Climate Emergency, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics

Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD, notes that despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of global warming and massive social injustices. Considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, we argue that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be “my other’s keeper” will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, we here consider relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose.

View the rest of the 2023-24 Friday Night Guest Lectures in the series.