Psychological Perspectives
A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought
Volume 58, 2015 – Issue 2: The Environment: Inner and Outer
Excerpt
Sustainability
This morning, I walk down a quiet valley to where its stream lets out into a small bay. Here, the Pacific pounds and shapes the steep red rocky walls of the ocean’s headlands. I come upon a great blue heron that is standing in the stream and see that a furry little creature is hanging from its beak. Thinking the heron a fish eater, I carefully step closer, mesmerized as the heron plunges its prey into the water and plucks it out repeatedly. Washing it? The heron sees me, hinges its long leg, and steps back. A few minutes pass when, from behind me, a falcon swoops at lightning speed, brushing within inches of my shoulder. I hear the air vibrate, a rush of wild sensation flushes through me. The falcon dives, screeching at the heron. The heron lets out a distress call and swiftly plucks its prey from the stream. The dripping body of the small mammal dangles from its long bill. I see the falcon land on a rocky, low ledge and then dive again, screeching. The great heron calls out and takes its prey, which is about the length of my forearm, into its beak and swallows it whole. I watch the bulge of it slowly move down the long slender curve of the heron’s neck. The falcon takes flight.
With a slight bow I too take leave. Aware of an inner pulsing, a wordless reflection, realizing I had unexpectedly become part of a hunt. Potential threat, silent witness. Soon I will be at my office with a week of analytic practice ahead.
Oil hemorrhages from the Deep Water Horizon each day as I write. The environmental crisis intensifies. I feel an insistent urging to consider what, if any, contribution analytic psychologists can make toward an ethic that values and preserves this living world within the context of the work we do. The ways we can contribute may be small but not to do so for me would be to dissociate from this living world and enter a state of psychic numbness.
The naturalist Barry Lopez suggests that we are autistic in relation to the natural world (1978). Yet, for a voice to emerge, there must be one who listens. For ‘if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream’ (Michaels 2009, p. 318).
What might emerge if we adjusted our listening perspective to hear what our patients experience in their relationship to nature? Would we want to? If we facilitate a deeper exploration, do we believe it will draw us away from the necessary work of intra- and interpersonal material? Do we hear patients’ feelings about the earth as resistance or displacement? Could these feelings instead be a root of psychic suffering? If truly heard, might prophetic visions arise about what is deeply desired? (Watkins 2009). Desires to restore what is wounded and live in dignity with each other and the land.
We listen to patients’ sense of animals and plants and stones and rivers as they arise in dream… Do we privilege dreams and symbols over direct experience in the living world?
Indigenous peoples recognize the earth, the sky and all the elemental forces in situating the individual in relationship and tend to find psychotherapy a fairly strange endeavor because of the absence of recognition of these non-human yet essential relationships (Fisher 2002). Parallel to Winnicott’s contextualizing statement that ‘there is no baby without the mother’ is the reality that there is no person without the earth (1960). An intersubjective perspective contributes to this understanding that if, in that primal dyad, the mother is perceived as a background mother, as a facilitating container rather than related to in her subjectivity, relational dynamics become prone toward domination and submission (Benjamin 1988). Looking at our culture’s reign of domination over the earth from this perspective, it seems there could be a wisdom in recognizing the earth and the earth’s inter-species community as non-human others whom we can both care for and hurt. Truly feeling the affective significance of our bond with the earth, I believe, may be a crucial basis for action to restore the earth and a sustainable life worth living.
With this in mind, I will present a small segment of work with a woman, whom I will call Renée.
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