https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0376-0828
ABSTRACT
Dennis Haseley and Claudia Lament, the editors of this special section of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child titled, A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight: Climate Anxiety in Our Youth, summarize in their introduction the contributions made by American and European activists, psychoanalysts, and researchers: Bill McKibben, Sally Weintrobe, Caroline Hickman, Panu Pihkala, Kathrin Hörter, Ines Schelhas and Martina Gast, Christine Bauriedl-Schmidt. In their introduction, the editors emphasize the emotional catastrophe, stemming from climate change, that is being visited on the next generations. They find the current culture of “uncare” implicated, as it gives permission to our worst instincts to both exploit the planet and deny the consequences. Remedies include psychological understanding, clinical work, and community support. Finally, they echo the call by the German author, Kathrin Hörter, for psychoanalysts themselves to use their tools to take action and find ways to intervene, not just on an individual clinical basis, but in the field of society as a whole.
What follows is a selection of papers that focus on children’s (and in some cases, parents’) reaction to the current distressing reality of the climate, and its forecasted future. Following a foreword by Bill McKibben, leading climate psychology clinicians from the UK, Finland, and Germany – Sally Weintrobe, Caroline Hickman, Panu Pihkala, Kathrin Hörter, Ines Schelhas and Martina Gast, Christine Bauriedl-Schmidt – offer their insights on children’s mental distress in this, the Anthropocene era. One cannot read these papers without a sense that one is reading the documentation of an emotional catastrophe being visited on the next generations. The continued promulgation of our current culture (a culture of uncare, as Sally Weintrobe describes it) is not only causing overwhelming harm to our planet but also psychological devastation to its most sensitive inhabitants. There are not only allegations against the current generation in power that are described in these papers; there is also an implication of the very stuff of human psychology, as Freud long ago described, as we employ our defensive postures to disavow and hide our destructive and narcissistic drives and their consequences, that, given a permissive neoliberal culture and cheap carbon sources, find their way with the environment and the vulnerable inhabitants of the planet.
These papers are featured in a journal dedicated to the study of child psychoanalysis. So, there is hope in these papers – found in community, support, communication, and psychological understanding. As readers of this journal know, the stuff of human psychology can be addressed analyzed, developed, even transformed, clinically. These papers, however, seem to call for something additional. Quoting Hutfless (Citation2018), Kathrin Hörter emphasizes that:
Psychoanalysis has committed itself to the process of rendering things conscious, to enlightenment. Can psychoanalysts therefore remain neutral even if the destructive, sadistic forces in a society, ones that constrain the subject, gain the upper hand? Or are they not precisely challenged to intervene where splitting occurs, where destruction gains the upper hand not just in the clinical setting but also in the field of society as a whole?
We are honored to have Bill McKibben, a groundbreaking climate activist and journalist, contribute his foreword to this section. In personal ways, he speaks of the importance of formulating ways of thinking and addressing climate grief and anxiety. He reminds us that what is most terrifying is feeling that one is in the state of facing this crisis alone. Reflecting on his own path, he speaks movingly of his own activism as a source for both personal solace and societal change; and he cites his many conversations with middle, high school, and college students who tell him that they share his belief in the importance of action, which has made a difference in their own lives as they address their sadness at the current climate crisis and gain a sense of agency.
Sally Weintrobe gifts us with a paper that is based on hands-on, experiential data, that is of the moment and is also revealingly personal. As part of a wider research project exploring youth and elder climate conversations in the US, Nigeria, and the UK, Weintrobe organized and sat in on a group of six young people (17–22) and six elders (60–70) both separately and in joint conversations over the course of a half dozen meetings.
