Second Edition

Radical Ecopsychology
Psychology in the Service of Life

ANDY FISHER

Foreword by David Abram

 Radical Ecopsychology,
Second Edition

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 SUNY series in Radical Social and Political Theory
Roger S. Gottlieb, editor

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 Radical Ecopsychology,
Second Edition
Psychology in the Service of Life

Andy Fisher

Foreword by David Abram

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 Cover illustration, Moon Howl, compotina print by Martina Field
Courtesy of Martina Field

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2013 State University of New York

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fisher, Andy, 1963–

Radical ecopsychology : psychology in the service of life / Andy Fisher ;
foreword by David Abram.—2nd ed.
p. cm.—(Suny series in radical social and political theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978‑1‑4384‑4476‑5 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978‑1‑4384‑4475‑8
(hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Environmental psychology. 2. Nature—Psychological aspects.
3. Environmentalism—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

BF353.5.N37F57 2012
155.9’1—dc23
2012003051

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 For the long haul

In memory of Marnie Fisher

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FM.indd 6 09/11/12 1:31 AM
 CONTENTS

Foreword by David Abram ix

Preface to the Second Edition xii

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xxi

PART I. GROUNDWORK

1. THE PROJECT OF ECOPSYCHOLOGY 3

The Terrain of Ecopsychology  •  Getting a Handle on the Project:
Four Tasks  •  A Naturalistic and Experiential Approach

2. THE PROBLEM WITH NORMAL 29

Discursive Problems • Between the Human and the Natural  •  In
Praise of the Not-So-Normal: The Hermeneutic Dimension  •  The
Symbolic or Metaphorical Nature of Reality and the Discursive
Primacy of Rhetoric
PART II. NATURE AND EXPERIENCE

3. BEGINNING WITH EXPERIENCE 51

“Returning to Experience”  •  Talking About
Experience  •  Experiential Destruction and Ecological Crisis

4. FROM HUMANISTIC TO NATURALISTIC

PSYCHOLOGY 91
The Irony of Humanistic Psychology  •  On Nature and Human
Nature

vii

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 viii Contents

5. NATURALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY: A SKETCH 117

“If We Truly Experience Needs . . .”  •  Naturalism  •  Life as a
Hermeneutic Sense-Making Journey  •  Nature and the Human
Life Cycle

6. MAKING SENSE OF SUFFERING IN A

TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD 155
Technological Progress: The (Paved) Road to
Happiness?  •  Suffering Under Technology  •  Contesting the
Pattern: Counterpractice  •  On Bearing Pain and Suffering

PART III. ECOPSYCHOLOGY TODAY

7. A DECADE LATER: STILL RADICAL

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS 197
Looking Back, Looking Forward  •  Situating Ecopsychology: What
About Environmental and Conservation Psychology?  •  Ecopsychology as
a Transformation of Psychology  •  The Ecopsychology Journal and “Second
Generation” Ecopsychology  •  Ecotherapy: The Question of Praxis
  •  Integral Ecology: Agreements and Disagreements  •  Challenges Ahead

Notes 249

Bibliography 337

Index 377

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 FOREWORD

Ever since the Enlightenment, technological civilization has assumed a clear divide
between the presumably “exterior” world of material nature and the presumably
“interior” world of the mind and emotions. In Europe and North America we
have lived with this division for several long centuries, and it has taken a tremen‑
dous toll—on ourselves, on our relationships, and on the animate earth around
us. Nevertheless, the bifurcation persists: today, for instance, the science of ecology
studies the external realm of earthly interactions, while psychology ponders and
ministers to the internal realm of our mental life.
As its name implies, ecopsychology (or ecological psychology) neatly explodes
this age-old divide between mind and matter, between the psyche “in here” and
nature “out there.” Ecopsychology suggests that the psyche cannot really be under‑
stood as a distinct dimension isolated from the sensuous world that materially
enfolds us, and indeed that earthly nature can no longer be genuinely understood
as a conglomeration of objects and objective processes independent of subjectivity
and sentience.
The book you now hold is the most important work yet written on ecopsy‑
chology from a clinical perspective. As a practicing psychotherapist, Andy Fisher is
well acquainted with the manifold stresses and sadnesses that beset contemporary
persons, and he has come to believe that a genuine comprehension and ameliora‑
tion of these ills cannot proceed without a radical metamorphosis in our under‑
standing of the psyche, and a new recognition of the psyche’s entanglement with
the more-than-human natural world.
Dr. Fisher has read widely and deeply, and he gathers insights from a rich
diversity of sources, greatly expanding our awareness of the manifold springs from
which ecopsychology can drink and draw sustenance. Yet he tests the reflections
of others against his own experience, synthesizing the disparate strands into a
uniquely coherent and compassionate vision. His voice is at once poetic and
­precise, and thus implicitly opens the way for a style of speech unencumbered by
obsolete distinctions between subjective and objective modes of discourse.
Among the divergent springs that feed these pages, the most consistent
philosophical source is that of phenomenology—the study of direct experience.
Developed in the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology sought to

ix

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 x Foreword

ground its investigations neither in an ostensibly rock-solid external world, nor

in the pure and precise ideas of an interior self, but rather in experience—in the
ongoing, lived encounter between oneself and the world. As a result of phenom‑
enology’s careful attention to direct experience, and its attunement to the deeply
embodied nature of such experience, the practice of phenomenology gave birth to
existentialism, and to the various streams of existential psychology that grew out
of this movement. Gradually, as they pursued their investigations, the more bril‑
liant phenomenologists began to discern that the earth, and the elemental powers
of nature, exert a much more profound influence on our human experience than
is commonly assumed within the modern era.
Yet in the latter half of the twentieth century this philosophy of experience
was eclipsed by a new fascination with language, texts, and the social construc‑
tion of knowledge. The intellectual discoveries spurred by this new attention to
the determinative power of language and of societal structures are many, and they
have helped to destabilize, and fluidify, our very modern belief in the unshakable
solidity of objective, “external” reality. Yet they have also perpetuated a kind of
human arrogance already endemic to the modern era, by implying that human
language, and the dynamics of human society, are the real powers that structure
the world we experience. It is true, of course, that our particular cultures and
languages greatly influence our experience. But it is increasingly evident that our
societies and even our languages have themselves been profoundly informed (and
dynamically structured) by the diverse terrains, climatic cycles, and biological
rhythms of the animate earth—by this more-than-human world with its thunder‑
storms and forests, its ravens and malarial mosquitoes, its deserts and tumbling
rivers and bison-stomped prairies.
In recent years the science of ecology has disclosed the radical interdepend‑
ence of the manifold organisms that populate, and constitute, this earthly world—
including, of course, the human organism. The new awareness of our coevolved
embeddedness within the terrestrial web of life inevitably raises the question of
whether the human intellect can really spring itself free from our carnal embed‑
ment in order to attain to a genuinely objective, or spectatorlike, understanding
of nature—or whether, in truth, all our thoughts and our theories are secretly
dependent on, and constrained by, our immersion in this earthly world, with its
specific gravity and atmosphere, its particular landscapes, its myriad plants and
animals, so many of whom are now threatened with extinction.
The latter intuition is that which motivates the emerging field of ecopsy‑
chology. Yet if ecopsychology is to pursue this intuition, it is in need of a much
more humble way of speaking than that which prevails in the conventional sci‑
ences—a new style of speech and of thought that honors the dependence not only
of our bodies but our minds on the more-than-human natural world. Such, in fact,
is the poetic language that was gradually being developed by various phenomenol‑
ogists at midcentury—and so it is only natural that the new field of ecopsychology

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 Foreword xi

would begin to resuscitate and carry forward the rich work done by some of those
thinkers. Indeed, Andy Fisher makes careful use of such phenomenologists as
Martin Heidegger, J. H. Van Den Berg, and especially the brilliant French phe‑
nomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as a number of their more recent
followers.
Fisher has also learned from hermeneutics, from psychoanalysis and Gestalt
psychotherapy, and from some of our best wilderness writers, as well as from the
unique and prescient reflections of Paul Shepard—the maverick “human ecolo‑
gist” whose audacious writings, so little known, have nevertheless influenced so
many environmental theorists. Yet Fisher brings to these various thinkers a keen
social and political awareness rarely present among those who write on behalf of
the natural world. His own turn toward the animate earth is not at all a turn away
from the social and economic relations that so influence our psychological life;
rather, his work suggests that our widespread social injustices can no longer be
understood without taking into account the unnecessary violence inflicted on the
rest of nature by a society impervious to all that stands in the way of “progress.”
Fisher implies that the many-voiced earth is the ultimate context of our social as
well as our psychological experience. His Radical Ecopsychology calls us toward
active engagement in a transformation of society no less profound than the trans‑
formation of personal life that he invokes, and makes clear that these two projects
cannot genuinely be separated.
Both political and deeply personal, stirring us both ethically and aestheti‑
cally, Andy Fisher’s vision enlivens the young field of ecopsychology. With any
luck, his book will infect the wider (and all-too-complacent) discipline of psy‑
chology, inducing more than a few therapists to throw open the windows of their
consulting room, letting a wild wind rush in to jostle their papers and to join in
the conversation.

—David Abram

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 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I am grateful to SUNY Press for the opportunity to update Radical Ecopsychology by

way of this second edition. The main change is a new chapter in which I examine
various ecopsychology-related developments from the last decade in light of the
aims of this book, and comment on how I see the project today. Although this
seventh chapter uses ideas and language from the original six, it stands alone to
some degree as a statement on the current status of ecopsychology. Readers may,
then, wish to start there.
A number of people have kindly shared with me that Radical Ecopsychology
was an important book for them. I hope the addition of the new chapter makes
it more helpful still.

xii

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 PREFACE

This book is both an introduction to ecopsychology and an attempt to encourage

the field to become more comprehensive and critical. Ecopsychologists argue that
genuine sanity is grounded in the reality of the natural world; that the ecological
crisis signifies a pathological break from this reality; and that the route out of
our crisis must therefore involve, among other things, a psychological reconcili‑
ation with the living earth. This, to be sure, is a compelling starting point. What
ecopsychology has yet to do, however, is organize itself as a coherent project, its
efforts to date remaining largely unconnected to one another. It has, furthermore,
yet to demonstrate an adequate grasp of the intellectually complex and politically
charged territory that ecopsychologists have entered into. The main goals of this
book are accordingly twofold. I aim, first of all, to map out the field of ecopsy‑
chology in a way that shows how its various elements hang together as a radical
whole. By this exercise I hope both to make the field more intelligible and to
provide a means for ecopsychologists to better locate and coordinate their activi‑
ties. My second aim is to offer one version of what a comprehensive and radical
ecopsychology might look like. I do this by methodically building my own nature-
centered psychology and by indicating how it can be used as a strong foundation
for both ecopsychological practice and critical social theorizing. Above all, I want
this book to appeal to a wide range of people—to other ecopsychologists, to stu‑
dents, psychologists, ecologists, environmental educators, philosophers, critical
theorists, activists, and general readers—who may find it of relevance in naming
and advancing their own pressing concerns.
For all my desire to complexify the field of ecopsychology, I also want to
present its basic message in simple, human terms. What motivates me as an ecops‑
ychologist is simply a concern for life. I became an ecological thinker because of
my disquiet over the violation of nonhuman life, because of the tearing in my
heart over the wasting of the earth. I later became a psychotherapist for a similar
reason, as a response to the routine violation or wasting of human life. Daily
existence within our economized and technologized reality has been described
by some as a process of low-grade, chronic traumatization. The field of psycho‑
therapy is itself undergoing something of a paradigm shift now that the role of
abuse and trauma in the generation of “mental disorder” is increasingly being rec‑
ognized. I have nonetheless wondered at the absurdity of lining up the wounded
xiii

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 xiv Preface

at the psychotherapist’s office, and of researching the minutiae of the therapeutic

process, while the everyday social forces that violate our nature, and guarantee a
steady supply of crippled souls, go for the most part unquestioned—and while
these same general forces continue to go about their business of tearing down the
biosphere. In a critical sense, then, ecopsychology is for me an effort to understand
the social links between these two areas of violence, between the violation we rec‑
ognize as the ecological crisis and the violation we recognize in human suffering.
The more popular or familiar sense of ecopsychology, by contrast, is what I call
its therapeutic and recollective sense. Here ecopsychology is an effort at recovery,
at recalling just how—in psychological terms—we humans are part of the big life
process. Its vision is that of humans healing and flourishing in concert with the
healing and flourishing of the larger natural world, in one great celebration of life.
I argue that ecopsychology needs both of these aspects. An ecopsychology with
both critical and therapeutic-recollective moments, in other words, will truly be a
psychology in the service of life.
To be radical means to go to the roots. I chose the title Radical Ecopsychology
because ecopsychology is a radical undertaking in both of the two senses just men‑
tioned. Critically, it takes us to the root cultural, social, and historical arrange‑
ments that authorize, legitimate, or give rise to the simultaneous injury of human
and nonhuman nature. While therapeutically and recollectively, ecopsychology
takes us to the roots of who we are as human beings in a more-than-human world.
If ecopsychology is an inherently radical project, as I am claiming here, then my
title is of course redundant. The title does, however, play the strategic role of
emphasizing that as ecopsychologists we need to catch up with the full radicalness
of our own field. A more self-consciously radical ecopsychology would also be in
a better position to make a deliberate place for itself. It is a radical fact that we
are limited in our ability to study the psychology of the human-nature relation‑
ship because this relationship is so attenuated within modern society. Indeed, the
phrase “human-nature relationship” designates a kind of forgotten land, a zone of
reality that is relatively hidden for most modern people. We also lack ready intel‑
lectual environments for articulating this reality. The human or social sciences
(such as psychology) depict a world largely devoid of nature, while the natural
sciences (such as ecology) depict a world largely devoid of humans. Where, then,
does a field that unabashedly straddles the dreaded human/nature divide (such as
ecopsychology) fit in? How might it find its conceptual legs? My own answer is
that as ecopsychologists we need to discover a voice that is true to our territory;
must invent or dream up our own terms so that we can then argue our positions
on them. For it is only with new intellectual frameworks and new kinds of practice
that we will get a handle on our own unique sphere of conceptual and political
struggle. By “radical,” then, I do not mean extremism and heavy-handed moral‑
izing, but only a certain insistence that we get to the bottom of things, and that
we remake our world as we do so.

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 Preface xv

I ultimately conceive of ecopsychology as a psychologically based ecological

politics. I call my own psychological approach “naturalistic” because it takes seri‑
ously that we too are nature. It asserts that we belong to the natural order, and so
that we are claimed by it, are limited by it, and feel its demands within our bodily
experience. I also call my approach “experiential” because it uses felt experience
as its touchstone, and focuses on the natural ordering of our experience. Indeed, I
think of ecopsychology as a field in which the human and the natural are joined in
experience. The advantage of such a naturalistic and experiential approach is that
it can speak relatively directly to how each of us experiences the ecological crisis,
how we carry the pervasive mistreatment of nature (both human and nonhuman)
in our bodies. In this way it can then also help identify the life-denying aspects of
our society (as we experience them) and awaken our genuine hungers for a more
life-centered world. It thus gives us a more qualitative way to go at the social
challenges of our times. Consider, in this regard, Tom Athanasiou’s remark: “To
win, greens, workers movements, and human-rights activists must go global, just
as the corporations have done.”1 This is a good point. Yet the thought of having
to “go global” puts my body into spasms. I do not say that we should therefore
neglect global issues, but only that it is important to pay attention to body spasms.
My conviction, in other words, is that our attempts to come to grips with the
ecological crisis will only benefit if we incorporate into them a good, embodied
understanding of what kind of creature we are, what our own nature is like. For a
different starting point I therefore turn to Audre Lorde’s statement that “poetry is
not a luxury”—I seek an approach in which critical analysis is allowed to coexist
with talk of deer tracks, sunshine on tree trunks, and heartfelt hugs. I have chosen
to approach the social question in my own naturalistic and experiential way.
I need to admit, finally, that this book is itself not radical enough. Given the
usual constraints of time and energy, I was not able to follow the implications of
my own ideas to the radical lengths they would ultimately have me go. Although
I talk in these pages about what ecopsychology is and how it might go, I am thus
aware of having done so from my own limited perspective and social location.
Despite inevitable limitation, what I hope to have made clear is that the project
of ecopsychology is the main thing. It is still early times for this project. Indeed,
much of my own labor has so far gone into just getting my approach right. Let this
book stand, then, as a kind of preface in itself.

