February 12, 2010
Yorkshire countryside, UK, photo by hchalkley
Having read my Wasted and Bombed paper, Nick Totton contacted me. He is a body therapist with an MA in psychoanalysis from Yorkshire, part of a network of British therapists of different specialties working on the interface between psychology and the environment. Check them out. And here too. Totton is currently editing a collection of writing on ecopsychology for the journal he edits Psychotherapy and Politics International . He is also working on a book which is intended to bring together ecopsychology, ecotherapy, and political issues. I had the opportunity to read his enlightening key-note address to an Adventure therapy conference.
He wrote: “But as a therapist, I am also aware of the need for a change of mind, a huge shift of consciousness, if humanity is going to take a different path into the future. That is why I have become involved with ecopsychology – an involvement which stems from my work as a body psychotherapist: it seems to me that a positive relationship with the other-than-human is founded in a positive relationship with our own embodiment.”
Between Glenn Albrect in Australia, Thomas Doherty and Peter Kahn on the west coast and now these folks in the UK, along with myself and the folks at CRED in NYC where I have spent some time learning and researching, it does feel as though there is a growing international interest in the unacknowledged relationship between our psyches and our environment. Thrilling, really.
Tags: ecopsychology, Ecopsychology UK, ecopsychology west coast, ecospsychology Australia, international ecopsychology, mind nature relationship
Posted in climate change, ecopsychcology, personal environmentalism, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
February 8, 2010
One of the most common difficulties in homes with school age children is dealing with homework. An adolescent male, a junior in high school, slept no more than 12 hours one week due to mid-terms. Parents consulted with me because their child had smashed several glasses due to homework frustration. A young middle school student avoided going to classes because she was having trouble completing assignments due to procrastination. Even for kids who have no learning or executive function complexities, homework has become the crucible for self-worth as children labor over hours of assignments. While the debate about excessive homework has been conducted in this country for many generations, I suspect that the issue with homework isn’t that there is too much of it (although it can appear that way). Rather, I have observed that most kids aren’t engaged enough with generative activities. Children, and especially adolescents, aren’t devoting enough non-competitive time to their bodies, to creative pursuits, or to spending time outside. There is no balancing of the cognitive discipline necessary to intellectual growth with other developmental needs that are emotional, physical and what I call expansionary. A social organization that is out of synch with its own ecology creates children who are out of touch with their own ecosystems. This leads to the massive homework meltdown. One way out of this is to change the way teachers, educators and principals think, like this. Another way is to practice the “more is less” approach to managing kids’ after school hours. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: after-school activities, excessive homework, homework, homework research, too much homework
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February 1, 2010
A NYTimes article by Daniel Smith describes a growing field of psychology, ecopsychology, that examines links between the function of the human psyche and nature. Glenn Albrecht in Australia coined “solastalgia” – “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” Thomas Doherty is a clinical psychologist in Portland Oregon trying to analyze and explicate the relationship between environmental issues and psychological well-being. Peter Kahn is a developmental psychologist researching, among other things, how technologically mediated nature versus real nature impacts human functioning. My take? In an article published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (which to my delight Doherty has used in his courses), I suggest that some common behaviors of young adulthood like obliterative drinking, excessive sexuality and dissociative materialism – as well as other classic psychological difficulties – are very much an expression of our changed relationship to the physical environment. In another paper based on random interviews I see a pattern. The more engaged a person’s relationship to the physical world, the more active they are in making choices about their life. In other words, the mind’s agency is directly affected by experiences with the environment. Like Gregory Bateson , I believe that the mind and the planet/environment/ecology in which we live define each other in an ongoing dialectic. What does this mean for you? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ecological unconscious. human relationship to nature, green consciousness, mind nature relationship, solastalgia, urban environmentalism
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January 20, 2010
Keep in mind that the year hasn’t gotten of to a good start. A devastating earthquake hit Haiti. Try to imagine how it feels when one person you are close to dies. Now start multiplying. Sarah Palin has decided to join Fox News, meaning that the most popular media is now fully controlled by a single ideology. The very same people who fear a fascist takeover are in fact enacting an ideological takeover. Unemployment remains high. Large banks appear to be the only people with money. Lots of people don’t have health care. As a provider of mental health care services, there are some very fine and hard-working people who can’t get care because they don’t have the money, or were sick before, or mistakenly sent a COBRA check a day or two late. With all of the difficult problems we are facing why are so many self-appointed experts naysing our President? How about a letter of support instead, empowering President Obama in his moment of need so he can do the job we elected him to do?
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Tags: Brown victory, health care reform, support Barack Obama, support Obama, support the president
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January 12, 2010
mongabay.com, copyright 2001-2009.
