God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea.
Psalm 46
Self-love, let us return to where we started from, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Lev. XIX: 18). With quantum theory, science appears to come full circle, confirming much of what the ancient Eastern and Western alchemical traditions have described for millennia, that all and everything is interlinked in an ocean of energy, implying a world soul or anima mundi.
The Talmud states, ‘We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are’ (in Plimer, 2009, p. 15). Following Nietzsche’s ‘Man can stretch himself as he may with his knowledge . . .; in the last analysis, he gives nothing but his own biography’ (1906, I, No. 513) for Jung, ‘every psychological theory should be criticized in the first instance as a subjective confession’ (CW 10, para. 1025). When I survey the doom-laden field of eco-psychology from this perspective, I understand the apocalyptic predictions for a future which cannot possibly be other than catastrophic, and there is nothing we can do about that anymore, as an all-pervading depression projected outward. Just as Jung – even with the hindsight of some 40 years – failed to see his own ‘subjective confession’, as it were, in his dream of late 1913, where he saw all Europe flooded by blood (1963, p. 199): rather than understanding the symbolism ‘in the first instance’ as reflecting the emotional catastrophe of his breakup with Freud, Jung ‘persuaded himself that . . . the dreams were “a true precognition of war,”’ – a possibility I do not mean to exclude – ‘and tried not to worry about them in a personal sense’ (Bair, 2004, p. 243).
Correspondingly, when, very shortly before his death, Jung wrote that our ‘immediate communication with nature is gone forever’ (CW 18, para. 585; cf. Bernstein, 2010, p. 16), this, I believe, is better understood in connection with his aforementioned resigned bitterness towards the end of his life. Somewhat provocatively, Eckhart Tolle writes, linking the intrapsychic realm with the collective as well as the ecosphere, in
resisting what is , . . . you are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution.
(1999, p. 65).
Negativity is . . . a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. . . . Your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. . . . our collective reality is largely a symbolic expression of fear and of the heavy layers of negativity that have accumulated in the human psyche.
(Ibid., pp. 157, 164–166) Winnicott, in ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1989, pp. 87–95) describes the psychic mechanism used to survive trauma, by definition the onslaught of overwhelming feelings: they get split off. But they do not vanish. The repressed returns to haunt us in the form of terrors, anxieties of future catastrophes. Winnicott understands these as the traumas of a past we have already survived – at the cost of current depressions. These hauntings do have a purpose other than making our lives a misery, as the feelings that were too much to cope with in the past demand to be dealt with. But passing them on like the proverbial hot potato by projecting – literally throwing them out – or passing them on to patients, is no way to do that. Conservationist does not at all need to mean conservatory, yet, in this sense, the vast majority of eco-psychologists work hand in hand with politicians and the media in what has aptly been called ‘the fear industry’. Catastrophist views abound. The editors of a recent collection of ‘Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis’ (Rust & Totton, 2012) head their introduction with a quote from George Orwell, ‘The actual outlook is very dark, and any serious thought should start out from that fact’ (p. xv). This dialectically corresponds to an apparently growing addictive craving for misery. Some 150 years ago Charles Baudelaire commented,
Every newspaper from the first to the last line is a web of horrors. And this disgusting aperitif every civilised European takes for his daily breakfast. I do not understand how a clean hand can touch a newssheet without getting cramps of nausea.
(1925, p. 356) Therefore, nutritionist Andrew Weil actually recommends ‘news fasts’, abstaining from news for periods of time because, ‘Most news reports increase anxiety . . . Many people are addicted to reading newspapers and news maga- zines, and to listening to news programs on radio and television . . . News addiction is a major roadblock to learning to relax’ (1998, p. 117). Weil underpins his recommendation by what is now known about the directly measurable weak- ening effect distressing news and images have on our immune system (ibid., pp. 92–93, 134, 138, 200–201, 256).
See-saw-like, the ‘imminent terror’ changes from one extreme to the other: since being scared in the mid-1970s by the ‘news’ of a new ice age was imminent, the emphasis has shifted to a ubiquitous end-of-the-world-scenario by global
warming. In 2012, we may well be on the cusp of yet another change as the popular press announces ‘Ice age is put on ice’ (Leaver, 2012, pp. 12–13), as if the immediate onset of another ice age had been foremost on our minds. Professor of Earth Sciences Ian Plimer writes:
Climate changes are cyclical and random. . . . To argue that we humans can differentiate between human-induced climate changes and natural climate changes is naïve. . . . The slogan “Stop climate change” is a very public advertisement of absolute total ignorance as it is not cognisant of history, archaeology, geology, astronomy, ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences and life sciences.
