{"id":449,"date":"2025-08-26T13:13:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T13:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migration.beingalive.earth\/?page_id=449"},"modified":"2025-08-27T08:20:39","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T08:20:39","slug":"we-must-all-be-mad-not-to-go-mad","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/?page_id=449","title":{"rendered":"We must all be mad not to go mad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Annkatrin Reiner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thoughts on Avoidance, Fear, and Resilience in the Face of Climate<\/strong> CHANGE<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

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This summer semester, a rather unusual elective took place at the Third Faculty of Medicine in Prague: \u201eBeing Alive: Humans in the Web of Life. Discussion of texts of biologists, philosophers, and anthropologists\u201c. Most electives in medical school cover scientific-clinical matters exclusively, and as someone who has always been very interested in the humanities, I immediately signed up for the course. I did not mind that ecology and climate change almost hadn\u2019t played any active role in my life so far – I consider myself interested and I try to live \u201egreen\u201c by following advice for ecological consumption (such as a meatless diet, regional products, using public transport, and the very German habit of waste separation). But I couldn\u2019t remember the last time I had read a text about the climate crisis despite the occasional dreadful news about melting glaciers and dying coral reefs. It was rather the idea of reading philosophical texts and discussing them in a group setting that encouraged me to sign up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following essay is based on my thoughts and reflections during our weekly ‘listening exercise’, during which we were encouraged to spend 30 minutes in nature and just listen to our surroundings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Becoming Aware: The Listening Exercise<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

I live in the city center of Prague, so the closest I got to \u201enature\u201c was the graveyard nearby, Ol\u0161ansk\u00e9 h\u0159bitovy. The task is not quite as simple as it sounds. Sitting somewhere for half an hour, without any distractions, listening to the noise of the surroundings is quite unusual for my generation and, to be frank, most of the time stopped after 15 minutes. My days are busy, and I often get interrupted by remembering points that should be added to my To-Do-Lists or open messages I just remembered I needed to answer. This became slightly better when the days got longer, and I could do this exercise by the end of the day. But I must admit that, despite trying, it never became enjoyable. I liked coming to the graveyards for walks before, but without any physical activity, I felt my day didn\u2019t really benefit from it. At some point, I began to realize that my difficulty with the exercise reflected something deeper than mere personal preference. With the ongoing course and spending quite a lot of time with the weekly readings, I discovered another aspect: it arose like a different layer, one that might lie way deeper than explaining my inner resistance with our zeitgeist, which optimizes even breaks with exercise or socializing (and for sure not listening to bird singing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fear and Denial in the Face of Climate Change<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

During our course, we looked at nature from different angles. Often, the authors were well-recognized scientists who left their particular field of research to formulate broader thoughts about life, the earth, and human role in it. Amongst these were Marcia Bjornerud with \u201eTimefulness\u201c (2018), Alfred Tauber with \u201eImmunity: The Evolution of an Idea\u201c and the very influential \u201eSilent Spring\u201c (1962) by Rachel Carson. They share their critical perspective on nature as a \u201eresource to be used\u201c and question the sharp distinction between humanity and the environment. Later in the course, we looked at economic concepts regarding \u201edegrowth\u201c and sustainability (\u201eLess is More\u201c by Jason Hickel, 2020), the approach of indigenous cultures towards nature (\u201eTending the Wild\u201c by Kat Anderson, 2005) as well as very practical approaches fighting the ongoing loss of biodiversity (\u201eThe Garden Jungle\u201c by Dave Goulson, 2019). This list of topics, authors, and texts is not exhaustive, but it shows how these readings did not particularly help us gain declarative knowledge about global warming; they furthermore encouraged us to reflect upon our position and emotional relationships towards the non-human world and discuss these with our classmates, whose different cultural backgrounds from all over the world often helped us expand our individual horizons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within these group discussions, a particular feeling was often mentioned: fear. It is this uncanny kind of fear that crawls up slowly, whose nagging gets stronger the longer you ignore it. This evokes the image of a child being put to bed who suddenly imagines a monster hiding underneath. The child tries their best not to think about it, but the fear gets stronger and stronger until it has to look. In contrast to this monster, climate change is real – when we look under the bed, it stares back with all its horrifying realities: acidifying oceans, weather extremes, mass extinctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my weekly listening exercise, this fear started crawling up, and not even able to distract myself with reading the texts, the listening exercise left me with only the emotional aspect of it. Here, the parallels with psychotherapy became clear to me: theway regular, structured encounters can gradually loosen defenses and bring repressed emotions to the surface. I think I often couldn\u2019t stand this fear and, therefore, tended to interrupt the exercises early. It left me with one question: how is it possible that we all live in denial, suppressing this fear, and pretend global warming is \u201ejust\u201c one of the many crises we are facing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Climate Anxiety and Psychoanalytic Perspectives<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Psychologists found a term for a phenomenon that\u2019s majorly observed in Generation Z and Alpha, the generations after mine. Climate Anxiety can be described as \u201eanxiety which is significantly related to anthropogenic climate change\u201c (Pihkala, 2020, p. 3). It is gaining more and more attention in modern mental health institutions as well as research platforms (Schwartz et al., 2022). I hypothesize that climate anxiety is actually widely spread – but in its unconscious form, and its defense mechanisms manifest in different ways in many societies. To explore this further, psychoanalytic concepts provide a useful lens. Joseph Dodds describes in his article \u201eDancing at the end of the world?\u201c an \u201eanthropogenic narcissism\u201c, which gets formed as a defense against feelings of helplessness and inferiority. Not only the COVID-19 pandemic has recently shown how fragile and at threat our modern life is. Already, Freud formulated an omnipotent defense against the superiority of nature. On the other hand, helplessness might arise as a defense against the fact that humanity does have certain powers, and maybe the circumstance that, within the shortest time, modern life has been able to impact systems that have evolved over billions of years is proof (Dodds, 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As often concluded in psychoanalysis, absolute extremes indicate defense, and reality might lie in the uncomfortable middle. Next to the reciprocality of inferiority-superiority, one can set Melanie Klein’s work into eco-psychoanalytical contexts. Melanie Klein describes an infant’s relationship towards his mother as characterized by both positive, \u201egratifying\u201c affects, such as love and feeling secure, as well as negative, \u201efrustrating\u201c feelings with rivalry and destructiveness. The picture of an infant endlessly sucking on its mother’s breast is easily convertible into an analogy with \u201emother earth\u201c and modern man. According to Melanie Klein, the immature, infantile psyche is stuck on the level ofgreed, which doesn\u2019t involve any other organism but itself; only with time and maturing can the psyche integrate the multidimensional world (Klein, 1946). The human-nature relationship can be interpreted on that level of greed instead of being able to \u201eacknowledge our dependence on the other, the Earth\u201c (Dodds, 2022, p. 1259). From this perspective, Klein\u2019s concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressivepositions shed further light on the psychological responses to climate change. Derived from the split of the infant’s first object, the mother’s breast, into good and bad, Klein formulated two positions: the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position. These positions have to be thought of as always within us, and the adult psyche oscillates between both positions, depending on levels of threat and trigger of defense mechanisms (Klein, 1946). Climate change, with its existential threat to human survival, evokes defense mechanisms of the paranoid-schizoid position. Thus, individuals split the world into only good or bad, and the depressive position, with its uncertain, multidimensional, and holistic perspectives, becomes harder to maintain (Dodds, 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Panic versus Paralysis<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

