Keywords

Introduction

What does it mean to add ‘eco-’ to a psycho-social analysis? The last few years of deepening climate crisis for me have meant a dive into this question. In what follows I try to convey that journey. To set the scene, I reflect on my trajectory of the last decade as I tried to make sense of the climate crisis from a psycho-social perspective. This entails looking for the missing eco- in psycho-social by tracing the dualistic nature of relationships between disciplines of the social and natural sciences and beyond into transdisciplinary, systemic approaches including eco- and posthuman feminisms. I follow two connected trails. First how Europeans – and subsequently, through colonization, the Western-dominated world – became split from the natural world that sustained life on earth. Second how this 500-year history of modernity reshaped humans into Modern individuals. The Gaia theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis challenged the natural sciences to move towards the principle of earth’s interconnectedness, a principle serviceable for an eco-psycho-social analysis of the climate crisis. For this purpose, a Gaian analysis needs extending to imagine interconnectedness that transcends the Modern human subjectivities based on separateness that are no longer viable; to imagine human subjectivities beyond individualism and exceptionalism. Among modernity’s deadly binaries, nature-culture and femininity-masculinity conflate in the exploitation of mother earth. A matrixial analysis develops the idea of com-passion beyond the masculine-feminine binary and establishes a proto ethics as the foundation of human life.

Psychosocial Analysis

I have a memory of becoming anxiously aware of climate change as a priority political issue and thrashing around in the waters of Psychosocial Studies looking for a way I could ‘do something’. I didn’t find it until later, when, in Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), I found an active bunch of like-minded people who, true to their often-psychotherapeutic formations, rallied around CPA’s strapline “facing difficult truths.”

This made sense to me: it would take a psycho-social perspective to probe the daunting problem, namely, that the human world has known about climate change for 50 years and has continued on its calamitous route of “infinite,” fossil-fueled, growth. There is an important political element to the need for a psycho-social analysis. The requirement to change has been put on the shoulders of individuals, in the form of “behaviour change” discourses and tasking individuals to reduce their carbon footprints. Meanwhile the “social” and power factors enmeshing people’s behavior – the costs, products, advertising, discourses, systems – continue along the lines that neoliberal capitalism dictates with few challenges and less regulation. The emphasis on individual behaviour is not only a feature of contemporary culture but also a heavily financed strategy by fossil fuel interests (Adams, 2016; Solnit, 2021; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

During the first decade of CPA, facing difficult truths meant a preoccupation with the many ways that people avoid facing them. Denial, disavowal, and an array of psychological defence mechanisms (Hoggett 2022) defend against the pain of knowing such unbearable realities as mass species extinction and the carefully predicted effects of rising carbon emissions. Denial works in the context of media collusion and – notoriously – is shaped by the now longstanding disinformation campaigns of fossil fuel interests that have not abated, even in their new “greenwashing” phase (Hoggett, op.cit.). (Writing this while COP26 takes place, a new critical phrase has emerged, “mitigation denial.”) Paul Hoggett’s psycho-social analysis shows the workings of deep psychological defenses such as denial and disavowal, exposing their each-way dynamic reinforcement with discourses, structures, and practices.

Sally Weintrobe’s psycho-social analysis charts the psychic fracturing involved in the neoliberal “deregulation of mind from care” which embedded exceptionalism as morally acceptable and encouraged the most consequential “fraud bubble” in human history – the “climate and environmental fraud bubble” that is now bursting (Weintrobe, 2021, p.2). The mindset of neoliberalism, which had gained dominance by the 1980s, is one of exceptionalism, the roots of which were already established in the longer history of modernity. While neoliberal economics refers to a deregulated form of capitalism, its mindset, in Weintrobe’s view, elevates the status of those in power to be deserving of all the rewards that arise from extracting and exploiting the rest. Weintrobe’s book is an extended study of the psycho-social articulation of “external” neoliberalism with a developing culture of uncare and with fractured inner worlds, cut off from reality.

Note Weintrobe’s label “climate and environmental” fraud bubble, coupled adjectives most of us use. It is the same bubble yet it requires two features of this crisis to be included in the label. In now widely available public discourse, climate change often means nothing more than accelerating carbon dioxide emissions, which leads to governments’ preoccupation with net zero targets. But if the world were suddenly – magically – to reduce its carbon emissions to zero, the climate crisis, because it is an ecological crisis as well, would be largely unaffected. That’s because it pertains to the way that we humans live on the earth as if its resources – air, river, earth, ocean, the multitude of species – were inexhaustible and of no value except through human extraction and use. This is why global heating is a subphenomenon within the broader problem of ecological crisis. This is also why the eco- needs adding to the psycho-social.

Digesting the Climate News

When I took over the role of writing the CPA monthly newsletter, it involved daily reading of the climate news – the science, economics and politics. No longer could I keep at arms-length knowledge of how dire the situation was. The period when it seemed possible to cover the climate news was then transformed by protest. The actions of Extinction Rebellion (calling out the BBC’s shocking avoidance of climate destabilizations, for example), the Greta Thunberg inspired school strikes and latterly Black Lives Matter drawing attention to the central part racism has played historically and still plays in the disproportionate costs of climate change to people of colour the world over – all this helped to heighten media coverage and make it more honest. Also, science was changing. Climate science had to exit its disciplinary silos, and shake off disavowal as well as fossil fuel influences. This combined with the availability of further data and models of greater sophistication. Complex earth systems approaches got more of a look in and climate sciences were more able to bring together the effects of global heating and ecological derangement. By mid-2021, successive IPCC reports had progressed from underestimating climate change to a “code red for humanity” evaluation.

