Materials: PDF in Dropbox file. Will also be sent in email.

Participants:

These sessions, mostly in seminar format, but with guest lectures included, introduce the burgeoning field of eco-psychoanalysis. This is an ASCA Research seminar. It is aimed at academic colleagues and visiting scholars at all levels. It is, therefore, also aimed at post-doctoral researchers and PhD candidates. Research Masters and Masters students working in the field of environmental humanities, are also invited.

Synopsis for Sessions January, February, May, September and October

With its emphasis on the climate crisis, environmental humanities can engage in a fruitful dialogue with psychoanalytic thinking. In our current environmental emergency, how do we mourn what we are losing from the more-than-human world? The first session introduces the field through the publications of psychoanalysts who are now strongly identified with this interdisciplinary domain. The second session features, as our first guest lecturer, a leading specialist in the field: Sally Weintrobe, an eminent psychoanalyst, will give an online lecture. The third session focuses on the topic of mourning and melancholia for the more-than-human world. Future seminars will consider how to queer and decolonize environmental humanities. More sessions will be dedicated to exploring how matters of extinction and the death drive are linked to the themes of biodiversity and Earth systems survival, as well as their collapse.

Session 1: February 2nd, 15:00-17:00 hrs. - Introducing the Field

BG2 , room 008. 

Live Lecture (30 minutes) – Catherine Lord

Kasouff, S. 2017. “Psychoanalysis and Climate Change.” American Imago. 74(2): 141-171.

Searles, H. 1972. “Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis.” Psychoanalytic Review, 59. 361-374.

Supplementary reading only:

Dodds, Joseph. 2011. “Object Relations Theory: A more ecological approach to mind.” Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos. 57-74. London: Routledge.

Session 2: Feb 15th,  17:00-20.00.  On Zoom  - Guest Speaker Sally Weintrobe

Online Lecture (45 minutes) – Sally Weintrobe

Weintrobe, S. (2020) Moral injury, the culture of uncare and the climate bubble. Journal of Social Work Practice [online] 34 (4), pp. 351–362. [Accessed 20 July 2021].

Weintrobe, S. 2023. “The Ordinary Exception” and “The Exception.” Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis. 16-30. London: Bloomsbury.

There will be two audiovisual links, only for participants who sign on to the course. All readings will be available for the participants only. 

Session 3: June 

Freud, S. [1915] 1916. “On Transience.” SE XIV. London: Hogarth. 303-307.

Freud, S. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia.” SE XIV. London: Hogarth

Marder, E. “The Shadow of the Eco.”

https://www.youtube.com/live/FdsDUDZyqvQ?si=jblh2VfzX-1X4IY8

Session 4: September – tba –  Entangled: Queering and Decolonializing Psychoanalysis

Morton, Timothy. 2010. “Guest column: Queer ecology.” PMLA, 23 October, (125) 2: 273-282.

(also, Short interview with Timothy Morton, 2019: “Nature is a Racist Concept.” https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2019/03/02/nature-is-a-racist-concept.html)

Stephens, Michelle. 2022. “Just in Time: Managing Fear and Anxiety at the End of the World.” A Journal of Critical History. 12(1): April 2022.

Session 5 – October – tba - Living to Die: the Death Drive in a Time of Climate Breakdown

Freud, Sigmund. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE XVII. 3-66.

Rose, Jacqueline. 2023. “Living One’s Own Death: Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic.” The Plague. London: Fitzcarraldo Edition. Kindle 36-60.

Rose’s lecture/ LRB text (original versions of the above) are close read by Michelle Stephens in her article above. Freud Institute Annual lecture, 2020, “To Die One’s Own Death – thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic” online - https://youtu.be/uPCGf2pqxng