BEYOND CLIMATE DEFENSIVENESS
The role of psychoanalysis in creating a sustainable future
BY ALAN MICHAEL KARBELNIG 
Photographs by Micheal McLaughlin
RISING SEAS, forest fires, flash floods, hurricanes, novel diseases, and collapsing food supplies dramatically illustrate the global warming problem facing humanity. The solution, if even possible, rests in our hands. We possess the knowledge, and the technology, to make changes necessary to prevent the climate from deteriorating further. Psychological obstacles, along with political ones, prevent us from implementing them. For that reason, psychoanalysis holds indispensable answers to the dilemma. Psychoanalytic practitioners wield expertise in three specific aspects of psychology relevant to the global climate crisis: greed, defensive styles, and triangulation. These concepts carry the potential to significantly impact how global citizens deal with the changing climate. Myriad ways exist for psychoanalytic practitioners to join the cadre of climatologists, ecologists, and environmentalists already striving to address the approaching climate crisis.
From left to right: Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong; Wan Chai, Hong Kong; Barcelona; Hong Kong
The Nature of the Firestorm
Most individuals throughout the world know about global warming. The 2023 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a synthesis of 14,000 peer-reviewed research studies—presents these worst-case scenarios likely as soon as 2030: runaway heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and unseasonable cold spells will occur with regularity. By 2050, global warming will create 200 million refugees. Half a century later, in 2100, the climate will warm by 8.5 degrees Celsius, destroying 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs, melting 80 percent of Alpine glaciers, and raising sea levels by three feet. The report’s authors believe insufficient time remains to prevent the extinction of half of humanity by then. Many will die of malnutrition, heatstroke, or dehydration; others will be killed by crop failures, mass migrations, and military conflicts. These terrifying predictions meet just as terrifying resistance to change in multinational corporations and political leaders who wish to avoid attending to the approaching crisis.
“2023 was the world’s warmest year on record, by far,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Sea surface temperatures broke records and Antarctic Ocean ice receded to its lowest level in history. Weather events due to global warming now appear in the news daily. The climatic changes correspond with a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene Era, a period defined by the environmental impact of human beings. Unless avarice-driven industrial processes can be slowed or stopped, the Anthropocene will end with the extinction of the species creating it.
The Problem of Greed
The ancient Chinese and Romans first discovered the energetic powers of coal. However, it was not until the early nineteenth century that the English and the Americans began aggressively mining it and, subsequently, extracting oil. Since then, petrochemical firms have developed ever-more aggressive means of mining coal and drilling for oil and natural gas. The burning of these fossil fuels for energy has made petrochemical corporations and their investors vast fortunes. It has also released enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide to raise temperatures on Earth significantly.
A similar process occurred in the domestication of animals for consumption. Evidence of sheep herding goes back 11,000 years, and the taming of cattle, pigs, and poultry followed shortly thereafter. Paralleling the exponential expansion of the oil and gas industries, aggressive animal agriculture also began in the early nineteenth century. Inorganic fertilizers such as superphosphates came into use in the 1840s, allowing farmers to grow crops for feeding livestock on greater scales. Meat production companies have since developed more efficient ways of feeding, housing, slaughtering, and delivering animal products. Animal agriculture today produces most of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide, also known as “laughing gas” in the dentist’s office, is a lesser-known greenhouse gas that traps even more heat than carbon dioxide does. While human activity produces less nitrous oxide than carbon dioxide, the former also plays a role in global warming. Runaway coal, oil, gas, and industrial meat production continues at unprecedented levels, driven by an insatiable greed which ignores its impact on the planet.
Psychoanalysts identified the problem of insatiable avarice early in the field’s history. In 1901, Freud observed how, because of our propensity towards greed, we humans commonly “forget” or dissociate. We litter fields and highways without remembering how such behavior impacts others (or, later, ourselves). Petrochemical companies take this dissociative littering to another level, as they persist in excavating, drilling, and using immense, high-pressure, multistory fracking machines to pump water hundreds of feet under geological formations in an effort to extract every last drop of oil and gas. Well before introducing his tripartite model of the mind (ego, id, and superego), Freud traveled further down the road of exploring greed. He believed our biological instincts, taking form in the unconscious as drives, remain primary motivators throughout the lifespan. The paramount importance of our embodied status is captured by his famous phrase, “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego”—an idea still considered relevant by scholars as diverse as psychoanalyst Jon Sletvold and neurologist Antonio Damasio. Equally famous is Freud’s 1914 description of infants who, free from the inhibitory effects of adult socialization, feel themselves to be “the center and core of creation—‘His Majesty the Baby,’ as we once fancied ourselves.” Some of Freud’s early followers, notably Melanie Klein, also emphasized the power of such primitive forces. In her 1957 work Envy and Gratitude, Klein called greed “an impetuous and insatiable craving.”