Psycho-social analysis is interested in the flows between internal and external worlds. In the external world, the growing cascade of terrifying news, of fire, flood, species extinctions, habitat destruction, air and water pollution, and uninhabitable temperatures under heat domes, fed growth in awareness. How is all this experienced? As CPA insists (contra the pathologizing tendency in mental health care), to be anxious about climate change is rational, well-adjusted to reality. But it needs support.

The role of CPA’s newsletter became to help “digest” the knowledge of climate derangement that was assaulting us daily. Its name ‘Digest’ refers to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s (1962) theory of emotional experience and thinking, which sees the processing of experience as akin to digestion. Traumatic experience needs to be made digestible into thinking, otherwise it remains in the body as trauma or it is dispelled through projection and paranoid-schizoid mental states that distort reality. This operates at cultural levels as well as individual and identity group levels. Paranoid-schizoid states of mind have become commonplace in widespread conspiracy theories and promote reality as “fake news.”

Unsupported climate anxiety is likely to lead to paranoid-schizoid defences, which means the projection of what is feared on to outside objects, including groups and practices. Knowledge of climate collapse, coupled with recognition of governments’ inaction, is deeply affecting people, especially young people, all over the world. A survey of 10,000 young people in ten countries spanning the global North and global South found that 45% said climate anxiety was affecting their daily lives, 39% said they were hesitant about having children, and 64% said governments were not doing enough to avoid a climate catastrophe (Marks et al., 2021).

Holding on to such a frightening reality is especially hard without the containment of others, without help in bringing fears into language and recognition for the grief (Lertzman, 2015), without the feeling that there is something one can do. Traditional psychotherapeutic practices have useful skills in this regard but the work of support and containment needs to exit the clinical one-to-one setting and be available in communities. CPA’s outreach includes climate cafes, “Through the Door” training workshops for group facilitators and free support sessions, for example, for Extinction Rebellion participants.

The Missing “Eco-”

My habits in viewing the world psycho-socially were helpful in tracing the multiple interactions between the (depth) psychological and the cultural, discursive, material, political, historical, economic, and structural that together make up the “social” in “psycho-social.” But the ecological was surprisingly absent. I started to wonder at the history of critical social science (within which I position much of Psychosocial Studies) which meant the natural world was left separate – split off – from the social and human world. The concept “nature” is rather like the “individual” to Modern sensibilities: so obvious, so real, it seems a philosophical indulgence to question it. But it too is a product of a historical period. Of course, the earth, the teeming life that makes up humankind’s “environment,” existed anyway, but it began to be conceptualized as nature in the context of Man’s separation from it; in the context of Modern Man’s exceptionalism in putting himself above nature. With the consequences we now are facing. I’ll return below to my use of the term “Man.”

This splitting off had characterized my own work too. For example, I might draw attention to the nature-culture binary (in among a long, critical psychology list of binaries – body-mind, emotion-cognition, femininity-masculinity, objectivity-subjectivity – that characterize Modern psychology) but in my analyses, I ignored the nature side of the binary. My thinking interacted with another binary characteristic of social science – realism-constructionism – which enabled “nature” to be treated with reductive vision as a cultural construction. As such, the discursive treatment of nature reflects the dualistic foundation on which modernity is built: nature experienced as “out there,” consisting of objects for Man’s exploitation, forgetting – suppressing – that humans are part of nature. More recently, this avoidance has been challenged, especially from the Humanities: “nature” can still be critiqued as a Modern construct but what it represents can be taken seriously, often now likely to be called the ecological. (For example, the book title Ecology without Nature, Morton, 2007.)

Timothy Morton’s claims (2010) for “ecological thought” are as broad and inclusive as psycho-social thinkers would wish for:

Ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power – and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with capitalism and with what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion and scepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with race, class, and gender. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence. (Morton, 2010, p.2)

It is but a short step to claim, along with a growing current of systems and complexity thinking, that the earth is interconnected, as is concisely stated on Morton’s back cover: “all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh” and “no being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement.” This is the Gaian idea to which I shall return.

Animism and Ontological Turning

Morton’s writing comes out of the Humanities. Anthropology too has taken an “ontological turn,” occasioned by a new urgency in the perception of entanglement of human and non-human worlds and resulting in decentralizing humans from its focus. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012) and an edited collection by de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) illustrate this philosophical anthropology which reaches into critical social theory from influences in indigenous knowledges.

I started soaking up perspectives that held in common the conceptualizing of earth from a post-anthropocentric point of view. David Abram, ecologist and philosopher, was an early, radical and transformative voice with Spell of the Sensuous, first published in 1997. It was Abram who, in 1996, coined the phrase “more-than-human-world” and is credited with adding the prefix “eco” to disciplines such as linguistics and phenomenology – and “ethno” – to ecology.