The young people speak of their struggles with maintaining their mental health, their sense of emotional equilibrium, as they contend with their own powerful affects of anger and guilt around climate, all the while contending with economic and cultural forces that seek to impede their thinking with care and to hinder their emotional engagement with climate reality. Quite strikingly, they also report feeling forces of ostracism and labeling by their peers for their concern about climate as not being “cool” or “lite” enough; they are met with scapegoating and indifference which Weintrobe points out is a collective defense keeping care and engagement at bay, and promulgating the criminal silence that she references in her title. She notes that the youth in her study are grimly aware of the earth’s life support systems careening and crashing, while those with political and economic power drive environmental destruction. She notes, “Their political world might be said to feel akin to living in an unsafe family home with mad and dangerous parents,” and she is impressed with their mutual support and self-understanding of the toll this takes on their mental health as they work to keep their minds functioning, to engage in repair, and not to succumb to despair.
Weintrobe experiences the elder group as more prone to disavowal and denial around climate realities, having difficulty maintaining sustained conversations on the topic. In the first intergenerational group conversation, the elders seem less open – even dismissive – of the younger group’s concerns, resulting in a kind of group paralysis. By the second intergenerational conversation, however, the elders, seemingly having reflected on what has transpired, are much more supportive and sympathetic. This data – albeit from a small group – reinforces her main thesis, as described below.
Weintrobe’s take-aways from her experiences with these groups are far-reaching. She has in prior publications called out “the culture of un-care which seeks perversely to deregulate peoples’ moral sense; to “un-care” them.” As she says,
The culture of uncare has generated a climate bubble, meaning a collective psychic retreat inside of which people actively arrange to disavow – thereby avoiding conscious guilt – the by now ecocidal levels of damage this economy is causing. From inside the bubble, damage and violence are seen, but minimized and made to seem trivial.
Group pressure (as reported in the youth group) and social, cultural, intergenerational, and mass media forces (such as those discussed by Adorno) collude and contribute to this perverse organization of disavowal. Weintrobe focuses on a major engine for this collective psychic retreat: personal guilt. The youth groups describe an intense amount of guilt for how their privileged (Western, middle class, capitalist) lives impact the climate, as well as their remorse over the disproportionate impact of climate catastrophe on the Global South, vs. their habitations in London. Older generations struggle with a barely conscious overwhelming sense of guilt over the harm they and their peers are causing those they love and protect – their children (Unconscious envy may drive this as well). If enabling carbon recklessness and hiding in a climate bubble constitute moral injury, then the guilt of causing destruction and abuse to the younger generations is near unbearable, unless support is available and forthcoming. Societal groups of uncare promulgate denial, disavowal, and, as Weintrobe notes, quoting Hannah Siegel, the defense of “manic restitution,” in this case, the omnipotent belief that harm is or will be undone and solutions found. Such groups of uncare attempt to bully those who care into a shared perverse silence of denying reality.
In the final section of this powerful paper, Weintrobe shares her own personal reactions in doing this research. She struggles with feeling so overwhelmed with guilt that she is unsure she will be able to go on, as she harbors feelings of her own inadequacy as a climate researcher in safeguarding the young people in the group she attends. Confronted with hopeless feelings in some respondents, she feels her own urge to shut down, and also struggles against paralyzing rage in finishing her work. She is able to work through these reactions with the help of a group supervisor and her own self-reflections, and to produce her valuable contributions.
What echoes here – from her work with these groups to her own struggles – is the need for a caring group support to allow people to speak about climate reality in a meaningful, sustained way. A caring group can function as a benign superego, allowing guilt to be borne and to make way for mourning – and action. She takes much inspiration from her observations of this in the youth group. The other key here is the importance of supports for psychological health – the kind that allow someone to talk to others and to themselves – to address and contain their feelings, to struggle against the perverse forces that work against our self- and other-care. Her central conclusion might be this: The silence – between ourselves, within ourselves, outward toward life-denying political and cultural and economic forces – must urgently be broken and our caring voices validated and lifted against this planet-endangering culture of uncare in order protect ourselves and the generations to come.
