Beyond the reality principle - ecological conception of sanity

Sierra, March-April, 1993 by Theodore Roszak

Freud himself had at last to grant the oceanic feeling one major role in adult life. From it arise the fires of Eros, the emotional force that binds the self to others. The ego, he observed, in its conventionally sane relations with the world "outside,"

seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state--admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological-in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love, the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of the senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

Freud's language lacks the poetry his insight demands, but his concession is touched with a persuasive honesty. This is a tribute to the wisdom of the heart by one of the great stoical philosophers. Ecopsychology would enlarge that insight, letting it reach beyond our social relations to embrace all we have learned of the intricate bond that exists between ourselves and the planet that has given us life. We need only follow where science itself leads us, into the depths of matter and the far reaches of space. Somewhere within this emerging vision of cosmic wholeness lies a new, ecologically based conception of sanity.

THEODORE ROSZAK is Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. His study of ecopsychology, The Voice of the Earth (Simon & Schuster, 1992), will be reissued as a Touchstone paperback this spring.