“It Makes Me Sad When So Much of the Forest Burns Down!” Childhood and Youth in the Context of the Climate Crisis

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the perspective of children and young people growing up under the current threat of climate crisis. It shows that there is a multiplicity of ways in which children and young people are already affected by the impact of the climate crisis and will be affected far more in the future. Taken together, the deleterious effects on the development of children and young people are underlined by the empirical findings on the stress young people experience. It must be considered that climate injustice also influences the relationship between the generations and must be seen as a rupture in transgenerational justice. The paper is rounded out by socio-critical and psychoanalytical observations which attempt to explain our mechanisms of defense toward the climate crisis. These mechanisms can be analyzed at the level of the personal but also on the macro scale of societal defenses against a terrifying reality. Finally, I offer responses to the question of what might typify “climate-friendly psychoanalysis.”

KEYWORDS:

• Climate crisis
• children and young people
• climate injustice
• transgenerational justice
• psychoanalytical social psychology
• climate-friendly psychoanalysis

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Kathrin Hörter

Kathrin Hörter, Dr Phil, Dipl-Psych, is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents, and adults in private practice (MAP/DGPT/ACP). She is a member of the board and lecturer at Münchner Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Psychoanalyse (MAP) and also a member of Psychologists/PsychotherapistsForFuture (Psy4F). Besides clinical psychoanalysis, her special interests are psychoanalytical social psychology.