Caroline Hickman argues that across the globe, eco-anxiety is an emergent mental health crisis among our young. She brings home the confusing messages children feel when those adults who wield power – for example, those in high level political positions in government or leaders in fossil fuel corporations – appear to care little about future generations. Indeed, the facts speak for themselves: As recently as July, 2023, Hickman references a statement made by Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, that we have now entered the world of global boiling, not global warming. On the heels of that announcement, the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom stated that he is on the side of car drivers rather than clean air projects. Going further, he went on to say that he aims to “max out oil and gas reserves in the North Sea.” “It is little wonder,” Hickman reflects, “that children are left confused about who to trust and wondering how to process and make sense of these contradictory arguments where there seems to be no priority given to their needs for a safe future.”
She underscores how important it is for adults not to whitewash or minimize children’s anxiety about the crisis. For the psychotherapist, it is imperative to be alert to her own counter-transferences. We, as adults, are moving through a terrifying reality alongside our patients, and the therapeutic alliance in a treatment situation is vital to maintain as a container for both child and therapist’s anxieties. Feelings of grief alongside holding on to hope that “much can be done to mitigate or adapt to these crises” is crucial for all adults and especially for therapists to convey to children who are in their care.
The centerpiece of her paper is an examination of an eco-anxiety scale she developed from clinical data derived from psychotherapy treatments of young people. The scale ranges from mild to critical; of special note in this latter category is new and highly disturbing symptomatology (e.g. suicidal and self-harming behaviors) which Hickman has been witnessing over the past three years. It is often the case in reports that chart people’s emotional reactions to the cataclysmic losses associated with climate change that the perspectives tend to lean in the direction of how adults feel. What is fresh here is that Hickman’s scale, which can be applied to any age group, draws special attention to the ways in which young people in particular experience “the individual, relational, collective, and planetary trauma” that is now widespread and affects all of us.
Hickman concludes her piece with a plea for adults to apologize to children for the harm that they have done to the environment, for all of us bear responsibility for where we are. As she says, “We need to support children and young people in developing emotional biodiversity (all feelings are relevant here), emotional intelligence, internal as well as external sustainable activism.” In these ways, adults can help children feel understood in their distress about the new climate reality, and of no little importance, less alone.
Panu Pihkala relates the concept of anxiety over climate change in children and adolescents to “ecological distress,” which he reads as heavily infused with various types of grief. Using research studies in bereavement, he explores forms of climate-related loss and grief that specially impact young people. Among these are: tangible and intangible losses, nonfinite loss, ambiguous loss, and disenfranchised loss. The tangible forfeits are easily discerned; examples include receding glaciers, decimated forests, flooding, and intolerable heat. Intangible losses are less obvious but also devastating and include, in addition to injury to mental and physical well-being, the foreclosure of a sense of self-determination and personal agency, “the felt loss of whole futures, lifepaths, and dreams.” A take-away message here is that anticipatory loss and loss that hovers on the border between being concrete and abstract makes emotional resolution problematic. To add just one of his many valuable concepts, disenfranchised loss – loss that is denied or unseen – makes matters worse, as it has no space to be recognized and held emotionally. A worldwide zeitgeist in which climate change denialism is prominent adds significantly to this kind of distress. Touchingly, Pihkala also describes the ways that such ecological losses may interweave with maturational loss – the sorrow that is accompanied by excitement – that accompanies children as they grow toward adulthood. Mature realizations about climate change are added stresses for children and young adults, compounded by the adult world’s failure to engage constructively with climate change, creating a moral injury (like child abuse or neglect) on younger generations.
Pihkala finds an historical precedent to the current crisis in the works of Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the psychological impact of the threat of nuclear war in the 1980s. He highlights Lifton’s comments on the subjective and painful sense in the children of that generation of the inability of the adult world – of their parents – to guarantee their safety, skewing dynamics of authority, love, and security. Pihkala also draws redeeming lessons from Lifton, who advised on the importance of having “witnessing professionals” (nuclear scientists then, climate scientists now) as authoritative touchstones. Pihkala expands on this need and suggests that trustworthy and climate-aware adults in the child’s world can be of great benefit. He cites post-adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth as factors that also may affect children in certain positive ways. He is not being naively optimistic here, but notes that the contradictory aspects of early maturation in youth who are climate aware – as with young people in roles of care – may include their ability to develop skills, increase their resilience, and gain self-esteem and social connections. Pihkala is arguing here for more attention to both the losses and the possible areas of growth caused by the climate crisis, a need for a more nuanced breakdown of these broad concepts in order to help with self-understanding and person-to-person communication. (This point is especially apt for climate-aware therapists.) Finally, he underscores the importance for children of the adults in their lives becoming more climate aware and empathic to the plight of the next generations given the new climate reality. Pihkala points to the need for adults to struggle with their own feelings around this crisis, and to use the resources – especially of community – to help themselves and the young people around them in their struggle for emotional understanding and resilience in these times.