The voices of indigenous groups are informing this post-anthropocentric turn, conveying the way that these cultures – cultures ruthlessly suppressed by colonial forces – lived in harmony with the earth. Braiding Sweetgrass (2020) by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an ethno-botanist of American-Indian heritage, is a powerful example reaching far beyond academia (half a million copies sold worldwide, nine languages). In her writing, the social and the psychological are also present, in the figuration of community, systems, and personhood in new ways. Indigenous knowledges are based on an idea of relationality that describes its extension into all life. Relationality, an idea confined to the human social world when part of a psychosocial perspective, is made eco-psycho-social:

In the indigenous worldview, a landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners. It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected non-human persons to whom we humans have a responsibility. […] Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land (Kimmerer, 2020 p.338).

Indigenous knowledges have been influential in anthropology, “displacing anthropos itself,” decentering its subject from the Humanist ideal of Mankind (Braidotti, 2017 p.26).

For example, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn documented the animistic beliefs of an Amazonian forest people about the shared characteristics of themselves and the non-human animals that live around them: ‘they are selves … that have a point of view. This is what makes them animate and this animation enchants the world’ (2013 p.97). His work is an example of recognition of personhood in nonhuman animals. Animism also means recognizing soul – a kind of intelligence at least – in plant life and even minerals. For example, Suzanne Simard reveals the reciprocal relationships among trees. Her title, Finding the Mother Tree (2021), is considerably more than a metaphor for the protection that old growth trees afford the young ones in their environs; ones they have seeded and others; both their own species and others.

I shall return to the currents of eco-feminism and posthuman feminism where I found a comfortable second home on account of the way relationality and connectedness are extended to encompass the more than human world. But this semi-autobiographical narrative needs to go back in time first.

Ecopsychology

What about ecopsychology? I am ashamed to say that I had never incorporated it into my critical psychology or psychosocial studies and I have wondered why – not so much in the spirit of an individual reparation but interested in exploring my own position as representative of a psychosocial studies that had no or little interest in ecopsychology.

Ecopsychology turns out to be an eclectic, scholarly, challenging field. The foundation text, which I take to be Theodore Roszak’s (1992) The Voice of the Earth, is huge in its scope, drawing on cosmology, psychoanalysis (both Jung and Freud), ecofeminism, systems theory, Lovelock’s Gaia; addressing consumerism, urbanism, technology. Andy Fisher, more recently, distinguishes between two senses of ecopsychology; the first, psychotherapeutic, “about mending the split between psyche and nature” and the second, critical, “about addressing the social sources of violence done to both human and more-than-human nature, identifying the historical, cultural, political roots of our ecopsychological crisis” (Fisher, 2013, p.167, cited in Rust, 2021, p.44).

Ecopsychology is defined by its concern with the alienation of humanity from nature, more particularly, psyche from nature. This concern is now more widespread than in 1992 when Roszak’s book was published. Where conventional psychology limits itself to the human world, ecopsychology focuses on people’s more-than-human relations and their effects on sanity and wellbeing. Arguably, psychosocial studies have left off where psychology does. In the widely shared belief that sanity depends on sane relationships with one’s environment, ecopsychology lines up with relational psychoanalysis, the difference being that “environment” is natural in one case and interpersonal in the other.

Mary-Jayne Rust, for example, introduces ecopsychotherapy as about understanding self in relation to nature (op. cit. p.48). And because nature and bodies have been conflated, ecopsychology has been better than social sciences used to be at theorizing an embodied self (a blindspot that is not the case in contemporary psychosocial studies). When talking about sensing, feeling, intuiting, rather than cognition and reasoning, we address these as capacities of an embodied self. An example of the eco-psycho-social reach of contemporary ecopsychotherapy in the hands of Mary-Jayne Rust, who has deep knowledge of eating disorders from her psychotherapeutic practice, is contained in the following comment, about the consequences of human exceptionalism:

… separate from nature as well as our creatureliness, [this] disconnects us from the source of life … [creating] generations of loneliness and isolation into which the great hunger of consumer culture can be born. This is breeding a raft of psychological disturbances which need to be seen in relation to culture rather than individualized and privatized (p.114).

Modernity

One way of summing up my past ignorance of ecopyschology is to recognize that I could not at the time get my Modern head around the connectedness of humans to all life on earth, our belongingness to the category of animals, nor the idea of human dependency. Perhaps this was unsurprising, product as I was/am of modernity. Mine is not simply an individual trajectory. A psycho-social (and eco-psycho-social) perspective requires, I believe, the insights of inner reflection on experience linked to understanding a complex external world. Born after World War Two, my life is contemporaneous with that unique period in human history called the “Great Acceleration,” when global growth across a large range of measures, notably world population, energy and water consumption, and carbon emissions, became rampant (McNeill & Engelke, 2016). As vessels of historical experience, we have lived during what Bruno Latour (2018) sees as the end of the arc of modernity. Shaped and defined by it, we must nonetheless find ways of looking outside the current Modern world view (Robertson, 2022), which, with knowledge of climate derangement, is no longer tenable.

