So this enquiry is into that threshold of existential dread that is the climate crisis - the defended underbelly of moderns. I read the climate crisis as the antipode of the rainbow; not a reassuring promise but a challenging initiation activated by radical instability.
Article published in Unpsychology
Excerpts from Exploration
Excerpt from Culture Crisis chapter in Depth Psychology and Climate Change: the Green Book
This article reviews the limits of individual psychotherapy’s capacity to contain the distress brought into the consulting room from the effects of climate shocks. It focuses on the psychological work involved in group work to think the unthinkable and be with the emotional impact of ecological troubles. It explores the liminal thresholds of culture change and openings to rethinking the place of humans on earth. It draws on examples from the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), which aims to support psychotherapists working with climate distress and its cultural expressions. Ideas explored include: the end of progress; ecoanxiety; Winnicott’s notion of holding and Bion’s containing; optimal failure; living thought; sixth mass extinction; cultural threshold; Gaia’s intrusion. Practices explored include: Negative Capability; Group Dialogue; Dream Matrix; Climate Aware group work.
How can we face into the tragedy of our predicament and sense unthought possibilities?
On trust, mistrust and letting come
A fascinating, deep and powerful book written by an author who has been pondering the fate of our planet for over two decades
Exploring how to work with unconscious processes outside of the consulting room
Review of the Film Denial (Feb 2017)
Psychotherapy, control and winds of homecoming (Self & Society 2014)
Article on Jonathon Lear’s catastrophe ethics (The Psychotherapist 2016)
Exploring what happens psychologically if we were to accept a climate catastrophe