Kathrin Hörter begins her paper with a moving account of her own self-protective and defensive posture concerning the climate crisis that culminated in a personal transformation. She reports on having appeared at a demonstration in 2019 on the Global Day of Climate Action that took place in her hometown of Munich, Germany. Her decision to attend it, she explains, was spurred primarily by an intellectual curiosity about this “new social movement” which was forming around climate change, but also she wonders whether another part of her, only vaguely felt, was genuinely worried about the worsening health of the planet. It was not until she saw up front and personal the serious nature of the gathering that she felt her cool stance as “merely an observer” begin to crumble. She was amid a throng of tens of thousands of protesters which included not only children and young people. As she put it, she saw:
… representatives of Scientists for Future, Parents for Future, Buddhists, Christians, grandparents. The mood was one of solidarity and embarking on new frontiers. While I stood in the crowd and tried to absorb it all I was suddenly hit by a strong wave of sadness at what I am–and what we are–actually doing to our children with the way we live, how we act and how we refuse to act, that tears came to my eyes.
Hörter holds up a mirror to the individual and to society by bringing her epiphany about that day to usher us toward a deeper understanding of the defensive structures that individuals and societies use to avoid and deny the devastating reality of the effects of global warming. She explains the term, “climate injustice,” as a form of unfairness in the way it takes greater tolls on certain groups than on others – and uses the categories of class, gender, race, and monetary status to illustrate these inequities and the terms of their costs. She throws light on how our young generation and those that follow must confront an untold and terrifying ecological disaster that they bear no responsibility for, yet its consequences have been thrust at their doorstep. Moreover, Hörter brings attention to the cruel irony that it is up to the youth to bring attention to the fact that adults must act against this threat, for they themselves lack the power to make the changes necessary to prevent the impending debacle. There is a parentification that is taking place, a role reversal about who assumes responsibility for what previous generations have side-stepped. Much like Hickman, she makes the case that to even these imbalances, the adult community-at-large must not pathologize or demean the anxieties that accompany a child’s fears about what has already happened – and is continuing to happen – to the planet.
One of Hörter’s most arresting messages in her piece is her call to arms to psychoanalysts the world over to interrupt the disavowal and passivity that accompanies humanity’s tendency to sleepwalk through this crisis. She names the strengths of psychoanalysis and its focus on unconscious irrational forces, that if go unrecognized can do inexorable damage. It is an extraordinary tool to light up the bogeyman – to link the individual to society and to our way of living – and constructively critique societal norms and values. She cites the work of Esther Hutfless who advocates that it is the duty of the psychoanalytic community to break up destructive wrongdoing in the larger social polity:
Psychoanalysis has committed itself to the process of rendering things conscious, to enlightenment. Can psychoanalysts therefore remain neutral even if the destructive, sadistic forces in a society, ones that constrain the subject, gain the upper hand? Or are they not precisely challenged to intervene where splitting occurs, where destruction gains the upper hand not just in the clinical setting but also in the field of society as a whole?
Ines Schelhas and Martina Gast’s contribution is a fascinating report on their findings of four interviews with parents of young children, ages three to eleven, who are involved in the climate protection movement. The authors provide back and forth exchanges between the interviewers’ questions and the parents’ responses. What comes to light are the parents’ feelings of guilt and shame for leaving their children with the lion’s share of the burden in having to manage the impact of the crisis. The parents painfully acknowledge that many of the ways they have conducted their lives as families incurred steep costs in terms of damage to the environment. The reckoning these parents have come to brought Schelhas and Gast to consider the usefulness of Lertzman’s (Citation2015) term, “environmental melancholia:”
a state in which one remains or is trapped, because the destruction of the environment is vague, difficult to grasp and cannot be sufficiently mourned like, for example, the loss of a person.
