This book presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. Martucci argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra and simulation, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the "end of nature." Rather, his fiction emphasizes the lasting significance of the natural world and alerts us to the dangers of destroying it. In order to support this argument, Martucci examines DeLillo’s novels in the context of traditional American literary representations of the environment, especially through the lens of Leo Marx’s discussion of the conflict between technology and nature found in traditional American literature. She demonstrate that DeLillo’s fiction explores the way in which new technologies alter perceptions and mediate reality to a further extent than earlier technologies; however, she argues that he keeps the material world at the forefront of his novels, thereby illuminating the environmental implications of these technologies. Through close readings of Americana, The Names, White Noise, and Underworld, and discussions of postmodernist and ecocritical theories, this project engages with current criticism of DeLillo, postmodernist fiction, and environmental criticism.
Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize. Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers. As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.
This book presents the psychoanalyst with the question of how our enormously modified environmental conditions determine our subjective mental changes and vice versa. The gravity of the environmental crisis is amply clear and yet, in the face of such incontrovertible evidence, there is an emotional, more than cognitive, difficulty in comprehending the present reality and its future consequences. In understanding the collective imagination as permeating the individual one and vice versa, this book investigates this relationship of mutual co-determination between the individual traumatic stories told and experienced in the consulting room and the positive or negative environmental attitudes exhibited by patients. The pairing of clinical vignettes with dispatches from the collective imagination sheds light on the confused affective investments and anxieties that propel pathological defenses, such as negation, suppression, intellectualization, displacement, and disavowal. The final chapter concludes with notes on the role of hope in a damaged world and the importance of integrity within the psychoanalytic field and beyond. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as anthropologists, environmentalists, and ecologists.
From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?
Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.
This book argues that psychoanalysis has a unique role to play in the climate change debate through its placing emphasis on the unconscious dimensions of our mental and social lives. Exploring contributions from Freudian, Kleinian, Object Relations, Self Psychology, Jungian, and Lacanian traditions, the book discusses how psychoanalysis can help to unmask the anxieties, deficits, conflicts, phantasies and defences crucial in understanding the human dimension of the ecological crisis. Yet despite being essential to studying environmentalism and its discontents, psychoanalysis still remains largely a 'psychology without ecology.' The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, combined with new developments in the sciences of complexity, help us to build upon the best of these perspectives, providing a framework able to integrate Guattari's 'three ecologies' of mind, nature and society. This book thus constitutes a timely attempt to contribute towards a critical dialogue between psychoanalysis and ecology. Further topics of discussion include: ecopsychology and the greening of psychotherapy our ambivalent relationship to nature and the non-human complexity theory in psychoanalysis and ecology defence mechanisms against eco-anxiety and eco-grief Deleuze|Guattari and the three ecologies becoming-animal in horror and eco-apocalypse in science fiction films nonlinear ecopsychoanalysis. In our era of anxiety, denial, paranoia, apathy, guilt, hope, and despair in the face of climate change, this book offers a fresh and insightful psychoanalytic perspective on the ecological crisis. As such this book will be of great interest to all those in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and ecology, as well as all who are concerned with the global environmental challenges affecting our planet's future.
