Imagine for a moment a place that you frequented, or that had special meaning to you as a child – it might be a beach on Cape Cod, or a special nook behind a garden shed, or an apple tree that you plucked from on your walk to school. Now imagine that particular object or place being gone forever, washed away by floods, or too polluted to swim in or cut down for a road to be constructed. While those events may seem minor, if they occur, we grieve something of ourselves in that loss, in both memory and in meaning. These places are more than just physical locations: they are repositories of childhood memories and experiences, making their loss deeply personal.

We are living in a time known as the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere, resulting in the extinction of countless species and massive climate events, contributing to the losses mentioned above. Wildfires, massive flooding, and extreme heat have become commonplace occurrences that all of us have either experienced ourselves or know someone who has. We are at a planetary tipping point, where every action we take, every law passed or struck down, every defense we engage in or work through, has significant ramifications for generations to come. We have strayed from our connection, and our place, on the earth.

Psychoanalysis has a significant place in this context, beginning with the work of Harold Searles (1972). Sally Weintrobe (2021), a British psychoanalyst, believes that the spirit of psychoanalysis can offer us an understanding of as well as a direction out of our current situation. In her seminal text, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare, she posits that such defenses as projection, denial, disavowal, and a feeling of omnipotence all play a role in the unfolding of the climate crisis as we experience it today. And because of this, the moral injury, or sense of injustice, about what is happening to the planet affects not only us, but also our patients as we experience this world together. How do we hold our own feelings, as well as theirs? How might we imagine a culture of caring as it applies to our planet? How can we foster improved mental health by turning to nature (Adams & Morgan, 2018)? And because we are writers as well as psychotherapists, how might we “write wild” (e.g., turning to the natural world for creative inspiration) in order to form a “creative partnership with nature” (Welling, 2014)?

This weekend we will examine the intersection between psychoanalysis and the climate crisis, as well as how this dialogue can enrich our understanding of ourselves, our patients, and the non-human world. To advance this objective, we will consider what it means to “write wild”, and by doing so explore our attachment to the natural world, as well as explore what it means to foster a culture of care. This will be an offering of hope and resilience!

Coordinators: Donna H. DiCello, Psy.D.

GUEST FACULTY:

Elizabeth Allured, Psy.D. is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who co-founded the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America in 2017.   This nonprofit organization’s mission is to educate mental health clinicians, and the lay public, about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis and related social injustices.  She served as its co-president, and currently chairs the Professional Development Committee.  She teaches in CPA-NA’s  Climate Aware Therapist course, as well as its Climate Café Facilitation Training program.  She began presenting professional papers on mental health and the environmental crisis in 2007, and since then has presented papers on this topic at national, international, and local conferences.  Her writing on the topic appears in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and as chapters in psychoanalytic books by Routledge Press.  She has been interviewed by media sources including the San Francisco Chronicle, Parenting Magazine, and The Psychotherapy Networker.  She has given workshops for climate activists, and for undergraduate and graduate students at various academic institutions such as Bard College, Yale University, and the Harvard Undergraduate UNICEF program.  She is currently completing a book for Guilford Publishing, entitled Climate Aware Therapy for Every Clinician.  She is in private practice on Long Island, New York.

Susan Bodnar, Ph.D., is on the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, and is, among other things, a walk therapy practitioner in her private practice in NYC. She is also the part-time clinical director of The Wellness Center, a start-up mental health clinic in upstate New York. She is an associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues and on the editorial board of Ecopsychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She loves to write and recently published an edited volume, Unmoored Yet Unbroken: Ecopsychology for a Changing World – Stories of Human Nature Relationships (Wiley). Importantly, she is a great friend of all living things – plants, animals, most people and especially her family.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and was published as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day initiative. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. She’s a proud Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world.

Kari Weil, Ph.D. is University Professor of Letters, College of the Environment and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and is the author of three books, Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Thinking Animals:  Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP, 2012), Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1992) and numerous essays related, most recently, to the fields of animal studies (within the arts and humanities) and to issues of feminist theory and gender studies. Her current research explores the literary legacies of what was known as animal magnetism in theories of affective influence, tactility, and traumatic healing.