Outline of the Book

The book is divided into two parts, with part one laying the ground for part
two. In part one, “Groundwork,” I introduce the reader to the terrain of ecopsy‑
chology; reflect on the overall ecopsychological project; and situate my own work
within this larger project. The two chapters that comprise this part of the book

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 xvi Preface

are the most heavy-going and academic in tone. The reader who is put off by such
weightiness, or who prefers to go straight to the main event, may therefore wish
to either skip or skim them. I do, however, encourage such readers to consider
circling around to pick these chapters up after having reached the end.
Chapter one, “The Project of Ecopsychology,” begins with a brief discus‑
sion of currently used definitions of ecopsychology, as well as some of its historical
antecedents. The bulk of the chapter consists of a discussion of the four main
tasks that in my view comprise the essential work of ecopsychology. I call these the
psychological task, the philosophical task, the practical task, and the critical task.
The best way to define the project of ecopsychology, I suggest, is to trace the inter‑
relationships among these four historical tasks. Given that all of these tasks rely on
each other, I argue that they ought to be pursued more or less in unison, whether
through a coordination of separate efforts or through an inclusion of all of them
within individual undertakings. For the purposes of demonstrating the interde‑
pendencies among the four tasks, I have opted in this book for the latter strategy.
I address the psychological task by proposing a “naturalistic” psychology—one
that aims to link the claims and limits of human nature to the claims and limits of
the larger natural world. I address the philosophical task by adopting an approach
to theory-building that is grounded in the experiential or phenomenological tra‑
ditions in both philosophy and psychology. I address the practical task by pro‑
viding an experiential framework for undertaking a wide range of practices that
go counter to the life-negating tendencies of our society. I address the critical
task, finally, by locating my project within what I regard as the deeper and more
critical currents within both psychology and ecology, and by demonstrating how
a naturalistic and experiential psychology may be used as a basis for developing a
critical theory of modern society.
In chapter two, “The Problem with Normal,” I reflect on what kind of dis‑
course the terrain of ecopsychology is calling for, that is, on what sort of method is
most adequate for approaching the subject matter of ecopsychology. The problem
with normal, mainstream psychology—including “environmental psychology”—
is that it is committed exactly to those philosophical dualities (inner/outer,
human/nature, subjective/objective) that ecopsychology must overcome. For my
own project I therefore adopt an interpretive or “hermeneutical” method—one
that can work in the difficult space between the “human” and the “natural,” and
that can disclose aspects of the human-nature relationship that normal science
simply cannot. Because I wish to set up ecopsychology as a project that raises rad‑
ical doubts about the course of modern society, I also adopt a rhetorical method.
As an art, rhetoric has historically employed language as a symbolic means to
create specific experiential effects in the psyche or soul, so as to inform, please,
and move the listener. As James Hillman has suggested, this makes a rhetorical
approach particularly appropriate for psychological discourse. For a radical project
such as ecopsychology, moreover, I suggest that an openly rhetorical approach is

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 Preface xvii

imperative. The hermeneutic and rhetorical traditions both recognize the prima‑
rily symbolic or metaphorical nature of reality and make room for discussion that
can both touch us where we live and advance viewpoints that go counter to the
social and cultural status quo. An interpretive and rhetorical discourse, in short,
can speak to the felt reality of our alienated relationship with the life process and
then say something critical that might help move our society forward from that
estranged starting place.
In part two, “Nature and Experience,” my goal is primarily to demonstrate
the feasibility of the project—to show that the leap from a human- to a nature-
centered psychology may draw strength from much that is already agreed on or
familiar within psychological and ecological thought, and that many practical
and critical implications can immediately be drawn. I call this part of the book
“Nature and Experience” because these are my two central terms. Nature refers
to ecology, experience to psychology. We discover the claims of nature precisely
by interpreting our bodily felt experience of them. I thus argue that if we are to
better understand our own nature, as well as our place within the larger natural
order, it is crucial that we work experientially. Learning to do so, moreover, has the
character of a therapeutic and historical task, in that those of us living within the
repressing structures of the modern world tend to lose touch with our own bodily
experience. As a consequence, we become limited in our ability to take guidance
from our own feeling process and vulnerable to ideological manipulation of all
sorts. It is for this reason that I conceive of ecopsychology as a kind of naturalistic
and experiential politics that struggles against the nature-dominating and reifying
aspects of this society as it correspondingly works to relocate the human psyche
within the wider natural world.
In the tradition of the existentialists, I suggest in chapter three, “Begin‑
ning With Experience,” that we need to ground ecopsychological inquiry in lived
experience. The aim of the chapter is thus to provide some introductory con‑
cepts, descriptions, and exercises that will get the reader on speaking terms about
“experience.” More specifically, I want the reader to appreciate that our experi‑
encing is always an organismic or bodily phenomenon, and that it is also always
an interacting with an environment. Once this basic appreciation is gained, it is
a short step into ecopsychology. I additionally introduce the key notion of the
“life process.” Both epidemic human psychopathology and the ecological crisis
can, I suggest, be fruitfully understood in terms of a general violation of the life
process under capitalist social relations. This understanding makes for a helpful
critical strategy for linking psyche and ecology. It also offers a way to conceptually
unify our psychological and ecological crises under the umbrella of our nihilistic
cultural condition, wherein the violation of life is tied to a frustrating absence of
meaning or widespread impoverishment of our experience.
Chapter four, “From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology,” is a bridge
between chapter three, which still draws primarily on “humanistic” sources, and

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 xviii Preface

chapter five, which proposes a specifically “naturalistic” approach. The bridge itself
is an inquiry into nature and human nature, wherein I describe what I mean by
these hugely contested terms. Although this seems a foolish exercise, it is nonethe‑
less a necessary one, for the plain reason that so much rides on our understanding
of nature, including how (and if ) we understand ourselves as spiritual beings. I
discuss a number of conceptualizations of nature within three general categories:
the natural world; the essential quality, way, order, or character of a being; and the
life force (desire, spirit, etc.). While it is right to allow for a plurality of interpreta‑
tions within these categories, I also believe that it is fair to argue for better interpre‑
tations—one’s arrived at through a deepening and broadening of one’s experience.
It is only by undertaking hermeneutical inquiries into the meaning of nature (even
if such inquiries have no final endpoint) that we may make persuasive arguments
for just what is being violated and what needs to be recovered. Showing my realist
colors, I assert that the place of humans in the natural order is not some insoluble
puzzle, but is to be found in the given order of our own bodily, world-bound
nature; and that the demands of nature, inside and out, can therefore simply not
be intellectualized, marketplaced, or bulldozed away.
Chapter five, “Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch,” is my outline of a kind
of psychology that would serve the life process or hold out the human-nature
relationship as an ultimate concern. Naturalistic psychology advocates fidelity to
nature, being in the service of nature, and seeing humans as part of a larger natural
order. I want to develop a psychology that reinterprets our current situation in
ever-more primordial terms, even as it acknowledges the historical and culturally
mediated nature of human reality. At the core of this psychology are three herme‑
neutical (or “sense-making”) principles that I suggest will be helpful, at this early
stage of inquiry, for getting our bearings. The first holds that we are ordered by
nature to participate ever-more widely in the world; the second that our language
is always a “singing” of this world; and the third that all phenomena intertwine
or mirror one another as a common “flesh.” I finish this chapter by illustrating
these principles through an examination of the human life cycle in the context
of a more-than-human world. I discuss the infantile need for loving, responsive
human relations and for exploratory contact with wild nature; the childhood need
for playful immersion in the natural world; and the adolescent need for rites of
passage into a sacred adult cosmos, wherein the natural world is understood not
as a fallen realm to be transcended but as the everyday ground of our limited and
mysterious human existence. Attending to the human life cycle is a key concern
of my approach.
In my sixth and concluding chapter, “Making Sense of Suffering in a Tech‑
nological World,” I emphasize the need to create a psychology that is not just
for those who like the outdoors (or whatever), but which can be used as a basis
for social criticism. This chapter is thus my most concentrated attempt to tie my
psychological efforts into a critical framework. Given my own approach, I take

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 Preface xix

the ideology of technological and economic progress as the theme of my criti‑

cism. My arguments turn on the conviction that humans will never find happiness
through the “progressive” immiseration of the rest of the natural world. In truth,
our economic and technological system has made a perverse necessity of suffering.
A society that is organized primarily to serve the expansion of capital—rather than
to serve life—must increasingly exploit both humans and the natural world, and
so generate a state of psychospiritual ruin and ecological crisis. While I am not
out to tell anyone precisely what to do, I am thus at least certain that the practice
of ecopsychology needs to be a countering of this system. I suggest in this chapter
that the most crucial element of such “counterpractice” is that it give authority to
our (naturally organized) experience, all the more so as we learn to listen to and
focus it. Experiential politics is not about violent revolution or abstract master
plans, but about taking life-forwarding steps that emerge from making honest
contact with presently felt reality. Such politics may, then, help people to live
ecologically radical lives in whatever ways make sense from within the context of
their own life experience and interests. I see two main requirements for ecopsy‑
chological practice: that it offer support for resisting or opposing the life-denying
tendencies within modern society and for building an ecological society instead;
and that it revive those essentially human forms of practice, largely forgotten, that
involve meaningful and reciprocal engagement with the natural world. I finish
the chapter with a reply to Freud, arguing that the “fateful question” for our time
is not whether the instinct for life can win out over the instinct for death, but
whether or not we will choose to find collective ways to bear our pain and suf‑
fering, to strengthen ourselves, so that we can then stop negating life and instead
get back to it.

FM.indd 19 09/11/12 1:31 AM

FM.indd 20 09/11/12 1:31 AM
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am pleased to make my grateful bows to some of those who have helped me

along the way.
This book started out as a doctoral dissertation at York University, Toronto.
For financial support throughout my student years, I am thankful to the taxpayers
of Canada and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Thank you, next, to Mora Campbell, for encouraging me to write what was in
me and for being so available, collegial, and warmhearted in all your advising.
To the rest of my committee members, who came and went over the years, I also
give thanks: Peter Timmerman, Stephen Levine, Reg Lang, Neil Evernden, Jay
Tropianskaia, Ray Rogers, and Leesa Fawcett. I want to thank Stephen and Jay, in
particular, for numerous fruitful disagreements and insightful suggestions. I also
wish to thank two other figures who played an important role in my university
education: Sam Mallin, whose kind philosophical mentorship during my early
years as a graduate student helped me to understand so much; and John Living‑
ston, whose impassioned rhetoric still rings in my ears. To Anita McBride and the
Student Programs Office staff, I am most thankful for a smooth and friendly trip
through my years at the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
I have benefited, beyond words, from many other skillful teachers. From
the Gestalt Institute of Toronto, a place of a different sort of learning, I give my
big thanks to JoAnne Greenham, Jay Tropianskaia (again), and to all the members
of my training group. From the Center for Focusing in Toronto, I am grateful to
Mary Armstrong, Jan Winhall, and my fellow trainers for all that cleared space.
For her lessons in radical humanism, I am forever indebted to my first
teacher of Re-evaluation Counseling, Shirley Russ. I am deeply grateful to my
Dhamma teacher, S. N. Goenka, for bringing Vipassana meditation and the Bud‑
dha’s teachings to a place where I could then get on the path myself. For their
many gifts to me, and for the kind of people that they are, I am also thankful to
my guides in the wilderness quest, James Wright and Hannah Maris.
Books, says Gary Snyder, have become our teaching elders. What I have
learned from my many elders—the writings of Snyder, Paul Shepard, Eugene
Gendlin, Joel Kovel, James Hillman, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, David Levin,
Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Borgmann, and others who fill
my bibliography—is so beyond reckoning that I cannot imagine my life without
xxi

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 xxii Acknowledgments

them. I give my gratitude to them all. Thanks, also, to Joanna Macy for (among
other things) inspiring the dedication to this book.
Friends and family have been universally supportive. For warm, musical,
and thought-provoking friendship, I am particularly thankful to my class (and
canoe) mates Jean-Marc Daigle, Donna Havinga, Joanne Nonnekes, Lionel Nor‑
mand, Adrian Ivakhiv, mark meisner, Ian Attridge, Stephen Horton, David Berger,
Dieter Brock, Julie Palmer, Randee Holmes, Anne Bell, and Connie Russell. The
generous love of my parents, David and Marnie Fisher, is a constant source of
good feeling; as is the presence in my life of sister Lynne, brother Richard, sister-
in-law Shelley, and niece Gwyneth. Closest to heart and home is my wife, Jill
Dunkley, who throughout our time together has graced me with her humor,
patience, emotional support, and gut-felt criticism. I also wish to acknowledge
here my grandfather, George Gilmour, who died some months before I was born,
but whose religious and scholarly spirit has become a welcome force in my life.
Since “coming out” as an ecopsychologist, I have been encouraged-on by
a number of good people. Robert Greenway was the first to suggest that I look
for a publisher and has been a generous supporter of my work. I am honored to
know this wise and spirited man. David Abram’s enthusiasm for the manuscript
really got me going on the book, and a number of his suggestions have helped me
to improve it. He is a wonderful ally and mentor. Joel Kovel took time out of his
own busy writing schedule to carefully read my work and offer some tough and
thoughtful advice. I look forward to carrying-through on many of his suggestions
in future efforts. An encouraging letter from Steven Foster, who also found the
time to read the manuscript, did much to warm my heart. Jed Swift and Laura
Sewall invited me to an ecopsychology workshop in Boulder, Colorado, in the
summer of 2000. It was in preparation for that event that I did much of my
final thinking about the project of ecopsychology itself. The reception that my
views received from the participants at that event emboldened me to put them
into print. Laura, who has since become a collaborator in thinking about ecopsy‑
chology, kindly helped me to hone my vision. My deepest thanks to all these
people.
For making available a copy of her beautiful print, Moon Howl, for the cover
of this book, I am grateful to Martina Field. Thanks, also, to a number of anony‑
mous reviewers, who made a number of helpful comments; and to my editor
at SUNY Press, Michael Rinella, for taking this on. And thanks to my mother,
Marnie Fisher, for her last-minute commentary on the entire book.
Finally, I want to mention the many other-than-human beings, from icicles
to cormorants, who keep me writing. I am especially thankful to the powers of the
Leslie Street Spit, and to my neighborhood crows (for their constant reminders).
For the second edition, I wish to acknowledge my wife Jill Dunkley for her
patience, love, and always helpful feedback. Thank you, also, to Robert Greenway,
for his many thoughtful and encouraging comments.

FM.indd 22 09/11/12 1:31 AM

 Part I
GROUNDWORK

It is in country unfamiliar emotionally or topographically that

one needs poems and roadmaps
—Clifford Geertz

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Chapter_01.indd 2 09/11/12 2:39 PM
 1
THE PROJECT OF ECOPSYCHOLOGY

The Terrain of Ecopsychology

Human sanity requires some less-than-obvious connections to nature as well

as the necessities of food, water, energy, and air. We have hardly begun to
discover what those connections may be. . . .
—Paul Shepard,1 1969

Around the time that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was igniting the modern
environmental movement, the psychoanalyst Harold F. Searles published a book
that received a much quieter reception, a thick volume entitled The Nonhuman
Environment: In Normal Development and in Schizophrenia. His guiding idea was
that, whether we are aware of it or not, the “nonhuman environment”—the trees,
clouds, raccoons, rivers, skyscrapers, and manifold other nonhuman phenomena
that weave together as the larger matrix for the affairs of humans—has great sig-
nificance for human psychological life, a significance we ignore at peril to our
own psychological well-being. In introducing his subject matter, Searles paused to
comment that it “may be likened to a vast continent, as yet largely unexplored and
uncharted.”2 Sensing this large territory before him, he wrote: “During the past
approximately sixty years, the focus of psychiatry’s attention has gradually become
enlarged, from an early preoccupation with intrapsychic [interior] processes . . .
to include interpersonal and broad sociological-anthropological factors. It would
seem then that a natural next phase would consist in our broadening our focus still
further, to include man’s [sic]3 relationship with his nonhuman environment.”4
Four decades later, this next phase in the broadening of psychology’s5 focus—call
it “ecopsychology”—is finally beginning to take shape.
In offering definitions of ecopsychology, most of the people presently devel-
oping this field do indeed say something along the lines of Searles. They talk about
synthesizing ecology and psychology, placing human psychology in an ecological
context, and mending the divisions between mind and nature, humans and earth.
3

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 4 The Project of Ecopsychology

Many have simply adopted the position that, as human ecologist Paul Shepard
put it in 1973: “If [the] environmental crisis signifies a crippled state of conscious-
ness as much as it does damaged habitat, then that is perhaps where we should
begin.”6 In the words of one of its most visible representatives, cultural historian
Theodore Roszak, ecopsychology does not want to “stop at the city limits,” as if
“the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles,”7 but rather illuminate the
innate emotional bonds between “person and planet.” Such characterizations are
appropriately in harmony with the root meanings of “ecopsychology.” Psychology
is the logos—the study, order, meaning, or speech—of the psyche or soul. “Eco”
derives from the Greek oikos which means “home.” Ecopsychology, then, would
approach the psyche in relation to its earthly or natural home, its native abode,
and explore “the basic shifts in our patterns of identity and relationship that occur
when we include our connection to the web of life around us as essential to human
well-being.”8
Ecologists study nature, while psychologists study human nature. Assuming
these natures overlap, psychology already has obvious potential links to ecology.
Indeed, before ecopsychology even became a word a small number of psycholo-
gists and ecologists were already crossing the boundaries. Any thorough reading
of the works of depth psychologist Carl Jung, for example, will demonstrate that
ecopsychologists are by no means starting from scratch. Among many other note-
worthy remarks, Jung wrote that as:

scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man
feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature
and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These
have slowly lost their symbolic implications. . . . No voices now speak to man from
stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His
contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy
that this symbolic connection supplied.9

To be sure, among their various sources ecopsychologists have drawn heavily on

Jungian or archetypal thought, the clearest example of which is Roszak’s pos-
iting of an “ecological unconscious.”10 Noting that in Jung’s hands the so-called
collective unconscious11 took on an increasingly “incorporeal and strictly cultural”
flavor, removed from more bodily and earthly contents, Roszak proposes that the
“collective unconscious, at its deepest level, shelters the compacted ecological
intelligence of our species.”12 Although the notion of the ecological unconscious
remains undeveloped by Roszak, he writes that we are repressing this “ecological
level of the unconscious,” leaving unawakened our “inherent sense of environ-
mental reciprocity”—and suffering the ecological crisis as a consequence.
From the reverse starting point of ecology, we may recall Aldo Leopold’s
remark (from his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac) that the basic concept

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 5

of ecology is that “land is a community,” of which humans ought to be regarded

as “plain members.”13 “We abuse land,” he said, “because we regard it as a com-
modity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong,
we may begin to use it with love and respect.” In this vein, ecopsychologists argue
that if we accept the ecological view that we are members of the biotic community,
rather than its mere exploiters, then we may learn to recognize the natural world
as a social and psychological field, just as we do the human community. In his
work on cybernetics, for instance, especially from the late 1960s onward, Gregory
Bateson (a protoecopsychologist) sought to explain how our personal minds are
part of a larger “eco-mental system” or Mind. The titles of his two best-known
books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature, suggest the territory he
was walking. Although his work (and cybernetics in general) has been criticized
for its ironically disembodied and purely formal portrayal of human conscious-
ness,14 his claim that polluting Lake Erie is to drive it insane is certainly one way
to identify a suffering in the soul of the natural world. Leopold spoke, in this
respect, of his living “alone in a world of wounds.” Ecologists, he suggested, are
trained to see the “marks of death in community that believes itself well and does
not want to be told otherwise.”15
I have intended these introductory remarks and brief background samples
to provide the reader with an initial sense for what comprises the terrain of ecopsy-
chology. It remains to acknowledge, however, that ecopsychology is a product of
the modern or Western mind. Those indigenous or aboriginal peoples whose life-
ways are still dedicated to the maintenance of reciprocal relations with the natural
world are, by contrast, said to have no need for an ecopsychology. In fact, the
direct engagement of many indigenous peoples with plants and animals, earth and
sky, make the confinement of modern psychology to a strictly human bubble seem
odd in the extreme. One of the few contributors to the ecopsychology literature
of Native American heritage, Leslie Gray, thus claims that we “have only to look
at the cross-cultural practices of perennial shamanism to find effective models of
applied ecopsychology.”16 The archetypal psychologist James Hillman similarly
contends that we must reimagine what it means to “make soul” by, among other
things, getting “out of Western history to tribal animistic psychologies that are
always mainly concerned, not with individualities, but with the soul of things . . .
and propitiatory acts that keep the world on its course.”17 As still others have
remarked, however, ecopsychologists must guard against becoming part of the
historical process of colonizing and appropriating indigenous cultures that today
includes the plundering of traditional spiritualities by Euroamerican seekers or
new age “wannabes.”18 They must also be careful not to blindly assume that all
aspects of all indigenous societies are unquestionably good. Given their obvious
relevance, it is inevitable that ecopsychologists be familiar with some indigenous
beliefs and practices—and this may remain a source of tension for some time.
I believe, however, that most nonindigenous ecopsychologists are committed to

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 6 The Project of Ecopsychology

keeping themselves based primarily in the contexts of their own traditions, with
which they are most familiar.

