What is the emotional experience of Scotland’s Citizen’s Assembly members as they learn about climate change? How does that compare with the general population?

These are two of the questions that CPA Scotland member, Nadine Andrews, explores in her recent paper.

“In facing up to the reality of the climate crisis and the risks it poses, people encounter powerful emotions that can be difficult to bear, Nadine writes. “Consequently, various defences and coping strategies may be used to suppress or avoid feeling these emotions. The way in which emotions are regulated has important implications for wellbeing and decision-making. In recent years there has been growing interest in using citizens' assemblies to inform government climate policy. Assembly members learn about and discuss the subject, and produce recommendations for action. Given this element of learning about climate change, it is likely that difficult emotions will come up for assembly members.”

As there is no published literature on this specific topic to date, this paper presents original research that can support organisers of future climate assemblies or other deliberative processes as well as be of practical use to policy makers and the therapeutic community.

Read the full article here.

Organisations that engage with the public – campaigning, educating - on this most overwhelming of problems are infused with the unbearable.

Elsewhere in this edition of New Associations, we are introduced to the growing body of psychoanalytically-informed scholarship on climate change. This work helps us to see the characteristic ways in which unbearable feelings (anger, grief, loss, shame, guilt and fear) evoke defences visible in human responses to climate change. My psychoanalytically-informed research suggests that organisations that engage with the public – campaigning, educating - on this most overwhelming of problems are infused with the unbearable at both individual and organisational level. In this article I use the systems-psychodynamic perspective to suggest aspects of the emotional experience of working in such organisations. 

Systems-psychodynamics draws on Kleinian object-relations theory, including splitting, projection and projective identification. It is influenced also by the work of Wilfred Bion and his successors on groups, and by the socio-technical framework originally developed by Miller and Rice. One useful concept is ‘organisation in the mind’: the mutually-interacting relationship between the individual’s internal psychic organisation and their experience of the organisation in which they work: their own particular response to an organisational dynamic. Within this concept, crucially, the working assumption is that the dynamics in a group reflect the dynamics in the wider organisation.

As part of my doctoral research, I am convening a small action-research group of people whose work involves public engagement on climate change. With members (including myself) from climate change charities both very large and very small, informal networks and local government, the group has been meeting regularly since January this year. We are trying to understand the emotional experience of our work as a group, in order to offer some insights into our organisations.

The first indication came with our difficulties in forming as a group. We have had confusions over location, two permanent departures, cancellations at short notice, differences over purpose and activities, and caring responsibilities felt as in opposition to joining the group. Despite these difficulties, and the pain and bad feeling they are associated with, we are still persevering, still meeting and interacting. I have proposed to the group that what we are experiencing may reflect the difficulties of co-operation and trust on this ‘wicked problem’ of climate change. I wonder too if it indicates splitting and projection: note the opposition between caring and being in the group, and the perseverance, which reminds me of the way tenacity gets located in environmentalists while apathy is located in ‘the public’.

A second indication derives from my attempt to structure one of our early meetings as a ‘social photo matrix’. Intended in theory as a form of containing space, this design also arose from my own anxiety-fuelled wish for a short-cut to the group’s unconscious. And it led in practice to an exercise in loss and broken connections – waiting for Skype to work, losing someone’s photos, feelings of being kept at a distance by the technology and losing our human connections and therefore our ability to think. Rosemary Randall argues that in public discussion in the UK, the losses associated with the impacts of climate change are characterised as ‘terrifying but far away’, while the losses associated with technological solutions to climate change are ‘completely excised’. It seems interesting that in our group, it was precisely at the moment of trying to use the technology of the social photo matrix as a quick fix that something was excised.

One further indication is to do with need, desire and judgement. As our group develops we have become more aware of the desire (which moves between us) for more care, connection and fellow-feeling than is available, of often feeling isolated and lonely and as if it is not possible both to be in the group and to have caring responsibilities; and of the feelings of judgement that come up, that others in the group (and oneself) are not doing enough, not giving enough, they (we) don’t care enough for us, they (we) are inadequate. In our early discussions we acknowledged that our emotional experience of engaging the public on climate involves quite a primitive wish to move others, to get them to act. If getting them has a double meaning here it may relate to getting our basic needs met.

Over the years, organisations trying to engage the public on climate change have been characterised as getting people to change, and also as denying people basic needs (warm houses, hot water, plentiful food). The desperation evoked by this dynamic is there in our group.