Subsequent psychoanalysts, mostly from the Kleinian tradition, expanded further upon greed. In 1985, Eric Brenman proposed the phrase “greedy dependency” to describe how some patients, plagued by archaic greed, live “skin deep.” In other words, these individuals drain energy from others to fulfill their own needs. Their relationships lack reciprocity. These ideas map well onto the history of humanity’s exploitation of energy-creating natural resources during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The supplies seemed infinite, like endless mothers’ milk, and the effects of draining these chemicals from the earth were ignored. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, namely self psychology, inter-subjectivity, and relational psychoanalysis, tend to marginalize the impact of greed and its relationship to primitive drives. Instead, they highlight the human need for attachment. Mostly, however, psychoanalysts agree that some strands of insatiable primordial self-interest remain, even in individuals who achieve high levels of maturity and individuation.
Psychoanalysts may need to leave the quiet sanctuary of their offices to become involved in international relations— precisely because they possess the unique understanding of the power of greed, of defensive processes, and of the hope offered by positive triangulation.
Midtown, New York City
The Problem of Defensiveness
Psychoanalysts understand how, when people are frightened, their defensive shells harden. An analogue to the body’s immune system, the ego shelters itself from pain. In the late nineteenth century, French psychologist Pierre Janet first used the word “dissociation” to describe how mental processes fracture. In 1894, Freud, one of Janet’s students, first used the phrase “defense mechanisms,” extending the idea of dissociation. These protective cogitations arise, he thought, to defend against internal and external threats. In 1936, Anna Freud delineated and expanded upon ego defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. The concept of defense mechanisms rests upon the assumption that, when stressed, the mind creates partitions, much as submarines break into self-contained sections when attacked. Each mental subdivision has unique characteristics. Mature defenses like anticipation neutralize threatening information by motivating people to prepare. Sublimation channels discomfort from threats into productive activity. Other maneuvers like disavowal (conscious) or denial (unconscious) create still different mental segments. These various defense mechanisms are, essentially, varieties of dissociation. Humor, for example, separates out a painful experience by giving it levity.
“Many, if not most, global citizens are immobilized by fearfulness. Psychoanalysis’s first order of business may well be to focus on releasing individuals from such paralysis.”
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Psychoanalytic insights regarding group psychology contribute to an understanding of ego defenses. In 1921, Freud used the phrase “primary group” to describe how groups acquire their own ego equivalents, noting that groups “have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal” (emphasis Freud’s). They consciously or unconsciously appoint a leader. Individual anonymity empowers these unconscious processes. Like Freud before him, Wilfred Bion, arguably the most significant contributor to group psychology, describes how groups tend to project authority onto leaders. He writes, “having thrown all their cares on the leader … [they] sit back and wait for him to solve all their problems.” Perhaps such passive fantasies include beliefs that a leader, like Greta Thunberg, represents the promise of a messiah. Bion would consider such fantasies as representing group “depersonalization” and psychotic dissociation. Global society seems gripped by just this kind of depersonalized, psychotic denial when it comes to climate change. Of course, no real indication exists that Ms. Thunberg or any other leader will sufficiently motivate citizens around the globe to attend to the climate emergency. It will take, instead, a group consisting of much of the world’s population, certainly including many state and corporate leaders, for real changes in climate policy to succeed.
Meanwhile, climatologists, meteorologists, and ecologists commonly bewail their audience’s ironclad resistance. In 2018, William Vollmann wrote, “Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet will wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we were thinking at all.” Andrew Malm also mentions denial in his 2011 book, The Progress of This Storm, writing, “the higher the temperatures, the more conclusive the science … the more confident and belligerent the denialism will be” (emphasis Malm’s). Despite the dissemination of ample information documenting the ecological situation, petrochemical companies’ persistent excavation processes proceed apace. Mitigation plans are so far ineffective. And those planning to build a civilization on Mars, a distant and hostile planet, ignore the self-destruction occurring on ours.