Getting a Handle on the Project: Four Tasks

Broad definitions of ecopsychology, such as I have just introduced, are easy enough
to come by. Many people are still left wondering, however, just what ecopsy-
chology is or what exactly an ecopsychologist does. I think there are two main
reasons for this. First of all, the combining of psychology and ecology opens up
such a vast terrain that it can seem limitless at times. Psychotherapy with “nature,”
contemplative practice, wilderness practice, vision quests, earth poetics, ecolog-
ical restoration, ecological design, building sustainable communities, shamanic
counseling, Jungian dream analysis, deep ecology, environmental education: all
have been associated with ecopsychology. How can a field that includes so much
be considered a field at all? The second reason why ecopsychology is hard to define
is because there is actually not a lot of strictly ecopsychological work that one can
define it by. The literature of ecopsychology is still small, and much of it consists of
explorations directed “toward” an ecopsychology rather than attempts to actually
build one. The challenge I want to take up in this section, then, is that of getting
a handle on a field that seems to have so much possibility yet so little actuality.
I suggest, to begin, that ecopsychology is best thought of as a project, in the
sense of a large, multifaceted undertaking. This makes room for a great number
of perspectives and interests and rules out the idea that ecopsychology will ever
resemble a traditional discipline. I suggest, next, that ecopsychology be consid-
ered a historical undertaking—which is to say that it has arisen in response to
specific historical conditions. More exactly, I believe there are four general tasks
that ecopsychologists are in fact engaged in, each of which aims at resolving a cor-
responding historical need. I call these the psychological task, the philosophical
task, the practical task, and the critical task. These tasks identify the common
burdens that befall ecopsychologists, regardless of our particular orientations or
vocabularies, for they derive from a historical moment we all share. Nature and
history demand that we undertake these tasks. Hence, our work as ecopsycholo-
gists is to feel this demand in our bodies and to be true or faithful to it in our
own particular ways. When the examples of ecopsychological work that do exist
are organized into these four tasks, the overall project comes into view. Thus, I
propose that it is these four tasks—or, more precisely, the interrelations among
them—that define ecopsychology. In other words, the four tasks weave together to
form the whole endeavor that I am calling the project of ecopsychology.
In what follows I walk through the four tasks in turn, describing the his-
torical situations from which they arise and offering brief examples of ecopsy-
chological works that are addressed to each of them. The section concludes with

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 7

a discussion of some of the interrelations among the four tasks, so that my defi-
nition of ecopsychology as an intricately woven general project can be further
elaborated. I wish to say, finally, that my goal with this exercise is not to nail
down ecopsychology for good, so that it can never move again. Certainly, there are
other formulations of the tasks and other examples that could be given. My goal,
rather, is to provide a scheme that can bring into better focus what we are doing
as ecopsychologists, or at least provide a basis for some good discussion, while
nonetheless leaving lots of room to maneuver.

The Psychological Task: To Acknowledge and Better Understand the

Human-Nature Relationship as a Relationship

It may seem absurd to those unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thought to

suppose that man treats Nature in terms of dominance and submission as
he might treat another human being with whom he has not been able to
establish a one-to-one relationship, but I believe these attitudes can not only
be demonstrated, but are actually important for our understanding of what
has gone wrong in our relationship with the natural world
—Anthony Storr,19 1974

Ecopsychology is a psychological undertaking that essentially says “we too are

nature.” Its first task is therefore to describe the human psyche in a way that makes
it internal to the natural world or that makes it a phenomenon of nature. Stated
otherwise, the task is to build a psychology that expands the field of significant
relationships to include other-than-human beings; a psychology that views all psy-
chological and spiritual matters in the light of our participation within the larger
natural order. Ecopsychology is still concerned with our suffering and happiness,
our dreaming, our search for meaning, our responsibilities to others, our states of
consciousness, and so on; it just frames these concerns within the fuller, more-
than-human scope of human existence.
The historical situation from which this task arises is obvious enough.
Modern society is in an extreme, pathological state of rupture from the reality of
the natural world, as is indicated on a daily basis by the ecological crisis. There is,
moreover, little public recognition that this crisis is indeed a psychological one.
This lack of recognition extends most crucially to the arena of psychology itself, as
has been discussed by David Kidner in his recent exploration of why psychology
is so conspicuously mute about the ecological crisis. Kidner notes that most psy-
chologists are unwilling to regard our ecological troubles as evidence of “pathology
in the relationship between humanity and the natural world.” Ecological prob-
lems are effectively “dichotomized into individual and environmental problems,
and any possible relation between the two is repressed.” The result is that “envi-
ronmental destruction is invisible to psychology.”20 Searles likewise commented

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 8 The Project of Ecopsychology

on psychology’s indifference toward the world of nature, stating in 1960 that in

the writings of developmental psychologists “the nonhuman environment is . . .
considered as irrelevant to human personality development, . . . as though the
human race were alone in the universe, pursuing individual and collective des-
tinies in a homogeneous matrix of nothingness.”21 Perhaps one day it will seem
strange that psychologists were ever so deaf and blind to the natural world—at
which point ecopsychology will simply be psychology itself.
The initial challenge for ecopsychologists is thus to counter this deeply
ingrained habit of ignoring the psychological significance of the human-nature
relationship. This amounts, first of all, to acknowledging the human-nature rela-
tionship as a relationship. In other words, it means granting the natural world
psychological status; regarding other-than-human beings as true interactants in
life, as ensouled “others” in their own right, as fellow beings or kin. The require-
ment, in short, is to conceptualize the natural world in a way that is more
satisfying for the purposes of psychological understanding than are the more
usual representations of nature as a realm of mere scientific objects, resources, or
scenic vistas. The demand here is also to find ways to talk about the human-nature
­relationship that do not set humans outside of nature, that is, that clarify how it
is that we relate to “nature” while also being an embodied part of nature, involved
in its processes ourselves.
As an example of one person’s efforts to undertake this first task, perhaps
no one has done more to reconceive other-than-human beings as psychological
counterplayers (Erik Erikson’s term) than the human ecologist Paul Shepard.
Shepard claims that our psychological development inherently calls for a child-
hood immersion in wild nature and for a subsequent adolescent tutoring into
mature, reciprocal, and harmonious relations with the larger natural world. Given
this unconventional view, he then interprets our society’s persistent degradation
of its own habitat in terms of a widespread arrestment of this “normal” process of
psychogenesis. General, “culturally-ratified distortions of childhood” and “mutila-
tions of personal maturity,” argues Shepard, are at the root of our “irrational and
self-destructive attitudes toward the natural environment.” He writes:

The archetypal role of nature—the mineral, plant, and animal world found most
complete in wilderness—is in the development of the individual human personality,
for it embodies the poetic expression of ways of being and relating to others. Urban
civilization creates the illusion of a shortcut to individual maturity by attempting to
omit the eight to ten years of immersion in nonhuman nature. Maturity so achieved
is spurious because the individual, though he may be precociously articulate and
­sensitive to subtle human interplay, is without a grounding in the given structure that
is nature. . . . Indeed, the real bitterness of modern social relations has its roots in that
vacuum where a beautiful and awesome otherness should have been encountered.

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 9

Westerners, suggests Shepard, “may now be the possessors of the world’s flim-
siest identity structure.” “The West is a vast testimonial to childhood botched
to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men
of action and men of thought to alter the world to match their regressive moods
of omnipotence and insecurity.” In short, we are “childish adults” who keep our
society going only at the private cost of “massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants,
narcotics, fits of destructive rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies, . . .
and, perhaps worst of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world we dimly
perceive as having failed us.”22

The Philosophical Task: To Place Psyche (Soul, Anima, Mind) Back into
the (Natural) World

Psychology without ecology is lonely and vice versa. The salmon is not merely
a projection, a symbol of some inner process, it is rather the embodiment of
the soul that nourishes us all
—Tom Jay,23
commenting on the view of Northwest Coast Indians, 1986

The thought of ecopsychology shakes us to our modern foundations. Most obvi-

ously, ecopsychologists reject the presumed dichotomies that underlie the modern
enterprise, especially the human/nature and inner/outer splits. Indeed, the dual-
istic cleavage of our “inner” lives from an “outer” world may well be the core
problem of ecopsychology, for it divorces mind from nature. As a project, ecopsy-
chology therefore has no choice but to undertake philosophical efforts that will
give it a more adequate intellectual home. This is a genre or concept-making task,
as there are few existing theoretical frameworks that do not suffer from dualistic
biases. To be sure, the split between humans and nature—as well as a near endless
stream of related ones—runs through most of modern philosophy, science, and
art.24 Such a bifurcation of reality, however, is historical; it reflects a withdrawal
of reality into the head of the modern Western individual and a corresponding
estrangement of that individual from the “external” social and ecological world.25
Modern psychology, like most things modern, has nonetheless taken this dichot-
omized reality as its starting point. “Having divided psychic reality from hard or
external reality, psychology elaborates various theories to connect the two orders
together, since the division is worrisome indeed. It means that psychic reality is
conceived to be neither public, objective nor physical, while external reality, the
sum of existing material objects and conditions, is conceived to be utterly devoid of
soul. As the soul is without world, so the world is without soul.”26 In other words,
if mind is all “inside” and nature all “outside,” then psychology and ecology have
nothing in common. The broad historical requirement of ­ecopsychology, then,
is to “turn the psyche inside out,” locating mind in the world itself—healing our

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 10 The Project of Ecopsychology

dualism by returning soul to nature and nature to soul. In a statement definitive of

ecopsychology’s terrain as any, Jung once said: “Our psyche is part of nature, and
its enigma is as limitless. Thus we cannot define either the psyche or nature.”27
The alchemical healer Sendivogius likewise said, “The greater part of the soul lies
outside the body.”28 In more recent times, there are two main figures in ecops-
ychological circles who have explicitly argued such positions: the post-Jungian
James Hillman and the ecophilosopher David Abram.
Hillman’s strategy is to revive the Latin term anima mundi (anima = soul),
which gets translated as the “soul of the world.” The way to counter dualism is
not to deny that there are inner and outer poles of reality.29 That worldly things
have their own inwardness is the very condition for their appearing as meaningful,
having their own depth, mystery, and intentions; and for their being able to invite
us into some kind of relation, to elicit our imagination. The soul of the world is
this inner sense that runs horizontally through all things, showing itself as that
implicit reality that shines forth from the world. “Each particular event, including
individual humans with our invisible thoughts, feelings, and intentions, reveals a
soul in its imaginative display.”30 Or as George Steiner wrote: “It is hidden Being
that gives the rock its dense ‘thereness,’ that makes the heart pause when a king-
fisher alights, that makes our own existence inseparable from that of others.”31
An intangible inner presence lends the world the richness of its outer visibility,
gives it personality, and unites all phenomena beneath the surface of reality. In this
case, it makes more sense to say that “we are in the psyche” than that our psyches
are in us.32 Hillman argues, however, that a kind of mass soul loss defines the
modern epoch; and the world correspondingly robbed of soul has therefore taken
on a relatively flat, disconnected, uninviting, depersonalized, and literal appear-
ance for most of us. By pressing all of the soul into the human being, we have
deanimated the world and simultaneously inflated the significance of the human
person. Hence, “I must be desirable, attractive, a sex object, or win importance
and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either
from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things,
potentially forever lonely. . . . What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cem-
etery.”33 Because a dead, soulless world offers no intimacy, an enormous weight
now rests on human relations, which have become “overcharged with archetypal
significance”: “our mothers fail, for they must always be Great, . . . having to sup-
plant the dead depersonified world and be the seasons of the earth, the moon and
the cows, the trees and the leaves on the trees. All this we expect from [human]
persons.”34
While arriving at similar conclusions, David Abram makes his arguments
from out of a different tradition, namely, the philosophical movement known as
phenomenology.35 Because the method of phenomenology is unfamiliar to most
people, I will attempt a brief explication before turning to Abram’s thought itself.
(The “transcendental” phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is usually distinguished

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 11

from  the “hermeneutic” phenomenology first articulated by Husserl’s student,

Martin Heidegger. I refer primarily to the latter.) Phenomenology, most impor-
tantly, begins with phenomena, the reality given in lived experience prior to
reflection. Eschewing statements that cannot somehow be related to our everyday
experience of things, phenomenologists adopt as their method the description of
the world as it is actually lived. In the words of the great French phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologists wish to re-achieve a “direct and primi-
tive contact with the world.” They point out how poorly the various theoretical
notions we habitually use to explain reality actually conform to our pretheoretical
experiencing of it. The goal is therefore not to produce one more causal model to
predict and control the world, but rather to find those words that are true to our
experience—and so which, like good poetry, effect a shift in that experience,
bringing us a new awareness or understanding of things.
Phenomenology’s experiential focus and “demand for awareness” make it a
kind of therapy for healing the splits of modern thought. Many phenomenolo-
gists suggest that the delinking of inner self and outer world is an illusion, and
describe instead how inside and outside intertwine as a single interactive structure
they call “being-in-the-world.” One of the basic arguments of phenomenology
is that no so-called inner experience can ever really be had. If we were to take
the metaphor of “inside” literally and cut into our bodies, perhaps our brains,
we would of course not find there any thoughts, images, emotions, percepts, or
behavior, for all these things arise only in relation to or contact with a world. If
I see something, this mug of tea before my eyes, I see it not as a representation
on some mental screen in my head, but as that thing in front of me, out in the
world, where I meet it or am with it. Similarly, my anger, although inwardly felt,
is not something I can identify as an isolated content in an inner psychic con-
tainer, for it is indivisible from the entire situation in which I am feeling angry.
This is true even in my dreamworld, where I still live in relation to the sights
and sounds around me. It was in this sense that Merleau-Ponty said that we live
“out there among things,”36 in a kind of communion with the world: “there is no
inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”37
Through their descriptions of prereflective experience, then, phenomenologists
disclose human existence as a network of relations; our being is not locked up
inside us, but is in fact spread throughout this web of worldly interactions in
which our existence continually unfolds. Or to turn to Merleau-Ponty one more
time: the world is the “natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my
explicit perceptions.”38
Abram’s project is to draw out the ecological implications of phenomenol-
ogy’s quest for the primordial and its relational emphasis, especially as these are
expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The “hidden thrust of the phenomeno-
logical movement,” says Abram, “is the reflective discovery of our inherence in
the body of the Earth”—for “the ‘world’ to which [Merleau-Ponty] so often refers

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 12 The Project of Ecopsychology

is none other than the Earth.”39 Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy was itself gradually
revealing the earth as the original field for all human experience, the ultimate
source of, or necessary ground for, all psychological life. He called perception a
“mutual embrace” or conversation between body and world, such that the sensible
world solicits our bodily responses and our bodies in turn interrogate the sen-
sible.40 Claiming, as did Merleau-Ponty, that we can have no experience, percep-
tion, or self-knowledge without a world in which to bodily interact, to touch and
be touched by, Abram argues that the earth—the soil, wind, birds, insects—is the
given world that our sensory life opens on to, anticipates, and is fed by. Turning
to Abram’s evocative words themselves:

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself
inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself,
induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the ani-
mate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the move-
ment of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. . . .
By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the
perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the
psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to
return to the visible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but
is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each
terrain, each ecology, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its own unique
vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.
Each place its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed
hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains
in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams—all these
together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by
all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys,
by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their
way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.41

The Practical Task: To Develop Therapeutic and Recollective Practices

Toward an Ecological Society

Of course I am in mourning for the land and water and my fellow beings. If
this were not felt, I would be so defended and so in denial, so anesthetized,
I would be insane. Yet this condition of mourning and grieving going on
in my soul, this level of continuous sadness is a reflection of what is going
on in the world and becomes internalized and called “depression,” a state
altogether in me—my serotonin levels, my personal history, my problem. And

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 13

the drug industry . . . and insurance companies are in general agreement.

You must become even more anesthetized. Take Prozac: Depression is a
disease and weakens the economy.
—James Hillman,42 1996

The practical sphere of ecopsychology is the most difficult to delimit. Almost

any existing “psychological” activity (e.g., psychotherapy) can be placed in an
­ecological context, and almost any “ecological” activity (e.g., ecological restora-
tion) can be approached in terms of its psychological effects or benefits.43 As I
mentioned above, this makes for a great deal of potential “ecopsychological”
activity. Although people will no doubt draw their own lines around the content of
ecopsychology practice, if we are to get a better handle on the project of ecopsy-
chology we do at least need to specify what characterizes its practical dimension.
As with the other three areas of ecopsychology, I believe the best way to do this is
to ask ourselves what general task we are undertaking and what historical need we
are thereby attempting to fill. To answer this question, furthermore, I suggest that
it is helpful to regard ecopsychology as a psychologically based ecological politics.
Viewed this way, the broad practical task is to develop psychologically informed
practices or interventions aimed at creating a life-celebrating society. This task, in
turn, has two overlapping aspects: practices that play a supportive or therapeutic
role and practices that play a recollective role.
Therapeutic ecopsychological practices are those aimed at addressing the
emotional and spiritual conditions underlying the ecological crisis. We live in
a world where very little seems secure; where many people feel isolated, worn
down, beleaguered, disempowered; and where the future can look even more
unjust and hopeless. The ecopsychological task, in this respect, is to design prac-
tices that provide supportive or therapeutic contexts for people to find their foot-
ings in life and turn their attention to the real work of creating a life-centered
society, whether this work be private actions or more public forms of political
involvement. What makes such practice “ecopsychological” is its emphasis on the
psychospiritual side of building an ecological society. For example, psychotherapy
or spiritual training with ecological activists is in my view a form of ecopsycho-
logical practice, whereas the activism itself is not (unless undertaken precisely as
such practice44).
Recollective practices, on the other hand, are those activities that aim more
directly at recalling how our human psyches are embedded in and nurtured by
the larger psyche of nature and at relearning the essentially human art of revering,
giving back to, and maintaining reciprocal relations with an animate natural
world. Recollective practices, as the name suggests, invite us into zones of reality
that may be quite unfamiliar, where a bird or a stone just might have something
important to say to us. One such practice that is growing in popularity (at least in

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 14 The Project of Ecopsychology

the United States) is the “vision quest,” in which a solo quester typically spends a
number of days fasting in the wilderness in order to seek guidance and spiritual
renewal through openly encountering the forces of nature (a practice that, while
being recollective, also has a therapeutic dimension).
What I propose, then, is that ecopsychological practice can presently be
grouped into these two general areas, even if there may at times be considerable
overlap between them; and that what characterizes the practice is both a psycho-
logical intention or emphasis and an alignment with the historical goal of building
a society in which human and nonhuman nature can flourish together.
Although therapeutic and recollective practices are not mutually exclusive,
I wish to offer some further examples below that relate primarily to the former.
I have chosen this focus not because I think that the one area of practice is more
important than the other (far from it), but simply because this seems the right
place to talk about therapeutic practices and because the theme of recollection will
appear throughout much of the second part of this book.
The work of the ecological, peace, and social justice activist Joanna Macy
and her colleagues probably offers the most extensive answer to the need for thera-
peutic practices. Macy offers an illustrative story. “Once, when I told a psycho-
therapist of my outrage over the destruction of old-growth forests, she informed
me that the bulldozers represented my libido and that my distress sprang from fear
of my own sexuality.”45 Macy’s experience, she says, is not untypical; therapists
often interpret feelings of despair “as manifestations of some private neurosis.” In
her own work, she has therefore made a point of validating, as healthy and real,
what she calls our “pain for the world”: “the distress we feel in connection with the
larger whole of which we are a part.” Refusing both dualism and individualism,
she says that we suffer for old-growth forests and for other people in pain because
we and these others are so interdependent. The immeasurable losses we are expe-
riencing—including the loss of the biosphere as a viable habitat for countless life
forms—comprise “the pivotal psychological reality of our time.” Our emotional
responses are appropriately complex: fear, dread, or terror before the forces pres-
ently threatening life on earth; anger and rage at having to live under such threat;
guilt for being “implicated in this catastrophe”; and, above all, sorrow—a “sadness
beyond telling” that arises from confronting “so vast and final a loss as this.”46
Macy says that she has yet to meet anyone “immune” from this pain for
the world. Yet, precisely because this suffering is so collective and great we face
an additional difficulty: the tendency to deny or repress this pain. The notion of
“psychic numbing”—coined by psychologist Robert J. Lifton to describe the lack
of feeling capacity among Hiroshima survivors—is often used to make sense of
this denial. Immersed in an emotionally overwhelming reality, we anaesthetize
ourselves and blot out or dissociate the unwanted truth. As therapist-activist Elissa
Melamed wrote: “We may know intellectually that we are in desperate straights,
but emotionally we are unconnected to this knowledge. An aura of unreality