This psychoanalytic split resonates with broader societal dynamics. It parallels the often-reported \u201esplit of society\u201c: old versus young, right-wing versus left-wing, fight for climate protection versus neoliberal views. Sociopolitical topics in general, but climate change particularly, often seem very frustrating topics for discussion and are thus avoided: within families, groups of friends, and workplaces. It leads to a simultaneity of asynchrony – on the one hand, we subjectively feel that more and more people seem to adapt their consumption to decrease their carbon footprint, we observe ecological perspectives increasingly often in product descriptions, business websites or advertisements and huge protests with several hundred thousands of people, organized by Fridays for Future, took place in many countries over the last couple of years. On the other hand, numbers tell us a different story. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, \u201eglobal greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals\u201c (Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, IPCC 2023, p. 10). Paul Hogett describes the feelings climate change evokes and its defenses as collectively shared, which means that we can observe these phenomena on a societal level as well (Hoggett, 2019). Thus, psychoanalysis does not only help us understand our personal anxieties but also provides a framework for interpreting collective paralysis and polarization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion: Walking a Tightrope<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Living in today\u2019s world might be a constant conflict between denying and realizing our fragility as humankind and our consequently just as fragile psyche, leading to the occurrence of the previously described defense mechanisms. They keep us \u201esaneenough\u201c to pursue our individual lives. Facing the truth about the current state of our world leaves us with unbearable feelings, and in order to remain functional, most people consciously and unconsciously neglect it. I think our currently perceived \u201emental health crisis\u201c can, among others, be explained by the idea that this neglect might be incomplete and unconscious feelings of fear, guilt, and shame find their way to the surface in the form of various symptoms: despair, depression, all forms of addiction and even psychotic disorders. It raises the question\u2014are we all mad not to go mad facing such existential threads? Or are we \u201emad\u201c exactly because we struggle so hard not to go \u201emad\u201c about climate change?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what now? Joseph Dodds formulates an interesting approach by highlighting the role of joy, a rather neglected affect. Can we still feel joy in the face of a world under ecological stress? Perhaps we must\u2014in order to create lives and societies worth fighting for (Dodds, 2022). It might give us the energy necessary to confront us with our defenses, integrate the reality of global warming, and move on from paralysis. I would like to end this essay with a short anecdote of our course. Our teachers not only offered us the weekly teaching unit but also invited us to spend some weekends all together at a farm in the Czech countryside. During that time, we experienced the joy of a like-minded group that comes together and spends valuable time talking, reflecting, and enjoying nature. This experience underlined for me that community itself can act as a healing force, counterbalancing fear with shared resilience. It was a small reminder that even in uncertain times, meaningful connections and shared experiences can make space for liveliness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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References<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Dodds, J.: Dancing at the end of the world? Psychoanalysis, climate change and joy, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2022, 67, p. 1257-1265 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hogget, P.: Climate Psychology. On Indifference to Disaster, Springer International Publishing, 2019, p. 8-11 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IPCC: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023, p. 10 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Klein, M.: Notes on some schizoid mechanisms, 1946, p. 164 – 169 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pihkala, P.; Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety. 2020, p.3<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schwartz S. et al: Climate change anxiety and mental health: Environmental activism as buffer. Curr Psychol. 2022, p.1 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Annkatrin Reiner Thoughts on Avoidance, Fear, and Resilience in the Face of Climate CHANGE This summer semester, a rather unusual elective took place at the Third Faculty of Medicine in Prague: \u201eBeing Alive: Humans in the Web of Life. Discussion of texts of biologists, philosophers, and anthropologists\u201c. Most electives in medical school cover scientific-clinical matters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-449","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/449\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingalive.earth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}