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Climate Psychology offers ways to work with the emotionally unendurable predicament of climate change. An original and vital text, it attends to the undercurrents leading to our present ecological crisis and potential social collapse. Rather than prioritise explanations and solutions, this text takes us into the unconscious processes of the Modern psyche and the psychological challenges that confront Western civilisation’s failure to adapt. As the climate becomes further destabilised across the world, we can no longer avoid the reality of the eco, psyche, and social crisis and potential collapse.
Read the authors’ blog post discussing why we must alter our relationship to Earth to combat climate destruction.
| Authors | Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9781912691326 |
| Format | Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book |
| Page Extent | 160 |
| Publication Date | January 2022 |
| Subject Areas | Political theory, Psychoanalysis |
Climate Psychology offers ways to work with the unthinkable and emotionally unendurable current predicament of humanity. The style and writing interweave passion and reflection, animation and containment, radical hope and tragedy to reflect the dilemmas of our collective crisis. The authors model a relational approach in their styles of writing and in the book’s structure. Four chapters, each with a strikingly original voice and insight, form the core of the book, encased either end by two jointly written chapters.
In contrast to a psychology that focuses on individual behaviour change, the authors use a transdisciplinary mix of approaches (depth psychology and psychotherapy, earth systems, deep ecology, cultural sociology, critical history, group and institutional outreach) to bring into focus the predicament of this period. While the last decade required a focus on climate denial in all its manifestations (which continues in new ways), a turning point has now been reached. Increasingly extreme weather across the world is making it impossible for simple avoidance of the climate threat. Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe address how climate psychology illuminates and engages the life and death challenges that face terrestrial life.
This book will appeal to three core groups. First, mental health and social care professionals wanting support in containing and potentially transforming the malaise. Second, activists wanting to participate in new stories and practices that nurture their engagement with the present social and cultural crisis. Third, those concerned about the climate emergency, wanting to understand the deeper context for this dangerous blindness.
Wendy Hollway is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She co-founded the UK psycho-social network, has been active in the European psycho-social network, and co-edits the Palgrave “Studies in the Psychosocial” series. She edits a monthly Digest for Climate Psychology Alliance.
Her books include:
Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (1984/1998), with J. Henriques, C. Urwin, C. Venn, and V. Walkerdine. London: Routledge.
Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method (2000/2013), with Tony Jefferson. New York: Sage.
Knowing Mothers: Researching Maternal Identity Change (2015). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paul Hoggett is a psychoanalytical psychotherapist and a training therapist at the Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy. He is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he co-founded the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. His research focused on the emotional dynamics of race, class, community, and governance. With Adrian Tait he set up the Climate Psychology Alliance in 2012. In 2019, Paul edited a collection of CPA research papers Climate Psychology: On Indifference to Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan).
His previous books include:
Partisans in an Uncertain World: The Psychoanalysis of Engagement (1992). London: Free Association.
Politics, Identity and Emotion (2009). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Chris Robertson has been a psychotherapist and trainer since 1978. He was the co-creator of Borderlands and the Wisdom of Uncertainty, which in 1989 became the subject of a BBC documentary. In 1988, he co-founded Re-Vision, an integrative and transpersonal psychotherapy training with an ecopsychology component. He retired from Re-Vision in 2018. He was chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance, with which he still works.
Recent publications include:
Culture crisis: a loss of soul. In: D. Mathers (Ed.), Depth Psychology and Climate Change (2020). London: Routledge.
Climate psychology: a big idea (with Paul Hoggett). In: H. Flynn (Ed.), Four Go in Search of Big Ideas (2018). London: Social Liberal Forum.
Transformation in Troubled Times (co-editor) (2018). London: Transpersonal Press.
Climate change, despair and radical hope (co-editor). The Psychotherapist (2016).
Sally Weintrobe has spent her professional life practising as a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS), a long-standing Member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, and she chairs the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Committee on Climate Change. She was formerly an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies at University College London, and a member of teaching staff at the Tavistock Clinic.
Her publications on climate include:
Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. (2012). London: Routledge.
Communicating psychoanalytic ideas about climate change. In: P. Garvey and K. Long (Eds.), The Klein Tradition (2018). London: Routledge.
The new imagination. In: Trogal et al. (Eds.), Architecture and Resilience (2019). London: Routledge.
Climate crisis: the moral dimension. In: D. Morgan (Ed.), The Unconscious in Social and Political Life (2019). Bicester: Phoenix.
The climate crisis. In Y. Stavrakakis (Ed.), Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2019). London: Routledge.
Moral injury in neoliberalism’s culture of uncare. Journal of Social Work Practice (2020).
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (2021). London: Bloomsbury.
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Chapter 1
Introduction: a matter of life and death
Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe
Chapter 2
Climate change: from denialism to nihilism
Paul Hoggett
Chapter 3
How the light gets in: beyond psychology’s Modern individual
Wendy Hollway
Chapter 4
Climate psychology at a cultural threshold
Chris Robertson
Chapter 5
The new bold imagination needed to repair and expand the ecological self
Sally Weintrobe
Chapter 6
In the end is my beginning
Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe
Index
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Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home –
‘To the uninitiated, the waltzing heat of recent years, the melting ice sheets of recent fears, and blusteringly rude clouds outside our pristine windows, are matters of the outside. This book, however, is not a gentle tap on the door separating that outside from the gilded interior of modern subjectivity, it is a haunting within: the urgency to consider that the inside has always been exposed. It is a transdisciplinary invitation to recognise how we Moderns are aspects of an ethical/psycho-ecological/socio-material arrangement that has helped produce the calamities we now witness. There is no neat inside any longer; we are all undone. But, you see, the undoing – the timely gift of this book – is the initiation we all need.’
Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD, teacher, psychoanalyst and author of Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear –
‘These four eminent British climate psychology thinkers challenge us to think creatively, beyond binaries, to reach what they name the “eco-psycho-social”. This book is an engaging and important support to clinicians and to all trying to manage and think through our contemporary emergency in humane and ethical ways. We are in their debt.’
Professor Rupert Read, former strategist, spokesperson for XR, and author of Parents for a Future: How Loving our Children Can Prevent Climate Collapse –
‘Individualism, human exceptionalism, modernism (and its bastard child, postmodernism): this book dares to imagine a psychology that moves decisively beyond these fatal trends. Instead, we are offered fare badly needed: a social ecopsychology, the personhood of nonhuman as well as human animals taken seriously, an unembarrassed call to feel and show our love for this world. There is nothing less than a revolution in the offing, in the discipline we used to call psychology. This book indicates a way to (re-)imagine it.’
Mary-Jayne Rust, art therapist, Jungian analyst, ecopsychotherapist and author of Towards an Ecopsychotherapy –
‘Climate psychology is an emerging and much-needed field in our struggle to make the necessary changes to our dysfunctional relationship with Earth. This book offers a diverse range of innovative thinking that pulls together threads from the eco–psycho–social fields. It challenges the reader to find new ways of seeing and understanding our current eco social crisis which will hopefully inspire new forms of action.’
Dr Els van Ooijen, psychotherapist, ‘Therapy Today’ Sept 2022 –
‘This timely and important book comprises an investigation of the causes of the current climate crisis, common reactions to this existential threat and how therapists can help each other and their clients face reality and find a way forward. […] I heartily recommend this engaging and well-written book’