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Cosimo Schinaia and Psychoanalysis and Ecology are winners of the IPA Climate Award!
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.
List of contents
Introduction - the role of psychoanalysis 1. Main steps to mitigate the climate emergency 2. Human beings and the environment 3. Freud and the environment 4. Psychoanalysis and the environmental crisis 5. Waste 6. Wastefulness 7. Light and noise pollution 8. From the individual to the social sphere 9. Work-health balance conflict 10. Servants of the future
About the author
Cosimo Schinaia is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the SPI and a full member of the IPA, working in private practice in Genoa, Italy. He is the author of several books and articles, including On Paedophilia (2010) and Psychoanalysis and Architecture (2016), translated in several languages. Psychoanalysis and Ecology is also available in Italian, French, and Spanish.
Summary
This book presents the psychoanalyst with the question of how our enormously modified environmental conditions determine our subjective mental changes, and vice versa.
