acting as
if natural resources are infinite
·
green initiatives
that fall way below what needs to be done
·
long term voluntary targets
·
the problem
will be solved by the market
However, clearly
there are also deeper psychological processes at work that create widespread
experiences of denial, fatalism and passivity in relation to climate
change. In some profound emotional and
cognitive sense the implications of global warming cannot be faced, and we know
that behind psychological avoidance there always lie difficult feelings.
‘Fear messaging’ can be counter-productive, leading to defensive
avoidance as in ‘this is too scary to think about’. It can generate a state of prolonged worry
and anxiety, which over time may lead to numbness, desensitisation and
disengagement from the issue altogether.
Climate
change represents a threat, both in terms of the imagined catastrophic
consequences and the threatened loss of what we have come to take for granted
in our lives. We know that in the face
of any perceived threat there will be an increase in emotional energy to hold
on more tightly to what is precious but threatened (our consumption, cars, our
jobs, air travel) together with an angry attack and rejection of what is seen
as providing the threat (for example extinction rebellion or climate change
policies that lead to unemployment).
Simultaneously, at the unconscious level, there will be an accompanying
rise in energy aimed at warding off unbearable and conflicted feelings
including:
· fear of the consequences
of climate change
· anticipatory loss
of what we’ve grown used to
· either/both guilt
and shame, for example by not reducing our harmful impact on the environment,
not being a good, responsible member of society
· states of
overwhelm, helplessness and despair.
Without
access to these feelings, without the ‘space’ - to reflect, absorb, feel, share
with others and stay with the unpalatable truth, the trouble, and the unknown –
there will be no drive to change and denial will continue to hold sway. In the workshop that Kieran Nolan and I ran
at the conference we experimented with a ‘truth and reconciliation’ type experiential
exercise, which was both an attempt to create such a space, and to embrace the
idea that a conversation with one’s enemy is inevitably a conversation with
oneself.
Truth and reconciliation
In this exercise one
group represented people most at risk from climate change eg people in the
‘third world’, future generations, the ecosystem/other species, and the other
group representing those opposed to climate change policies eg fossil fuel
companies, employees in jobs with a large carbon footprint, consumers in the
‘first’ world, and governments with inadequate climate change policies.
In both of the
above groups there are consumers, people working in high carbon emitting
industries, and people in the third world both desiring the benefits and
suffering the consequences of economic development. In a very real sense we are all in both
camps, and intrinsic to the truth and reconciliation process is the aim of some
sort of healing through both mutual recognition and personal integration of
split off parts of self.
The previous day
the keynote speaker had shown how healthy attachment develops via the mother’s
attuned response to the baby’s non-verbal signs of distress in relation to what
Winnicott calls impingements arising in the mother-infant interaction. In relation to this she also referred to the
work of Jessica Benjamin, but in my view could have said more about Benjamin’s
view of the necessity of mutuality in
this process of recognition. In
Benjamin’s view, we can only experience
recognition from another if we in turn recognise the other’s subjective
internal experience, because otherwise we wouldn’t ‘know’ that they are having
a resonating experience. This is similar
to Carol Rogers’s idea about empathy, namely that for change to occur as a result of the communication
of empathy there needs to be a recognition in the receiver of empathy of how
the other is impacted – their emotional resonance, understanding, and fellow
feeling. In TA terminology, recognition
hunger is essentially mutual.
As the two groups
talked to each other I could see a movement towards mutuality, as each ‘side’
changed from attempting to ‘prove their case’ to the beginnings of
experiencing, and acknowledging how those on the ‘other’ side were affected. A particular example of this process was the ‘other’
side’s response to a woman ‘representing’ a local community in the third world
who talked movingly about the harmful impact of industrial development that
took no account of the local community or their local environment.
Another feature of
the discussion between the two groups was the predominant focus on the
objective facts regarding both the impact of climate change and the reasons for
not doing more to effect change. Part
of the problem in efforts to promote awareness of and action on climate change
is that most people involved have been either physical scientists or
environmental groups. They have tended
to rely simply on delivering more facts (or the reiterating the same ones) on
the assumption that it is information that drives understanding, acceptance,
and ultimately appropriate behaviour - the so-called ‘information-deficit’
model.
