Climate anxieties and their countertransference challenges in psychoanalysis

Abstract

The paper discusses countertransference issues when patients’ anxieties about global warming appear in the psychoanalytic situation. Both analyst and analysand are affected, concretely and emotionally, by manifestations of climate change. It is argued that when a patient’s climate anxieties surface in treatment, the analyst may end up in a peculiar countertransference. The analyst, whose task is to discern and address any anxieties in the patient, may simultaneously note climate anxieties in himself or herself. There may thus be two anxious people in the consulting room, and both may use unconscious defences against awareness of climate destruction. This may explain the observation that concerns about climate change seem rarely expressed–implicitly or explicitly–in the analytic situation. Alternatively, patients do express them, but the analyst does not discern them. The paper discusses the psychoanalyst’s technique and stance when analysing climate anxieties in patients. This presupposes that the clinician analyses apathy and solastalgia in connection with his/her own anxieties, as well as his/her oscillating between hope and hopelessness about climate restitution. His/her capacity of enduring the pain of the depressive position will be put to the test.