humanity questions 1135
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ecopsychology_readings.docxPsychology has been an organized discipline for a rather short time - a century or so - although every important philosopher since ancient times has expressed opinions about the human mind, how it works, what motivates or frightens us and why, and what constitutes sanity and insanity. Modern psychology, of course, properly begins with Sigmund Freud. There's no way that we can even begin to look at his ideas here; suffice it to say that one of his lesser-known works, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) may have opened the door to what is now eco-psychology. Click on the following link to view a brief Excerpt.
Freud suggested cautiously that we may have been defining insanity or psychosis wrongly all along: perhaps the "crazy" person is really sane, and reacting as best he can to a world that is insane. Perhaps our civilization has gone so far off he tracks that the only "sane" way to deal with it is by irrational behavior. Sensing himself on the edge of an abyss, Freud recoiled in horror: if such a thing were true, it would not only have invalidated his life's work but would also have annulled "Sigmund Freud" as understood by himself. To publish Civilization and Its Discontents must have been the bravest thing he ever did.
The next step was taken by Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), who argued that we lock up our real feelings inside a barrier of "character armor," thus making ourselves mentally ill. This image of the human mind as a dark and rather nasty cesspool dammed up inside concrete armor is not pleasant, but it explains a great deal about Western culture. Only "character armor" can explain how educated and rational men could systematically torture and burn witches, send Jews to gas chambers, deliberately infect poor illiterate black men with syphilis, and order the systematic military gang rape of Bosnian women -- all in the name of Knowledge, Rule, Order, as the evil wizard Saruman would have put it. For Reich character armor was responsible for the strange paradox of the 'inhumanity of humans.' Healthy (or cured) individuals with little or no character armor are most capable of giving love and sympathy to others, since neither the constructive nor destructive emotions are dammed up. Click on the following link to rea an article about charactor amor.
Reich had to flee the Nazis in 1939. After the war, living in New York, he published works on the nature of sexuality and the orgasm - and got hauled into court, where he was convicted of defying a court order and was sent to prison for two years. Worse yet, the federal government ordered the burning of several tons of his books and notes - perhaps unaware of the irony - the United States had only recently helped defeat Nazi Germany, famous for its bookburnings.
Next we move into eco-psychology itself with the work of Theodore Roszak (born 1933), who coined the term in his book The Voice of the Earth (1992). Roszak, a professor at California State, had already written widely on the 1960s counterculture and the first awakenings of environmentalism in the 1970s. In this book he lists these basic principles:
1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society; open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.
2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as "the universe."Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience.
3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment.
4. For ecopsychology, as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally "sane" adults. To do this, it turns to many sources, among them the traditional healing techniques of primary people, nature mysticism as expressed in religion and art, the experience of wilderness, the insights of Deep Ecology. It adapts these to the goal of creating the ecological ego.
5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility with the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.
6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on some (not all) of the insights of ecofeminism and feminist spirituality with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.
7. Whatever contributes to small-scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some life-enhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is post-industrial, not anti-industrial, in its social orientation.
8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.
Click on the following link to listen to a radio interview with Roszak.
Paul Shepard (1925-1996; that's him in the photo) had already explored some of these ideas from the perspective of a professional psychologist. In his landmark book Nature and Madness (1982), Shepard wondered, what is at the base of our ludicrously self-destructive behavior toward the rest of nature? Is it greed, or ignorance, or a defective value system, or some combination of these? He had noticed one thing that sets the West apart from most other cultures: the discontinuing or trivialization of certain ceremonies that mark the transition from child to responsible adult. By abandoning the rituals and rites of passage that sustained our ancestors for thousands of generations, have we doomed ourselves to permanent childhood? Why has this happened? The answer is of course not simple; but it clearly has to do with deracination -- our uprooting and separation from the rhythms and exigencies of the natural world. Because we no longer experience the process of self-definition outlined for us by two million years of evolution, we don't know who we are . Click on the following line to read a key passage from his book.
Nature and Madness opened a floodgate, and there are now countless books on eco-psychology. My favorite is Chellis Glendinning's My Name Is Chellis and I'm In Recovery from Western Civilization . Click on the following link to view a brief interview for a clear idea of her thesis that we are "techno-addicted" and unable to face the real, natural world without the crutch of technology. And she bashes cell phones, the bane of many a sensible person!
Any theory of psychology needs, of course, a corresponding psychotherapy. For ecopsychology this has not yet had much time to develop, but there are some therapies being practiced. For the most part they take the 'patient' out of the office and into the real world of nature, preferably the wilderness, where he or she can try to restore some of the lost contact with the environment. They also look to non-western philosophies (especially Taoism and native American religions) that emphasize the human connection with nature. Sometimes this means involving 'patients' in contrived rituals like drum circles and sweat lodges - fun, perhaps, but without much evidence that they have a therapeutic benefit. At the very least, ecopsychotherapy recognizes something that most other therapies ignore: the real pain and fear felt by more and more people as they watch the environment deteriorating around them. See, for example, this website, which offers training in therapy and counseling.
· Institute of Global Education
An important variation on, or correlative of, eco-psychology is known as "cognitive science" and is based on the assumption that there is no dichotomy between mind and body. Everything we say, think, and do is formed by the size and shape of our physical bodies and the ways in which the body interacts with its environment. If our understanding of that environment is flawed, there is no way we can act 'appropriately' towards it. Click on the following link to visit a good website if you want to explore this very complex field.
· UCLA
Cognitive science also overlaps considerably with a very new field called "behavioral ecology," which suggests that most of our behavior (and that of all species) is governed by genetic inheritance more than by our environment and experiences in life. For example, most of our actions are compelled by a desire (conscious or unconscious) for self-preservation and reproduction, so that we can pass on our genes to the next generation (evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls this the "selfish gene" theory). The technical term is 'adaptive' - meaning that over many millennia, evolution has selected for behaviors that help us survive, even when those behaviors seem destructive. Many radical and liberal thinkers reject this idea because it implies that our behavior is "hard-wired," and if so we cannot be educated to behave more altruistically - if this is true, all schemes and plans to "improve" human society are doomed to failure. Behavioral ecologists reply that even though much of our behavior is hard-wired, not all of it is; our "human nature" is highly flexible, and though we cannot eliminate hard-wired behavior, we can find ways to work around it. Eco-psychology is still wrestling with this idea. Clearly, human nature is a product of evolution. But does that mean that we cannot 'escape' the limits evolution puts on our behavior? Does it mean that our destructive behavior towards nature is 'natural' or 'hard-wired' and therefore we can't do much about it?
Another promising field of psychology is called "Gestalt theory" (Gestalt is the German word for "whole" as a noun). This theory argues that the human mind operates holistically; we cannot isolate certain parts of the brain (or the mind if you prefer) and say that certain behaviors are "located" there. In other words, "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." Many eco-psychologists like this idea because it suggests that the human mind (being part of nature, after all) reflects the real world - Nature is holistic, too; the science of ecology proves that all natural processes are interconnected. A Gestalt approach to the world means that whether we are talking about psychotherapy or hard science, we must tackle problems as a whole, rather than break them down into individual pieces and study those pieces one at a time (which has been the approach of Western science since the days of Newton and Descartes).
And there are lots more such theories, but this forum is getting too long already. Let's look at some of the documents, and then discuss this question:
Can our destructive behavior toward nature be explained by the fact (if fact it is) that we are mentally ill - that is, we as a society or culture, not we as individuals?
