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In "Views of the Apocalypse" (Orion, Winter 2019), Lisa Wells, author of the biographical work Believers, reports paying attention to her repeated experience of falling down various stairways. She finds herself thinking about Freud’s notion of parapraxis, where something internal emerges through a crack into the everyday but in an alien form, subject to immediate denial. Read More |
Modern (Western) civilization has always assumed that there are no problems for which solutions cannot be found. Today there is no shortage of technical solutions on offer for the climate crisis, from carbon capture and storage under the North Sea through to giant high altitude aerosols which deflect the sun’s rays back into outer space. These kind of solutions require what Iain McGilchrist terms a left hemisphere worldview.
This kind of instrumental rationality dominates our world, from how we educate our kids through to how we relate to the world around us (non-human nature). It also deeply affects how we think about ourselves. The triumph of modern psychology is in no small part a result of the way in which it uncritically inhabits this rationality. As a consequence alternatives, including psychoanalysis, ecopsychology and indigenous psychologies, have remained marginalised.
We invite contributions which critically reflect upon this rationality and its possible impact on climate psychology itself. We would value personal accounts of the grip of this rationality (as it can be so difficult to identify) and personal experiences of trying to challenge, subvert or transform it. Accounts of initiatives that deploy a different approach and contribute to new ways of collectively engaging with the climate crisis are especially welcome.
If you have an idea about something you’d like to contribute please contact the editors of Issue 6, Rembrandt Zegers (
Climate Psychology Alliance - Online Explorations Webinar:
Anger, Grief and the Climate Emergency
Date: Saturday 23rd March 2024
Time: 14:00-17:00 UK time
Please follow this link (eventbrite.co.uk) to register.
The climate emergency faces us both with irredeemable loss and with systematic injustice. Does it follow that both grief and anger have a powerful positive role to play in our individual and collective response? But what if grief simply encourages acceptance and reconciliation? And doesn’t anger sit uncomfortably with the commitment to non-violent direct action lying at the heart of environmental protest?
This webinar will explore some of the complex relations between grief, remorse, resignation, bitterness and anger. Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) co-founder Paul Hoggett will offer a brief overview of the role of such feelings in political protest based upon his book Politics, Identity and Emotion.
Then Caroline Lucas, who will retire as a Green Party MP at next General Election and hopes to train as a doula to the dying, will be in conversation with CPA members Chris Robertson and Steffi Bednarek.
Attendees will have the chance to participate in group dialogues and reflections during the webinar.
We hope to see many of you there!
Fees:
Please follow this link (eventbrite.co.uk) to register.
The webinar is part of a series that seeks not only to explore those questions above but also to fundraise for the running of the Explorations in Climate Psychology e-journal affiliated with the Climate Psychology Alliance. The e-journal sensitively tracks and reflects the pace, rhythms, voices, movements and other expressions of climate psychology that are emerging and aims to be inclusive of the different ways people are experiencing and engaging with one another on the climate and ecological crisis. For more information about the journal, please follow this link (climatepsychologyalliance.org).
We invite you to delve into our fifth issue of Explorations in Climate Psychology which is now available!
Explorations is an online publication that aims to be inclusive of the different ways people are experiencing and engaging with one another on the climate and ecological crisis. It welcomes various forms of expression from analytical articles, reviews and features that promote peer-reviewed research to interviews, reflections, testimonies, poetry, art and lightly edited conversations.
This latest edition asks authors to clarify the position of climate psychology on the edges of chaos and reveal the dimensions of these edges – the chaos on the edges of nature, within our mind, and in our political life and culture.
Follow this link to access all five editions of Explorations.
Do you feel, as we do, that the climate and ecological crisis is the defining social issue of our times? Would you like to bring your clinical and professional experience to build programmes that support young people?
We invite you to consider being our Young People’s Coordinator, working with CPA members and with other organisations to develop projects with children, young people and parents in a self-organised and relationship-based working culture. Join us and be part of our work facing the climate, ecological and justice crises.
1.25 days per week over 45 weeks per calendar year at £400/day with a flexible work pattern and start date for eighteen months in the first instance.
More information and details on how to apply, please follow this link (drive.google.com).
Contact email:
NB closing date: 23:59 on Monday 4 December 2023.
Interview date: provisional week commencing 11 December 2023.
We are a diverse community of therapeutic practitioners, thinkers, researchers, artists and others. We believe that attending to the psychology and emotions of the climate and ecological crisis is at the heart of our work.
