This summer, my friend was having happy recollections from her childhood as she said, “Greece reminds me of Tunisia”. It was not surprising that Greece was starting to feel like a desert climate. The wildfires and high temperatures made this place dustier and drier than ever. My friend’s happy emotions seemed incongruent to what was happening around us and this made me think of Freud’s essay “On Transience”. In it he describes a summer walk through the countryside with a poet and a friend. The poet was too anxious and depressed to admire the beauty of the surroundings because of his thought that there is no point since all of it will vanish in the winter—a worthless endeavor to admire something that will soon be gone. Freud concludes that he was resisting the act of mourning such transient objects of nature and so was refusing to take pleasure in them because that would mean investing in them emotionally. A second kind of reaction to transience and mourning that Freud describes is denial. This one reminded me of my friend who was also in denial about Greece turning into a desert.
From my early childhood years, I’ve been visiting my family here. People have changed, some deteriorated, but they still retain basic parts of their identity. Things from our past are lost yet memories resurface reminding us of the loss, and everything associated with it that we still have. An image of a familiar landscape, the sounds of birds, or other familiar sensory experiences from the environment will resurface memories.
Thinking about my friend’s recollection of a desert signifies something more than its geological meaning. It stands in for a different kind of loss, an emptiness, a fear of not going back. What happens to a person’s sense of identity when the environmental moorings of one’s memory vanish? A disrupted cycle of life with prolonged 40-degree temperatures for that entire month of July and a realization that created both an out of place, and an out of body experience in many of us. It ended up cooling off by a few degrees. There was a collective sigh of relief. Yet still, people were uneasy because these numbers were unprecedented. It felt like any heatwave just a little longer than last year’s and all the years before. The numbers heralded by the media, plotted on charts, felt more alarming than the actual experience or at least people weren’t letting on that they were alarmed until it was on the news. The conceptual “unprecedented” in a collective experience was different from the individual experience of feeling hot all month. In the latter, one can just stay indoors with the AC and pretend everything is fine. This dissimilitude makes me wonder what kind of an individual I amam I, who is situated in an unprecedented climate change with the AC on, watching the news about how horribly hot it is outside.
My eco-anxiety led me to Dodds’s book “Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos” (2011). One of the explanatory models he explores is the idea that climate change differs from other threats to human existence (like diseases) because it is not immediate and thus bypasses our “risk thermostat”. Dodds links the faulty risk thermostat with another idea from Terror Management Theory (TMT) which argues that our denial is not anything broken but a defense against a death anxiety that would otherwise paralyze us. Throughout the book various theories attempt to explain human behavior that seems destructive to our own survival, with conscious and unconscious mechanisms at play.
Theories about adaptive mechanisms have a stabilizing effect on my eco-anxiety.
An adaptive mechanism is not part of some teleological scheme but somehow it is supposed to increase our chances of survival. Other symptoms like binging and purging are also adaptive mechanisms that help an individual with an inner conflict that would otherwise be intolerable or potentially lead to destructive outer conflict situations. For me the obvious parallel with certain aspects of climate change is that of a massive collective binging and purging as a solution or adaptation to surplus capitalism. The price is global warming at an overwhelmingly faster rate than any of the previous mass extinction events.
Science reassures me that DNA survives these colossal extinctions. Shelley’s Ozymandias offers me a different kind of reassurance. The statue of Ozymandias remains amidst images of deserts and decay. Ozymandias is transient and his delusional identity is erased by nature and time, but the art remains, and Shelley’s poem remains. In his essay, Freud was pointing out that the transient nature of things can raise their value. The art associated with these ephemeral things will also decay but during our lives they provide us with enjoyment of a high value.
Marder’s essay “The shadow of the eco: Denial and climate change” (2023) puts an interesting slant on another of Freud’s ideas, that denial can lead to a loss of reality or an alteration of how the person experiences their environment, including climate change. Like Dodds’s reference to denial as an adaptive defense against death anxiety, people can’t go about their everyday lives if they are in fight or flight mode about the destruction of the planet. If it were not for this denial, the real future threats of climate change would traumatize us so much that significant events in life including the climate change itself could not be processed by the psyche. My reading of Marder is that she wants us to imagine attempting to go back in time with the hope of preventing the destruction of the planet and then realizing that this prevention is an impossible scenario. This realization leads to depression. Normal grieving can’t take place because the problem is too far in the future to bear reality and because of how rapidly everything is changing. Put another way, mourning never took place because the lost object “climate” is changing so rapidly we can’t even know what it is that we need to mourn.
Traumas of rapid climate change disturb memory and the associated transitional objects of fantasy. Denial can protect us from the damaging trauma of future climate threats, but it also diminishes our capacity to play and remember. Denial lacks the quality of “knowing” that characterizes children’s play. When we play, we know the difference between fantasy and reality using real objects as symbols for something imaginary. We play using parts of the natural environment as props for fantasies. The earth and its animals leave impressions on us when we are small children enabling us to knowingly project fantasy onto the external world, shaping our subjective sense of reality in a transitional space. For children, the whole environment can be a transitional space with its magical objects. We know from Winnicott that early experiences of imagination in transitional space function like a third entity linking us intersubjectively. Before we can know anything about another person we imagine them through this interconnected play space.
