The Importance of Psychoanalytic Insights on the Environment

Review of Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement (NY: Routledge, 2015), ISBN 978-0415727990, i-xvii, 221 pages, available as hardcover ($160) and e-book (Digital List Price: $54.95; Kindle: $43.96).

The psychoanalytically-minded environmental communications professional Renee Lertzman does a great service in inviting readers to learn about the ways in which psychoanalysis can illuminate important spaces beyond the consulting room. In Environmental Melancholia she demonstrates the power of a psychoanalytic approach in deconstructing the widespread myth of apathy that environmentalists, among others, use to explain the lack of any obvious reparative environmental engagement on the part of wide swaths of the U.S. population. Developing a relational mode of interviewing based on dialogue, one that implicitly questions traditional, frontal forms of social science research, Lertzman relies on three sets of interviews with ten people which allow her to explore their affective responses to industry’s destruction of the environment in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin.

Drawing on Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Lertzman diagnoses the dynamic with which so many appear to struggle as environmental melancholia, “a condition in which even those who care deeply about the well-being of ecosystems and future generations are paralyzed to translate such

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concern into action” (4). Lertzman sees her work serving as a hopeful corrective to the perspective of many environmentalists who construct themselves as morally superior to a pathologized and patronized public painted as “uncaring, selfish, cognitively limited or in denial” (8), or who in their campaigns simply do not allow the space for the range of emotions people feel when faced with environmental destruction (130).

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which lays the theoretical groundwork and the second of which focuses on the interviews themselves. Comprising about one quarter of the book are the rich interview transcripts in the appendices, along with Lertzman’s insightful comments, leading me to wish that the book might have been formally divided into three parts. She has included photographs of the Green Bay environment with relevant interview excerpts, an inclusion that not only adds dimension to the overall narrative but also shows the tenderness that Lertzman developed for the people she interviewed and the world that they inhabit. Both the people and their landscape are given voice by this telling gesture.

In Part I, devoted to exploring why psychoanalysis matters in the environmental arena, Lertzman posits the idea of environmental melancholia. Here she explains why psychoanalysis, in its emphasis on the presence of affect, the unconscious, close personal relations (object relations in the language of psychoanalysis) and countertransference, among other things, may offer a more helpful frame than the one currently dominating some social science circles in a gap between what people understand about the environment and how they behave in relation to it. This section also provides a useful survey of other psychological work on environmental destruction as well as climate change. Noting psychoanalyst Harold Searles’ significant articulation in the 1960s and 70s of the connections between environmental destruction and the human psyche, Lertzman wonders if his work perhaps never took root because of its speculative nature, and hopes that her own more empirically grounded research might gain better traction. Lertzman also explains in depth her development of the Dialogic, Relational Interview. Her approach offers an alternative to those social science methods that proceed as if what humans felt, said, and did were in seamless alignment, and as if the interviewer’s countertransference either did not exist or did not matter. Lertzman’s methodology should be of interest to social science researchers as well as ana-

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lysts. The former may come to see the value of free associative, relational approaches and the latter may come to see the relevance of an analytic approach in a broader scope of practice.

Part II focuses on the psychic dimensions of what Lertzman finds in the interviews. Originally suspecting that the participants, like herself, would express anxiety about the state of the ravaged Green Bay environment, she found instead narratives imbued with loss, mourning, melancholia, and ambivalence. Selecting to interview people whom environmentalists or policy researchers might glibly label as “apathetic” (49), Lertzman discovers that the people whom she interviewed do care about their environment, but for various reasons, find themselves unable to act in the world on these concerns or even feel any strong sense of outrage about levels of environmental destruction. Instead, lacking any sense of how to engage externally with their feelings or even find a space for them, they turn inward, and are left feeling betrayed, personally powerless, or nothing at all. Thus “when I ask Howard how the idea of contaminated fish makes him feel, he responds instead with a comment that it’s not something he can change; therefore, there is no point in ‘feeling’ anything about it. The space for emotional processing of the losses or sense of anger is not available; rather, it has been short-circuited in the single expression, “it’s not something that I can change immediately” (94).

Lertzman offers additional compelling interpretations of one participant’s ambivalence that prevents both anger and action (Victoria) and another’s sense of herself as a little person with no effect on the world (Sally). Drawing on Winnicott’s idea of contributing as central to creative reparation in the world, Lertzman makes a persuasive argument that the people she interviewed see themselves as having no viable means of contributing positively toward the environment.

In her final chapter, Lertzman suggests ways in which environmental professionals might take better account of the complex human psyche in their efforts to engage the public, suggestions that I believe apply equally well to those interested in social change in other arenas. For example, Lertzman’s interviews indicate that the tired, moralistic, and reductive approach versus apathy does not begin to capture the range of feelings or nuanced possibilities of agency that humans may exert in relation to the environment. Most important, Lertzman urges those interested in environmental reparation to create different contexts for engagement and participation,

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contexts which all interviewed participants sensed to be missing.

This final chapter on next steps is, sadly, the shortest of the book, and something that I hope Lertzman and others will expand upon in the future. How can we integrate Lertzman’s findings about the presence of environmental melancholia, among other psychic states, into efforts to engage more people in environmental reparation and other causes for public concern? An equally interesting question to pursue might be why some people do not experience melancholia with regard to the environment, but rather anger, terror, or any number of other emotions. Why do people and policy makers in other countries seem better able to act upon the array of feelings environmental destruction (and climate change) evoke? Is it worth asking about the Native American history and presence, as well as the history of trauma environmental and otherwise, in the Green Bay area? Might this be part of the historical unconscious of those interviewed and contribute to their inchoate sense of loss as well as possibly guilt? (And why did Routledge’s copy editors not give Ms. Lertzman, her readers, or the subject the respect that they are due? This expensive hardcover and e-book suffers from typographical errors, the unnecessary repetition of quotes, and the misspelling of several authors’ names, such as Alice Kuzniar/Kunziar [sic!], Ulrich Beck/Bech [sic!], and E./R. [sic!] Santner.)

Although the book’s innovative methods and trenchant critiques of environmental communication strategies might be most immediately useful to professionals engaged in that field, many others should find Lertzman’s arguments worth exploring. Those engaged in psychoanalytic work may be pleased to see where psychoanalysis can go when taken out for a spin, and find themselves more sensitive to hearing the ways in which the environment emerges in the language and unconscious of patients and themselves. Environmental Melancholia makes a forceful case as to why anyone interested in pursuing social change needs to pay attention to psychoanalysis and what it teaches us about our inner worlds.

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