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 15

hangs over the whole thing. . . . We are dealing with a vast psychological problem,
a planetary clinical picture of flattened affect, if you will, yet psychology offers
little in the way of assistance.”47 Although it is understandable that we cut our-
selves off from our painful feelings, people like Melamed and Macy point out that
by doing so we deprive ourselves of the energy and direction our emotions might
lend us toward taking creative political action. By staying numb, we stay stuck.
Against this emotional background, some ecopsychologists are now
exploring how the ecology movement may in fact be “organizing, educating, and
agitating with little regard for the fragile psychological complexities of the public
whose hearts and minds it [seeks] to win.”48 Roszak, for example, goes right to
the point: “Environmentalists are among the most psychologically illiterate people
you will ever meet. They work from a narrow range of motivations: the statis-
tics of impending disaster, the coercive emotional force of fear and guilt. . . they
overlook the unreason, the perversity, the sick desire that lie at the core of the
psyche. Their strategy is shock and shame.”49 In this light, many environmental
groups may actually be exploiting our emotional condition—our fear, guilt, and so
forth. Macy herself says that the grim information held up by activists “by itself can
increase resistance, deepening the sense of apathy and powerlessness.”50 Amongst
its goals, ecopsychology thus “seeks to acquaint the environmental movement with
a subtler, more sensitive psychological approach to the public it seeks to win over
to its cause.”51 Educator Mitchell Thomashow similarly claims that environmen-
talists have a responsibility “to provide support for the anxiety that accompanies
the perception of cultural upheaval and wounded ecosystems.” They must learn to
facilitate the inner changes in the public that will help bring about the policy and
behavioral changes they desire. “In this way, the environmental profession becomes
a healing profession.”52
Macy comments that “unless you have some roots in a spiritual practice that
holds life sacred and encourages joyful communion with all your fellow beings,
facing the enormous challenges ahead becomes nearly impossible.”53 The role of
psychological and spiritual practice in ecopsychology is currently being devel-
oped in a number of ways. Organizations such as the Center for Psychology and
Social Change (with its Institute of Ecopsychology, Psychotherapy and Health)
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Shavano Institute in Boulder, Colorado,
for instance, hold workshops where health professionals, activists, and others
are introduced to ecopsychological theory and a range of psychological and
spiritual practices to assist them in their work and lives. Macy and others have
also responded to the need for healing on a more collective level by developing
community workshops aimed at facilitating the so-called inner work of social
change. One of the purposes of these workshops is to help participants overcome
the oppressive taboos against expressing their pain for the world. As Sarah Conn
notes, to become responsible for the current state of the world one must regain
the ability to “feel and to engage rather than to become numbed and dulled.”54

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 16 The Project of Ecopsychology

The workshops typically take place over a number of days, and proceed through
three typical stages which spontaneously flow one into the other. The first stage
involves using exercises to evoke the dreadful social and ecological realities of our
times. People are supported to feel their pain for the world in a group setting and
to cathartically express formerly blocked emotions. This expressive process sets
the ground for the second stage, in which participants come to realize that just
as there is pain in being interconnected with others, so too is there synergy and
power. The “collective nature of our pain for the world is recognized as evidence
of our interexistence, revealing the larger transpersonal matrix of our lives.”55
The third and final stage is called “empowerment,” in which participants experi-
ence their personal power, broaden their vision of what is possible, and acquire
skills for social change work. Because of the intense sharing of emotion and
transpersonal sense of this work, it carries a distinctly spiritual charge.
The basic principles of despair and empowerment work have also been
focused by Macy and others into another, more exclusively ecopsychological or
deep ecological practice called “The Council of All Beings.”56 This Council is a
ritual meant to help people “think like a mountain” (as Aldo Leopold phrased it).
Through exercises aimed both at freeing up painful emotions over our society’s
destructive relation to the natural world and at deepening a sense of identity or
connection with other-than-human beings, participants are supported to become
more “ecologically conscious” and are allowed to “express their awareness of the
ecological trouble we are in, and to deepen their motivation to act.”57

The Critical Task: To Engage in Ecopsychologically Based Criticism

There is a blind spot in ecopsychology because the field is limited by its

Eurocentric perspective, in the same way that the environmental movement
as a whole has been blind to environmental racism. . . . I’ve been saying to
my friends for a long time, “Why is it so easy for these people to think like
mountains and not be able to think like people of color?”
—Carl Anthony,58 1995

When Searles proposed a broadening of psychology’s focus to include the human

relation to the nonhuman environment he probably did not foresee how deeply
such a move would cut. For when revealed as a relationship the human mistreat-
ment of nature—the bulldozing, blasting, eliminating, slaughtering, polluting,
and so on—comes glaringly into view. The rising exploitation of the natural world
by our society has been justified only through a historical process of despiritual-
izing and depersonifying other-than-human beings so as to rule out any sort of
ethical or sensitive relations with them.59 Ecopsychologists propose an undoing of
this human-centered—or “anthropocentric”—reduction of the being of nature to
raw, moldable, inferior stuff that exists as if only to be on-call for human use.60

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 17

They would reconceive nature along less narcissistic lines, as a sacred realm of
intrinsic worth and as a world full of vital “others” for the articulation of the
human psyche. (This, to say the least, changes everything.) This challenging of
anthropocentrism is an example of the critical work of ecopsychology: to engage
in ecopsychologically based criticism. Such criticism is called for because the
world ultimately envisioned by ecopsychology is simply not the world of today.
As I conceive it, the critical task consists (at least initially) of bringing
together the sorts of social and cultural criticism found among the more radical
voices within both ecological and psychological circles. I believe it is fair to say,
however, that most of the criticism currently encountered within ecopsychology
is of the “cultural” variety (such as the critique of anthropocentrism) rather than
the “social.” Indeed, the more socially critical elements of the radical ecology
movement have yet to really make an appearance in ecopsychology. Ecopsycholo-
gists have made little use, moreover, of the socially radical views found within
the literature of psychology, many of which are critical of the “psy” practices (psy-
chiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, etc.) themselves. Of the four tasks or histor-
ical demands I have identified, I therefore suggest that the demand for criticism
has so far received the least satisfying response from ecopsychologists. Hence my
emphasis in what follows is on the vital need for ecopsychologists to become
more thoroughly engaged in social analysis. Because my treatment of this task
will involve detailing the points I have just introduced, the discussion here will be
lengthier than each of the previous three.
Roughly speaking, mainstream environmentalists aim for reforms “within
the system,” while the radicals want to reconstruct or change the system itself.
On the whole, radical ecologists argue that without challenging the cultural back-
grounds (beliefs, values, attitudes) and social arrangements (institutions, mate-
rial conditions) that have historically sanctioned ecological degradation, nothing
much will change. Among radical ecologists themselves, however, there is much
disagreement about the best way to go, as is indicated by the numerous dif-
ferent schools or movements to which they variously belong, and by the vigorous
debates that often occur between them.61 Of these schools, it is “deep ecology”
and “ecofeminism” that have had the greatest influence on ecopsychology, prima-
rily the former. Indeed, some say that ecopsychology is simply an outgrowth or
instance of deep ecology. The result of this situation, however, is that the tension
between deep ecology and the rest of the radical ecology movement has effectively
carried over into ecopsychology. Plainly put, ecopsychology is currently vulnerable
to the same criticism that is often made against the deep ecology movement itself:
that its social and political thought lacks depth. To understand this point, we first
need to take a look at deep ecology itself.
As with ecopsychology, deep ecology defies easy definition. I would briefly
characterize it, however, as a movement to bring our personal lives and our culture
into alignment with an ecological view of reality. It is usually defined by a broad

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 18 The Project of Ecopsychology

eight-point platform written by philosophers Arne Naess and George Sessions,

the main planks of which involve making an “eco-centric” commitment to the
well being and flourishing of all “Life on earth,” to ensuring that a richness and
diversity of life forms exist.62 What deep ecology is perhaps most well-known
for, however, is the attention that its supporters have paid to the relationship
between ecology and self-identity. If everything is connected to everything else, if
everything internally relates,63 then what am I? The Buddhist-poet Gary Snyder
remarks: “If people can acknowledge their membership in the fabric of the whole,
acknowledge that they are part of the habitat, part of the network, part of the
web, and feel that the welfare of the web is their welfare, and their welfare is the
welfare of the web—in other words, not be mindlessly but mindfully one with
the whole—that is an extraordinary spiritual and political step right there, and it
dumps the cartridges out of the weapons.”64 Indeed, much of the deep ecology
literature is about experiencing the interrelatedness of all things in wilderness set-
tings—as when the nineteenth-century wilderness advocate John Muir sensed
trees and mountains shining with a kind of psychic aura, everything being lumi-
nously present as an interdependent whole. The shift to such an “ecological” mode
of consciousness, in which one’s sense of reality lines up with the ecological givens,
is held out by many deep ecology supporters as a necessary step toward an “ecolog-
ically mature” society. The deep ecology scholar Warwick Fox has in fact argued
that what distinguishes deep ecology is precisely this psychological dimension.
Because ecological consciousness (or Self realization, as it is also called) involves
transcending the more narrow, biographic, egoic, or personal sense of self, he
suggests that deep ecology has much in common with transpersonal psychology,
which takes spiritual (beyond-the-personal) experience as its subject matter. He
even proposes replacing the term deep ecology with transpersonal ecology—the idea
being that as one develops a sense of self that is both transpersonal and ecological,
one will care for the earth without being morally persuaded to do so because one
will identify with it as Self.65 It is thus through a process of psychospiritual growth
that one will become motivated to develop an ecocentric lifestyle and participate
in actions such as the direct defence of threatened wilderness areas.
While having great appeal for its placing of humanity back within the web
of earthly life, deep ecology has not escaped criticism from the other schools of
radical ecology; its criticisms have themselves been criticized.66 Deep ecology sup-
porters generally view the ecological crisis as a crisis of “character and culture.”67
Their criticisms therefore tend to be along characterological and cultural lines.
They denounce our modern culture (worldview, paradigm) for its anti-ecological
qualities—for its anthropocentrism, its disenchanted and mechanistic science,
its fixation on progress, its technocratic ways, and so on. They also criticize our
culture for the shape it lends to our modern character. The modern, Western
self is individualistic, egoistic, consumersitic; in a word: ecologically immature.
The critics of deep ecology point out, however, that our character and culture

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 19

themselves have a social context—a context that the deep ecology movement has
to a large extent ignored. For example, while deep ecology supporters wish to sup-
port a revolution in worldviews (from Newtonian-Cartesian to holistic-ecolog-
ical), they tend not to consider how our worldview is itself anchored in particular
social structures and everyday relations within a racist, sexist, classist society. At
times they therefore give the impression that worldviews change merely through
revolutions in thought or through the introduction of a new science.68 Such criti-
cism will not of course apply to all of those who think of their work as being
deeply ecological. It is worth taking note, however, when one of the defenders of
deep ecology, Kirkpatrick Sale, defines it by the fact that it thinks primarily “in
biotic rather than social terms.”69 For it is precisely over this point that the other
areas of radical ecology have taken deep ecology to task.
Much of the criticism of deep ecology has come from ecofeminism.
Ecofeminists bring attention to the historical fact that under patriarchal rule the
repressing and exploiting of women has gone hand-in-hand with the repressing
and exploiting of the natural world. The domination of nature, say ecofeminists,
cannot be satisfactorily understood unless viewed as a feminist issue, so close is the
connection between the man-centered or “androcentric” exploitation of nature
(regarded as feminine) and of women (regarded as natural).70 Many ecofeminists
suggest that as a movement deep ecology is insufficiently sensitive to the com-
plex ways in which naturism (domination of nature), sexism, racism, and classism
interlock, and to the strategically central role that gender analysis could play in
dismantling all of them.71 In reference to Fox, for example, Ariel Salleh charges
that the attraction to transpersonal psychology “hangs on the self-actualizing logic
of middle-class individualism,” and betrays comfortable doses of “illusion and
self-indulgence.”72 (The kind of psychology advanced by many ecofeminists, by
contrast, is a version of the feminist “self-in-relation” model—one in which the
self is defined by its concrete and caring relations to particular others, human
and otherwise, and by an openness to a plurality of other voices.73) It is exactly
deep ecology’s preoccupation with psychological and metaphysical themes, and
the relative weakness of its social analysis that concerns her. Although the ecofemi-
nist literature is widely held to be an important source for the development of
ecopsychology (ecofeminism anthologies appear on all the ecopsychology bibliog-
raphies), the more demanding political claims made by ecofeminists such as Salleh
have simply not been taken up by ecopsychologists.74
The relative lack of social radicalism in ecopsychology is also indicated by its
near complete neglect, so far as I am aware, of the social ecology and ­ecosocialist
literatures. Broadly stated, social ecology is an anarchist movement based on the
notion that social conflict is of a piece with our ecological troubles, that is, that
oppressive social relations and the domination of the natural world share a single
hierarchical mind-set; while ecosocialism goes beyond the classical Marxist anal-
ysis to emphasize how the contradiction between expanding economic production

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 20 The Project of Ecopsychology

and finite ecological limits (i.e., between the forces/relations of production and
the conditions of production) will also play a role in the transition toward a post-
capitalist society.75 The one notable person to contribute views to ecopsychology
in this social area is the environmental justice activist Carl Anthony.76 One of
Anthony’s main points is that the so-called ecological self has to date not been
a “multicultural self,” and that deep ecology’s embrace of diversity and interde-
pendence has not in practice extended to an embrace of human diversity and
interdependence. “An ecopsychology that has no place for people of color, that
doesn’t set out to correct the distortions of racism,” he says, “is an oxymoron.”
Deep ecology, he says, tends to construe the ecological crisis in terms of a “white”
identity, neglecting the experiences and history of people of color, including the
estrangement of blacks from the land under slavery. He also speaks of “the sense
of loss suffered by many people living in the city, who are traumatized by the fact
that they don’t have a functional relationship to nature.” Suggesting a possible
area for ecopsychological investigation, he notes, finally, that the “environmental
justice movement . . . needs a greater understanding of the psychological dimen-
sions of environmental racism.”77
Whether any given ecopsychologist aligns him- or herself with environ-
mental justice, ecofeminism, or some other socially critical brand of radical
ecology is not my main concern. My intention in these paragraphs has simply
been to identify (in an admittedly limited way) a general area of radicalism that is
at present not well-enough occupied by ecopsychologists.
The other general area relatively unoccupied by ecopsychologists is that
of socially radical psychology. Psychological knowledge, insofar as it exposes the
unlovely shadow side of a society, is dangerous knowledge.78 As psychology
unmasks, it has the potential to threaten—a fact well known by those, such as
feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman, who have fought to disclose the widespread
occurrence, and devastating effects, of domestic abuse and political terror. As
witnesses to the psychic injuries wrought by our society, psychotherapists are
uniquely positioned to be social critics. Indeed, there is a sort of latent affinity
between social radicals and psychotherapists in that they both have an interest in
identifying our self-deceptions and mystifications, in piercing our illusions and
making better contact with reality. From a psychological angle, I therefore believe
that what Joel Kovel has said about psychoanalysis also needs to be said about
ecopsychology: that it “necessarily has to adopt a deeply critical attitude toward
society” and that it “cannot be itself unless it is linkable—at least in principle—to
a radical political attitude.”79
The number of radical thinkers in psychology is relatively small, these
including, in my reading, Herman, Kovel, David Ingleby, Russell Jacoby,
­Christopher Lasch, Peter Breggin, Philip Cushman, and Isaac Prilelltensky.
What these radicals lack in numbers they nonetheless make up for in polem-
ical bite. They accuse the psychological mainstream of being an instrument of

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 21

social conformity and depoliticization; of propping up an oppressive ideological

status quo; of obscuring the sociocultural and political origins of psychological
distress by adopting medical, natural scientific, individualistic, and male-centered
models; and of repressing Freud’s scandalous insights into the socially generated
sickness, the “demonic terror,” hidden in the depths of the modern mind behind
the “facade of consciousness.” Freud, some of them say, amply demonstrated that
“individual neurosis is a response to brutal social conditions,”80 that the Western
tradition has a “seamy side;”81 and yet—to update Marx—“psychotherapy has in
some respects been even more successful than religion in deflecting energy away
from the need for radical social change.”82 “Indeed, an opacity to the actual social
basis of psy practice is one of the defining features of these professions.”83 Dreyer
Kruger writes, finally, that “it is one of the ironies of contemporary psychology
that it fails to demonstrate a concern with the problem of man, that it allows
its views of reality to be dictated to it by technology and its concomitant social
structures, that it has hardly any historical dimension, that it is oblivious to the
problematic past and blind to the possible agonies of the future.”84
While a thorough examination of the “morals and politics of psychology”
is beyond the scope of this book, I suggest that if ecopsychology is to be a radical
project then it must seek out the critical currents within psychology itself, not
just ecology. As I read it, the central message of critical psychology is that (1) the
organization of society affects the organization of psyche; and (2) psychologists
uncritically participate in, and so reinforce, many oppressive aspects of our society
which themselves contribute to psychic suffering. My concern with the develop-
ment of ecopsychology is correspondingly that it not (1) reductively cast social and
ecological issues in purely psychological terms; and (2) itself maintain oppressive
social relations.
Regarding my first concern, there is growing awareness within ecological
politics (as I discussed above) that we are now facing a “social-ecological crisis;”
that the earth will not be saved while issues of justice, power, and emancipation
go ignored.85 Translated into the domain of ecopsychology: if we are, in good
faith, to understand the psychopathology in the human-nature relationship, we
cannot avoid an examination of the social mediation of this relationship. If the
psyche exists beyond the boundaries of the skin, then this makes it a social as well
as an ecological phenomenon, and ties our alienation from nature to our aliena-
tion within human society. I repeatedly come back to Kovel’s work in this book
because (among other reasons) he has been carrying on a discourse that parallels
ecopsychology’s, but on a sociological plane. He turns psyche inside-out to land it
not in a forest, but in an unjust, fragmenting society.86 Kovel convincingly argues,
then, that “the social” is a category with which psychologists—and I would add
ecopsychologists—must reckon.87
Ecopsychologists have approached the psyche-society connection in sev-
eral ways. Some are simply quiet on the matter; as is Fox, for example, in his

