The environmental crisis and the field of political ecology: a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective

Abstract

The relationship between environmental thinking and the Psychoanalysis thought by Freud still needs to be better thematized. It requires complex and interdisciplinary theoretical assumptions, not only from Environmental Sciences, but also from Humanities. This essay aims to point some reflections in this direction. It is understood that the environmental crisis, in its most emerging facet, climate change, should not be reduced to the perspective that the environment is in crisis, because what is really at stake is a way of being, a collective way of life, that is, the subjectivity of a civilization. In view of this, the environmental crisis unveils an unconscious process in the psychic economy, something that has been well appropriated by the capitalist way of life and that, by definition, has no proper, natural, immanent relationship with the world of nature.