Triangulation as Psychoanalytic Fire Retardant
The more global citizens realize the scale of climate change, and how it will leave no individual or country unscathed, the more they can share a motivation towards a common good. Murray Bowen, an early contributor to the family therapy movement, first identified triangulation phenomena. Triangular relationships emerge, he observed, when a third person enters a dyadic relationship and influences the dynamic between the former pair. For example, an adolescent child of a disengaged, argumentative couple may commit an antisocial act as a way of uniting the parents against himself or herself. Well before family therapy entered the scene, British object relations theorists identified the same phenomenon. Within the more recent psychoanalytic literature, triangulation remains a relevant theme. For instance, Beverly Burch uses the term crucible to identify how an outside event can alter a dyad.
How might the concept of triangulation be directly applied to the ecological cataclysm before us? The fact that people bond when united against a third party or entity offers a powerful political tool. Global warming, already acutely threatening, provides a theme around which peoples and nations could cohere. The UN’s various efforts are positive but fail to address the problem quickly enough. And if psychoanalysts are to contribute to efforts to save human civilization, they must first transcend some of their own struggles.
Transcending Psychoanalysis’s Own Challenges
We psychoanalysts are not particularly prepared, or even motivated for, eliciting social change on a global scale. One barrier preventing the mobilization of our profession is the lingering infighting over theories of mind and method. A survey of the history of psychoanalysis reveals an embarrassing preoccupation with such in-house debates. In 2006, Lawrence Friedman complains of a “century of yapping dogfights.” Paul Stepansky coins the word “fractionation” and, along with Lewis Aron and Karen Starr, worries that psychoanalysis’s lack of coherence threatens its survival. These disputes drain psychoanalysts’ energies.
Mystic, Connecticut
However, we all share a “common background,” as Robert Wallerstein has said, in our clinical practices. We create a transformational frame, bring our emotional presence to our patients, and engage them in conscious and unconscious dialogue, seeking to access and alter troubling unconscious schemata. Indeed, if psychoanalysis decides, as a discipline, to take on climate change, then triangulation against the common enemy of climate destruction may well overcome the unfortunate internal disputes plaguing psychoanalysis since its inception.
Applying Psychoanalysts’ Current Skills in One-on-One Psychotherapy
Psychoanalysts can increasingly expect to find themselves working with individuals who are fearful due to the changes in weather, water, and fire situations already unfolding. Even though events like World War II brought anxiety into households around the world, those citizens lacked access to the kinds of mass communications commonplace now. Information then was disseminated through newspapers, radio, and telegraph; in contemporary society, myriad methods of communication exist. Already, people around the globe nervously see and hear climate change unfolding daily. Some individuals may enter psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy because of these stressors. Those already in treatment may increasingly voice these concerns in psychoanalytic sessions.
Patients who sustained trauma in early childhood may find these events triggering; they often harbor unconscious affective memories, including states of terror, onto which these real events will be mapped. Along these lines, Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film Winter Light features a character seeking pastoral counseling because he is projecting anxieties in his personal life onto the threat of nuclear war. A similar storyline about global warming appears in the 2017 film First Reformed, which was inspired by Winter Light. In this context, existential psychoanalytic approaches like Ludwig Binswanger’s and Irwin Yalom’s will prove increasingly relevant to clinical work. Climate writer and philosopher Roy Scranton believes we already prepare, at least unconsciously, for “death in the Anthropocene.” What could be more meaningful than applying existentialist concepts to patients’ global-warming-related anxieties?
In addition to addressing reactive symptoms, patients will require assistance in making massive lifestyle adjustments. The coming decades will bring increasing demands for adaptation. Lessening dependence upon, and ultimately discontinuing, fossil fuels already approaches. Reductions in animal agriculture will likely follow. Changes in water and food distribution systems and housing will come next. These unfolding developments will elicit psychological problems while requiring mature capabilities for adaptation.