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 22 The Project of Ecopsychology

elaboration of transpersonal ecology.88 (To be clear: I take no issue with talking

about the transpersonal self, but only insist that we discuss at the same time the
violent social conditions that make a depersonalized self the more likely reality for
most of us.) Among those who do speak directly to social issues, there is nonethe-
less a tendency to reduce these to the outward “manifestations” of our inner state
of consciousness, rather than to consider how socioeconomic and political forces
themselves contribute to that inner condition.89 Finally, there are a small number
of ecopsychologists who go so far as to examine the effect of social forces on
our psychic lives, such as the role played by the advertising industry in fostering
consumerism. Allen Kanner and Mary Gomes speak, for example, of the “out-
right abuse of psychological expertise” in the advertising field.90 On the whole,
however, there is still a minimum of critical social theory within ecopsychology.
This is no small matter, for if our goal is ecological consciousness, and if our
society produces a devitalized, narcissistic consciousness instead, then it is impera-
tive that we give critical attention to the social order. Indeed, for ecopsychologists
to overlook social analysis in favor of a more narrowly psychological approach is
no less than to bypass one of the main factors in our ecopsychological situation.91
I cannot myself claim to have adequately achieved a socially radical ecopsycho-
logical stance (one that thoroughly incorporates, rather than bypasses, the social
sphere), as the interdisciplinary demands and personal commitments necessary to
get there are great. I do, however, hold this task out as a challenge to myself, and
hold the same challenge out to the rest of the field.
Regarding my second concern, that ecopsychology not involve itself in
oppressive social forms, I suggest that some conservative tendencies within
ecopsychology act to undermine its own radical implications. Roszak, for
instance, has put forward the idea that it “might generate a new, legally action-
able, environmentally based criterion of mental health that could take on prodi-
gious legal and policy-making implications.”92 Sarah Conn has similarly offered
that the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual
(DSM) be revised to include such diagnoses as “materialistic disorder,” the need
to consume.93 My own wish, by contrast, is that ecopsychology stay well away
from any numerically coded catalogues of “mental illnesses.” The danger is that
the DSM is a highly contested document that has been criticized for both its
metaphysical dubiousness and its use as a tool for oppressing and mystifying
people by medicalizing them and labeling them deviant, thereby serving the
dominant power-interests of our society.94 Speaking of the sheer massiveness
of the DSM, Kovel writes that the “age-old dream of science, that of total con-
trol by man over nature, embodied here in the endless proliferation of catego-
ries, lists and ‘decision trees,’ becomes thereby an instrument of domination.”95
Roszak and Conn genuinely want to challenge psychology’s lack of considera-
tion for our relationship to the earth, and Conn is herself a critic of the DSM.96
My concern, though, is that proposals to institutionalize ecopsychology may

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 23

wind up further legitimizing the authority of an oppressive, nature-dominating

mental health establishment.97
In his The Voice of the Earth, Roszak does give brief mention to “Rad-
ical Therapy.” He comments, however, that his “impression has been that those
who commit to Radical Therapy may never get beyond heroic opposition to the
psychiatric establishment.”98 I think this remark too easily passes over the need
to reflect on the position of (eco)psychology within society. One of the stated
functions of the Ecopsychology Institute at California State University, of which
Roszak was formerly Director, is to develop ecopsychology as a mainstream
academic discipline and profession. With such mainstreaming, however, I fear
that ecopsychology would indeed become “disciplined,” its radical implications
fading from view. I do not want ecopsychology to become a marginal movement
made up of a handful of “beautiful losers,” nor do I wish to create unnecessary
rifts within the field. I only ask that we keep the question of social radicalism
open before us.
As a final note, I think it is important to recognize that the critical task also
includes taking social actions that are specifically inspired by ecopsychological
criticism. I am not aware of any examples of such actions at this time. I can, how-
ever, easily imagine ecopsychologists rising up in protest on account of what they
know as ecopsychologists. One example would be for ecologically minded psy-
chotherapists to organize against the nature-dominating and repressing aspects of
this society because of what they understand as both healers and radical ecologists
(a possibility that interests me, as I mention in chapter six). Because actions of
this sort are so closely connected with the work of criticism, I decided to mention
them here rather than under the practical task (which I have conceived as being
more strictly psychological in focus).

Defining Ecopsychology: Interrelations Among the Tasks

Having looked at the four tasks of ecopsychology (psychological, philosophical,

practical, and critical), I now want to say that what defines ecopsychology as a
unique undertaking is not only these four tasks but also the interdependencies
among them. Considered as a project in which all four tasks explicitly feed into one
another, I believe that ecopsychology has tremendous promise. An advancement
in any one of the four areas would then more or less directly support advances in
the others, each step helping to open up a comprehensive ecopsychological space.
The power and complexity of ecopsychology lies exactly within the connections
between the four tasks. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts.
To conclude this section I therefore want to evoke a sense of this whole project
by briefly tracing some of the interrelationships among the tasks that stand out
for me—an exercise that might also help the reader to digest the large volume of
material I have already introduced.

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 24 The Project of Ecopsychology

Part of the psychological task, first of all, is to utterly dispel the illusion that
we are somehow exempt from membership in the natural world and to overcome
the delusion that we could ever be sane while alienated from our own earthiness,
from the bodily ground we share with the twigs and mice. In this respect, the
psychological task clearly feeds the critical task, in that it provides a good base
from which to criticize our earth-punishing society. The philosophical task, next,
feeds the other three tasks by supplying the conceptual-linguistic or ontological
environment in which to articulate and unfold them. The practical task, in turn,
feeds the psychological and philosophical tasks by providing a body of experi-
ence from which to then build psychological and philosophical theory. It also
feeds the critical task, in that ecopsychological practices not only provide support
for radical actions, but also show us what kind of shape our psyche’s are in; by
showing us the emotional and spiritual toll exacted by the modern world, they
provide material for indicting modern society. The critical task, finally, feeds all the
other tasks by making room for them. While it is ecopsychology’s goal to foster a
sense of connection with nature, including our own, the major structures of our
society generally function by rubbing out that connection (a claim I will expand
on later). The critical work of ecopsychology thus makes room for the other tasks
in the sense that it demonstrates the very need for an ecopsychology. The critical
task also feeds the philosophical task, in that our dualistic thought has emerged
within a particular historical and social context. In order to ultimately overcome
dualism we must become different people, must overcome the mode of existence
in which our dualistic thought is rooted, and for this our repressing and frag-
menting society must itself fundamentally change. Lastly, the critical task feeds
the practical task as well, in that it offers up ecopsychological critiques that may
then provide further ground for social action.
The project of ecopsychology, as I have just described it, is a big one. It will
take a great number of committed people, working together, to keep it rolling.
Some will want to concentrate on or go deep with one particular task. Others, like
me, will want to keep all four on the go, working from a sense for the project as
a whole. Indeed, my intention in this book is to promote the project of ecopsy-
chology by illustrating it with an approach of my own.

A Naturalistic and Experiential Approach

I call my own approach to ecopsychology naturalistic and experiential, as these two

dimensions run through my handling of each of the four tasks. In this section, I want
to introduce my approach only enough to briefly situate myself within the field and to
set up the discussion on ecopsychological discourse that I present in the next chapter.

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 25

Naturalistic

We need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us.
—Charles Taylor99

The discourse of the ecology movement focuses on the claims and limits of the
natural world. Stan Rowe, for example, writes: “we belong to the encompassing
world and sooner or later it claims us.”100 Much psychological discourse also
addresses the claims and limits of nature, as when Konrad Stettbacher says that:
“Child neglect runs counter to all the dictates of Nature.”101 Not only external
nature, the biotic community, but our own human nature makes demands on
us and sets limits. The work of ecopsychology, naturalistically conceived, is to
relate or unify these claims and limits. Naturalistic psychology advocates fidelity
to nature, being in service of nature, and seeing the human as part of a larger
natural order. The ecological and psychological crises of our time may then both
be traced to the violation of nature. The destruction of rain forests and the neglect
or abuse of children are equally transgressions of the natural world, for children
are nature too. Ecopsychology, in this sense, is the ecology movement not only
psychologized, but expanded to include the domination of human nature. When
we include human nature within ecological discourse—is it not odd that it is usu-
ally left out?102—that discourse necessarily turns psychological.
Despite the dangers of doing so, I thus propose that nature be adopted as
a radical concept. In this, I fortunately have an ally in Kovel, who in his own
writings has attempted to “rescue the notion of human nature . . . for radical
discourse.”103 Only something that has a nature can be violated; thus, as we
recognize violation so do we recognize nature. Precisely how we are to under-
stand this nature remains for me to elaborate in the chapters to come. I have
said, however, that the society that violates nonhuman nature is the same society
that violates human nature. A naturalistic psychology that keeps both of these
abuses in sight will not abandon human society for the wilderness, nor will it
deny the deep need we all have to be initiated into mature, personal relations
with the natural world. As critical thinkers such as Kovel tell us, modernity’s
infamous domination of nature faces in two directions: in one it diminishes the
earth (ecological crisis), in the other it diminishes the human (social and psycho-
logical crisis). A naturalistic approach carried through to its proper conclusions
will therefore itself face in these two directions—as did John Rodman when
he made the following remarks: “I strongly suspect that the same basic princi-
ples are manifested in quite diverse forms—e.g. in damming a wild river and
repressing an animal instinct (whether human or nonhuman), in clear-cutting
a forest and bombing a city, in Dachau and a university research laboratory, in

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 26 The Project of Ecopsychology

censoring an idea, liquidating a religious or racial group, and exterminating a

species of flora or fauna.”104 An important implication of the kind of naturalism
I propose is thus the need, in some fashion, to comprehend the complex nexus
of psychological, social, and ecological factors at play in our field. Throughout
part two I touch on the need for such understanding (focusing especially on our
­economized and  technologized reality) and indicate some of the points from
which it might be further pursued.

Experiential

The only “drive” or instinct of which one can usefully speak, in human
behavior, is the drive to interact with the environment itself
—Gordon Wheeler,
commenting on the view of Kurt Goldstein105

The kind of naturalism I am proposing requires an experiential approach, for the

demands of nature are discovered precisely via our experience of them. Fidelity
to nature is gained, that is, only through fidelity to experience—through paying
attention not only to our experience of nature, but to the nature in our experi-
ence. (That “we too are nature” is an idea in which ecopsychology must keep itself
soaked.) Our experience is grounded in our bodily nature, in felt intentions that
arise of their own (and yet which are “ours”) and demand of us some kind of sat-
isfaction. An experiential approach is based on a faith in the organismic wisdom
at work in such bodily felt experience, and relies on what John Dewey called “the
directive powers” that inhere in it.106 It means therapeutically resensitizing our-
selves to and taking practical guidance from our experience, the only ground we
ultimately have. Working experientially also offers a way to formulate alternative
interpretations of reality, one’s drawn from our own felt contact with the world,
and so to challenge the existing reality principle. Indeed, an experiential approach
is indispensable for the difficult philosophical task of articulating a nondualistic
psychology, as well as for the critical task of articulating a socially radical psy-
chology. In introducing a number of experiential concepts—taken mostly from
humanistic psychology and the overlapping philosophical traditions of phenom-
enology, existentialism, and hermeneutics—I am thus intending to add some
theoretical support to the field.
While experience is had through bodily feelings, it is also an interactive
process. Our experience is always directing us toward some sort of contact with
the world and the world itself calls forth our experience. John Welwood writes
simply that “psychological events must be understood as forms of interaction.”107
Insofar as psychology takes an interactive view of reality, it may then also join
ecology along the common axis of “interaction.” Psychology deals with interac-
tions as they are meaningfully felt from the inside, whereas scientific ecology has

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 The Project of Ecopsychology 27

traditionally dealt with them as external events. If, however, we give our relation-
ship to nature psychological status, then we may study the inner sense of our
interactions with, and participation in, the natural world. Part of my strategy
toward this end is to build up in the reader an experiential sense for the interac-
tive or dialogical nature of reality. For having a sense for how all phenomena
mirror each other, intertwine, and arise only in contact with one another, radically
undoes our more usual dualistic, isolated-in-the-head, feel for the world.
Perhaps what is most radical about an experiential approach is that it gives
authority to our experience, all the more so as we learn to listen to and focus it.
As discussed above, social movements do not always attend well to what people
are experiencing, and it is not uncommon to hear of activist organizations that are
themselves oppressively run. An experiential approach to politics makes the open
sharing of experience and the active supporting of personal healing central to its
agenda. At a time when many of us are struggling just to make it through the day,
such an approach may have much to contribute to resolving the kind of prob-
lems identified above. Experiential approaches avoid being dogmatic about what
people must or ought to do. They do, however, maintain that our bodily experi-
ence of the world implies certain social changes, and encourage us to take actions
that move in the direction of those changes.108 This is not to say that experiential
politics takes no guidance from social theories, as these are certainly important for
helping us to interpret our situations. It concentrates as much, though, on taking
life-forwarding steps that emerge from making honest contact with presently felt
reality. Experiential approaches take advantage of the creativity of the life process,
of the arising of new meanings and possibilities with the unfolding of experience
itself. To the extent that it adopts this kind of approach, ecopsychology may avoid
fitting itself into ready-made forms, and seek new ones instead. (The despair and
empowerment work of Macy and her colleagues is an excellent example of how a
radical new form of practice may develop through paying attention to what our
experience is calling for.) Most generally, by acknowledging the uniqueness or
particularity of people’s life situations, an experiential approach allows for a high
degree of flexibility and a wide variety of options. It may, then, help us to live
radical lives in whatever ways make sense from within the context of our own life
experience and interests.

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Chapter_01.indd 28 09/11/12 2:39 PM
 2
THE PROBLEM WITH NORMAL

Discursive Problems

There are few experiences quite so cruel as, when after having made a well-
argued, even elegant and moving case to someone, you lean back expecting
the warm sparkle of shared insight and understanding, only to encounter the
flat opaqueness of complete and utter incomprehension.
—John Livingston1

Philosopher Albert Borgmann writes that the discourse of modernity, narrowly

focused on the prediction and control of events, is simply not capable of lending
us a human “voice in which to articulate our misgivings and aspirations.”2

We predict the weather and try to control inflation because we are not the weather
and not inflation. . . . the dominant discourse about the future of our society is com-
posed of the vocables of prognoses, projections, extrapolations, scenarios, models,
programs, simulations, and incentives. It is as though we have taken ourselves out
of reality and have left only objectified and disavowed versions of ourselves in the
universe we are trying to understand and shape. We vacate our first-person place
and presence in the world just when we mean to take responsibility for its destiny.3

Nowhere are the inadequacies of modern discourse more apparent than in what
Owen Barfield once called “the virtual breakdown of communication between the
devotees of technocracy on one side and the habitual lovers of nature and life on
the other.”4
It is a source of some dismay for ecological advocates that the things they
are moved to talk about often find no home within the official views of reality
that dominate our public language. Robert Socolow, for example, writes: “conser-
vationists have separate languages for talking to one another, to politicians, and

29

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 30 The Problem with Normal

to their avowed opponents. Except when they talk to one another (and perhaps
not even then) they refrain all too often from articulating what really matters to
them.”5 John Rodman similarly writes of his impression that when legal and moral
philosophers use “logical gymnastics” to advocate for the “rights” of natural enti-
ties—whether laboratory animals or trees—“they sound as if they want to say
something less reasonable, less moralistic, more expressive of their total sensibility,
but are afraid of seeming subjective, sentimental, or something that’s not quite
respectable.”6 Putting his finger on this dilemma, Neil Evernden notes that: “not
everyone feels compelled to defend a mountain. But those who do . . . find it
an awkward compulsion, for they must reconcile the conflicting tasks of being
faithful to their subject and maintaining their credibility.”7 Because ecopsycholo-
gists share the basic concerns of the ecology movement, they are to a large extent
in the same boat: they are burdened with the task of finding a language capable
of honestly illuminating their ecologically and psychologically informed accounts
of what truly and finally matters, while at the same time being respectable or
­legitimate before a public audience.
And so we must talk about discourse. A discourse (as I use the term in
this chapter) is a way of making sense with words; as such, it is from the start
an interpretation of the world. When our interpretations are just too far off
the norm, however, our audiences—as John Livingston says regarding wildlife
ethics—“literally do not know what we are talking about.”8 The danger is that the
reality we care for and feel compelled to talk about may be so poorly recognized
by others that it is simply “leaving the realm of discussibility.”9 In this respect,
historian Michel Foucault claimed that an era’s reigning discursive practices act to
police which beliefs, values, and attitudes get to be included within a society and
which get excluded, setting the boundaries on what is understandable or accept-
able. In a related vein, the communist Antonio Gramsci believed that changing
the structure of society is no longer a matter of military revolution but of rhe-
torical struggle. He spoke of the need for “new popular beliefs, that is to say a
new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will
be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative
quality as traditional beliefs.”10 Insofar as ecopsychology seeks to help reverse,
at the level of psyche, one of the cardinal features of modernity—the domina-
tion of nature11—it may be thought of as an effort to move beyond the modern
era. And like other holders of nonmainstream perspectives, ecopsychologists want
their radical notions to one day be part of the common sense which governs our
everyday existing.12
The purpose of this chapter is to offer a reflection on the discursive possi-
bilities—and pitfalls—open to ecopsychology in pursuing this end. I am framing
the discussion as “the problem with normal” in order to highlight, first of all,
that normal psychological discourse is incapable of making good sense of the ter-
rain of ecopsychology because of the dualism entrenched into it. Quite simply, in

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 The Problem with Normal 31

contesting the strict division between inner, subjective, human reality and outer,
objective, natural reality, ecopsychology implicitly puts the whole research tradi-
tion that is based on this division into question. Whereas conventional modern
science holds that the best way to disclose the natural world is to eliminate any
personal or subjective relations with it, ecopsychology seeks a nature that is known
precisely through enhancing this relationship. There are, of course, certain kinds of
truth that only a scientific method can reveal, and there are many varieties of sci-
ence. However, because ecopsychologists wish to grant the natural world its own
subjectivity, agency, or personhood, they, of all people, need to protest the rigidly
scientific viewpoint that denies nature these properties, and must embrace other,
less divisive and more qualitative methods of inquiry. While the supremacy of the
modern scientific method is increasingly questioned among qualitative researchers
in the human disciplines, Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln note that the
challenges are still many: such “researchers are called journalists, or soft scientists.
Their work is termed unscientific, or only exploratory, or entirely personal and
full of bias.”13 These are the same barbs that will undoubtedly be used against
ecopsychology (and which, incidentally, have already been tossed at some of my
own work by a peer-reviewer). I believe that foregrounding this issue will better
allow ecopsychology to deal with such criticism and make the case for privileging
a “not-so-normal”14 discourse. More specifically, I suggest that ecopsychology
needs to wrestle with finding interpretive, experiential, or “hermeneutic” forms
of discourse which, being demanded by the subject matter itself, have their own
validity and necessity.
A second bit of trouble facing ecopsychology is the privilege normally
granted to our technocratic and economic discourses. As Tom Athanasiou notes,
it is doubtful whether “greening” is even possible so long as “economics is taken as
the sole source of sound judgment and virtue,” and while economists themselves
grope “even to locate the ecological crisis on their charts.”15 Within such a climate,
how can ecopsychology win an audience for its own discourse? How can it gain
any recognition for its own radical set of priorities and ultimate concerns? My
suggestion on this matter is that ecopsychology adopt an openly rhetorical style of
speaking. As I discuss below, there is a strong affinity between the hermeneutical
and rhetorical modes, and both are well-suited for navigating through psycho-
logical terrain. I propose, in short, that a hermeneutical and rhetorical method is
well-suited for the purpose of establishing a radical ecopsychological discourse.