There is more to our organisation in the mind than I have space for here. We have much to do to deepen our understandings of it, too, and to validate the connections between our group experience and what our organisations are bringing to us, and we to them. But I hope the characteristics sketched out here – splitting care and uncare, splitting tenacity and apathy, technology as a defence, desperation and judgement – are recognisable to others, as they are to me, as features of public discussions of the climate emergency.

This article by CPA member Rebecca Nestor was part of a special issue focusing on the climate emergency of New Associations, the magazine of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Helen Morgan, a Jungian analyst and former Chair of the BPC commissioned the articles that comprised this autumn 2019 issue. (British Psychoanalytic Council www.bpc.org.uk) Illustrator: Allen Fatimaharan.

This book made a particular impression on me because I am Dutch. Ghosh starts off with describing the Dutch killing the inhabitants of the Banda Islands, determined as they were to dominate the trade in nutmeg.

After decades of bad behaviour by the Dutch, while the locals tried to live life as they were accustomed to (e.g. not putting particular people in charge of representing others, something which made the Dutch very suspicious) a particular incident started the killing. As the story goes the trigger for the massacre (and it is documented) was a lamp that fell over in the headquarters of the Dutch at the start of the night of April 21 in the year 1621.

Ghosh points at the fact that the extermination of indigenous people was not invented by the Dutch but also by the British and other West European people. The principle of war allows capitalism to flourish (chapter 10). It is war on people but most of all it is war on their way of living and the ecosystems they depend on. 

A central point of the book is about relating to nature. As soon as the indigenous people are gone ‘The fruits of the Nutmeg Have Died’ (chapter 3). Ghosh shows terraforming to be pivotal to colonialisation, replacing indigenous cultures and existing ecosystems with new ways of producing wealth for (western) elites (chapter 4). Belief systems created in the early days of capitalism are still alive in the current day, e.g. the idea that white people are biologically superior (chapter 5). 

Almost half way through the book, Ghosh adds another perspective – that of of Gaia. Based on that idea he gives examples of Gaia striking back, illustrating the current climate crisis and its relation to other crises (chapter 7). While the West until now responded through thinking that the same way of building the economy will keep it safe, Ghosh shows this to be an illusion (chapter 11). 

Digging deeper into the relations that Ghosh explores throughout the book, he writes a whole chapter on the enormous contribution of (western) military operations to greenhouse gas emissions, yet these figures are hardly visible as they are not included in official statistics (chapter 12). He also shows what he calls ‘War by Another Name’ by which he means deliberate inactivity by the policy makers and politicians in order to shift the burden (or risk to survival) to the least powerful (chapter 13). ‘One has to teach the natives about want and money’ is a central quote in chapter 14 (The Divine Angel of Discontent). 

Ghosh then discusses the origin of the word ‘brute’ and how it got used to address first nation people as well as nature (chapter 15). In chapter 16 he introduces the reader to Davi Kopenawa, an indigenous thinker, activist and writer (The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman) who has been instrumental (among others) in creating a short pause in the destruction of the Amazon Forest, where now under Bolsanaro the VOC style omnicide is at an all-time high.

Ghosh ends his book in two ways. One is by pointing at the emergence of and hope in vitalist politics. The other is by once again illustrating nature’s agency through quoting a Dutch writer (Louis Couperus) who was famous for his novel about a loyal and dedicated administrative person in Indonesia during the VOC years, who against his will, witnesses the most strange and mystical manifestations that cannot be rationally explained. Ghosh says: 

“Van Oudijk’s (the protagonist in Couperus’ novel) crisis is not just personal; he is forced, rather, to confront the epistemic violence of colonialism. He, who believes himself to be in a place that has been subjugated and brought to order long ago, now finds himself dealing with forces that he can neither control nor understand. He is unable to mute the voices that are making themselves heard around him.” (p. 250).

The experience of the text is being close to the events he writes about. Also, he brings insights I had not realized so strongly before. On page 95 Ghosh writes about Linnaeus’ system of categorising the plant world. This system is still the way biologists and ecologists ‘systematize’ the living plant world into names. Two things about it: first, this system became a world standard mainly because authorities ordered everybody to use it (Spanish empire, mid 18^th century). So now suddenly indigenous naming did not matter anymore. Secondly, it is now more and more understood that Linnaeus’ system is one of the clearest examples of cutting off vitalist elements (life) from the very subjects it describes and categorises.

Covid-19 and the climate crisis have forced us to acknowledge that we are not separate from the world. The heroic stories of eternal ascension, human supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy and western supremacy don’t provide the necessary answers any more. These ideologies have torn wounds into the fabric of the world that are so deep that they can’t be healed by ordinary medicine. Most of us have become colonisers and colonised at the same time.