Climate Distress and the Problem of Action
Anouchka Grose
10 January 2024
A small number of Anouchka's Everyday Analysis pamphlet are still available here.
In climate psychology circles there seems to be a great deal of consensus around the idea that the antidote to climate grief is climate action. Of course no one’s so naïve as to think it’s an actual cure, just that it can help. Not only does it have the ring of common sense (admittedly a phrase that might make a psychoanalyst’s ears prick up) but it’s regularly recommended by activists and climate scientists alike, who lend the idea authority by speaking from experience. But what kind of action would be enough to make a difference, either to the individual or to the crisis?
To begin with the obvious, the problem is big, and any action one can take will inevitably feel small. The futility of even the bigger successes — say, being a part of the 2019 Extinction Rebellion protests that caused governments all over the world to declare a climate emergency — can make the prospect of further action depressing. Especially since XR have all but imploded and those same governments’ sense of emergency appears notably lacking five years later.
In psychoanalytic practice, one would be unlikely to dish out advice on worthwhile responses to the crisis, let alone having consistent, constructive ideas about it in private. The magnitude of the problem is at the very limits of thinkability and anyone engaging with it is liable to find themselves confronted by a tangle of contradictions and impasses. Is it wise to focus on the problem, or to pull back? Is there any such thing as a ‘healthy’ position in between? Is it worthwhile to analyse an individual’s unconscious attitudes towards such a real-world difficulty? And does any of that make it qualitatively different from any other area of psychoanalytic work? Surely we are always being asked to ‘cure’ people of things we ourselves suffer from, or being confronted by the perpetual nature of distress.
Within the world of activism we are also seeing a crisis around the idea of effective action. The discourse around climate change is becoming ever more fractured and non-uniform. There are those who believe the sanest response is to learn to accept the looming catastrophe and try to adapt, foregrounding ideas like ‘community’ and ‘care’. Further down the line, perhaps, are the accelerationists and members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement who invite collapse in the name of ripping open alternative futures. Then there are those who believe in tweaking political systems. Or exiting them altogether. Or that technology will save us. Or that the problem isn’t necessarily all that bad. The concerned, vegan, climate-marching, archetypal activist is only one voice among many, and this group appear to be splitting into those who still adhere to the idea of non-violent civil disobedience and those who are beginning to think we’ve been too polite for too long and that the lacklustre results speak for themselves. Each political position clearly echoes a subject position with regard to an object: give up on it, destroy it, conserve it, negotiate with it, fight for it, and so on. This isn’t to say that one’s attitude to environmental breakdown is somehow developmentally anticipated, just that it’s informed by forces deep at work in us, sometimes beyond our field of vision.
The last group of people — the anxious activists — are perhaps the ones most likely to present their climate-related suffering in therapy or analysis. But if they are already somehow ‘active’ what more can anyone do to help? Perhaps the beginnings of an answer might be found in questions around what it means ‘to act’ at all? Are all actions equal? Are some actions designed to dissemble — to mask helplessness? How might it be possible to help another person find the kind of action that would make a difference, even if only to them?
In ‘Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’ (1963) Winnicott writes about the ways in which an infant uses privation, frustration, and various shattering experiences — alongside more gratifying interactions — in order to construct a habitable world of good enough relationships for itself. If all goes well, thanks to this tangle of pain and pleasure, ‘the object changes over from being subjective to being objectively perceived’ (p.182); it can let you down but you can still love it. Your pathway through these experiences will literally be character-building. Of course nothing is set in stone — or at least, as psychoanalysts, we probably have to believe this — but our ‘character’ will inevitably be a huge determining factor in how we respond to the climate crisis, alongside other factors such as our social milieu, events in the world, our preferred sources of information and the ways in which the algorithm interprets our interests and desires (which perhaps provokes the question, ‘What is the object relation of the algorithm?’). Although one obviously can’t draw up anything like an organised, horoscope-like schema linking types of childhood experience to ecological engagement it might at least be helpful to develop more nuanced ways of thinking about why some people are waiting for Bill Gates to develop the technology that will save us, while others are supergluing themselves to corporate glass entrances in the desperate hope of forcing immediate change.
Regarding the climate crisis, and our responses to it, we might extrapolate from all this in two quite different directions. On the one hand we could take the idea of object relations at face value and try to analyse why some people are like this while others are like that. But this would perhaps be to accept too readily that each of us is a discrete entity, and that there is such a thing as ‘objective reality’ to which one can adapt. If the ‘object’ of object relations is related to the Kantian object in that the perplexing, potentially overwhelming object of perception has to be tamed by the concept of the object to the point where the two — experience and concept — can somehow be synthesised into something we experience as convincingly ‘real’, might we just as well begin to wonder what effect this style of ‘knowledge’ may have on our treatment of the planet? Isn’t it the fact that we can use concepts to discretely organise and portion things off, to separate ourselves from others, nature from culture, humans from other animals, animals from plants, the land from the sea, the sea from the sky and so on, that’s got us into this whole mess in the first place?
In Timothy Morton’s book, ‘The Ecological Thought’, he develops the idea of the hyperobject in order to begin to rethink our relation to the environment. (Even this last sentence demonstrates the problem — there’s ‘us’ and there’s ‘the environment’, separated as much as joined by the concept of a ‘relation’.) Morton’s hyperobject is a challenge to thinkability. Styrofoam is a hyperobject in that it permeates the world and exists in a timescale way beyond our own. Climate change is also a hyperobject in that it defies our notions of categorisation; every single thing that’s ever existed, or will exist, might feasibly be included in the concept ‘climate change’. ‘The ecological thought’ is just that; the uncanny realisation that what we call ‘the environment’ means absolutely everything, ever. Thinking of ourselves as neutral, rational beings who can act to save poor old Earth (without changing our lives too much in the process) is completely delusional. The enormity and complexity of the problem extends so far beyond anything we can do about it individually that it sends us reeling. The atrocity of the harm done to our unlikely and astonishing world — and all by small, incrementally damaging acts like driving and dressing up — is barely conceivable. It hardly seems real, at the same time as being the most real thing.