Between the Human and the Natural

We shall . . . have to rediscover the natural world . . . , and its mode of

existence, which is not to be confused with that of the scientific object.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty16

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 32 The Problem with Normal

The subject matter of ecopsychology is neither the human nor the natural, but
the lived experience of interrelationship between the two, whether the “nature”
in question be human or nonhuman. In their quest for scientific respectability,
however, modern psychologists have thoroughly adopted an objectivist outlook,
which to a large extent excludes this subject matter from consideration. Natural
scientific empiricism and rationalism continue to exercise a “dual hegemony” over
academic psychology, providing the bulk of its taken-for-granted background
assumptions.17 In other words, mainstream psychology is organized around the
very dualism that ecopsychology would overcome. Rationalists, such as cognitive
psychologists, focus on such things as the internal processing of “information,”
while empiricists, such as behavioural psychologists, focus on data gathered from
the external world (e.g., human behavior). Within this mainstream, questions con-
cerning “the environment” are dealt with by the existing field of “environmental
psychology,” a field from which ecopsychologists generally distinguish their own
efforts.18 In what follows, I suggest that—precisely because of its continuity with
a dualistic research tradition—environmental psychology is simply not capable of
disclosing those meanings that concern the more radical field of ecopsychology.
Ecopsychology tends to attract the more experientially oriented and less main-
stream psychologies, while environmental psychology tends to hold that scientific
line.19 The challenge for ecopsychology is thus to give up psychology’s attachment
to the various forms of objectivism, and, accordingly, to find a mode of discourse
that can walk in the challenging space between the human and the natural.
The goal of environmental psychology is to use traditional scientific methods
to study the impact of certain environmental factors—atmospheric conditions,
pollution, stress, noise, urbanization, crowding, and so forth—on individual
human well-being. The research in this field is dominated by the behavioral and
cognitive traditions, neither of which has much of a presence in ecopsychology.
Although I do not intend to discuss in any great detail the kind of findings pro-
duced by these two approaches, I will venture here to say that ecopsychology
reaches beyond them to a more qualitative or poetic consideration of the inter-
weaving of humanity and nature, one that reveals aspects of the world and modes
of experience that are not visible to the modern scientific persona. One leading
pair of cognitive researchers, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who clearly bring much
sensitivity to their work, admit in this regard that “it is hard to justify the role that
nature plays in rational terms.” Their findings are largely limited, then, to how
nature can provide a “restorative environment” that supports humans in recov-
ering from “mental fatigue,” and so in regaining the ability to effectively “manage
information.”20
In addition to making for narrow findings, the scientific worldview adopted
by environmental psychology quite simply preserves the human/nature split. As
David Kidner remarks, “scientific and technological ‘objectivity’ serve to stabilize
a style of personality functioning in which the relation of humanity to the natural

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 The Problem with Normal 33

world is one of comfortable domination.” Hence, “the anthropocentric view-

point is overwhelmingly predominant” within environmental psychology.21 Two
implications are that environmental psychologists attend primarily to human
built environments and that they designate an environment as “healthy” simply
if it promotes human health. They also take a managerial and resourcist outlook.
In one of the more well-known studies to involve “the natural environment,”
Kaplan and Kaplan conclude, for instance, that “it is rare to find an opportunity
[i.e., as is provided by nature] for such diverse and substantial benefits available
at so modest a cost. Perhaps this resource for enhancing health, happiness, and
wholeness has been neglected long enough.” They further ask: “Is there a way
to design, to manage, to interpret natural environments so as to enhance these
beneficial influences?”22 Again, the language here is hardly that of a psychology
that would ponder our membership and earthly responsibilities within the com-
munity of all beings.
This last point leads to a final one: the political goals of environmental
psychology are unambiguously those of mainstream or reformist environmen-
talism.23 In their recent text on environmental psychology, Russell Veitch and
Daniel Arkkelin write of the need

to produce changes in human behavior to preserve the environment and quality of

life. This social technology entails knowledge of individual human behavior (e.g.,
techniques to promote the use of public transportation or to encourage energy con-
servation in the home). The science of psychology has been devoted to ­understanding
human behavior and developing technologies for changing behavior.24

The ethos of environmental psychology is frankly technocratic. Among the goals

of one behavioral psychologist, for example, are the manipulation of citizens (e.g.,
through altering rewards and costs) toward “global change-producing behaviors,”
the elimination of “barriers to adoption of technologies and practices to mitigate
global change,” and the “identification of cost-effective interventions by govern-
ment and other actors.”25 In other words, environmental psychology medicalizes
the ecological crisis (as does much of the environmental movement), treating it as
a kind of clinical problem to be technologically solved. Through its research we
therefore discover little as to what this crisis is all about, who we are, or what it
means to be a human being on a living earth. While I am not able to speak for all
ecopsychologists, I think it is fair to say that there is less interest among them in
manipulating behavior, and more in allowing people to imagine, and practically
seek, a more mature, satisfying relation to the world of nature.
Ecopsychology is an effort not just to apply modern, objectivist psychology
to environmental problems, but to consider more fully how nature figures in the
human life-world. I have already noted ecopsychology’s refusal to see the natural
world only as it is revealed by conventional natural science, that is, in that severely

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 34 The Problem with Normal

restricted way that makes it amenable to prediction and control. Indeed, it espe-
cially behooves ecopsychologists to criticize the idea that modern natural science
gives us the only solid way to know reality.26 But what of human nature? To reduce
people, as is common in psychiatry, to genetic, biochemical, or neurophysiological
explanation, is surely to see humans in an equally restricted way. The science of
psychiatry, to pursue this authoritative field, has grown particularly “hard” since
the 1980s, when—spurred on by the development of psychiatric medications—it
was overtaken “with a fervor for biological explanation.”27 The experiential cri-
tique of biological psychiatry begins with the assertion that human existence is a
totality, simultaneously psychic and somatic, and so is prior, and irreducible, to
either of these two aspects.28 No physiological condition is ever just a “natural”
phenomenon, but is lived. Lived, moreover, within a political, economic, and
sociocultural field. Whatever is the “organic” contribution to, say, schizophrenia
(and there is no unanimity of opinion on this),29 to attend mostly to manipulating
the physicochemical structure of schizophrenic people is to refuse to give their
hellish existence a hearing, to listen to the meaningful voice—the logos—of their
suffering souls.30 The medical strategy that would bring schizophrenia “under the
sway of medical technics,” says Kovel, and so reduce this horrific “collapse of
being” to a biochemical abnormality in the brain, has

obvious cultural power, since it combines in one conception the mystique of the
machine and the managerial ethos. In its system the doctor-expert is the manager
of the soul, regarded now as a mechanism like any other, capable of tuning up or
overhauling. . . . The notion also has a political power, . . . disease is something going
on within a person; it is to be looked for in the malfunctioning of the ‘parts’ of his
personality and not in the entire relationship between the self and the world; and it
is to be remedied by individual or particularistic action. . . . It should not [, however,]
be thought that social problems are beyond the scope of the medical model. Quite
the contrary: it exists to gobble them up and medicalize them.31

I have cited this passage to indicate how the modern project of splitting off and
mastering nature has made its way into the psychiatric establishment, as it has
with academic psychology more generally. By keeping madness primarily on the
far (nature) side of the human/nature divide, in the realm of broken machinery, it
helps obscure the role that social disintegration, poverty, family stress, child abuse,
sexism, racism, class discrimination, dehumanizing institutions, ecological col-
lapse, and other stressing social factors also play in the genesis of suffering32 (even
if these are not entirely ignored by psychiatrists33 and even if medical knowledge
and psychiatric medication are indeed sometimes called for).34 More generally,
however, my intention in this paragraph has been to highlight the need to develop
better conceptions not only of nonhuman nature, but of human nature too.

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 The Problem with Normal 35

The challenge posed by “human nature” is that it is the one notion in

which humans and nature undeniably cross. Although this phrase puts the words
“human” and “nature” next to one another, the normal scientific reduction of
nature to matter-in-motion renders the question of human nature paradoxical.35
We have to either slide humans into “nature” and so imagine ourselves as mechan-
ical animals, or come up with a nature for ourselves that has only sociocultural
or psychological, that is, “human,” dimensions—neither of which option keeps
the tension between the two terms alive. It is noteworthy, for this reason, that
the founder of twentieth-century psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, did not entirely
avoid this dilemma. On the one hand, Freud recognized a natural moment to
human existence—that of instinct, appetite, energy, force—to which he applied a
natural scientific approach in his more abstract (“metapsychological”) writings. He
called the mind a “mental apparatus,” and drew numerous analogies from hydro-
dynamics, mechanics, optics, and other areas of natural science. On the other
hand, for his more concrete, clinical findings he posited a human moment—that
of language, symbols, representation, meaning—to which he brought a discourse
that demonstrated much artistry and interpretive virtuosity. In so doing, Freud
introduced a method explicitly attuned to meaning, and thereby made a historic
break from normal psychology. Nonetheless, his attachment to the idea of being a
natural scientist prevented him from ever finding any intermediate terms to com-
prehend the act of translation between our instinctual “nature” and our “human”
experience. (To return to the medical model, there is just no way to conceptually
demonstrate how anybody’s brain chemistry, considered to have only external or
objective reality, can eventuate in inward, subjective experiences, such as delu-
sions of grandeur.) In the end his was therefore what Paul Ricoeur called a “mixed
discourse”: an “objective discourse of force uneasily combined with [a] subjective
discourse of meaning.”36
Because Freud’s discourse acknowledges that human being is subtended by
nature, and yet also preserves an experiential or “meaning” component, it may be
thought of as transitional toward a form more adequate to ecopsychology. Whereas
Freud treats natural force and human experience within separate domains, ecopsy-
chology requires a singular discourse in which the human and the natural may
be held together in more unitary terms. The limitations of the natural scientific
disclosure of the world become apparent when we apply it to ourselves and then,
realizing that there is more to us than blind matter, we create a dualism in order to
save ourselves. The attempt to find a discourse free of such dualistic trouble puts
ecopsychology right in the middle of those difficult philosophical problems, still
very much in play, that have preoccupied Western thought. I introduced some of
these in the previous chapter, and in the next four consider further some of the
philosophical and psychological options available to ecopsychology for its own
efforts at resolving them. Suffice to say for now that our discourse will come to

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 36 The Problem with Normal

walk between the human and the natural, and so escape the trouble discussed
above, only as we learn to describe how we experience them together: the move
away from dualism is the move toward experience.

In Praise of the Not-So-Normal: The Hermeneutic Dimension

Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the

unknown always beyond you. Catching, crystallizing your simpler clearer
vision of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel
ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp.
—Georgia O’Keeffe37

A good research method is one that allows some interesting phenomenon to

reveal itself as truthfully as possible; the method must be suited or adequate
to the phenomenon or the phenomenon itself gets missed. If ecopsychology is
to be a discourse of the human-nature dialectic that is “liberated from the spurious
narrowing imposed by the model of the natural sciences,”38 then what exactly
are the methodological options available to it for rejecting a normal scientific
approach and developing a not-so-normal one? The general route out of objec-
tivism is to participate more intimately or concretely in one’s subject matter and
thereby discover meanings, develop understandings, or make interpretations not
accessible to the remote observer. Ecopsychology would thus do well to enter
the field concerned precisely with how we understand and interpret the world:
hermeneutics. Richard Rorty writes that hermeneutical discourse is “supposed to
be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid
us in becoming new beings.” It plays the cultural role of (in John Dewey’s words)
“breaking the crust of convention,” guarding us from the self-deception “that we
know ourselves by knowing a set of objective facts.”39 Such inquiry is also based
on the view that the “keys to understanding are not manipulation and control but
participation and openness, not [data] but experience, not methodology but dia-
lectic.”40 Conflict or debate is not ruled out, but rather turned to advantage—to
revealing prejudices, overcoming misunderstandings, and finding more common
ground. Understood as a kind of open conversation with few hard and fast rules,
hermeneutical discourse is thus more truly a discursus, “a running to and fro”
toward better understandings. Its course is not straight, but is a dis-course. I will
myself be leaning heavily on hermeneutic principles throughout this book. In this
section I therefore want to introduce three aspects of hermeneutical inquiry that
are relevant to ecopsychology, and to which I am myself committed. My points are
made here in a rather cursory or compact way, but should gain strength as I revisit
and flesh them out in the remaining chapters.

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 The Problem with Normal 37

Overcoming Alienation. J. H. van den Berg once called child psychology the
“result of a state of emergency,” its “scientifically-phrased understanding” being
“the smallest compensation for the lost natural understanding between old and
young.”41 Anthropologist Stanley Diamond likewise commented that his own
discipline has grown popular precisely because civilization has exacted such an
acute loss in our understanding of ourselves as human beings. Yet, anthropology is
in the main a “narrow discipline with mechanical techniques and trivial goals” that
represses its own urgent and central question, namely, “what part of our humanity
have we lost and how and in what form we may regain it.”42 I take these blunt
statements from van den Berg and Diamond as suggesting that our scientific “olo-
gies” not only restrict our vision, but largely define our estrangements. As the scope
of our historical alienation widens, and as the losses are felt, disciplines or fields
such as child psychology and anthropology—and now ­ecopsychology—are born.
The ecophilosopher George Sessions has traced ecopsychology’s beginnings
to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first Europeans to articulate the “psycho-
logical importance of relating to wild Nature.”43 Van den Berg claimed, though,
that the “sense of nature” Rousseau would have us believe was “a valuable matter
which people for some inexplicable reason had never seen before” was in fact “the
discovery of a loss.”44 Does it not seem fitting to suggest that the “vast conti-
nent” to be mapped by ecopsychologists is, in truth, a terrain born of alienation?
Richard Nelson writes: “Probably no society has been so deeply alienated from
the community of nature, has viewed the natural world from a greater distance of
mind, has lapsed into a murkier comprehension of its connection with the sus-
taining environment.”45 I imagine van den Berg and Diamond, then, cautioning
ecopsychologists not to forget the “state of emergency” that has initiated our own
field; to beware the danger of attempting “to find in science a substitute for lost
orientation.”46 As ecopsychologists, we need to keep our own broad and urgent
questions of alienation, of loss and recovery, before us.47
This is where hermeneutics comes in; for a hermeneutical inquiry is one
that studies something strange, unfamiliar, or alien that must be made compre-
hensible, familiar, or near through a process of interpretation.48 One of the key
figures in hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, described it as letting “what is
alienated by the character of the written word or by the character of being distan-
tiated by cultural or historical distances speak again.”49 And alienation takes place
“when we have withdrawn ourselves and are no longer open to the immediate
claim of that which grasps us.”50 To hear Gadamer’s words with the idea that
it is nature’s claims that have been made distant is, I suggest, to reveal ecopsy-
chology as a hermeneutical form of inquiry. It seeks to listen to or interpret the
voice of nature in a way that normal science simply cannot. What Gadamer tells
us—that estrangement is overcome “only through a dialogical encounter with
what is at once alien to us, makes a claim upon us, and has an affinity with what

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 38 The Problem with Normal

we are”51—thus applies equally, and especially, to our current relationship with

nature, including our own.
Hermeneutic investigations have previously granted a voice to historical
texts, traditions, works of art, foreign cultures, and so on, but not so much to
nature. Borgmann notes, for example, that Rorty, one of the main advocates for
conversation and solidarity with others, believes nature to be “utterly silent.”52
Rorty himself says that “nature has no preferred way of being represented.”53 This
is no incidental omission, but a highly limiting prejudice within hermeneutics—
and grounds for a strong critique of much hermeneutical practice itself. For, aside
from presuming that the birds, lakes, and trees make no claims on us, it leaves little
room for how nature enters into our experience through the body. While Gadamerian
hermeneutics does hold that interpretations are always drawn from experience, in
practice it has little to say about the bodily nature lying right at the heart of the
human situation. According to Kovel, hermeneutics thus drifts “toward an ulti-
mately repressive and flattened view of human beings,” one in which desire and
unconsciousness have no place—as if experience had no negativity or depths, but
consisted primarily of writing and interpreting texts.54
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, because so influential, may come
in for particular criticism here, for it tends toward a kind of linguistic idealism,
in which reality is felt to be constituted by language alone (the poststructuralist
view).55 There are, however, a handful of philosophers—including Merleau-Ponty,
Eugene Gendlin, and David Levin—for whom our bodily nature is a central
thematic, and to whom Kovel’s comments do not therefore apply. Against much
current scholarship, Gendlin writes, for instance, that “it is nonsense to say that
only [human] language and culture create meaning.”56 “Language and culture,”
that is, “do not abolish the animal.”57 Even these authors, however, while willing
to give nature its due, have ventured little into the realm of nonhuman nature.
To borrow a phrase from Abram, their thought “never quite leaves the city.”58
A hermeneutics of nature proper, such as ecopsychology might become, must turn
that much more sharply back on hermeneutics itself, because—as I try to show in
chapter five—it makes both human and nonhuman nature central to the genesis of
meaning or understanding, that is, hermeneutics’ very subject matter. As Abram
noted in the previous chapter, this is exactly the direction in which Merleau-Ponty’s
own hermeneutic phenomenology was headed.59

Risking Being Changed. A basic tenet of hermeneutics is that all experience takes
place within an implicitly sensed context or “horizon” of background under-
standing, which for the most part remains obscure or concealed. Most of what
we understand was never given to us in the form of an explicit belief system or
theory, but is simply embodied in shared daily activities or cultural practices we
have meshed ourselves into. We do not teach children, for instance, how far to
stand from other people; instead, they catch on to our subtle distance-standing

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 The Problem with Normal 39

practices by imitating adults, with little awareness that they are doing so.60 In
like fashion, we also pick up or come to grasp specific points of view and ways of
conceiving things—all of which adds up to a pervasively felt “preunderstanding”
that “forestructures” our perception of the world. Thus, no matter how clear and
distinct our knowledge, it will always trail off into an unclear background sense
whose origins will forever remain mostly in the dark.
There can therefore be no presuppositionless understanding, no coming
to some topic without any biases or tacit expectations.61 Otherwise, we could
not make any contact with our subject matter to begin with; it could not even
show up as something interesting or worthy of study. The process of interpreta-
tion, accordingly, must proceed from whatever understanding we already have;
it has no absolute beginning or end, but takes place within the so-called herme-
neutic circle. In reading this chapter, for instance, you, the reader, are grasping the
meaning of my words under the condition of whatever prior understanding of
things you bring to them. Certain passages, if quite unfamiliar to you or foreign to
your background, may be opaque; while others will be more readily gathered. In
any event, if after finishing this chapter you read it again, my words will inevitably
make more sense. This is because the first reading will have granted you a feel for
the chapter-as-a-whole, however tentative, which will then act as a new horizon
within which to continue puzzling out its various details. You will, in short, be
interpreting what I am saying by cycling back and forth between the various pieces
or particulars of the chapter and the chapter considered more globally; by reading
the ending into the beginning, and vice versa. This interpretive dialectic, in which
“a partial understanding is used to understand still further,”62 and in which one’s
felt sense of the “text” is explicated by shuffling between parts and whole, is the
hermeneutic circle.
Notice that in the process just described the reader’s own horizon of
­understanding must somehow meet the implicit horizon of the text, such that
there is what Gadamer called a “fusion of horizons.”63 In other words, as we make
genuine contact with something novel or alien, our own horizons are broadened
and enriched. What is more, the alien context provides a contrasting ground
against which buried prejudices hidden within our own preunderstanding are
made more visible. A central tenet of hermeneutics is therefore that we gain self-
understanding only through our interaction with others. Gadamer was insistent,
however, that we not merely explicate our own prejudices, but be willing to risk
them. Readers of this chapter who are committed to a traditional scientific view,
for example, might become more aware of their own prescientific assumptions
and perhaps willing to examine and/or modify some of them. Or they might
disagree with what I have said, but still find that this helps them sense, clarify, or
advance their own understanding of things. This kind of hermeneutics asks, then,
that we risk, as one anthropological title puts it, Being Changed by our encounter
with the other.64 The kind of reality we discover depends on the kind of people

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 40 The Problem with Normal

we are. If we wish to uncover new realities we must therefore be willing to become

new people. In short, the “hermeneutical task is to find the resources in our
language and experience to understand . . . initially alien phenomena without
imposing blind or distortive prejudices on them”;65 and this is accomplished only
as we reveal and risk our own prejudices, and dialectically bend ourselves toward
the phenomenon’s own governing demands; let it grasp us as much as we grasp
it—serve it, in a sense.