(2009, pp. 11–12). Plimer concludes by saying:
The greatest global threat . . . is from policy responses to perceived global warming and the demonising of dissent. . . . There are calls for trials and imprisonment for those scientists who, on scientific evidence, do not agree that human emissions have changed climate. Such scientists are called deniers and are compared to Holocaust deniers.
(Ibid., p. 435) Recently, James Lovelock, who formulated the Gaia theory of Earth as a self- regulating, single organism, said in an interview, ‘I am allowed to change my mind’ (Hickman/Lovelock, 2012). He ‘predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”’ (ibid., p. 35). He now admitted that he had been mistaken in ‘claiming to know with such certainty what will happen with the climate’ (ibid.). He also expressed criticism of the cultish aspects of the green movement, saying ‘if there’s a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion . . . it’s got all the terms that religions use’ (ibid., p 36).
Let us turn here to the myth of Pandora (see Chapter 6, pp. 98 ff.). She is assumed by some to be a denigrated nature-goddess. One way to translate her name is ‘the All-Giver’ (Panofsky & Panofsky, 1991, p. 4). The evil ways we usually associate with her are seen as the result of patriarchal defamations. In early versions of the myth she does not have a box but a huge storage jar. Apparently, the aforementioned Erasmus, in his referring to the myth, changed the storage jar to a small box (ibid., pp. 14 ff.), a make-up case, thus pushing the story towards that of an alluring femme fatale carrying a box which contains all the evils of the world. But there is something else: the myth tells us that at the very bottom of this box, once all the evils have been released, there is hope. In view of what I have said so far, might we, from an analytical perspective, understand the mythical Pandora in one aspect as an anima/soul, holding for us all that which we have
found impossibly overwhelming to deal with? Might the myth also be suggesting a solution to our dilemma in the direction of setting free the traumas of the past – poisonously self-destructive only as long as they are being internally re- /depressed? And might that put us in touch with hope, hope that has thus far been buried?
There are two kinds of hope: one that grows out of what Freud calls a ‘turning away from reality’ (in Lear, 2006, p. 116), turning a blind eye. Clearly, this cannot be the kind of hope the myth speaks of: a hope that is found ‘at the very bottom’, after all the evils have been faced. Rather, it is a hope that squarely does face reality, including all its shadow sides and evils. This is the second kind of hope which the American philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear calls ‘Radical
Hope’ (2006). In the context of his alchemical studies, Jung said, ‘the shadow can
contain up to eighty percent pure gold’, its essence is ‘pure gold’ (in Tuby, 1984, p. 13). This perspective leads us back to the original Pandora as a nature goddess with a large storage jar. We may understand it as a cornucopia full of life, life energy, in its multiple forms, as Jungian Gail Thomas beautifully describes in
Healing Pandora: The Restoration of Hope and Abundance (2009).
And this, finally, brings me to the chickadee, a small, titmouse-like bird of North America. In his book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Lear develops the concept with the help of the biography of the Native American Crow Chief Alaxchiiaahush or Plenty Coups (referring to the number of times he had touched enemy warriors in battle, called ‘counting coups’ (1846/7–1932)). His lifetime nearly spans the century when the Native Americans faced cultural devastation and total annihilation: ‘not only the loss of their entire way of life . . . but the concepts that made life meaningful beyond mere survival. . . . The young future chief was called to dream on behalf of the tribe when he was nine years old’ (Eyres, 2009). He dreamed of the annihilation of the different Native American people and their way of life in seeing all the trees of a forest being blown down by a mighty storm, except for one: the tree that housed the chickadee, ‘the most insignificant of all forest creatures. But the chickadee made up for in mental strength what he lacked in physical power: the chickadee was a great listener, willing to learn from others’ (ibid.). The interpretation given by the tribe’s elders was ‘that the Crow-people should learn from the wisdom of the chickadee; not succumb to despair or go down fighting in a blaze of glory’ (ibid.), as some neighbouring tribes did. The path Plenty Coups chose, based on his childhood dream, was with an immense courage to find an alternative to the tribe’s warrior tradition and to arrange themselves with the overwhelming might of the whites. Fully facing their cultural devastation, his radical hope ‘wagers a visceral trust that there is enough goodness in the world for things to turn out . . . alright’ (ibid.), even if there is nothing rationally knowable on which to base such trust.
In ecological terms, Plenty Coups’ listening to the chickadee unmistakably speaks not only of the necessity of ‘an immediate communication with nature’, as Jung expressed it, but also, in contrast to him and most current eco-psychologists, of a continuing potential to do so. To be clear, the communication I mean is, as
Jerome Bernstein puts it, ‘not a regressive return to a state once lived but is developmentally progressed in evolutionary terms’ (2010, p. 21).