They also cite a related term, coined in 2005 by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, “solastalgia,” that refers to the felt loss when one directly witnesses the change or destruction of their home and habitat – although one might wonder, as some of these parents seem to, how much this “directness” needs to be first hand versus via news and social media posts related to larger planetary destruction and species extinction (Compare here Pikhala’s citations of tangible, intangible, and disenfranchised loss.).
The interviewees’ words in this piece powerfully attest to the wrenching dilemma faced by climate aware parents: How do you give your children a sense of stability when everything is shaky. The authors reference concepts by Winnicott and Bion to underscore these sensitive parents’ awareness of the difficulty in not hoisting “too much” of their own guilt and fear onto their children, and at the same time not sheltering their children from the reality of the consequences of what has already happened.
To address their own guilt and to valorize action as a way to address environmental anxiety and the need for change, parents reported having taken action to show their children that they are choosing to live in a more climate-conscious fashion, a way of living which contrasts with the decisions taken by their former selves when they squandered precious resources. For example, they spoke of how they have given up airplane trips and long-distance car travel or eating meat. They want to adhere to a standard of care toward Mother Nature that they can feel proud of, and a model that is a standard for their children.
Finally, the parents described with touching self-awareness their tightrope walk of balancing hope and despair. One of the most hope-affirming actions that the parents took was their participation in Parents for Future and other climate protection groups. They discovered that they were not alone, that a group setting provided the necessary sustenance to feel safe and secure and to go “beyond their limits or do things that they would not have expected of themselves.”
In the words of one parent:
I then always focus on the good again, because there are people out there for whom that is also so important and who also fight there. And then it gives me a little bit of hope that you can always do something better.
Christine Bauriedl-Schmidt elaborates on the hope offered in shared action too; but first, based on her meticulous and comprehensive review of thinkers in the fields of psychoanalysis and the social sciences, she examines some of the internal forces within the mind that turn away from the climate crisis. As humans, we tend to forswear the inevitability of our own death, and thus, it is not surprising that we also tend to deny the reality of the ongoing destruction of our planet. In part, this is the result of our not taking seriously evidence that up to now has tended to be experience distant, such as the melting of polar glaciers. Breakthroughs of disavowal do not happen until we see and feel the evidence, such as the catastrophic events of record-breaking heat waves, uncontrollable wild-fires which necessitated mass-scale evacuations, hurricanes, and unexpected torrential downpours and flooding in cities and rural areas that swept the globe in the summer of 2023.
She references Donna Orange’s emphasis on the work of the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who conceptualizes the necessity of a subject’s face-to-face encounters with the Other in order to take positive action when it is called for: The subject must take the role of guardian over the Other. Orange links this concept to the imperative that the Global North, as subject, must accept its guilt concerning its neglectful behaviors toward the environment and transform them, in recognition that the Global South, as Other, will suffer most from this neglect, and will pay the brunt of the costs. (Sally Weintrobe’s coining of the term, “culture of uncare” takes up this view and expands upon it as well, as is demonstrated in her paper.)
Bauriedl-Schmidt argues that in order to address the “pathology of the social” and to make substantial changes to our way of living, societies must move from an unconscious stance – denial of the reality that is upon us; avoidance of our responsibility in having created that reality and why; and the inextricable relationship between the human body and the body of nature – to a conscious one. She cites the thinktank, the Club of Rome, dedicated to a globally sustainable future, which stated in a recent report that in order to achieve this goal, there must be sweeping systemic shifts across the world that aim to put an end to poverty and social injustices and to refocus our efforts toward the implementation of clean energy. Yet, there are those who rail against such movements and organizations. What triggers this push-back?