For Bruno Latour, the significance of COP21 in December 2015 was not so much the agreement itself but the shared acknowledgement that “if they went ahead according to the terms of their respective modernization plans, there would be no planet compatible with their hopes for development” (2018 p.5). On that occasion, this truth also went global. The eco-psycho-social consequences have been percolating into world cultures and politics ever since. Facing the truth that, on its current course, the earth will no longer support human civilization contradicts all we are taught about progress, development, human superiority, and the triumph of technology. In his damning critique of the Modern period, Latour exposes the willful blindness of its foundational principles:

How could we deem ‘realistic’ a project of modernization that has ‘forgotten’ for two centuries to anticipate the reactions of the terraqueous globe to human actions? How could we accept as ‘objective’ economic theories that are incapable of integrating into their calculations the scarcity of resources whose exhaustion it had been their mission to predict … How could we call ‘rationalist’ an ideal of civilization guilty of a forecasting error so massive that it prevents parents from leaving an inhabited world to their children? (Latour, 2018 p.66)

This is existentially frightening. Joanna Macy (1991 p.12) captures a momentous psycho-social dimension of it when she points out the loss of certainty that we humans have a future, “felt at some level of consciousness by everyone.” This, she says, “is the pivotal psychological reality of our time.”

Where did modernity start? This complex question requires an extended treatment, especially its relation to capitalism. Here I focus on European peasant women. The separation from the land, seasonal cycles, and the life-death-life cycle that occurred in Europe from the sixteenth century was achieved through violence and oppression, as peasant cultures began to be decimated in the service of the new mercantilism (allied with church and state) which needed labor power to create profit. Silvia Federici, feminist historian, documented these historical processes in Caliban and the Witch (1971/2004). We have learned about European history as development, progress, a linear process of dawning Enlightenment and Reason. Yes, the stranglehold of the church was loosened as sciences and arts opened up new knowledges; yes, capitalist development had many facets. But Federici’s work provides an overlooked angle relevant to the treatment of the natural world.

Federici details the violent witch persecution in Europe that was central to the transformation of subjectivities in the early Modern period, especially in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The figure of the witch was essential to the changes, “the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (1971/2004 p.88). Women were the healers, shamans, midwives, and magicians and therefore in charge of pre-modern relations to the natural world. Through the figure of the witch, they became controlled as part of the demand for population growth to supply the new economies. Pre-modern women had been in control of reproduction; now European governments imposed severe penalties against contraception, infanticide, and abortion (Federici op. cit.).

Federici shows how magic, which conferred a privileged position to natural elements outside individual agency, was a threat, especially to the rationalization of work. Magic supported a refusal to work, insubordination and resistance to power: “the world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated” (Federici, 2019). Repressions were aimed at the spiritual beliefs that linked people to the soil, air, oceans, stars, trees and rivers, animals and rocks. As women were the chief bearers of this knowledge, they were a threat to the new order.

It was during this period that ‘Nature’ in the contemporary sense came into being because it was a construct shaped by Modern Man as he separated himself in a hierarchy from all that was positioned as for Man’s use. I say ‘Man’ here because it was men (the ruling elites of European men, not peasants) who created this world view, and they placed women on the other side of the Mankind/Nature binary: women were inferior by being an expression of nature, by being – so it was routinely claimed – incapable of rationality.

Nature became the ‘other’ to Mankind in Europe’s Age of Reason, which then spread to the New World through missionary Christianity and military force. George Mpanga, rap artist, conveyed the colonizers’ gendered violence against the land when he refused an MBE: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple of hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.”

The idea of a hierarchy of all beings, as decreed by God and depicted in Medieval Europe’s ‘great Chain of Being’, remained foundational in Christian thought. From God and then the Angels, it proceeded down via Mankind to animals, then plants and minerals. Evolutionary theory became popularly absorbed into the same idea, depicting – from the bottom up - a succession of primates turning first into aboriginal-style, dark skinned humans (always men), getting whiter as they got taller, less hirsute and more clothed. Such a foundational image was used to legitimate European colonization and enslavement.

In summary, at the risk of oversimplifying, modernity led to a disastrous separation of mankind from nature, one of the many Modern binaries that captures thought and culture in the contemporary world. As part of systems of production, nature became framed as external and passive, determinate and mechanical, a world of quantities. The mysterious and spiritual, once largely experienced through residing in nature, became ‘supernatural’ (above nature) and demeaned as superstitious. Mankind became above nature in a further sense: in the move to cities and industrial production, people were removed from lives attached to the earth. The eventual outcome of the Modern period was to establish a radical separation of Man from the natural world. The characteristics of the Modern individual – rationality, separateness, entitlement – were the preserve of a minority of ruling white men, which is to say these features are gendered, racialized and classed.

Patriarchy, Outer and Inner

It may be unsurprising that the European Enlightenment gave rise to scientific knowledge imbued with patriarchal ideas, but it is still startling to recognize the extent to which these were gendered. When developing my PhD research on gender for publication (Hollway 1989), early second wave feminism afforded access to aspects of this history. For example, Francis Bacon, English aristocrat and philosopher living in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, is credited with establishing the equation between “the aims of science and the control and domination of nature” (Fox Keller, 1985 p.33), part of “a fantasy of omnipotent power over a calculable universe” (Walkerdine, 1988, p.90). Bacon’s writing was blatantly gendered, just at the time witch hunting was gaining strength, a crusade he and other scientists approved of. The feminist biologist Evelyn Keller provides examples of Bacon’s “coupling” of the genders in patriarchal styles ranging from consent to violence: “a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature”; “I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave”; “the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her very foundations” (Fox Keller op. cit. pp.33–39, cited in Hollway 1989 p.110–111).

