Conference Agenda

In this article I explore the phenomenon of ecological disaster through the perspective of relationships and intersubjectivity using a psychosocial lens. I argue that fragmentation and hyper-individualism in late modernity are the root causes of ecological disaster. Fragmentation and disconnection from the consequences of our actions allows us to exploit our finite resources, as if infinite, with catastrophic consequences for our ecosystems. The hyper-individualism we have become acculturated to today and socialised into believing denies the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence on one another. In the context of climate change, the logical conclusion of fragmentation results in a fatal kind of disconnection, akin, I argue, to suicide and genocide, which the climate change campaigner Polly Higgins referred to as ‘ecocide’. To highlight my argument I will make some links between the concepts of suicide, genocide and ecocide in an attempt to understand the psychosocial dynamics of fatal self destructiveness, using personal experiences to explore aggression, in the hope that personal insights may shine a light on dynamics that lie at the heart of climate change brought about by fragmentation and disconnection.

Just as political ecologists have critiqued narratives of “climate migration” and “climate conflict” for their implicit climate determinism – or the tendency focus on climate change as the decisive causal factor behind complex social processes – this article argues that we should move beyond climate or ecology-centric accounts of “climate emotions.” Some of the existing literature highlights how the emotional impacts of climate change intersect with histories of class, race, and gender oppression. But these insights can be deepened by developing a critical political economy approach that illuminates how climate emotions are conditioned by intersecting developments in global capitalism, technology, and subjectivity. To do this, I will bring together the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler with Feminist Marxist analyses of the “care crisis” of neoliberal capitalism. These analyses help demonstrate how emotional responses to ecological crises are shaped and constrained by broader epidemics of depression and “burnout” driven by neoliberal capitalism’s systematic devaluation of care, production of precarity, and diffusion of ideologies of self-optimization and individualized responsibility. By bringing these insights to bear on climate emotions and the climate-mental health nexus, we will be in better position to develop strategies of collective healing and activism that can help address the intersecting crises of ecology and what I call “burnout capitalism.”

In Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric: Freud, Burke, Lacan and Philosophy's Other Scenes (Routledge 2022), psychoanalyst Chris Vanderwees and I stage a number of encounters between psychoanalysis and Kenneth Burke's "New Rhetoric." Burke's approach to rhetoric was tremendously influenced by Freud in that he saw Freud's conceptions of identity, subjectivity, and the unconscious as not only psychoanalytic concerns but fundamentally rhetorical ones bound up with interpretation, persuasion, and influence. Whereas previous waves of rhetoricians saw the two disciplines as mutually exclusive, Burke caused them to coalesce in a fashion that brought out the therapeutic and philosophical potentials within each of these lines of inquiry.

Drawing on the work of Freud, Burke, Klein, Lacan, and Zupančič, my presentation will build on some of the optics developed in my book to probe hybrid psychoanalytic/new-rhetorical approaches to diverse psychosocial strategies for the processing of dangerous, traumatic, and mundane experience. Zeroing-in on Burke's adoption and adaptation of Freud's conceptions of reality testing and "the pleasure principle," I will cast several nets to reflect on the mechanisms that set in when individuals and groups have to reorient themselves towards and metabolize economic turmoil, environmental catastrophe, and social crises. Following Burke and Lacan, I will suggest that these questions necessitate profoundly multiperspectival, interdisciplinary points of reference in order to orient the psychic life towards something like what Alenka Zupančič calls an "ethics of the Real."