The author puts forward her view that the massive changes necessary to create a better, fairer, and more just world means that the privileged must relinquish their reckless and wasteful lifestyles. The narcissistic rage that ensues from the puncture of omnipotence that is aroused at the idea of placing constraints on one’s way of living is turned against those protesters who insist that humanity pull off its blinders.
Finally, Bauriedl-Schmidt closes her paper with what she describes as the “radicalness” of hope. It is founded on the idea that “something good” will arise, even when we cannot predict what shape that source of “goodness” will take. Poignantly, she points to its transformative power in the face of great adversity and sorrow at what has already happened. One source of that transformative power is in the hearts and minds of our children who, as Sally Weintrobe tells us, will need our nurturance and support in finding a way to make the world as livable as possible for them and for the generations to follow.
We, as editors, have been powerfully impacted by reading these papers, and our own views in understanding climate anxiety can be expressed as follows: Psychologically pernicious aspects of the new climate reality include its associated economic, political, and cultural aspects – as many of the writers allude to – that are both things in themselves and that also touch on and replicate feelings of childhood helplessness and pain. The level of disturbance and trauma in one’s own life and history, and the maladaptive defenses one employs, form a complex structure that easily slips into place under certain kinds of stress. For instance, as one witnesses and lives through the weather events of the summer of 2023, it may not only seem like the world is ending – terrifying in itself, of course – but the experience may also enforce the sense of powerful and irresponsible political, corporate, and media authorities who are neglectful of one’s well-being, depriving of care, and even antagonistic to one’s present and future survival.
Despite the accuracy of such a perception, if the structure of absolute childhood helplessness, deprivation, and rejection slips into place, what follows may be fragmented and self-defeating defensive postures: passivity, paralysis, unproductive rage, isolation, dissociation, apathy, depression. If one has engaged in the neoliberal carbon culture, as all of us (and our children) have, one may succumb not just to proportionate guilt and shame, but to primitive and totalistic feelings of badness, for which the only solution might be disavowal, dissociation, or self-destruction. For some who are struggling in this area (those in Hickman’s “severe” and “critical” range of eco-anxiety come to mind) psychotherapy may help to disentangle the individual’s psychology and personal childhood history that holds its own traumata, which may overlap, duplicate, and violently reinforce the current already critical state of the climate, making for a virtual tsunami of feelings that can threaten the individual’s psychic stability.
What the writers in the following section emphasize is the need for healthy responses to the climate crisis: adaptive defenses, agency, communication, receptive and supportive listeners and interlocutors. In addition to a striking commonality in these papers, there is an implicit – and sometimes explicit – prescription: a call for the normalization of human responses to the new climate reality. On this level, anxiety, despair, depression, guilt, rage and so on are not symptoms but emotional responses to denied danger that need to be framed as steps in adaptation, as affect states that encompass the range of understandable responses to the madness of denialism and the culture of uncare. Such responses are in need of support and validation and community – including by and among psychoanalysts and therapists – to find their proper places as spurs to awareness and individual and collective action.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dennis Haseley
Dennis Haseley, LCSW, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Psychoanalytic Association of New York, an affiliate of The New York University Langone School of Medicine. Among his other writings, his paper, Climate Change: Clinical Considerations, appeared in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies in 2019 and has been widely cited in scientific papers on this topic. He is a member of Climate Access and the Climate Psychology Alliance.
Claudia Lament
Claudia Lament, PhD is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Psychoanalytic Association of New York, an affiliate of The New York University Langone School of Medicine, and member of Climate Psychology Alliance. She is the President of The Anna Freud Foundation and a former editor-in-chief of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
References
- Hutfless, E. 2018. Warum Psychoanalytiker*innen politisch nicht schweigen sollten – Zum Verhältnis Politik und Psychoanalyse. Accessed January 5, 2023. https://queeringpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/warum-psychoanalytikerinnen-politisch-nicht-schweigen-sollten-zum-verhaeltnis-politik-und-psychoanalyse/.
- Lertzman, R. 2015. Environmental melancholia. London: Routledge.