Three hundred years later, Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, describes the dynamic relationship between nature and civilization (a Modern civilization) from a perspective of recognizing the conflicts of the inner world:

The principal task of civilization … is to defend us against nature … [which] rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization (cited in Rust op. cit. p. 56).

Nature had to be tamed precisely because she reminds us of our weakness and helplessness: Freud, like most male writers, identified with the forces of civilization by personifying nature as she, but he recognized her power, and its effects on the interminable defensive work of civilization (culture).

This patriarchal identification needs disentangling from the reality of the natural world as a sometime destructive force, a reality that now, with the derangement of the climate from its relatively stable holocene garb, has taken center stage, prompting desperate geo-engineering schemes in order to continue modernity’s business as usual. Gaia, as we shall see below with Stengers, is destructive as well as nurturing. Gaia represents the life-death-life cycle.

But first, the realities of life and death need to be followed as they transmute into human inner worlds, and are transmuted by them. Psychoanalyst Roger Money Kyrle (1971) posits three primal “facts of life.” John Steiner, in Psychic Retreats, explains their profundity as follows:

Money-Kyrle proposes that all adult thinking, all later acts of recognition, are hampered by the difficulties which beset the recognition of a few fundamental aspects of reality, and of these primal “facts of life” he considers three to be supremely important. They are aspects of reality which seem particularly difficult to accept and without which no adequate acceptance of these aspects of reality is possible. His three primal facts of life consist of: “the recognition of the breast as a supremely good object, the recognition of the parents’ intercourse as a supremely creative act, and the recognition of the inevitability of time and ultimately death” (1971: 104). I believe all three are vital for the experience of the reality of loss and all have powerful defences mounted against their recognition (Steiner, 2003 p.95).

In the context of climate derangement, and Mother Earth’s non-submission to Mankind’s attempts at technical control over her, recognition of death’s inevitability is perhaps the hardest to access of these facts of life (in Western cultures), but the breast as supremely good object (signifying maternal care) comes a close second in Enlightenment culture.

The idea of powerful unconscious defences mobilized to protect against a threatening idea in the internal or external world underpins the psychoanalytic explanation of defensive splitting, in which something is psychically kept separate from its opposite. The psychoanalyst Harold Searles applied this to the state of the world, in which he included the non-human environment. He traces two-way dynamics:

The greatest danger lies in the fact that the world is in such a state as to evoke our very earliest anxieties and at the same time to offer the delusional “promise”, the actually deadly promise, of assuaging these anxieties, effacing them, by fully externalizing and reifying our most primitive conflicts that produce those anxieties. (Searles, 1979 p. 242)

By the time these splits are established in language as binaries, they have also become structured into culture. To put it more dynamically, in such ways cultural forms and psychic processes mutually reproduce and are reproduced by each other. These ideas go some way to explain Latour’s challenges to modernity, cited above, the forecasting error so massive that it prevents parents from leaving an inhabited world to their children.

The polarization of what it meant to be a man or woman, the emergence of concepts of femininity and masculinity, the sexual hierarchy that came with modernity, was always “at the service of a project of domination that can sustain itself only by dividing, on a continuously renewed basis, those it intends to rule” (Federici and Fortunati 1984, cited in the preface to 2004 edition, op.cit.). This is splitting seen from a political perspective. As we are seeing, the othering of both women and nature was part of the same move that established ‘Man’ as superior and potentially in control. A well-established current in feminist thought provides a critique of “Man” as the alleged “measure of things” (Braidotti, 2017 p.25). There is now talk of “ex-Man” (Massumi, 1998).

Modern Man and Female Nature

Transcending the gender binary has a particular importance for climate psychology, something I came to realize as I familiarized myself with the terrain and found a hiatus where gender was concerned. Its importance is not just because the binary thinking of gender is entrenched in Modern selves but because, as we saw above, it has mortally affected how the natural world is treated. The close conflation of women and nature in Modern discourses is an essential part of the binary that positions Man outside nature.

Woman and nature were pathologically identified together as Man strained to separate himself from nature, to identify with “Mind,” rationality, culture, and civilization against nature, to gain control over nature through science, to exploit nature in the name of progress.

The quotations from Francis Bacon, above, make clear how imbued with domination the masculine relation to female nature was. In these we see the conflation between the binary and rape of the earth. It is perhaps not just metaphorical to use the term “rape” to describe Modern Man’s extractivist relation to the Earth, for example, the entitlement with which he has cut and drilled incisions into the earth’s crust (skin) to exploit what suits him.

Vandana Shiva has “repeatedly stressed that the rape of the earth and rape of women are intimately linked” (2014 p.xvi), a link that she substantiates in myriad ways. The ecological and climate crisis is the consequence. Both the environment and the maternal are exploited, not respected as things that give life: the air, the earth, the waters that are polluted. Their value is rejected. A rapacious relation to the earth is at least partly unconscious, “an attack on the mother who has nurtured our species but whom we now, in our modern technological triumph, resent for our feelings of dependence” (CPA website). Attacks on the “archaic mother” (Ettinger, 2006) are attacks on nature and vice versa. A history longer than that of modernity shows oscillations in cultures’ relationships to women goddesses and, within that, of men’s relationships to women’s reproductive and sexual creativity. All the world’s myths and religions have conjured with a mother earth figure, both nurturing and destructive. The precarious fortunes of this figure over history demonstrate Man’s ambivalent relationship to his dependence on her (Fee & Leeming, 2016).

