Paper short abstract:

I intend to explore how a psychoanalytic approach might contribute to the field of environmental history, considering how critical use of its concepts could improve understanding of the human subjectivity and perception which is at the heart of human interactions with nature.

Paper long abstract:

Since the beginnings of the discipline of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century, analysts have engaged with analysands struggling with the problems of the present they inhabited. For the early profession, new forms of urban modernity, visual arts, or mechanised warfare ended up as subjects on the couch. For contemporary analysts, climate anxiety is emerging in the conscious and subconscious of analysands struggling with the lived reality and imagined future of environmental breakdown.

Psychoanalysis begins with a fluctuating subject underwritten with a subconscious containing conflict and contradiction as inevitable dynamics. It is aware of the difficulty of being in the world, and the ways in which the subject seeks to reorder that same world as a means of achieving relief. Our homes and everyday spaces have long been the site and subject of psychic life. The same theories and analytic approach might be applied to spaces of nature from gardens to ‘wilderness’.

Psychoanalysis is also concerned with the developmental stages of human subjectivity, and the transformation of our models and conceptual capacities to understand the world we perceive. Animals, plants and ecosystems all have both conceptual existence in the human subject, as well as their own ecological realities. Misalignment can result in significant and harmful consequences for human and non-human life.

Environmental History has a focus on human interactions with nature. Psychoanalytically informed approaches human subject, to the interplay of contradictions, projections, transferences, and desires, could provide interpretative value to the study of the nature that emerges from these interactions.

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