1 Extreme heat, fires, floods, and famines . . . Natural disasters and other frightening indications are becoming increasingly frequent: Global warming is no longer simply a vague concept regarding disaster in the distant future—it has become a disturbing reality that is unfolding before our eyes.
2 First coined in 1997 by the public health researcher, Véronique Lapaige, the term eco-anxiety refers to a particular type of anxiety that we experience in relation to the climate threat. It encompasses feelings including intense concern, vigilance, and impotence, but also anger. Young people aged eighteen to thirty-five experience this in a particularly intense manner. Let us not forget Greta Thunberg’s resounding speech to the UN in 2019: “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” For this age group, when it comes to climate change, anxiety and anger are inseparable: the former (eco-anxiety) as a response to witnessing the destruction of the biosphere, and the latter (eco-anger) provoked by the collective inaction of political leaders.
3 Referring to a maelstrom of affects, the term eco-anxiety has rapidly gained in popularity on social networks, to the extent that it sometimes serves as an auto-diagnostic category for certain patients. We can approach eco-anxiety in two ways. The first considers it a psychic symptom, to be treated or cured. In psychotherapy, we will look for what is hidden “behind” eco-anxiety: the fantasies, anxieties, and traumas for which eco-anxiety acts as a screen. The second option considers anxiety as pointing to a kind of clairvoyance—a discriminating faculty that is not in the least bit pathological. Quite the contrary! In the face of this threat, eco-anxiety has all the virtues of what Freud calls “signal anxiety”: It acts as a driving force, a trigger to act, or even a necessary remedy for us all, prompting us to recognize the gravity of the situation.
4 Since psychic life is somewhat less clear-cut, the texts plot a course between these two tendencies, to explore the crossover between individual anxiety and collective threat. All three approach the subject from their clinical stance, to consider how we might listen and offer interventions in the therapy session when patients talk about the climate threat—a very real phenomenon which concerns the therapist as well.
The notion of environmental identity
5 Why does climate upheaval disturb us in such an intense way? In this article, the researcher Christina A. Popescu explores the nature of our relationship with our surrounding environment. She holds that we can only truly understand the climate threat once we have acknowledged the extent of our dependence on our ecosystems. To expound her theory, she borrows the concept of environmental identity from an American psychologist, Susan Clayton. Much like an onion whose core is protected by multiple layers, our identity is created out of the sedimentation of our various senses of belonging, each of which contributes to defining our place with regard to others. Bringing to mind the image of a Russian doll, our personal, religious, social, and even national affiliations are encompassed in an overarching framework—that of our shared planetary habitat. This explains why images of the floods in Pakistan or forest fires in the Amazon affect us as if they were happening in our own countries.
6 For Popescu, the psychopathology of eco-anxiety is comparable to the idea of ecological grief. The destruction of the biosphere corresponds to the loss, whether visible or anticipated, of a loved and inhabited environment. Moreover, this loss is irreversible, there being no way back from this deterioration of the biosphere. Eco-anxiety thus feeds on the tragic observation that we will never again find our way back to the world of yesterday, a fact to which the scientific community has not ceased to draw our attention. Faced with such a situation, how can we not sink into a feeling of impotence or endless ruminations? What is the use of pursuing our goals in an uncertain world? What is the point of having children? What’s the good of living? The article clearly outlines the dramatic implications of climate change for our way of life.
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Between fear and anguish
8 Does eco-anxiety pertain to the realm of psychopathology? By psychopathology, we refer to the study, description, and understanding of mental disorders. The psychologist Jean-Baptiste Desveaux rejects this idea. For him, being eco-anxious equates to being lucid in the face of the changes affecting our ecosystems: undisputable changes creating an anxiety that must be undisputed. The recurrence of heat waves or floods is not a “fantasy,” but connected to events and hard facts. “It is no longer a matter of wondering if these changes will take place,” writes Desveaux, who refuses to treat eco-anxiety as a psychic symptom. In his opinion, we must accept it for what it is: a lucid anxiety lying halfway between fear and anxiety. Whereas fear implies a definite object, anxiety is characterized by the absence of an object. Take the fear of animals for example, always linked to an object (a wolf, spiders), as opposed to the anxiety felt on a Sunday night, which is more diffuse in nature. When it comes to ecology, the object of fear exists (a storm, a heatwave), but it is distant, part of an uncertain future.
9 Above all, what we are afraid of is yet to come. The author insists on this point: it is precisely because the threat lies in the future and we cannot imagine what the disaster will look like that eco-anxiety is so intense. The psyche has no solution other than to resort to stereotypical images to describe the ecological decline. Images of fire, ashes, or floods enveloping humankind populate our nightmares. Eco-anger, eco-anxiety, and eco-depression: the various forms taken by this anguish all converge on the risk of extinction of the human species. Will we survive? Will we have a future? Are we witnessing the end of time?
10 This text constitutes one of the most complete panoramas of eco-anxiety available in clinical psychology. Like all great texts, reading it results in the reassuring sensation that “this is exactly how I feel . . .”
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Listening “at face value”
12 She feels alone: the only one to “see” the ecological threat looming ahead of her, the only one to see how serious it is, the only one whose life is being held hostage by climate change. This young patient began seeing Isée Bernateau for psychotherapy sessions following a very particular attempt at suicide: Having taken an overdose of sleeping pills, the young girl had locked herself in a barn and buried herself under a pile of hay, covering herself from head to toe. She was discovered by her father who was able to save her.
13 Revisiting this episode over the course of the sessions, the patient and her analyst identify the unconscious fantasy underlying the teenager’s acting out, which illustrates the intensity of her ecological anxiety: By becoming one with the hay, the patient was perhaps entertaining the desire to return to Mother Earth. The mother/earth analogy opens up a very rich associative network on the relationship between the patient and her mother.
14 This all certainly seems reasonable. Reasonable, that is, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Yet, as Isée Bernateau writes, such a formulation “ prevented me from hearing an essential aspect of [her] teenage suicide attempt .” Unusually, for a psychoanalyst, she decides to take her patient’s anxiety “at face value.” Thanks to her patients suffering with eco-anxiety, she writes, “I learned to understand this “ecological distress” for what it is: the symptom of a contemporary malaise indicating one of the major concerns of their generation.” In refusing to deny the traumatic nature of the damage done to our environment, Isée Bernateau calls on analysts to acknowledge the reality of the ecological danger facing our planet prior to any further intellectualizing. Her clinical work provides a measure of the upheaval we are experiencing: “I felt the need to tell her clearly [...] that this ecological danger concerned us both, just as it concerned the whole of humanity,” she concludes.
15 Combining psychoanalytic references and ecological treatises, Bernateau’s illuminating article on eco-anxiety dispenses with the cliché of the silent psychoanalyst who is disconnected from reality.
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Translator: Emma Garner, Editor: Suzy Bott, Senior editor: Mark Mellor