Gaia

Gaia is the ancient Greek word for Mother Earth, the archaic mother. James Lovelock caused a scientific furore in the 1970s when he chose to call “Gaia” his hypothesis that “the sum of life optimizes the environment for its own use” (Margulis 1998, p.115). Lynn Margulis, Lovelock’s biologist collaborator, regretted the personification because Gaia is

less a single live entity than a huge set of interacting ecosystems, the Earth as Gaian regulatory physiology transcends all individual organisms. Humans are not the center of life, nor is any other single species. Humans are not even central to life. We are a recent, rapidly growing part of an enormous ancient whole (op. cit. p.120).

Bruno Latour (2015) turned to Gaia to furnish his idea of the Terrestrial in the new climatic regime (a concept designed to contrast with global, towards which modernity has been careering). He embraces the essence of Lovelock’s Gaia as “the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the earth.” That Gaia was so thoroughly misunderstood, he attributes to the fact that the old available frame for understanding this notion of Gaia made it into a single organism, “a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of new age Goddess or even Divine Providence.” Latour changes the frame, since not just Gaia but the whole of the Modern world view cannot survive climate mutation. “Gaia is the name of the return to Earth (the terrestrial) of all we rapidly sent offshore.” He expands: Gaia is what takes the place of the old Modern concept of nature, which served as a background for human action, subjugated to human laws, never an actor in human history. Gaia’s expressions are difficult to predict. Now everything which used to be background – the air, oceans, glaciers, climate, soil – can no longer be relied upon to remain background: “Far from being stable and reassuring, this being seems to be made up of a series of feedback loops in continual upheaval” (op.cit.) For Latour, the name Gaia fits best this new being.

Isabelle Stengers, chemist and philosopher, preserves the meaning of Gaia as active biosphere. In her In Catastrophic Times (Stengers, 2015), she names the problem of ecological catastrophe as “the intrusion of Gaia,” “this nature that has left behind its traditional robe and now has the power to question us all” (Stengers, 2015 p.12). Catastrophe has a specific meaning for Stengers: Gaia’s intrusion means that there is no future that can safely rely on the natural background, taken-for-granted in everyday life. With the intrusion of Gaia, problems have no solutions, humans must give up the idea of being in control of nature, of progress as the guiding myth. As with Margulis (op.cit. p.57), we are faced with the indifference of Gaia. This undoes – or should do – Humanist anthropocentrism.

According to Rosi Braidotti, the frame of reference that follows, the “sobering process of disidentification from anthropocentric values” is “becoming relational in a complex and multidimensional manner” (Braidotti, 2017 p.30), requiring “generative encounters with human and non-human others” (op. cit. p.39). This relational ontology and its accompanying methodologies are now zoe-centered. Where “bios” is separating, “zoe” refers to all living things, “the dynamic self-organising structure of life as zoe stands for generative vitality” (ibid.). If Gaia has sometimes been relegated to the idealist realm of eco-spiritualism, zoe-centredness, for Braidotti, is a response to the “opportunistic transspecies commodification of life itself that is the logic of advanced capitalism” (op. cit. p.32). Living matter is connected to the self-organizing root of organic life. This feminism is neo-materialist.

Ecofeminism

Adding the eco- to psycho-social, thus far I have arrived at a point of emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things in the way that the biosphere lives and the catastrophic damage done to this biosphere in the name of Mankind’s superior separation from the natural world.

The various ontological turns in the halls of knowledge seem to be converging on a Gaian vision not only of this interconnectedness, but also of animism, as we saw in Eduardo Kohn’s account of an Amazonian people. By this I mean the recognition of “soul” or “spirit” in objects that modernity decreed to be passive. Soul, for Aristotle, was the principle of functioning and organization of living things. Psyche, from the same Greek meaning, forms the root of “psychology,” a scientific discipline that demonstrates the outcome of a long cultural process involving a disappearing animistic world view and its replacement by a Modern individualized one. That soul came to be treated in binary relation to body provides another example of modernity’s cultural effects.

In ecofeminism, soul and spirit regain their bodies along with a critique of patriarchy; they shed idealism through centring on women’s sexuality and sensuality. The spirituality of the American writer Starhawk (1982), for example, is “largely identical to women’s sensuality, their sexual energy, their most precious life force, which links them to each other, to other life forms and the elements” (Mies & Shiva, 2014 p.17). This version of spirituality “abolishes the opposition between spirit and matter” (ibid.) Although such a turn to a radical feminist politics of paganism, witchcraft and rituals can be liable to a capitalist capture, as Mies and Shiva point out, as part of materialist ecofeminisms they are based on a stringent critique of capitalist patriarchy. Across 50 years, this is evident in feminist ecopolitics stretching from Silvia Federici, a Marxist feminist of the 1970s, to Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, whose original 1993 text Ecofeminism was foundational, to the recent posthuman feminism of Rosi Braidotti. Braidotti’s posthuman, materialist feminism rejects genders “… to rethink sexuality without genders … to reassess the generative powers of female embodiment [as] both pre- and post-identity.” This is part of a posthuman politics that is an “experiment with intensities beyond binaries.“It is also vitalist (Braidotti, 2017 p.36).

