Psychoanalysis and Climate Change: Revisiting Searles's The Nonhuman Environment, Rediscovering Freud's Phylogenetic Fantasy, and Imagining a Future

This paper explores whether psychoanalysts have an ethical and analytical obligation to acknowledge and address the exponential worsening of climate change anticipated in the next decades. It suggests that the conceptual principles underlying psychoanalytic ethical guidelines and schools of thought may hinder analysts from grappling with climage change. Revisiting Harold Searles's The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and Schizophrenia, it explores how Searles's concept of relatedness to the nonhuman environment may be modified to address a changed context and analytic responsibility. To illustrate the important and complex history of environmental thought in psychoanalysis, the essay examines a little known text by Freud, "Overview of the Transference Neuroses."