Only gradually did
the conversation account emotional experiences, despite the fact that it is
primarily via the expression and communication of feelings that others are
impacted and relationship and mutuality is established.
Another, related,
focus of the workshop was to explore the question of ‘what was it that impacted
people and heightened their awareness of the significance of climate change
and/or prompted them to take action?’
This is a very important question because our answers to it will hopefully
help us to understand better how awareness, change and action can occur.
For me perhaps the
most important single experience was reading Naomi Klein’s ‘This changes
everything’. Prior to training to become
a psychotherapist I had been very involved in left wing politics, political
theatre and trade unionism, and my Masters’ thesis was on the radicalisation of
social workers. The rise of Thatcherism
and the demise of the left felt devastating to my hopes for a ‘better’ society,
and becoming a psychotherapist represented a way of continuing this goal at the
level of the individual, alongside the mantra of ‘the personal is
political’.
Reading Klein’s
book rekindled in me the aspiration arrow of physis in that it helped me to see
how the planetary crisis of climate change and the nature of capitalist
economics and neo-liberal ideology are fundamentally inter-related. It helped me to see that the climate crisis
provided an opportunity for a resurgence of collective action for social good
that had been interrupted when I was younger. As the title of Klein’s book
proclaims, ‘This changes everything’.
One of the
participants in the workshop, Carol Wain, agreed to me including part of her
story of the impact that the workshop experience had on her, in relation to
this question of what provides the spark for change. In her words:
‘’I was DEEPLY
impacted by workshop, my core values were awakened and my emotions were stirred
thus shifting me to another level of consciousness and responsibility about
global warming and the part that I not just others are
contributing and the action I must take right now.
What particularly moved me was the continual message throughout the workshop
that we cannot stay in our comfortable denial, that we are in crisis NOW and
the urgency of action that needs to be taken is NOW. As I reflected
on the workshop I presented in the morning on ‘The Mystery beyond ‘self’ –
opening up conversations about faith, religion and spirituality and TA, I
understood taking responsibility to play my part to solve climate change as
‘actions of faith’ and coming from my spiritual core and as a part of my
expanding Adult. I would like to propose that it is the same with the earth – when we
treat the earth as an ‘It’ to be consumed rather than a ‘Thou’ to be related to
with love and care we destroy the ‘sacred’. ‘’
[The emphasis – capitals, bold type etc are from Carol’s original communication
to me]
Carol’s feedback was about the need for urgent action, but she also emphasised
her responsibility to address climate change as an ‘act of faith coming from
her spiritual core as part of her expanded Adult’. What I think this highlights is the crucial
importance, as we struggle with the impact of climate change, of the need to
address fundamental questions such as: What stories do we tell ourselves, in
our diverse cultures, about our place on this earth, the value of nature and
other species? What does being a good
human being, living a good life, being a good citizen, look like? What are our
I+U+ social responsibilities?
Like many other
social and political issues, global warming raises challenges in relation to
our focus remaining solely at the individual level. There is a growing need for a more social
psychology that addresses how social and political issues create collective
‘dis-ease’, and a need to return to the early days when TA was seen as a social
psychiatry. Global warming threatens
the planet’s very survival, and raises questions about our social
responsibilities in both our work and lives more broadly – including who
suffers, or benefits, from climate change denial and what economic and
political interests are involved
Understanding climate change denial: The Cultural Parent
The global economy
doubles in size every 25 years, and since the 1980s has been characterized by
privatisation of the public sector, deregulation of private enterprise, lower
corporation tax, and cuts in public spending.
What supports this process is our dominant global economic culture
driven by an unrelenting, narcissistic and addictive attachment to consumption,
consumerism, money, and economic growth at all costs. Material
affluence is viewed as the key to fulfilment, only the affluent are seen as winners,
and access to the top is allegedly open to anyone willing to work hard
enough.