Reviewing this history, the spirituality reminds me of a strong spiritual element in the Yorkshire Pennines where I live, from nature walks to pagan ceremonies and shamanic drumming, largely but not exclusively led by women. It is strong in local Extinction Rebellion culture where, weather permitting, we might meet outside sharing food, perhaps starting with a fire ritual and chant. The ubiquity of such radical ecological stances, especially among young people, prompts both hope and fear in me: hope that what Joanna Macy calls the “great turning” has begun; fear that fossil fuel interests will fight to the last extraction.

According to Ariel Salleh’s preface, Ecofeminism’s major premise is that “the material resourcing of women and nature are structurally interconnected in the capitalist patriarchal system.” His summary of its wide array of themes illustrates Mies and Shiva’s impressively eco-psycho-social capacity to link:

Ecofeminism is the only political framework I know of that can spell out the historical links between neoliberal capital, militarism, corporate science, worker alienation, domestic violence, reproductive technologies, sex tourism, child molestation, neocolonialism, Islamophobia, extractivism, nuclear weapons, industrial toxics, land and water grabs, deforestation, genetic engineering, climate change and the myth of modern progress. (Salleh, in Mies & Shiva, 2014 p.ix)

Beyond Separation

The relational principle, built on reciprocity and gratitude, is in contrast to the principle of separation governing so much of Modern culture. It is separation, alienation, from the natural world which, in the view of most ecological thought, accounts for the insanity of contemporary human life. The story of separation, according to Charles Eisenstein:

holds me separate from you, humanity separate from nature, spirit separate from matter, and soul separate from flesh; that holds full beingness and consciousness to be the exclusive province of the human being, whose destiny is therefore to rise to domination over the mechanical forces of nature to impose intelligence onto a world that has none. The Story of Separation embeds capitalism-as-we-know-it. It scaffolds all of our systems. It mirrors the psychology that has adapted to those systems. Each – story, system, and psychology – perpetuates the others. (Eisenstein, 2002)

A story of separation that Eisenstein does not mention is the way separation has been seen in social psychology (and far beyond) as a masculine characteristic in contrast to women’s relatedness or connectedness:

those advocating connectedness disowned for women the so-called masculine characteristics, and those who did not want to be deprived of their ‘rationality’ and ‘autonomy’ because this is what enabled them to claim equality with men, rejected their so-called connectedness and relationality. […] The actuality is more inclusive than either of these positions: the splitting is what binary thinking unfortunately achieves. (Hollway, 2022)

The psychologically separate individual is embedded in the dominant gender equality model, based on the idea that women can be just like men when it comes to their individual identity. This political aspiration must be wearing thin with the growing recognition of the masculine dimension of climate destruction. Mies and Shiva nail the point: “To ‘catch up’ with the men in their society, as many women still see the main goal of the feminist movement, (…) implies a demand for a greater share of what, in the existing paradigm, men take from nature” (Mies and Shiva p.7).

The idea of the separate individual is transformed when we understand that an archaic maternal layer remains, having been at the core of the self’s foundation. Bracha Ettinger calls this matrixial subjectivity (Ettinger, 2021). The matrixial stratum of subjectivity is primary, established well before birth in the trans-subjective encounters of prenatal life. The phallic or individuated layer gets established only after birth. In this view, subjectivity as com-passionate encounter, available from everyone’s own beginnings, can never be erased.

Matrixial theory’s “subjectivity as encounter” goes beyond the masculine-feminine binary. Central is the idea that com-passion (literally feeling-with; also suffering with) originates in the prenatal transactions that all experience by virtue of starting life within a woman’s body. Selfhood, because of its matrixial origin, entails encounter with something else; all elements of this originary becoming are effected by links with that other (this provides for differentiation, not the same as separation). Trans-subjective encounters create a co-becoming that pre-exists birth. This has fundamental ethical implications: a proto ethics based on com-passion. Access by both women and men, differently, to matrixial com-passion is explained as follows by Ettinger. When a woman becomes pregnant, the baby-to-come is familiar in two points in time. The first is the universal human experience of being in the womb. This comes together with the second, later, moment, unique to the becoming-mother, when she experiences her current condition also through the reactivated memories of her own origins in the womb. The first point in time is available also to a baby’s father and to any other social parent, but only in the first time dimension – that of his origins in the womb, his own becoming, product of matrixial co-eventing.

Adding the eco- to a matrixial perspective can proceed in various ways. As it follows from the critique of separation that the Gaian principle of interconnectedness is the character of all life, so “com-passion” is a feature of humanity’s relations with the reanimated natural world, as well as every human baby’s birthright. This is close to the definition of “ecological self” by Arne Naess, philosopher of deep ecology, based on identifications with other living selves beyond the human.

The notion of originary com-passion can afford selfhood to other than humans (while recognizing differences). It can go beyond constructions of meaning to actual matter. For example, from Ettinger’s proposition of matrixial com-passion and subjectivity as encounter, we can extend the principle of feeling-with from women’s maternal bodies to all mammals. This follows from Ettinger’s description of matrixial transsubjectivity as based in a physics of resonance, happening in a material medium, as resonances, vibrations, strings, waves. The example illustrates how a different theoretical starting point, in this case matrixial, affords a view of human selfhood as rooted in the same starting experiences as that of other mammals. The implications are then huge: because matrixial theory posits a proto-ethics that is based in primordial com-passion, other mammals share this ethical potential (Hollway in press).

