Psychoanalysis at the End of the World

Abstract

This chapter argues that the end of the world is not a storm upon a menacing horizon but an irreversible fact of the present. The general refusal to acknowledge this fact is most evident in Hollywood visions of global cataclysm, the endless repetition of which is the symptom of a melancholic attachment to the world whose end we are already living. Reading these films symptomatically further reveals the unconscious logic of the apparent contradiction between widespread anxiety and general inaction in the face of accelerating environmental collapse. Combining Freud’s insights into the libidinal foundations of messianic religion with Lacan’s study of the psychoses, the chapter wagers that psychoanalysis can disrupt environmental melancholia by motivating a painful but necessary work of mourning on the way to another future.