Ethan Watters wrote in the NY Times that the importation to other cultures of American models of mental illness actually creates new symptom patterns as people replicate what they are taught about themselves. This intervention of American mental health models sometimes obliterates local forms of understanding and healing. He writes, “When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.” American mental health models may also be disorienting this country.
There is, however, another view of mental illness that derives from relational psychologists and psychoanalysts. This model can cross cultural boundaries without disrupting indigenous meanings. It suggests that the interaction between biological processes and sociocultural contexts produces personality, and that mental illness results when there is a poor fit between them. Let me explain.
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Tags: americanization of mental illness, diagnostic categories, ethan watters, multicultural mental health
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January 5, 2010
In his New Year’s address, the pope called on Catholics (and I assume the rest of us can participate) to consider protecting the environment a personal responsibility as well as a political event. The Pope said, “An objective shared by all, an indispensable condition for peace, is that of overseeing the earth’s natural resources with justice and wisdom.”
If we don’t protect our planet and treat it as the sacred entity that supports life, we risk our own lives, we threaten humanity. Political decisions and legislation often brings about social changes. Copenhagen was a little more important than the Pope might wish to acknowledge. Yet, I also believe that change begins at home. Most of us wonder, what might living differently entail? How would it help me? What follows are three things anyone can do that will help the environment and support psychological health.
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Tags: Copenhagen, environment, ground up environmental change, personal environmentalism, Pope's new year address, relationship to nature
Posted in climate change, ethics, personal environmentalism, politics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
December 11, 2009
The news from Copenhagen is mixed. Josh Marshall is downright gloomy, and concerned. The talk is all politics and few seem to recognize that global warming is happening to people now in the small scale universe of the human mind. Climate change is a psychological problem as much as it is geological and meteorological. My paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues suggests that the same technical and mechanical innovations that are upsetting the balance of the earth are also disrupting the mind’s equilibrium. The Earth is Faster Now conveys indigenous narratives about arctic how climate change has transformed a community and its people. While it might be easier to accept the fact that people far away in colder climates experience the psychological dimensions of warming, it is harder to grasp that climate change has also already affected modern, western, urban, suburban and rural individuals, even in the United States. Technological change (fast paced stimulation, constant stimulus gratification), carbon emissions, environmental contaminants, and decreased access to land and outdoor spaces have created children and adults who think, feel and understand reality differently than generations past. The differences in thought structure may render them incapable of both perceiving global warming’s threats and acting to alter their course. These differences in thought structure may also promote behaviors that continue to promote the destruction of our ecosystem. Climate change is not only about politcs. It is about the everyday life of the human psyche. As long as solutions continue to only consider matters of state and economy, I’m not sure anyone can inspire the changes in human consciousness necessary to confront this problem and take care of our struggling planet.
Tags: climate change, Copenhagen, environment, global warming, pschological aspects of climate change
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November 17, 2009
Most of us were schooled in diversity and acceptance. A racist, therefore, was generally a forbidden character who shows up in someone else’s state. Among close friends and colleagues, color differences evince nothing more than variety. From a distance, however, any of us might easily disregard a color spectrum’s nuances in favor of a facile opposition between black and white. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: black white relations, racism
Posted in ethics, politics, race | 3 Comments »
November 17, 2009
The night before last my daughter scolded me for working late.
“Don’t you know that I need you at night?” she cried, wiping her wet eyes against my blouse.
I did, in fact, know. Many mothers talk about their presence in the home, especially in the evening, as crucial to the functioning of the household. This is not because dads don’t parent as well. My husband is a bread baking, laundry doing, practicing instruments with the kids, dishwasher emptier. There is just something about mommy that holds everything together. It’s not as if they spend time talking with me. Often, I’m just there in the kitchen making some food, reading a book, or doing some professional paperwork on the computer. Sometimes being a mom feels like nothing more than being a regulating mechanism. I’ve heard moms talk about themselves as real life thermometers, quietly tuning in to the minutiae of their kids internal states and providing just the right degree of emotional contact to keep everyone’s emotional temperature in optimal range. I’ve also heard moms wonder where they can possibly find the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: feminism, motherhood, parenting, psychology
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July 13, 2009
Someone else has finally articulated my long-held but private thought that there really is communication between ourselves and other mammals. Whales, it seems, are checking us out. When Charles Siebert described the female humpback swimming around her rescuers in “joyous circles” and then “nudging them all gently as if in thanks”, a whole series of experiences with whales and other mammals came to mind.
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Tags: animal human relationships, human-animal communication. human-animal link, whales watching us
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Ordinary Earth ™ 