Affect and Social Dreaming

Psycho-social Studies has grown up with the challenge of going beyond its dualistic disciplinary origins in psychoanalytic psychology and sociology to become transdisciplinary in the sense of theory that does not start from one or other side of that binary divide; theory that no longer betrays disciplinary origins. Affect theory is one such candidate, in my view, because it does not start with the premise of individual separation from the rest of life. Deleuze stipulates that “affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those who live through them” (cited in Manley, 2018 p.100). Affect, in this definition, is also consistent with the materialist turn in recent ontologies. Like energy in sub-atomic Physics, like qi in Daoism, affect has no boundaries; in this way of thinking, space is not empty and objects not inert. It takes us away from a psychological concept (feelings as emotions belonging to individuals and exchanged interpersonally), to a free-ranging flow without boundaries which, passing through things, including human bodies, fashions their becoming. Affects are “fluctuating patterns of intensities” (ibid). This is why Deleuzian affect theory is a staple of posthuman philosophies based on interconnectedness.

Creatures live within a net of affect flows and affect operates as a continuously fluctuating pulse, increasing and decreasing in intensity, creating communicative connection between objects and holding elements together in relationship. This idea finds its parallel in Ettinger’s concept of metamorphoses, processes of change and exchange in the matrixial zone of encounter; it also reflects the Gaian emphasis on indivisibility of all life processes that is in such contrast to the binary thinking of modernity.

Julian Manley, whose theorization of the practice of social dreaming is based on Deleuzian affect theory (2018), concludes that social dreaming is an expression of the eco-psycho-social:

… it seems to me that social dreaming is a process of thinking that through its affinity with life processes is particularly apt in the environment of systems thinking [and] especially applicable to the networked web of life that constitutes ecological concerns. In this sense, social dreaming is ecology. By this I mean that our naturally shared thoughts in their totality as expressed in the social dreaming matrix work in parallel process to the workings of nature. (Manley, 2018 p.161)

To make deeper sense of these connections, I need to expand on the social dreaming matrix work referred to by Manley in the above quotation, a collective practice in which dreams and associations are shared and the focus is on the dream, not the dreamer. Manley’s psychosocial emphasis on social dreaming’s associative and collective thinking is made possible by affect theory. For example, the affect nets produced in a Social Dreaming Matrix, which functions as a container for dreams and associations, require a “rhizomatic” analysis: “not linear, not broken up into discreet entities, respecting the bizarre-seeming, the multiple and uncertain, sensing the affect, following the associative unconscious through links and gaps” (Manley & Hollway, 2019 p.139).The structure of the Social Dreaming Matrix encourages the emergence of the unthought known and thus has special relevance for facing the almost unbearable realities of climate derangement and species extinction.

The practice of social dreaming has been taken up by Climate Psychology Alliance and the UK Association of Psychosocial Studies. An example of an event that incorporated artworks into the social dreaming experience of climate change is detailed in Manley and Hollway (2019). In addition to offering an eco-psycho-social practice supporting awareness of the climate catastrophe, this example shows the possibility of going beyond disciplinary binaries at epistemological and methodological levels because social dreaming affords a different way of knowing: “… our material has shown the utility of re-imagining a new sense of ‘fact’, moving from a bare, reduced raw fact of science to what is meaningful to participants in the matrix. The latter is like a felt truth, where the eventual knowledge is sensed through affect” (Manley & Hollway, 2019 p.146). Both image and affect “involve what Donald Meltzer calls ‘the poetry of the dream’ whose role in thinking is that it ‘catches and gives formal representation to the passions which are the meaning of our experience, so that they may be operated on by reason’ “ (Meltzer, 2009 p.47, cited in Manley and Hollway, p.131).

To End with …

… I would like to emphasize the central, possibly fatal, role of separation in bringing about the end of the arc of modernity and anthropocene derangement. In Vandana Shiva’s words,

we will either make peace with the earth or face extinction as humans. (Mies and Shiva, 2014 p.xvi)

I have explored extensive ramifications of separation:

  • the separation of Moderns from the natural environment and more broadly the separation involved in binary thinking, ubiquitous in Modern thought, with its production of subjectivity through the dynamics of splitting;

  • how the masculine-feminine binary (which is NOT equivalent to men and women) underpins this separation through femininity’s conflation with Nature (and thus masculinity’s with Culture), which separation has been a crucial force in the way modernity developed and its current neo-liberal expression;

  • how separation’s successors, interconnectedness and indivisibility or wholeness, Gaia, are central to recent post-anthropocentric thinking and to an eco-psycho-social approach.

To embody these developments – to furnish the “psyche” part of eco-psycho-social – I sketched out how matrixial theory provides a rare example of transcending separation as the foundational principle of human subjectivity, and of the gender binary. Instead it foregrounds the primary existence of com-passion. Finally, I explored how social dreaming’s basis in affect theory and associative thinking provides an illustration of an eco-psycho-social practice adequate to knowing climate derangement, one used in collective climate change support and awareness contexts.