Consequently, the
most significant reason that we haven’t done the things that are necessary to
lower emissions is because they fundamentally conflict with deregulated
capitalist economics and the dominant values of
neo-liberalism. We continue to
expand the global economy on the fantasy that resources are infinite, and that
a person (or company) is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural
wealth as their money can buy. This by
its very nature is opposed to any notion of sustainability. It is, as Drego says, suicidal, and the
prevailing culture of consumerism, ‘what the customer wants’, and free market deregulation
will not by themselves avert environmental and human catastrophe.
What
the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of
resources. However what our free market,
capitalist economic model demands to avoid collapse is the exact opposite,
namely unfettered expansion. This is a
fundamental contradiction that is not being faced socially or politically. Far from being the only viable economic system capitalist economics is
in fact primed to destroy the human environment, and threatens catastrophic
consequences, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.
At the same time,
culturally, there has been a profound and deeper shift towards a pervasive cynicism and passivity
that cultivates indifference to fundamental social issues such as human rights
and the safety of our planet, which in 2017 the Institute of Policy Studies
described as a ‘moral crisis’. Things are bad, but more than that, within
our Cultural Parent, we hold the belief that nothing can be done about it. Infamously, Maggie Thatcher once said, in
relation to the dominance of Thatcherite neoliberal economic policies, ‘there
is no alternative’. In an echo of that idea
it is now easier to imagine the end of the world because of global warming than
it is to imagine the end of capitalism, or any alternative to it. This cultural belief, that nothing can be
done, is analogous to the deflationary
perspective of a depressed person who lives life as if their hopelessness,
despair and pain are endless and about which nothing can be done. There is no alternative, and any positive
state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.
Socially this fatalism manifests as a detached, cynical spectatorism,
opposed to active engagement and involvement.
Depression and
anxiety, phenomena of endemic proportions in our society are conventionally pathologised
in terms of an individuals’ mental ‘illness’. However, the fact that 1 in 6 Americans are
taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications surely means that we cannot
see these symptoms as merely individual, rather than something that arises from
social conditions, and which in turn serves to foreclose the possibility of
social action. Interestingly Mark Fisher
makes a similar point regarding the increasingly widespread phenomenon of what
he calls hedonic depression. Depression
is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia ie an inability to get
pleasure. Depressive hedonia however refers
to the inability to do anything except pursue ‘pleasure’, and is characterised
by a retreat into displacement activities such as compulsive consumption and a
narcissistic withdrawal from ‘society’ and social issues. Or, to
quote Maggie Thatcher again, ‘there is no such thing as society’.
As Christopher
Bollas puts it, with something that could apply equally to the ‘retreat’ of
either form of depression; ‘Perhaps the most serious climate change lies within
the human mind itself. Unless we find
some way to get ourselves to come out of our retreats, be it religious
fundamentalism or normopathic materialism (normopath is a term that refers to
the mental process of immersing oneself in material comfort and a life of
recreation, fundamentally disinterested in ones’ subjective life) our societies
will continue to deteriorate and the political processes will be emptied of
that intellectual vitality and communal effort essential to the survival of
homo sapiens.’
We are all in it together: the need for
collective action
The risk of
planetary catastrophe, inevitably, affects everybody and brings people together
in a shared collective experience. There will be no ‘winners’, only losers, and
as Christopher Bollas says ‘even the oligarchs will be fast tracking themselves
to a nihilistic emptiness in which there will be no rehab centre’. We are not in it together equally though. Climate change and the ecological crisis is going
to, and already is, affecting those most vulnerable in the world in much more dire
and catastrophic ways. This moral issue
can and should provide one of the main arguments for climate change policies.
Unfortunately, to
say the least, the past 40 years, in the UK and elsewhere has been
characterised by a fundamental retreat from social and cultural forms of
collective attachment and a corresponding retreat into social isolation,
individualism, cynicism and loss of meaning.
Public space, both literally and metaphorically has been predominantly
supplanted by the rights and privileges of the private domain.
History however tells
us that slavery, racial discrimination, sexism, apartheid, colonialism weren’t a
‘social problem’ that anyone did anything about until the abolition, civil
rights, #metoo, anti-apartheid, independence social movements turned them into one. We also know that change in our internal, private
world is more successful when accompanied by change in our engagement with
others in our social worlds. Hopefully
also, within our professional community, we will heed Pearl Drego’s exhortation
to expand our vision of Transactional Analysis and as she wrote, reframe our
theories and aims in all three fields, and reposition ourselves in the midst of
larger social movements, including that of embracing strategies for planetary
healing.
