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The Voice of the Earth:
Discovering the Ecological Ego
Theodore Roszak
Ecopsychology: A ReconnaissanceIn
1901 Sigmund Freud delivered a famous series of lectures titled “The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” His purpose was to acquaint the public with
the new and still mysterious science of psychoanalysis. He went about this in a
clever way. He used jokes, double-entendres, and slips of the tongue to show how
these familiar experiences reveal the repressed sexual and aggressive drives of
the unconscious mind. Today,
a similar series of lectures might draw its material from reports of ozone
depletion, toxic waste, and the greenhouse effect. These commonplace
environmental problems have become the psychopathology of our everyday
life. They reveal a condition for which Freud would not have had a name. While
sex and violence continue to smolder in the depths of the mind, the anguish of
what I will call the “ecological unconscious” has emerged as a deeper
imbalance. At this level, we discover a repression that weights upon our
inherited sense of loyalty to the planet that mothered the human mind into
existence. If psychosis is the attempt to live a lie, our psychosis is the lie
of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home. In
the century since psychology was first staked out as a province of medical
science, we have learned a troubling lesson. The sanity that binds us one to
another in society is not necessarily the sanity that bonds us companionably to
the creatures with whom we share the Earth. If we could assume the viewpoint of
nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behaviour in our social affairs might seem
madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be
greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a
“point of view.” We think that sanity—like honour, decency,
compassion—is exclusively a social category. It is an attribute of the mind
that can only be judged by other minds. And minds exist, so we believe, nowhere
but in human heads. This
is an essay in ecopsychology. In search of a greater sanity, it begins where
many might say sanity leaves off: at the threshold of the nonhuman world. These
days we see the prefix “eco” affixed to many words. Ecopolitics,
ecophilosophy, ecofeminism, ecoconsumerism, even ecoterrorism…
The result is not always graceful, but the gesture is nonetheless significant as
a sign of the times. This tiny neologistic flag flies above our language like a
storm-warning meant to signal our belated concern for the fate of the planet.
Its often-awkward connection with words from many sources—politics, economics,
the arts—reveals our growing realization of how many aspects of our life that
concern will have to embrace. The
goal of an ecopsychology is to bridge our culture’s long-standing, historical
gulf between the psychological and the ecological, to see the needs of the
planet and the person as a continuum. I hope to show that in a sense that weaves
science and psychiatry, poetry and politics together, the ecological priorities
of the planet are coming to be expressed through our most private spiritual
travail. The Earth’s cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the
industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life
that will free each of us to become the complete person we know we were born to
be. Once upon a time,
all psychologies were “ecopsychologies.” Those who sought to heal the soul
took it for granted that human nature is densely embedded in the world we share
with animal, vegetable, mineral, and all the unseen powers of the cosmos. Just
as all medicine was in times past understood to be “holistic”—a healing of
body, mind, and soul—and did not need to be identified as such, so all
psychotherapy was once spontaneously understood to be cosmically connected. It
is peculiarly the psychiatry of modern western society that has split the
“inner” life from the “outer” world—as if what was inside of us is not
also inside the universe, something real, consequential, and inseparable from
our study of the natural world. Turn,
for example, to the modern psychiatrist’s constant companion, the DSM,
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This is our society’s canonical
listing of all officially recognized neuroses, universally used for all medical,
legal, and insurance purposes. In the DSM, one finds such exotic
categories as “Schizoaffective Disorder in a Narcissistic Personality,” or
“Childhood Onset Pervasive Developmental Disorder.” The categories for drug
dependency are especially refined. “Hallucinogen Affective Disorder,”
“Hallucinogen Delusional Disorder,” “Hallucinogen Hallucinosis.” But
with the possible exception of “Zoophilia” (buggery, as it is more commonly
known) there is not a single disease of the psyche that connects insanity to the
nonhuman world where our environmental responsibility is grounded. The alchemists of
the ancient world had a teaching. “As above, so below.” Four words that
contain an entire cosmology. In the alchemical tradition, the heavens above, the
Earth below including its living cargo were seen as a grand cosmic unity, a
harmony resounding in the mind of God. Centuries later, modern science would
substantiate that teaching in several ways. We too perceive a unity to the
world. We know that the stuff and logic of the universe are everywhere uniform.
