Psychoanalysis and the ecological crisis: when a child’s eco-anxiety signals an improvement in their psychological condition
Lebon, Cristelle
Psychoanalysis and the ecological crisis: when a child’s eco-anxiety signals an improvement in their psychological condition - 2025.
4
Can eco-anxiety be a sign of improvement in the subject’s psychic state during therapy? Or is it a new pathology to be treated? What then can psychoanalysis do to address patients’ climatic anxieties? Based on the clinical case of a child undergoing therapy, articulating individual and family timescales, the author, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic family therapist, suggests we consider eco-anxiety in a dual dimension, between inner psychic reality and outer reality. While H. Searles (2020) postulated the existence of massive unconscious defences in order to understand “generalised apathy” in the face of global warming, the author prefers to turn this hypothesis on its head: what if the relaxation of a subject’s defences in the course of therapy encouraged the emergence of eco-anxiety, soundly anchored in his or her socio-environmental reality and enabled by the treatment of anxieties linked to his or her history?
Psychoanalysis and the ecological crisis: when a child’s eco-anxiety signals an improvement in their psychological condition - 2025.
4
Can eco-anxiety be a sign of improvement in the subject’s psychic state during therapy? Or is it a new pathology to be treated? What then can psychoanalysis do to address patients’ climatic anxieties? Based on the clinical case of a child undergoing therapy, articulating individual and family timescales, the author, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic family therapist, suggests we consider eco-anxiety in a dual dimension, between inner psychic reality and outer reality. While H. Searles (2020) postulated the existence of massive unconscious defences in order to understand “generalised apathy” in the face of global warming, the author prefers to turn this hypothesis on its head: what if the relaxation of a subject’s defences in the course of therapy encouraged the emergence of eco-anxiety, soundly anchored in his or her socio-environmental reality and enabled by the treatment of anxieties linked to his or her history?
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