Beyond the reality principle - ecological conception of sanity

Sierra, March-April, 1993 by Theodore Roszak

The parallel with family therapy is instructive. During the 1960s a growing number of psychologists came to realize that there were sources of anxiety and forms of neurotic behavior that could be treated only if the entire family were brought into analysis. Some, like Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, went so far as to indict the family as the main crazymaking institution in our lives. Similarly, ecopsychologists suspect that there are forms of neurosis, perhaps including the most emotionally corrosive kind, that trace back to our entrenched alienation from the natural environment. The crowded industrial city, with its killing pace and compulsive habits of consumption, may disseminate an "urban madness" that exacts a heavy toll upon both the person and the planet. Is it possible, then, that every nature poet since Wordsworth has been right in telling us our sanity depends upon access to wilderness and natural wonders, upon the companionship of trees and beasts, and above all upon the reverence we experience in the presence of the inhumanly magnificent? If so, then healing the wounded psyche may require that we find ways to "prescribe nature."

Seeking to do just that, a conference titled "Psychology as if the Whole World Mattered" was held in 1990 at the Harvard-based Center for Psychology and Social Change. There a gathering of ecopsychologists concluded that "if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of the world will be experienced as self-destruction." One speaker, Walter Christie, assistant chief of psychiatry at the Maine Medical Center, observed that the illusion of separateness we create in order to utter the words "I am" is part of our problem in the modern world. We have always been far more a part of great patterns on the globe than our fearful egos can tolerate knowing .... To preserve nature is to preserve the matrix through which we can experience our souls and the soul of the planet Earth.

Sarah Conn, a New England clinical psychologist who belongs to a "global therapy group," put it more dramatically. She contended that "the world is sick; it needs healing; it is speaking through us; and it speaks the 1oudest through the most sensitive of us."

Behind these words lies a boldly affirmative reappraisal of the oceanic feeling--not as an infantile phase to be outgrown, but as a valuable sensibility to be salvaged. Oddly enough, Freud himself anticipated this revision; he might be credited with inadvertently authoring the program of ecopsychology in a single sentence. At one point in his dark ruminations, he candidly acknowledged that "our present ego-feeling is only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive-indeed, an all-embracing--feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it." In Freud's typically dolorous view, there was no alternative to surrendering the childlike pleasures of the oceanic feeling in favor of a cruelly diminished ego. But ecopsychologists refuse to settle for that "shrunken residue" of the psyche. For them the newborn's "intimate bond" with nature is the key to a higher order of environmental sanity.