Nature and Madness

Preface

Preface us is A P R O G R E S S REPORT. Initially my effort was to seek and understand the historical origins of an environmental esthetic. In Man in the Landscape I examined Renaissance sources of the American traditions of landscape painting and gardening as kernels from which our leisure takes its expression in travel and nature study.But that esthetic is too fragile and wayward to bear much of an ecological ardor. Its failure is due to the time dissonance of evolution and ideas. Culture, in racing ahead of our biological evolution,does not replace it but is injured by its own folly. Beginning again, in The Tender Carnivore and theSacred Game, I sought a more durable model for ourselves in the deep historyof ancestral hunter -gatherers. In an unexpected wayI wasrewarded, for foraging is a more thoughtful activity than I knew. I felt that I had glimpsed a central figure ofconsciousness, whose expressions in intelligence and speech appeared to be bound in each individual human emergence, as well as in that of the whole species, to plants and animals. I attempted to trace that emergence in Thinking Animals. Meanwhile,the sense of a normative psychogenesis became a compellingidea, of development as an organ. The prospect of general, culturally-ratifieddistortions of childhood, of massive disablement of ontogeny as the basis ofirrational and self-destructiveattitudes toward the natural environment is the prospect to which I now turn. Most of my teachers I never met, nor am I sure, givenmy xix TH Nature and Madness thesis, that they would assent heartily to my apprenticeship. Nonetheless, I revere their work and this book comes from a cross-reading of the psychology of human development by such masters as Erik Erikson, Peter Bios and Jerome Kagan, of religious history as explored byJoseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade. Certain writings have been particularly seminal: Homer Smith's Man and His Gods, AnthonyStorr's TheDynamics of Creation, and Herbert Schneidau's Sacred Discontent. Both I and mystudents havefoundJoseph Chilton Pearce's Magical Child to be a beautiful and provocative statement of the lifelong effects of the non-human environment on the newborn. Especially rewarding have been the papers, books and personal encouragement of Harold F. Searles. Hervey Kleckley's discussion of the fluidity of typologies in psychopathology in The Mask of Sanity warned me that I should avoid clinical diagnoses, that such terms as schizoid and paranoid might indicate a mode but, for a non-physician like myself, not an etiology.1 His idea of the mask, the enactment of normalcy which enables psychopaths to hide behind the routines of daily life, emboldened me to thinkthat pathology might be epidemic in a culture, yet hidden from itself.All of these authors stimulated my curiosity about the relationship of the complex course of child development and its deformities to those 'external9 environmental problems which we so often interpret either as a minorityconceit or a momentary administrativeawkwardness. I am grateful to MalcolmWood for his scrutiny and criticisms , to Sierra Club Books editor James Cohee for his diligent help and editorial conscience, to Robin and William Matthews who remind me with much energy that to become too categorical about Christianity is to enact the dualism of which it isaccused, and toJoseph Meeker, who made valuable suggestions for improvements of several parts of the manuscript . Mywife, June Shepard, as always, has been a resolute xx P R E F A C E critic ofvagueness and carelessness.AHumanities Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation helped make time possible for reconnaissance of the relationship of ecology to the history of thought. Like so many other ideas that seem at first original, this one turned out not to be private property. I soon found that Erich Fromm had already asked "Can a society be sick?" in The Sane Society. He assailed sociological and cultural relativism , wryly observing that consensual validation has no bearing on mental health: "That millions ofpeople share the same forms of mental pathology does not makethese people sane" —a remark as urgent and valid as whenit waswritten twentyfiveyears ago. The subject thrust me sidewaysso to speak, into the field of psychohistory. In my remedial purview I found that most psychohistory has been concerned with the biographies of famous men. Closer to Fromm's view is the work of Kenneth Keniston and Lloyd deMause. Keniston says, "Largely ignored so far in the study of historical change have been...