The environment’s elements have always been at our disposal for fantasy. We think that nature will always be there, like a grid or a foundation for the formation of the ego. Our relationship to the reliability of the environment bears a similarity to the toddler who can turn his back on the mother to play, having the capacity to be alone, but always knowing that the mother will not disappear just because he looks away. The threats of climate change act on individual and collective fantasies of why we are on earth, like threats of a mother’s disappearing act on a child’s fantasies during play.
Even if we remove denial or other adaptive mechanisms from the equation, imagining myself being changed by an erratic climate is not easy with all of the technology, food engineering, and climate control. Our reality sends us mixed messages. When I make attempts to ignore reality and to imagine how a radical climatological situation like a season permanently lost would affect me, denial prevents me from believing this on a deeper emotional level. I fall into imagining that even though it is warmer this month or this year, next year will be colder on the average so as to stay within the limits of the pre-industrial levels.
To distance my ego from these rationalizations and other defenses, I will use one of Bergman’s films Wild Strawberries (1957) as an example for the remainder of this article. In the actual film, the main character, Dr. Borg, suddenly awakens to his identity crisis brought on by the coming together of various conditions such as old age, confrontations with his family, and a ceremony honoring him for his professional achievements. Summer brings with it wild strawberries which appear in the film as metaphors for the parts of his life. His encounters with wild strawberries in later life sweeten the conflict, assuaging his transition from one life stage to another, as he creatively recollects or “re-members” his emotionally fragmented past to make this transition successful, to repair broken relationships with people in his life. But If Dr. Borg inhabited the world during a time of drastic climate change without the current technological advancements to distract him, I would imagine his experience as a trauma mirroring the erratic climate. Freud’s Transience presents a contrast to such trauma, inspiring the notion that the wild strawberries add beauty and value to the conflicts because their transience represents human transience. What metaphor would stand in place of Dr. Borg’s more important life’s events if floods and fires were destroying the wild strawberries he had once encountered? Or if one day the season never changed and they disappeared from the once familiar landscape? This fruit is symbolic but also scaffolds impressions of his memory.
Another example to imagine is using Searles’s paper “Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis” (1972) in which Dr. Borg denies that the destruction of the environment is a threat to his identity and to his progeny’s existence. The threat of climate change is external and unrelated to his own life’s purpose. Searles would argue that underneath the apathy about the destruction of the planet lies unresolved Oedipal rivalry that becomes a generationally displaced death wish. In Bergman’s film, as in other spheres of life, this interpretation is conceivable if there were no resolution. Borg has a cold distant mother, an absent father, and a brother who stole the love of his life. Borg’s daughter-in-law is pregnant, but his only son doesn’t want the child– at least three generations of unconscious hatred. However, the resolution of the hatred so evident in the actual film is initiated by his encounter with the environment, as the wild strawberries prompt him to engage in a dialectic where he can mourn the past and construct a meaning in the present. It isn’t only about the strawberries but about the temporal stability of his natural surroundings that frame his identity.
The element of traumatic time that Marder introduces in her essay is the antithesis of Dr. Borg’s dreams of going back in time as a way of reckoning with and engaging in a dialectic of internal conflict. In the Bergman version, Dr. Borg can see what his past actions will result in as it is slowly unfolding. His past traumas have him (and us) envisioning a future of alienation and hatred that Searles would say leads to a death wish via neglect of the environment. The solution is to somehow reconstruct the past that would lead to a tolerable future. Through Marder’s lens I imagine a person who experiences permanent estrangement from his life because of a changing climate with no specific future object. It is traumatic because our past actions have caused something in an unknowable unimaginable future.
When there is something so unthinkable about future climate threats the result is severe psychic stress and trauma. It is also an unrealistic anxiety that is at times unusable because of how effective technology has gotten at constructing environments that offer substitutes for transitional objects and transitional spaces. Perhaps Marder wants the reader to feel a paralysis so that climate threats bypass the technological protective shields bolstering our adaptive defenses. It feels paradoxical to engage in dark fantasies of being a movie character who loses his ability to dream and fantasize in the hope of making such threats part of a dialectic. But by imagining ourselves in unnatural situations where the transitional objects of nature are obliterated and objects can’t be mourned, like a dying planet, we can make the threat of climate change real with the emphasis on the disruption of a maternal metaphor rather than the abstract concept of a future time.
References
Dodds, J. (2011). Psychoanalysis and ecology at the edge of chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and psychoanalysis for a climate in crisis. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Freud, S. (1916). On Transience. SE XIV (pp. 303–307).
Marder, E. (2023). The shadow of the eco: Denial and climate change.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 49(2), 139-150.
Searles, H. (1972). Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis. Psychoanalytic Review, 59(3), 361-374.