And finally: What will we tell our
grandchildren when they ask us ‘what did you do’?
Kieran will never
forgive me if I don’t mention Extinction Rebellion. What they are demanding and
want all of us to demand, of our government, is;
1) Government must tell the truth by
declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions
to communicate the urgency for change
2) Government must act now to halt
biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025
3) Government must create and be led by the
decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice
As I write these
three ‘demands’ I’m thinking to myself, my god how simple, obvious,
unobjectionable, maybe even too limited they are, and yet, currently, how unlikely
they are to be adopted.
Remembering the
‘stories’ I told at the beginning of this article, and in particular the
reprimand that the government minister made to the demonstrating school
children, I find it actually laughable, if it weren’t so very serious, that the
media, politicians and others make such a fuss about the disruption caused by
Extinction Rebellion demonstrations. We
can only imagine the ‘disruption’ that will ensue should even the least
catastrophic predictions of climate change come to pass!
I’m grateful to
Mary Dees, another participant in workshop mentioned above, who referred me to The
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research’s 2015 report entitled ‘The
challenge of communicating climate messages.’ It comes to very similar conclusions
regarding the importance of emotional reactions and motivations, and provides
some very interesting and useful guidance on how to account this. It struck me as the kind of approach we
Transactional Analysis educators, organisational consultants and
psychotherapists are particularly skilled in and which could therefore provide
the basis for using these skills to support work aimed at promoting climate awareness
and action.
Recommendations included such things as:
1) More dialogue is needed, less lecturing
2) Promoting affinity with the natural world
through learning experiences that demonstrate the interdependence of human and
natural systems and the ecological impacts of unsustainability
3) Fostering understanding of physical,
emotional and spiritual human needs and the need to reconcile these with the
ecological needs of the planet
4) Participating in difficult dialogues, as
opposed to delivering unwelcome messages
5) Making a human connection as opposed to delivering
scientific findings
6) Deliberately engaging the heart as
opposed to just speaking to the mind
7) Taking people on an emotional journey as
opposed to merely giving bad news
8) Motivating active engagement as opposed
to triggering fight-or-flight
As a TA
psychotherapist I am of course interested in how we might include climate and
ecological issues into our therapeutic work with clients, for example in
relation to safeguarding (children, future generations), fostering
autonomy-awareness, decontamination and deconfusion in relation to climate
denial, and the ethics of our social responsibilities But that is for another article perhaps?
References and suggested further reading
These
are the primary references re influences on my ideas for this article.
Jessica
Benjamin,
‘Recognition and Destruction: an outline of inter-subjectivity’, in Mitchell
and Aron, ‘Relational psychoanalysis: the emergence of a tradition’, The
Analytic Press, 1999.
Christopher
Bollas,
‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment’, Routledge, 2018
Pearl Drego, ‘The cultural
parent’, TAJ, Vol 13/4, 1983
Pearl Drego, ‘Bonding the
Ethnic Child with the Universal Parent: Strategies and Ethos of a TA eco-community
activist’, TAJ, Vol 29/3, 2009
Mark Fisher, ‘Capitalist
Realism: Is there no alternative’, Zero Books, 2008
Naomi Klein, ‘This changes
everything’, Penguin, 2014
The
Bollas and Fisher books I strongly recommend in relation to the section on
Cultural Parent, and for addressing issues regarding a
social/cultural/political psychology.
Naomi Klein’s book is in
my opinion essential reading, primarily in the relation to the link between the
prevailing capitalist economics and climate change, and for a thorough analysis
of what can be done at the social, political level and technological levels.
Pearl Drego, especially
the ‘Bonding the ethnic Child…’ article is inspiring, particularly in terms of
accounting spiritual and moral issues and the importance of collective action.
The
Extinction Rebellion/the truth
website is as good as I’ve seen in terms of ‘making the case’ and, unusually,
in accounting the importance of the emotional.
