So Many Birds: Psychoanalytic Listening in the Time of Climate Crisis

Abstract

Susan Bodnar urges the psychoanalytic field to expand our scope of attention by attuning our listening to the ecological dimension of our patients’ object-relational worlds, and to take up nourishing and elaborating these inner landscapes as a core part of our clinical task. This discussion extends Bodnar’s application of ecotherapy to investigate the question: How are our psyches registering and internalizing our catastrophically changing world? The author offers an extended clinical vignette in an effort to explore the dynamic tension between the potent healing potential of inviting in, attending to, and supporting a healthy internalized relationship to the more-than-human world, and the ways in which a damaged, dangerous, or unstable world may be registered by the psyche and interwoven into the psychoanalytic process.