Summarizes Grof's experiences and observations from more than forty years of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. This accessible and comprehensive overview of the work of Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, was specifically written to acquaint newcomers with his work. Serving as a summation of his career and previous works, this entirely new book is the source to introduce Grof's enormous contributions to the fields of psychiatry and psychology, especially his central concept of holotropic experience, where holotropic signifies "moving toward wholeness." Grof maintains that the current basic assumptions and concepts of psychology and psychiatry require a radical revision based on the intensive and systematic research of holotropic experience. He suggests that a radical inner transformation of humanity and a rise to a higher level of consciousness might be humankind's only real hope for the future. "It's rare to find a textbook that is both extremely informative and enjoyable to read. Psychology of the Future has to be one of the first ones I've ever come across ... Each chapter brought an entirely new concept, theory, or method that was just as engaging as the previous one." — Dr. Tami Brady, TCM Reviews "This book is by a pioneering genius in consciousness research. It presents the full spectrum of Grof's ideas, from his earliest mappings of using LSD psychotherapy, to his clinical work with people facing death, to his more recent work with holotropic breathing, to his latest thoughts about the cosmological implications of consciousness research and the prospects for dealing with an emerging planetary crisis. Grof has always been one of the most original thinkers in the transpersonal field, and his creativity has kept pace with the maturity of his overall vision." -- Michael Washburn, author of Transpersonal Psychology in Psychoanalytic Perspective "Grof offers an outstanding contribution to the ever-growing debate about the nature of human consciousness and about the place of humankind in the cosmos. If more psychiatrists could be persuaded that human consciousness transcends the limitations of the physical brain, and instead is but an aspect of what may best be described as 'cosmic consciousness,' we could not only expect treatment modalities to change, but we could also anticipate the possibility of culture-wide rethinking of the basic presuppositions of modern cosmology, the cosmology that grounds Western institutions, ideologies, and beliefs about the nature of personhood." -- Michael E. Zimmerman, author of Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity Stanislav Grof, MD, is a psychiatrist with more than fifty years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness. He has been Principal Investigator in a psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia; Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center; Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University; and Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork, and gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA). In 2007, he was granted the prestigious Vision 97 award from the Vaclav and Dagmar Havel Foundation in Prague. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration; Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy; The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness; and Human Survival and Consciousness Evolution; all published by SUNY Press.
Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno's concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term "mimesis" as both a "world-reflecting" and a "world-creating" mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different "location of culture" and "direction of culture;" they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.
*First Place Winner of the Society of Environmental Journalists' Rachel Carson Environment Book Award* "If you're looking for something to cling to in what often feels like a hopeless conversation, Schlossberg's darkly humorous, knowledge-is-power, eyes-wide-open approach may be just the thing."--Vogue From a former New York Times science writer, this urgent call to action will empower you to stand up to climate change and environmental pollution by making simple but impactful everyday choices. With urgency and wit, Tatiana Schlossberg explains that far from being only a distant problem of the natural world created by the fossil fuel industry, climate change is all around us, all the time, lurking everywhere in our convenience-driven society, all without our realizing it. By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel - Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us: How streaming a movie on Netflix in New York burns coal in Virginia; how eating a hamburger in California might contribute to pollution in the Gulf of Mexico; how buying an inexpensive cashmere sweater in Chicago expands the Mongolian desert; how destroying forests from North Carolina is necessary to generate electricity in England. Cataloging the complexities and frustrations of our carbon-intensive society with a dry sense of humor, Schlossberg makes the climate crisis and its solutions interesting and relevant to everyone who cares, even a little, about the planet. She empowers readers to think about their stuff and the environment in a new way, helping them make more informed choices when it comes to the future of our world. Most importantly, this is a book about the power we have as voters and consumers to make sure that the fight against climate change includes all of us and all of our stuff, not just industry groups and politicians. If we have any hope of solving the problem, we all have to do it together. "A compelling-and illuminating-look at how our daily habits impact the environment."--Vanity Fair "Shows how even the smallest decisions can have profound environmental consequences."--The New York Times
In western culture, the separation of humans from nature has contributed to a schism between the conscious reason and the unconscious dreaming psyche, or internal human "nature." Our increasing lack of intimacy with the land has led to a decreased capacity to access parts of the psyche not normally valued in a capitalist culture. In Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land, Rinda West uses Jung's idea of the shadow to explore how this divorce results in alienation, projection, and often breakdown. Bringing together ideas from analytical psychology, environmental thought, and literary studies, West explores a variety of literary texts--including several by contemporary American Indian writers--to show, through a sort of geography of the psyche, how alienation from nature reflects a parallel separation from the "nature" that constitutes the unconscious. Through her analysis of narratives that offer images of people confronting shadow, reconnecting with nature, and growing psychologically and ethically, West reveals that when characters enter into relationship with the natural world, they are better able to confront and reclaim shadow. By writing "from the shadows," West argues that contemporary writers are exploring ways of being human that have the potential for creating more just and honorable relationships with nature, and more sustainable communities. For ecocritics, conservation activists, scholars and students of environmental studies and American Indian studies, and ecopsychologists, Out of the Shadow offers hope for humans wishing to reconcile with themselves, with nature, and with community.
