Living On Earth: Embodiment and Ecopsychology

Originally delivered as a talk and published in Self and Society (2007), Totton argues that psychotherapy - and body psychotherapy in particular - is already implicitly engaged in the project ecopsychology names explicitly: finding a good, embodied way for humans to live on earth. He sets out three strands of ecopsychology (the therapeutic effect of contact with the nonhuman world, practical work to shift human-nonhuman relations, and the philosophy of that relationship), then develops the idea of 'wild mind' - spontaneous, co-creative, self-balancing and inherently wise - as a counterpart to physical wild ecosystems. Drawing on Reichian body psychotherapy, Taoist philosophy, Bateson's systems thinking, and examples from indigenous land management (notably Kayapo agroforestry), Totton traces how Western culture's mind-body and culture-nature splits produce a fear of spontaneity rooted in early experiences such as toilet training, and how this fear underlies both personal alienation and ecological destruction. He proposes that therapy's task is to act as guardian and cultivator of this 'wild mind,' relaxing the defended, controlling ego enough for embodied, relational wisdom to re-emerge - in the client, and by extension in how humans relate to the nonhuman world.