Short abstract:

Here, I examine the role of nature-based therapeutic practices (‘forest bathing’ or shinrin-yoku) in psychological culture. I argue that such practices rely on a particular psycho-politics, in which unstable modernity is contrasted with the psychic and moral certainty of the pre-modern world

Long abstract:

In recent years, nature-based therapeutic practices (sometimes called ‘forest bathing’ or shinrin-yoku) have taken up significant space in psychological and psychotherapeutic culture globally. These practices center on a claim that being surrounded by nature is critical to properly functioning psychology; that absence of nature is a major psychological risk (Berman, 2019). The practice has been bolstered by the emergence of fields like environmental neuroscience, with significant research interest in measuring how nature contact produces a measurable effect on neurobiological states. Though data is patchy, we know that forest therapy has grown rapidly in the last decade and is a central part of the public culture of mental health in several countries (Fraccaroli et al, 2021). In this paper, I report on pilot work (fifteen semi-structured interviews, with site visits and mobile methods) among forest bathing practitioners, focused on how practitioners configure forest therapy practice within psychological and political culture. Through thematic analysis, I show that a particular form of nostalgic or regressive temporality is central to forest bathing’s account of itself: at the individual scale, participants report, forest therapy returns the subject to a state of childlike wonder and moral innocence. At the collective scale, it returns humankind to the psychic and moral stability of the pre-modern world. I argue that, in mobilizing such temporalities, forest bathing becomes legible through a reactionary politics of return, and I analyze this novel psychological practice through literature on the role of environmental and ‘wellbeing’ horizons in contemporary far right mobilization (Crockford, 2021).