Being Creative. Considerable scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating that,

in a qualified way, all inquiry is hermeneutical. Every researcher, including the
natural scientist, participates in an interpretive community, with its own shared,
implicitly grasped practices, points of view, and fore-conceptions.66 Herme-
neutics, then, is universal. What makes a science normal is simply that this pre-
understanding is taken for granted. Normal scientists get on with studying the
“facts” (now read: interpretations) revealed within the horizons of their chosen
paradigm, being inclined to leave all the philosophical discomfort to their less
normal colleagues.67 What concerned Gadamer was that research not become
blind to its hermeneutical dimension, that it not get trapped in an unreflective
methodology that “flattens experience and inevitably leads to a betrayal of what is
specifically other.”68 Gadamer was imploring, then, that thinking remain creative,
dialectical, responsive. Always located in that zone between the familiar and the
not-yet-clear, hermeneutic researchers must work with a taste or feeling for that
which has yet to be formulated, letting their intuition for the subject matter guide
their engagement with its particulars. They do not work solely in the “well-lit
world of observables,”69 but rather face the arduous task of bringing new truths
to light. Indeed, as was declared by the Eskimo shaman, Baleen, just before being
swept away into ritual ecstasy: “It is a hard thing to speak the truth. It is difficult to
make hidden forces appear:”70
I am suggesting that ecopsychology itself adopt such a creative hermeneutic
spirit. Ecopsychology is not about lying on the couch; it is a unique undertaking
which will have to struggle to find its own particular praxis. Allen Kanner says
that “we have no words in our psychological parlance to describe the deep distur-
bance people experience when the urge to be in contact with the natural world
is repressed, or where we are routinely isolated from the patterns and rhythms of
the rest of the Earth.”71 Robert Greenway likewise speaks of the frustrating dearth
of terminology available for lighting up the human-nature relationship, calling
ecopsychology, as much as anything else, “a search for a language.”72 In view of
this linguistic poverty, I find Christine Downing’s comments on the hermeneutic
efforts of Freud and Jung to be instructive.

Both really invent their own language to communicate their own vision; there is no
given mode of discourse, no recognized literary genre, no established philosophical

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 The Problem with Normal 41

option, which is wholly adequate. Their fusions of the language of myth and of sci-
ence are not confusions but conscious and deliberate undertakings. Because they are
writing out of their unique and overwhelming experiences—Freud out of the discovery,
“I am Oedipus,” precipitated by his father’s death; Jung out of his six-year-long
deliberately chosen “confrontation with the unconscious”—they could not borrow
another’s language to render them. To them their own speech was alive, pregnant,
avowedly metaphorical.73

When in the grips of an experience, we interpret it by formulating whatever

language helps elucidate that experience—that “saves the appearances.” Does it
not make sense, then, that the most exciting discourses in ecopsychology will be
born by those who can find original terms to symbolize their own “unique and
overwhelming experiences”? As Freud and Jung made much use of the arts to
develop their theories, so Greenway and others have insisted that poets, nature
writers, novelists, musicians, visual artists—those most gifted at truth disclo-
sure—will hold an important place within ecopsychology. While I agree with
this, I also emphasize the importance of finding our own voice. In other words,
I suggest that we each get a handle on the kind of experiences that have led
us to ecopsychology—that are defining the field—and to then let these serve
as the determining grounds for our own creative theorizing, including how we
­appropriate the arts.
I suggested above that ecopsychology was born of alienation. While alien-
ation may not be every ecopsychologist’s defining experience, I do suggest that
ecopsychology has emerged largely from a sense of loss. We have little positive to go
on, have few words, because our experience is of absence, of lack, of relationships
that aren’t. We are grasping at a painful hole, at nonbeing. Peter Mathiessen writes:
“The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty
and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each
breath, there is a hollow place that is filled with longing.”74 Richard Nelson watches
a Raven fly off, and says: “As I watch him grow smaller in the distance, I feel a deep
longing, pangs of uncertainty, and a sense of aching, overpowering loss.”75 Nelson
is among the most articulate of nature writers, yet here is an inchoate longing
that admits of little explication—like a rage, unsure of its target, that can only
scream. That we have no existing framework or mythology for making sense of
these experiences is in itself a sign of the magnitude of our loss. It is precisely
this sense of loss, moreover, “present in eco-radicalism and absent from reform
minded strategies,” that the critical environmental thinker Ray Rogers ­suggests
is one of the “most significant contrasts that separates the radical and moderate
perspective.”76 I am aiming, then, to adopt a genre of discourse based on the
experience of loss. Of course, many have sat in sweat lodges with animal spirits
lighting up the darkness, cried for visions and received them, felt the immanent
power of the Goddess, surrendered in yoga or meditation into profound body

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 42 The Problem with Normal

awakenings, made a living in the outdoors, delighted in newts and salamanders,

or found other ways to personally acquaint themselves with the psyche of nature,
and this is all to the good. My own interest, though, is to develop a discourse
more centered on speaking to and illuminating our estrangement, for that is where
I believe our common experience most lies.77 Although I have found my own ways
to converse with nature, my experience, too, is still overwhelmingly that of loss—of
grief and longing—and so it is here, in all honesty, that I must begin my inquiry.
My experiential approach to nature (or naturalistic approach to experience) grew
precisely out of my efforts to better understand the nature of our shared loss and to
trace some of the conditions that contribute to it. (Because I am concentrating on
the experience of loss, some will fault me for being nostalgic and for ignoring what
has in fact been gained in modern times. I think it is wrong, however, to automati-
cally slot any discussion about loss into the nostalgia category, as I discuss in the
following endnote.)78
All experiential approaches require first contacting whatever one is actually
experiencing, in the faith that this will lead to the next step forward. Abram writes
that the “pain, the sadness of [our] exile” from nature “is precisely the trace of
what has been lost, the intimation of a forgotten intimacy.”79 As Macy might have
it, this pain and sadness will be our guide. Hence, ecopsychology, as I see it, will
take the course of a gradual process of healing, of slowly allowing ourselves to be
changed and reclaimed by nature, and of charting or interpreting this process one
little bit at a time. This means that the practical side of ecopsychology will play a
particularly key role in the development of its theoretical side. While ecopsycholo-
gists may have defined a new field of study, this does not mean they yet know
much about it. In my view, then, the leading edge of our theory will be the leading
edge of our experience.80
To adopt a genre based on loss is to set a tone or mood that may disclose
some of the painful reality lying behind the manic mask of modernity. Following
Borgmann, I regard this effort of mine as a experiment in questioning and finding
a way beyond the modem frame. I am working from a felt sense of incomplete-
ness, from a feeling for what is needed, even if not entirely known.81 My style
is to begin with this felt sense and to slowly fill in some of the pieces, to place a
few broad, initial strokes on an admittedly large canvas. While this may make for
many gaps and some fuzziness in the picture, I do not see this as a problem; for it
reflects the actual nascent state of ecopsychological inquiry, and it demonstrates
the process to which I subscribe, namely, entering the hermeneutic circle from
wherever one is. The struggle to make meaning, to lend form to experience, is
like the struggle to recall something forgotten; we feel an immediate satisfac-
tion when words finally come for the recollected thing. So it is for any moment
when we recognize a pattern, contact some truth, or bring into symbolic focus
a feeling that has been haunting us from the deep. I thus have in mind a style of
inquiry with lots of ragged edges, unanswered questions, and loose ends; and yet

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 The Problem with Normal 43

with an atmosphere and an impelling force that can be felt; where points, even if
­surrounded by ignorance, nonetheless get made and are able to dialogically elicit
fruitful responses from the reader.

The Symbolic or Metaphorical Nature of Reality and the Discursive

Primacy of Rhetoric

Metaphoric usage is appropriate to [philosophy] because reality is itself

metaphoric.
—Erazim Kohák82

. . . to assert our concepts of reality . . . or to offer our imaginative pictures of

man or nature is necessarily to immerse ourselves in rhetoric.
—Paul Campbell83

In the previous section, I characterized my approach as hermeneutical, in that

it operates on the basic level of how we experience, interpret, or understand the
world and highlights how all inquiry has a hermeneutical dimension. I now wish
to further designate my approach as rhetorical, in that rhetoric is the persua-
sive use of language on this same primordial plane and because I wish to high-
light how all discourse also has a rhetorical dimension. To make the link between
hermeneutics and rhetoric, I introduce below the idea that these two fields are
simply more deliberate instances of two interrelated symbolic or metaphorical
activities we are always already involved in: interpreting reality and speaking to
one another. As an art, rhetoric has historically employed language as a sym-
bolic means to create specific experiential effects in the psyche or soul, so as to
inform, please, and move the listener.84 James Hillman has thus called rhetoric
the “speech form” of the soul, the soul being “precisely that mode which recog-
nizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”85 To the extent that
ecopsychology openly positions itself within this rhetorical dimension, I believe
that it will enjoy greater freedom to both criticize and create. Indeed, for ecopsy-
chology to eloquently argue its radical positions, for it to disclose or make figural
the ultimate matter which concerns it (namely, the human-nature relationship),
an explicitly rhetorical discourse is most appropriate.86 In this section I outline
a form of discourse which, because it aims to be rhetorical precisely by being
hermeneutical, I am adopting for my own ecopsychological efforts. Deictic dis-
course was first named as such by Aristotle. For my purposes, however, I am
staying closer to the way in which it has been characterized by Albert Borgmann
in his philosophical works on technology, even if I take a more psychological
route than he. The significance of a deictic discourse, according to Borgmann,
is that it lets us “be true to our deepest experiences and aspirations and to make

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 44 The Problem with Normal

these prevail against technology.”87 It is a style of rhetoric that uses a language

of personal resonance,88 addressing itself to those aspects of our lives for which
smooth and efficient functioning is not the main issue. It does so, finally, in order
to recall something that is endangered in our technological age, yet which, being
“other and greater than ourselves,” needs once again to be brought to the fore so
that we may reorient or focus our lives in relation to it. One such something, of
course, is nature.
Owen Barfield once observed that there is a “figurative relation between man
and his environment, out of which the words he is using were born.”89 Even the
most literal or nonfigurative of words contain within themselves the traces of their
metaphorical origins. The word metaphor, for starters, is itself a metaphor, one that
means “to carry” (pherein) “beyond” (meta). Thus may a given word like tongue
(in Latin: lingua) serve as the carrier for a meaning that goes beyond an initial sense
to form a new one: “language.” In like fashion, it can be demonstrated that all
words ultimately draw their significance from the deep pool of metaphorical pos-
sibilities latent within our experience of the world itself. There would be no word
language unless there was a tongue in our mouths that we can experience shaping
the words we speak, and so use as a metaphor for the whole field of ­word-use itself.
Hence the conclusion that “every modern language, with its thousands of abstract
terms and its nuances of meaning and association, is . . . nothing, from beginning
to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors.”90 More
radically still, we may suggest that every metaphor is a poetic creation, in that it
uses words in some novel way to reveal fresh meanings—and then say, along with
Ralph Waldo Emerson, that our everyday language is “fossil poetry.”91 Poetry, in
this sense, is not an adornment of the prosaic world, but its origin. Literalness is
a quality some words acquire as they become sedimented into habitual usage, but
only as they lose their metaphorical or poetic ring, which may yet survive as the
hidden “soul” of the word.92
If words are symbols or metaphors, then our speaking is never neutral.
Whenever we speak, we select linguistic symbols in order to evoke those particular
meanings that will communicate our own view or sense of reality. This nonneutrality
of speech is what in a broad sense characterizes its rhetorical quality. As Kenneth
Burke succinctly remarked, “wherever there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion.’”93
While persuasion may seem too strong a term to apply to every speech act, I use
the term only to indicate that all speaking calls forth meaning, bears an interpre-
tation, has a directionality, or, indeed, issues from a certain persuasion—and so
aims to “sway” or affect us somehow, no matter the intent. “Every utterance is
intended by the utterer to be heard, accepted, acted on, judged valid, or deemed
meaningful.”94 Mikhail Bakhtin held, along these lines, that every utterance is a
response to others and is itself molded in anticipation of a response from others.
It is “filled with dialogic overtones.” To my mind, this supports the idea that our
speaking will always have a rhetorical dimension, whatever the level of discourse

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 The Problem with Normal 45

may be: “our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, and artistic—is born and
shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this
cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well.”95
The poetic-rhetorical, in short, is the “single inevitable dimension of language.”96
Before anything else, we are every one of us poet-rhetoricians—symbolic and dia-
logical beings.
What, then, is the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics? The
fields of rhetoric and hermeneutics can both be said to work in the symbolic or
metaphorical mode, as speaking and interpreting are both acts of symbolization
or metaphor use. The difference lies in their emphases, the former on the com-
municative arts, the latter on the event of understanding or meaning creation.
Given that both communication and understanding are involved in any sort of
inquiry, however, it is safe to say that these two fields have a close relation. Says
Gadamer, “Convincing and persuading, without being able to prove—these are
obviously as much the aim and measure of understanding and interpretation as
they are the aim and measure of the art of oration and persuasion.” We would not
be seeking to persuade others unless shared understanding were at issue, and there
would be no hermeneutical task unless, in the pursuit of better understanding, we
were engaged in dialogue. Hence, “rhetorical and hermeneutical aspects of human
linguisticality completely interpenetrate each other.”97
In this book, I am myself attempting to maintain a balance between rhe-
torical and hermeneutical goals by speaking “deictically.” “The word deictic comes
from Greek deiknynai, which means to show, to point out, to bring to light, to
set before one, and then also to explain and teach. Speakers of deictic discourse
never finally warrant the validity of what they tell but point away from them-
selves to what finally matters; they speak essentially as witnesses.”98 The chal-
lenge for a deictical speaker is to make an ultimate concern tangible to others, to
articulate a world that has this concern at its centre. As Borgmann says, modern
scientific laws are unable to elucidate “the crucial and remarkable features of the
modern world” and so by themselves cannot provide us with the orientation we
so need. Scientists begin their explanatory work only after some subject matter
has emerged as worthy of investigation; they cannot explain the emergence of this
significance itself. For significance resides in-the-world, not in decontextualized or
“de-worlded” data.99 Deictic discourses, then, are experiential; they play the role of
offering the orientation, the larger context of meaning, that is missing from our
more narrow scientific or “apo-deictic” discourses.100 Of course, blank opposition
to all scientific investigation is an untenable position, for there are certain kinds
of regularity within the natural world that only the scientific mode can detect.
Indeed, we would be much the poorer without such undertakings as attachment
theory and conservation biology. The experiential critique, in general, insists only
that scientific knowledge be placed within the context of, and so take its sense or
bearing from, our whole lived existence.101 Erazim Kohák writes in this vein that

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 46 The Problem with Normal

there is “something wrong when we use medicine to deaden our sensitivity, when
we . . . blind ourselves with the very lights we devised to help us see.”102 Providing
a sensitive vision of what truly matters, and which may bring some sense to our
science, is, by contrast, precisely the task of deictical rhetoric.
In place of our more usual technical rhetoric, then, deictical rhetoric is
disclosive. It requires of us not scientific exactitude, but a sharpness of another
sort: for symbolizing and appealing to experience, for bringing to light what is
going on. It throws us back onto our shaky selves, onto our interpretive abilities.
Part of the therapeutic work of ecopsychology is exactly to resensitize ourselves
to what we might perceive without the aid of science or other forms of explana-
tion, by consulting our experience. As Joanna Macy suggests: “Our capacity to
reach each other stems less from our command of statistics than from our exis-
tential confrontation with the dangers of our time. . . . In all such conversation,
we need to believe . . . that there is that in the other person that can hear us at
the level of these deep concerns. To the extent that we can address the human
being—somewhere there inside—we become effective communicators.”103 Or as
Wendell Berry writes: “It is not necessary to have recourse to statistics to see that
the human estate is declining with the estate of nature.”104
I am calling my own work deictical because it is part of a larger effort to
establish or open up the human-nature relationship (as a relationship) as a domain
of concern, to make it discussible. Borgmann says that to get out of the modern
era we must let “the things that are beyond the control of modernity . . . speak in
their own right.”105 This statement could well serve as a motto for my own natu-
ralistic approach. In pointing toward wilderness as the most obvious realm that
stands in its own right outside the rule of modern technology, however, Borgmann
is typical of writers who effectively locate wild nature in the woods, not in the
body, and so avoid confronting more psychological themes. I wish, rather, to dem-
onstrate that not only field and forest, but our own bodily nature lies essentially
outside the control of modernity, is wild; and to reject mainstream psychology’s
alliance with the prevailing technological-economic order, allying my psychology
instead with the order of primordial nature, inside and out.
The way I am doing this is by building an approach: a set of concepts and
working principles by which the human-nature relationship may be understood and
practical actions encouraged. My intention is not so much to announce a system as
to disclose a matter of deep concern. Inasmuch as we are all poetic-rhetorical beings,
and that I want to address the reader at the level of our essential humanity, I would
like to use a poetic-rhetorical language in my efforts. Indeed, Borgmann asserts
that “poetical speech is the purest kind of deictical discourse since it is the most
adequate medium of ultimate significance.”106 His is not an uncommon sentiment.
Great poetry is language at its most hermeneutical, for truth “is always in poetic
form; not literal but symbolic.”107 Ecopsychology, in particular, must embrace the
poetic principle exactly because a gross imbalance toward the rational principle has

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 The Problem with Normal 47

been so pivotal in the historical divorce of human consciousness from nature.108

Lamenting this divorce, Calvin Martin comments that: “If anyone is going to
reinvent humanity, surely it will be the poets.”109 The problem, of course, is that
the darkness of poetic meanings often makes them inaccessible. When it comes to
deciding on official matters, moreover, it is not the poets and prophets to whom
we generally lend our ears. Gary Snyder comments, in this regard, that “poetry has
been a long and not particularly successful defending action.”110 What, then, to
do? I have myself felt sustained over the years by the rich smell of wet earth and the
generous sound of wind through trees; have experienced the natural world beyond
any doubt as the “horizon of all horizons”; and have begun a painful and rewarding
journey of recalling my own embodiment. Yet, my intention is not to write poetry.
Here, I again follow Borgmann, who positions his own work in the gap that has
opened up between art and science, calling his “para-deictic” writings a historically
necessary intermediate form of discourse.111 A paradeictic discourse uses a combi-
nation of conceptual precision and poetic sensitivity in order to draw out broader
concerns and patterns than does a more concrete deictic discourse.112 Its quality of
light is thus neither that of the scientist’s spotlight nor the artist’s studio. As a former
applied scientist on his way to becoming I’m-not-quite-sure-what, such a discourse
suits my own in-between perceptions and abilities.
In matters of ultimate concern there can be no knock-down arguments.113
The form of deictic discourse I am seeking, however, “reaches out to its listeners,
takes account of their situation, and searches out the strongest existing bonds
between the audience and the matter of concern. Thus it is most likely to create
conditions of collective assent and the basis of common action.”114 Continuing
on with what I have said above, my rhetorical strategy is to try to find the words
that may touch that part of you, the reader, that feels the same general loss that
I do. I ask that you measure my words against your own experience, seeing if they
stir anything inside you, make any sense, or speak to whatever your own version
of loss may be. Indeed, it is this very sense of loss that forms the basis for my social
criticism. Because I am talking from my own perspective, my own felt experience,
the discussions I present will not reach every reader in the same way. Nonetheless,
the human-nature relation includes all of us; I am not just talking about myself.
In other words, I am locating my inquiry within, and speaking to the life process,
which in one way or another is common to all of us. At bottom, then, my appeal
is to the reader’s sense of life itself, however she or he may uniquely sense it.