Apparently Morton’s choice of term was influenced by Björk’s ‘Hyperballad’. In the song, the narrator describes a ritual where she wakes up early and throws random small objects off a cliff. She watches the objects fall and imagines falling with them, crashing onto the rocks below. The ritual enables her to go home to her partner feeling safe and happy; it keeps her world functioning. For anyone involved in any kind of clinical therapy, this won’t sound so strange. Plenty of people perform private rituals, especially around the idea of ‘harm’, in order to cordon off the ‘badness’ — death, decay, aggression, destruction — and get on with living a semblance of a socially sanctioned good life. You could call it a symptom or an attempt at cure. And sometimes these attempts work, hence psychoanalysts’ hesitation around the idea of abrupt symptom removal. What if you made things worse by imposing some generic notion of ‘better’? What if so-called normality is just another mode of ritual or magical thinking, a means of kidding ourselves that everything is OK?
Where does that leave us with regard to climate action? Isn’t part of the problem that too many of us do rather Björk-like things in order to stave off panic — shop organic, ride bicycles, wear second-hand clothes? We might kid ourselves that we can make a difference in this way but we’d probably do just as well to throw a fork off a mountain.
In 2019, Extinction Rebellion burst onto the scene with a fully worked-out climate action manifesto. Their big, heavily-researched strategy was based on mass non-violent civil disobedience. If you could persuade 3.5% of a population to get involved in peaceful-but-disruptive protest you would, they claimed, quickly force the possibility of real change. At first, things went almost inconceivably well. The world seemed to get on board; people started to listen to climate scientists, climate deniers were delegitimised, and for a moment it began to look like drastic change could actually happen. Then there was XR’s famous Canning Town misstep, the accusations of white privilege against pale, posh protesters blithely throwing themselves into the hands of the lovely, lovely police, not to mention millions of pounds and countless hours of blue chip think tankery ploughed into working out cunning ways to make environmentalists look bad. Whereas for a moment it had seemed as though XR offered an arena for viable climate action, the movement soon came to be characterised as a bunch of clueless white people getting on everyone else’s nerves.
Now we have a terrible situation in the UK where the standard advice on climate-related mental anguish is to act, but this is against the backdrop of a government who are in the process of making protest illegal. You may find yourself too embarrassed to join XR for fear of ridicule, or too frightened for fear of jail. XR themselves are responding to this clash in messaging by asking whether our government’s inaction may be in contravention of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, forbidding torture. Surely they are gaslighting us, acknowledging that there is a serious emergency at the same time as forbidding us from acting with anything like a commensurate degree of exigency. Shouldn’t we all just be freaking out? How are we supposed to act and not act at the same time? We are encouraged by right wing politicians to try to bring about change through the ‘correct channels’, such as voting, but this may only happen every four years and, according to some persuasive calculations, we are due to pass irretrievable ecological tipping points within the decade. Consumer ‘actions’, like making the right choices, fall just short of superstition, and becoming a lawyer so you can dream up ingenious cases against irresponsible governments and businesses is great, but most of us are doomed to participate at the level of responsible consumption and clicktivism, which is apt to leave us feeling powerless and alienated.
So is there anything else left to try? Perhaps the diverse permutations of our possible object relations can be helpful here. In ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Andreas Malm questions XR’s insistence on non-violence, suggesting that damage to property might be a viable next step since it looks as though an insistence being nice risks holding things up. While XR point to the Suffragettes and the American Civil Rights Movement as shining examples of effective non-violent action, Malm insists that they were always helped along by a ‘radical flank’ — individuals or groups who were prepared to escalate things physically when the saintly saviours weren’t getting results. So here we have two possible modes of acting; non-violent and a bit more violent (he only advocates damage to property, not people) working together, albeit unofficially. Add to this others: private rituals, self-sufficiency, scientific research, massive cash donations, guerrilla gardening, politics, befriending spiders, orthorexia, documentary-making, education, lobbying, dancing, radical town planning, writing slightly feverish articles, whatever you can dream of that seems like a good idea to you. While each on its own may seem insignificant, perhaps it isn’t impossible to imagine that myriad mini-actions could culminate in a critical mass. As Merlin Sheldrake writes in The Entangled Life: ‘Within complex adaptive systems, small changes can bring about large effects which can only be observed in the system as a whole. Rarely can a neat arrow be plotted between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Stimuli — which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves — swirl into often surprising responses. Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic non-linear process. So are sneezes and orgasms.’ Once enough of us have had ‘the ecological thought’ our combined actions may start to surge in more ecologically feasible directions. Somewhat idealistic, it hardly needs to be said, but at least this kind of openness to manifold possibilities might enable people to begin to find the kinds of action that suit them.
Anouchka Grose is a writer and psychoanalyst practising in South East London. She is a member of The College of Psychoanalysts and The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, where she regularly lectures. She has been working one-to-one since 2003. Before that she ran writing workshops for people experiencing mental health difficulties. She writes about psychoanalysis, current affairs, art and fashion, and has contributed to The Guardian, Radio 4, and Resonance FM.