The same atomic rudiments, the same chemical constituents, the same laws and
principles extend from the cellular substance of our blood and bone to the
farthest galaxies. We have learned that our planet and all the life upon it are
made from elements that were forged in the fiery heart of primordial stars. As
the alchemists believed, the baser stuff of the world can be transmuted into
precious elements; commonplace hydrogen can be changed into gold—if it is
cooked in a stellar core to temperatures far beyond anything their primitive
furnaces could achieve and for eons longer than they could imagine. If
the alchemists were right about that much, we assume it was simply a hunch. By
our standards, their studies penetrated matter too shallowly to yield exact
physical knowledge. But then they may have had something else in mind; a
knowledge not of facts, but of the meaning behind the facts. For the “above”
was the macrocosm, the world of the heavenly spheres, the angelic hosts,
and Dame Nature vast as the entire planet Earth. “Below” was the microcosm,
the human soul. Between these two—celestial intelligence and the inner being
of man—there was said to be a vital link. Macrocosm spoke to microcosm;
microcosm reflected macrocosm. The two were in living dialogue. Understanding
the universe was a matter of listening, having ears to hear the music of the
spheres, the voice of the Earth. Wisdom meant connecting. In
these pages, we will also undertake to connect the two realms of being, big and
little, high and low, outer and inner. But for us the “macrocosm” has become
the province of the exact sciences, the greatest collective intellectual
enterprise of modern times, and no longer one pursuit, but many fields of study:
physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, each now subdivided into numerous
specialized disciplines. And “microcosm,” as the sphere of mind, soul,
emotion, means psychology, the study of human experience as it can be gleaned
from confessions made on a psychiatrist’s couch or possibly from the
introspective revelations of novelists or poets. For the better part of two
hundred years, keeping these two realms divorced and not even on speaking terms
has been the signal endeavour of rational thought and sound science. Matter to
one side, mind to the other. Out there, the objective; in here,
the subjective. The one a secure realm of mathematical certitude; the other a
murky terrain of shifting emotion, dream, hallucination. Thoughts are not
things, things are not thoughts. Thanks
to that separation, we have gained a wealth of knowledge about the structure and
function of nature; and from the artists and psychologists, startling insights
into the human heart. But the divorce of inner from outer, above from below,
could never be more than a temporary expedient, a way of getting on with
fact-gathering. Ultimately science is a creator of continuities sometimes in
spite of itself. Specialization narrows, but theory, which is the great
adventure, reaches out; it aspires to wholeness if cautiously. More and more the
discoveries of the sciences unite the myriad diverse areas of inquiry. Today,
scientists have high hopes of achieving a Grand Unified Theory: a “theory of
everything.” Some even labour to include the cultural, the psychological, the
religious within that project. Their effort is sincere, if tediously piecemeal.
What often came to the mystics in a flash of inspiration may yet return to us
slowly and painstakingly by way of disciplinary convergence. This
modern synthesis is being sought along two lines, one cosmological, the other
ecological. I give fair warning: the scientific concepts we will investigate
here as contributions to that search—the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia
hypothesis—are newly hatched and subjects of lively debate. They border on
“wild science.” Ideas still in the formative stage, susceptible to bizarre
formulations. Some may feel the use I make of them here is premature, given
their fledgling status. But both these ideas emerge as the culmination of a
long-term trend in modern science that cries out for philosophical elaboration.
That trend is our deepening appreciation of hierarchical systems in nature. Gaia
and the Anthropic Principle derive form insights into the intricately structured
character of the universe at the most ambitious level of generalization. As
rigorously professional as these new studies in ordered complexity may be, they
carry science forward to the boundary of metaphysics. This is ground that many
scientists understandably fear to tread. But sooner or later the greater
implications of the evolving complexity of the universe will have to be faced.
It may be that the deep systems of nature, from which our psyche, our culture,
and science itself ultimately derive, are the new language through which the
Earth once again finds its voice. I
realize there are scientific purists who object to seeing their intellectual
property set upon by amateurs, even respectful ones. But great scientific ideas
have rarely been allowed to preserve their virginal status for long. Galileo’s
astronomy, Newton’s laws of motion, Darwin’s evolution, all were rapidly
appropriated by the greater culture; even more so Freud’s would-be science of
the mind. While pure science is not pursued with an eye to social or ethical
significance, my purpose here is quite frankly to span the gap between the
personal and the planetary in a way that suggests political alternatives. That
project is overdue. I suspect that historians of the future will look back in
some astonishment at the last half of the twentieth century, wondering why so
few thinkers of this period registered the full importance of the revolution in
cosmology that took place in their lifetime. It would be no exaggeration to say
that in the course of the last generation, we have passed into a post-modern
cosmos as significantly different form the universe of Copernicus, Kepler, and
Newton (or even Einstein, Hubble, and Shapley) as theirs was from the cosmos of
Ptolemy. Many of the details of that transition may be familiar enough. The
discovery of bizarre new astronomical objects like the quasar, the pulsar, the
black hole, the measurement of microwave background radiation, the theory of the
Big Bang have received the attention of the popular press and the occasional
television documentary. But it is one thing to explain the technicalities,
another to spell out the living importance of great scientific discoveries. What
the new cosmology lacks is the moral consensus that philosophers and artists
once bestowed upon the Newtonian worldview. That consensus held for as long as
science grounded itself in divine authority and vouched for the importance of
human reason. Nothing has been more futile than our effort over the past few
centuries to establish values and define sanity within a cultural context that
finds no place for the sacred and views life as a marginal anomaly in the
universe. The cosmology that gave us that picture of the human condition has now
faded from the scene. The time is ripe for a new dialogue between scientific
intellect and human need. I offer this as a beginning. Ecopsychology:
Principles
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*** *** © Trumpeter, 1992 |
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