Psychological reactions to climate change run the gamut from a sense of the need for urgent action to utter denial. This paper looks at some categories of defenses that block acknowledgement of this pressing threat. It cites the work of Renee Lertzman, an analytically oriented social scientist, whose research suggested that disavowal, negation, or denial could be deconstructed and viewed as defenses against intolerable anxieties, feelings of helplessness and disappointment, loss and guilt, and warded‐off wishes for agency and reparation. Clinical examples and personal self‐reflection are employed to posit that when anxiety over climate change, a serious disquiet in its own right, gets confused with childhood traumatic anxiety, with its attendant feelings of helplessness, smallness, hopelessness, shame, isolation, and useless rage, then dysfunctional defenses and affects are more likely to come to the fore. In contrast to this, realistic anxiety over our changing climate and need to shift from a carbon‐based culture can be made more tolerable and can allow one to face the uncertain future, to feel one's feelings, to work them through, to share them without shame, and to feel a certain amount of agency in confronting the climate future and working to cope with it, both individually and societally. Finally, the paper suggests that we clinicians need to listen with new awareness to patients' references to and defenses against climate change, as not simply displacements but also as allusions to a looming reality that is a thing in itself. It is suggested that although we cannot impose our agendas on our patients, as climate change disavowal breaks down, we do have in our tool kit ways of helping our patients with it, depending of course very much on the state of our own disavowal.
There are few psychoanalytically informed, first-person commentaries on the creative process of writing fiction. In this paper, the author, a psychoanalyst with a parallel career as a children's book writer, explores his associations, autobiographical details, and related theoretical constructs as they relate to the writing of one of his published picture book texts. Lastly, he questions whether a piece of fiction not only illustrates the writer's current and past history, but also points to the writer's future psychological potentialities.
As psychoanalytic institutes evolve, adapting to the contemporary financial and social environment, the integration of new technologies into psychoanalytic education presents opportunities for expansion to candidates residing beyond the usual geographic boundaries. While the teaching of analytic content through distance learning programs appears to be relatively straightforward, factors including legalities, traditional mind-sets, and cross-cultural issues need to be considered as complicating the situation, as illustrated by one U.S. institute's distance learning initiative with a group in South Korea.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.