Middletown, Rhode Island
Applying Psychoanalysis Outside the Consulting Room
Meanwhile, psychoanalytic processes have applicability to broader political landscapes. Psychoanalysts already facilitate dialogue between different parts of minds and between different persons. Their work involves integrating layered, conflicting emotions. This work improves access to authentic thoughts and feelings; it facilitates patients’ abilities to speak truth to others. In 2020, writer Austin Ratner, today TAP’s editor in chief, along with coauthor Nisarg Gandhi, suggested in Lancet that psychoanalysts collaborate with epidemiologists in formulating public health messaging. Along these lines, psychoanalysts may need to leave the quiet sanctuary of their offices to become involved in international relations—precisely because they possess the unique understanding of the power of greed, of defensive processes, and of the hope offered by positive triangulation. Their work is similar to diplomacy, which is, after all, simply an extension of dialogue into the political realm. It is hard to argue against the binding effect a “shared enemy” has on individuals, communities, and nations. But first, nations must face into, and set limits on, the corrosive power of greed. They must break through their own systems of denial. The potential exists for nations to set aside even great political differences, like socialism versus capitalism, or authoritarianism versus democracy, and turn their attention instead to greater concerns like the real threat to human civilization posed by climate change.
The Paris Agreement of 2015, the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact, and COP28 in 2023 represent some international progress, but they still fall short. Do we psychoanalysts even have a choice about joining the global citizens striving to prevent further climate change? With our expertise in greed, defensiveness, and triangulation, we stand poised to make a meaningful contribution to the survival of human civilization. We could explain, and publicize, how these concepts account for much of the climate crisis.
Psychoanalysts interested in taking a more activist stance will face formidable obstacles. Gerard Chrzanowski questions whether societies—already witnessing fires, floods, and unsustainable temperature increases—can possibly break through their defensive avoidance. In a 2019 paper, he wonders whether a “large group [can] formulate a meaningful response to an inquiry about itself when such a situation freezes the group with psychotic fear?” In other words, he suggests, many, if not most, global citizens are immobilized by fearfulness. Psychoanalysis’s first order of business may well be to focus on releasing individuals from such paralysis. Panic and avoidance can be superseded by enhanced self-awareness. Psychoanalytic practitioners already increase self-awareness in individuals, but they will need to scale up their work to societal levels. For example, these ideas could be introduced to organizations by organizational/industrial psychoanalysts. Further, psychoanalysts could help rally environmentalists through, for example, making presentations at COP meetings or speaking to other international climate change organizations.
Humanity’s reaction of mass denial has an obsessive element to it: scientists report, meet, discuss, and observe—without any real action resulting. Instead of mass hysteria, mass obsessiveness occurs. Lacan suggests obsessives must be hystericized before psychoanalysis can begin. In other words, those who tend to hide their emotions behind walls of cognition require confrontations, followed by empathy, for feelings to emerge. Global culture requires the same treatment. If people drop their emotional ramparts and feel the pending calamity, they may begin to act. Here, again, lies a fertile field for applying psychoanalysts’ capacities for dismantling defensive shields.
Quincy, Illinois
Psychoanalysis has immensely impacted Western civilization—remarkable for a discipline repeatedly pronounced obsolete. Words like ego, resistance, and libido are in common use. Even hard-core behaviorists acknowledge defense mechanisms, wonder what their dreams mean, and struggle with intrapsychic conflicts. This influence can extend to the fight against climate change. Psychoanalysts can make a difference in this problem. They can, directly or indirectly, help people around the world prioritize the planet from whose surface we spring like apples from a tree. They might write op-ed pieces, author books explaining how these psychoanalytic ideas relate to climate change, or even testify before Congress. Psychoanalysts can explain how the power of archaic greed and defensive resistance can be managed. They can explain how positive triangulation can unify. These knowledge bases can be harnessed to inhibit our propensity to populate, excavate, and plunder the earth. Psychoanalysts can help to transform our terror as observers of a world on fire into a sense of empowerment to elicit broad societal changes. Psychoanalysis will achieve more than simply adding a few concepts to the international lexicon. It will positively impact the future of our species and of our beloved home: planet Earth. ■
Dr. Alan Michael Karbelnig, a psychoanalyst, writer, teacher, and forensic psychologist, practices in Pasadena, California. He lectures nationally and internationally, writes a weekly Substack newsletter, Journeys to the Unconscious Mind, and is the author of Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.