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Chapter_02.indd 48 11/8/12 11:41 PM
 Part II
NATURE AND EXPERIENCE

If, indeed, science cannot be expected to “save” nature, then it

is important to resurrect the tradition of experiencing the loss of
nature as the loss of human identity.
—Raymond Rogers

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 3
BEGINNING WITH EXPERIENCE

“Returning to Experience”1

In order to understand ourselves and heal ourselves in this age of abstract

horror, we must regain the sense of the totality and the immediacy of human
experience.
—Stanley Diamond2

On the way to becoming an ecopsychologist, my imagination was decisively

sparked by two environmental thinkers who each argue for a “return to experi-
ence”: John Livingston and Neil Evernden. Livingston, first, claims that reasoning
alone will never really serve the cause of wildlife, for those persons who would
save a wetland or defend a river are not really motivated by such reasoning. They
simply inhabit an experiential universe, a world, in which actions of this sort
make sense; they are motivated by their felt relation to things, by what they care
for, not by principles of logic. Livingston thus concludes that, at bottom, “wildlife
preservation is entirely dependent upon individual human experience.”3 Evernden
addresses the same problem, saying that for activists to adopt a technocratic lan-
guage and method is actually to betray their own cause; for it converts nature into
voiceless objects to be managed for human utility, nothing more. He urges the
environmentalist, then, not to accept “beliefs that trivialize the experience of living
and assert the reality of a valueless world,” but to “attest to his own experience of
a meaningful, valuable, colourful world.”4 Evernden and Livingston deliberately
leave their works suggestive, being openly cautious about offering any “solutions”
that would undermine their own noninstrumentalist views. I believe, however,
that their writings do point toward a particular kind of project—a project they
each repeatedly mention, but refrain from pursuing in any depth.
For Livingston, we might call this project one of “recovery.” Such would
entail a “compliant acceptance” of our human membership “in the beauty that
is life process,” as against the life-alienating tendencies of our modern culture.
51

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 52 Beginning with Experience

To illustrate what he means by this, Livingston invites the reader to take a moment
to “look at the cock pigeon strutting on the eavestrough [sic]. . . . See the bird;
really see him, and feel the urgency and the perfection and the beauty of his hot
being. . . . Know that you and he pulse as one, and that you always did.”5 For the
vast majority of modern folk, however, I suggest that such an exercise, to borrow
one of Livingston’s own phrases, is going exactly nowhere. It’s just not that easy.
Most of us simply do not have the capacity to feel what Livingston is attempting
to evoke in us. And the reason we do not is contained in the very notion of
“recovery.” To recover a sense of unity with all life is to also recover from the
trauma of having been so utterly divorced from it. I thus contend that what Liv-
ingston’s work essentially invites is the development of a more concretely detailed
understanding of the nature of this trauma and of the specific processes necessary
for some sort of genuine recovery.
We might, in similar fashion, call Evernden’s project “listening for a new
story.” Evernden describes humans as “natural aliens” in that as a species we are
born into the natural world problematically, as a kind of niche-less exotic that
must always mediate a relationship to nature through culture, must adopt some
story about how we fit into the scheme of things. Because our current story dic-
tates that we ravage the planet like some global locust, his hope lies with the
possibility of choosing a new cultural self-interpretation, one in which we might
recognize the natural world as a community of fellow subjects rather than a col-
lection of meaningless objects to be humanly exploited. In order to facilitate the
arrival of a new story, Evernden counsels a surrender of common sense, a let-
ting go of existing categories, so that we may recover a sense of wonder, experi-
ence the world afresh, and so hear the notes of a new song, should one be in the
offing. As with Livingston, however, I believe there is more to consider here than
Evernden allows. While I certainly agree that the place of humans in the natural
world is a troublesome question, it is also important to recognize that our current
state of extreme alienation is “achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated
by human beings on human beings.”6 Indeed, our current story is so thoroughly
geared against the life process that stepping away from it will require a great deal
of social struggle and healing along the way.
What is common to these two projects is their orientation toward some
kind of experiential renewal. Both prescribe a suspension of the belief system of
our culture in order to allow for a more direct contact with wild others and so
for a more authentic self-understanding and cultural script to emerge. What they
both lack, moreover, is any kind of practical or detailed insight as to just what
this might involve. It is perhaps unfair to expect of these two thinkers something
that neither professes to offer. However, without an understanding of the violence
inherent in our present manner of existing and of the nitty-gritty of recovery
work, that is, without taking a closer look at what is presently going on with our
experiencing, the kind of renewal they propose can only remain an idea. It is this

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 Beginning with Experience 53

“closer look” that I want to start undertaking in the next four chapters. Need
it be said, my intention in doing so is to honour the efforts of Livingston and
Evernden—for we most respect other people’s work when we try to pick up some
of its strands and weave them a little further. My work has effectively become a
response to theirs, a conversation with theirs. I like to frame it as such, in any case,
as a strategy for bringing some focus to my own critical and recollective project.

Talking About Experience

The concept of experience seems to me one of the most obscure we have.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer7

The purpose of this section is to lay down some concepts, introduce some notions,
that will get us on better speaking terms about “experience.” It is an endless topic.
In what follows, I have therefore restricted myself to four subject areas, all of
which will figure prominently in the remaining chapters: the primacy of experi-
ence or felt meaning in human existence; the embodied nature of our experiencing;
the power of a relational or interactive framework (so different from the individu-
alistic and dualistic framework of our Western tradition) to open up satisfying
new avenues of understanding; and the suffering we experience when our human
nature is violated. Each of these, in turn, have an important connection to the
life process, which for this chapter is my bridge into ecopsychology. The section
roughly progresses in order through these four areas, building on earlier terms as
it goes, and always aiming to bring along the reader’s own experience.

Experience Comes First

Somehow, the individual’s “own” experience . . . must become a trustworthy

ground. . . . if we do not have any faith in the truthfulness of the individual’s
experience, then we have succumbed to the self-destructiveness of nihilism.
—David Levin8

Beginning with experience is what existentialists do. Not just those French
ones who feel that human existence is absurd and nauseating but, more broadly,9
anyone who feels that, as Wilhem Dilthey put it: “Life cannot be brought before
the bar of reason.” To get close to the things that matter we have no recourse but
to our bodily experience. The philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin
writes:

Within experiencing lie the mysteries of all that we are. For the sake of our
experiential sense of what we observe, we react as we do. From out of it we create

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 54 Beginning with Experience

what we create. And, because of its puzzles, and for the desperation of some of
its puzzles, we overthrow good sense, obviousness, and reality, if need be.10

I consider this statement to be a kind of experientialist’s equivalent to the Freudian

dictum that human behavior has unconscious motivations. Whether scientist or
poet, we all move through life on the basis of meanings that are implicit in our
experience; and yet very little of these are ever consciously known to us, even as
they color our world and direct our actions. The Western tradition has proceeded
to ignore all this and to instead make human existence walk “on its head.”11
To make the mysterious reality we actually live the primary ground is thus the
first step in adopting an experiential approach. We can (as others have noted)
attempt to explain our psychology in terms of our biology, our biology in terms
of impersonal chemistry and physics, and these in terms of quantum mechanics,
but abstract theories about subatomic whirly-gigs do not really help us much
when it comes to choosing our lives, making sense of our deaths, understanding
our fears and desires, or bearing our suffering, all of which are irreducible,
experiential tasks.12
What makes the deliberate adoption of an experiential approach necessary
is that our age has so marginalized and mystified our experience. As Gendlin
remarks, “Nothing is as debilitating as a confused and distant functioning of
experiencing. And the chief malaise of our society is perhaps that it allows so
little pause and gives so little specifying response and interpersonal communion
to our experiencing.”13 This malaise has everything to do with the entire tradition
surrounding the division of the world into subjective experience and objective
reality. To confine truth to the latter is to trivialize and derealize the former, is to
“dissolve it into nothingness.”14 Thus, the success of science has brought about
the surrender of our own experience, including the claims it makes on the “outer”
world. This has also given rise to the “expert,” whose authority has replaced the
wisdom of our own feeling process. When Theodore Roszak dreams of a body
of expert ecopsychologists who could bring “the full weight of professional
­psychological authority” to the assertion “that people are bonded emotionally to
the Earth,”15 I believe, therefore, that he is playing an old game. The same goes
for his remark: “If human conduct were governed by reason alone, what science
has taught us about the great ecological patterns and cycles of the planet might
be enough to reform our bad environmental habits.”16 Reason alone, as Max
Horkheimer once observed, attaches little importance to whether the purposes to
which it is put “are themselves reasonable.”17 It only wants to serve some master
in efficiently achieving some given ends; beyond that it is rudderless. Reforming
“bad environmental habits,” putting a man on the moon, or producing nerve gas
are all the same to it. What is lacking in our response to the ecological crisis, then,
is not expert advice. In 1973 Paul Shepard wrote that: “Sufficient ecological data
to guide the redirection of society toward environmental harmony has existed

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 Beginning with Experience 55

for more than thirty years.”18 A quarter of a century later what is still apparently
missing is not the scientific data, but the existential sensitivity, the felt orienta-
tion.19 A story from my own life may help to make this point.
When I was a child I had a compelling love affair with all things rocky: bedrock
outcroppings, cliffs, mountains, sandy beaches, stones. I would sit for great lengths of
time among limestone boulders on the shores of the Bruce Peninsula, just sensing their
timeless presence, their heavy being. As a student geologist later in life, I undertook a
research project on what is known as the “Kingston limestone,” a lovely rock with a
warm glow. From a local quarry I obtained a section of rock core and then diamond-
sawed it into cylinders two inches in diameter and five inches tall. These were placed
one at a time between the plattons of a servo control compression testing machine,
and then slowly squeezed to the breaking point, so as to measure their strength. As I
watched that rock crumble, I felt a voice inside me scream; yet the mood of the labora-
tory overrode it. It was not until some time later that I let myself feel the shame for
what I had done.
Ecopsychology, as I discuss throughout, is fundamentally a response to vio-
lence (for to violate something is precisely to insult its nature). From this view, the
goal of the ecopsychologist is to work toward the recovery of our ability to perceive
and answer back to this violence, and to engage in nonviolent modes of relating.
The story I just told was meant, in this respect, to illustrate the principle that vio-
lence “cannot be seen through the sights of positivism.”20 (“The objects weep, but
the researcher sees no tears.”)21 Despite my repeated criticisms, I mean no disre-
spect to modern scientists. In a scientific age, we are all more or less naive positiv-
ists. What is so transgressive about smashing rock samples, anyway? What matters
to me is that in order to participate in the rock-breaking incident I had to deflect
my own felt recognition of violence. The promise of an experiential approach for
ecopsychology is that it may give such feelings a place, accord them their proper
truth and weight. While a psychology based on the model of externalized nature
aims to produce positive knowledge, a psychology based on relationships has no
choice but to be experiential. For the “data” of relationships are the feelings, reali-
ties, or meanings born of interaction. That is, an interactional perspective resig-
nifies experience; it brings—to use the familiar terms—objectivity to the subject
and subjectivity to the object. Thus, to study the human-nature relationship is to
pursue the essence of experience itself. While, conversely, to revivify our experi-
ence is to find nature at its heart.

Experiencing: Interaction Between Bodily Felt Meaning and Symbols22

Experiencing is essentially an interaction between feelings and “symbols”

(attention, words, events), just as body life is an interaction between body
and environment.
—Eugene Gendlin23

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 56 Beginning with Experience

Any explication of the process of experiencing will reflect the degree of the
author’s own awareness and understanding, and is best be read in that light. I
think it is helpful, for instance, to say that Cartesian dualism truly describes only
self-estranged, disembodied, narcissistic experience; and that with a deepening
of experience, mind, body, and world increasingly unify. My tutors in the deep-
ening of my own experience have been humanistic psychologists, existential-­
phenomenological and hermeneutic thinkers, and Gautama the Buddha. In what
follows, my aim is to introduce some general concepts that come from the tradi-
tions of these teachers (leaving Buddhism mostly for the next chapter), so that we
may get an initial sense of what is meant by the notion of “experiencing.”
An experiential approach is one that takes “experience” as its root metaphor
or main guide. The basic scheme I use for describing the process of experiencing
comes from Gendlin. In its simplest formulation, experiencing is the interaction
between feelings and symbols. To understand this better we need to say more about
“feelings,” “symbols,” and the nature of their interaction. Before doing that, how-
ever, I must make two notes about word usage. First, experiencing carries a double
meaning, referring both to the flow of feelings which interacts with symbols and
to this process of interaction itself. Given the internal relationship between feel-
ings and symbols, however, this ambiguity is fitting, and in my experience causes
no confusion. Second, although generally referred to as a noun—as experience—
the phenomenon of experiencing is a process, and so needs to be heard as a verb—
as in What are you experiencing?
Any piece of experiencing, then, whatever it might be, will always have two
basic aspects or orders. The symbol is the direct form of the experience. It is some
figure of awareness: a thought, a behavior, a sight or sound, an emotion (which, as
I clarify below, is not the same as a feeling), an image, a rite, an event, some words.
The feeling is the ongoing, concrete, underlying “inward sentience” or bodily sen-
sitivity that accompanies and interacts with these symbols: the felt background
that lends meaning or sense to the figure. Because they comprise the sense we
bodily-have in relation to any content we may be experiencing, feelings are also
called felt meaning. As Gendlin says, without having a “feel” for a concept it is only
some verbal noise, lacking in meaning; it is in the dimension of feeling that the
meaning of the concept is experienced. Note that felt meaning is explicitly known
only when given some symbolic form that houses and so completes the meaning.
From the reverse direction, note also that felt meaning is “called forth” when we
interact with something whose symbolic character arouses in us a feeling. Symbols
and feelings are thus mutually formative or determining: the traffic between them
moves in both directions. The difference between feelings and symbols is most
noticeable, perhaps, when we have a feeling but can find no words to express it.
We must then stay with the feeling and wait for the right word-symbols to come.
Or we may say something, but not mean it. Here, we have some word-symbols,
but they are hollow because lacking in feeling—which we must then sense if we

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 Beginning with Experience 57

are to speak more authentically. It is, then, the interaction between these two basic
orders that makes up experiencing. While not all of these terms may be clear at
this stage, I do want the reader to eventually develop a good feel for them, to get
a solid experiential sense for what these word-symbols mean. The descriptions and
examples I offer in this section, along with a couple of exercises, are intended to
help with that process. For now, I wish to make a number of points only toward
some initial clarification.
“Feeling is the very state . . . in which our being human hovers.”24 This
remark of Heidegger’s makes my first point. An experiential approach does not
advocate swimming around in emotions and eschewing all intellection. It instead
acknowledges that there is a felt or experiential dimension to everything; that
the world is intelligible only on account of the feeling tone that pervades, usu-
ally unnoticed, all our thinking, speaking, and doing (including our emoting).
Thinking does not therefore escape feeling, but is rather “the process of succes-
sively ‘selecting’ symbols for present felt meaning, finding that the symbols ‘call
forth’ more meaning than one anticipated, then ‘selecting’ more symbols from
some of this excess.”25 Feelings are our bodily grasping of all that is nonfocal at the
moment; they are our sensing, all at once, the many background meanings that are
in play or relevant to us in any given situation. Feelings are thus more diffuse or
fuzzy than emotions, less distinct or clear, because they contain all of these mean-
ings as a prereflective mass. It is, however, exactly because feeling is a constant and
pervasive factor in human existence that Heidegger called it the “basic mode” of
human being. When asked what I am experiencing, or how I am, or what I mean,
I turn to my feelings. They are the primary way I know, and may hermeneutically
inquire into, my own being-in-the-world. (A brief aside: while the question always
looms about the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his unsavory poli-
tics, I have chosen to selectively employ his thinking throughout this book.)26
My second point of clarification is that the term symbol is meant here in a
wide sense. We are used to thinking of symbols as a special class of entities, such as
those we find in churches or dreams. By saying in the previous chapter, however,
that all of reality is symbolic I was using the word symbol in a wider-than-normal
sense. Symbol is a compound of two Greek words, “sum-ballein,” which may be
translated as “to draw or throw together.” In other words, a symbol gathers, brings
together, or calls forth a confluence of meanings that are felt when we interact
with it. The richest symbols are those with great disclosive power. It is the case,
though, that anything we meaningfully encounter may be thought of as a symbol.
In other words, whatever we experience—a dinner party, a bird in the forest,
a fantasy, a summer breeze—symbolizes that experience immediately.27 We may
then find further ways to symbolize the experience, to bring out some more of its
hidden meaning—perhaps by doing a dance about the breeze. Or we may find no
more symbols for the experience at all. Much “nature experience” is like this; we
feel much meaning in our contact with a landscape, but are at a loss for words to

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 58 Beginning with Experience

describe it. The experience is ineffable, but the landscape symbolized it right on
the spot. Similarly, ordinary sense perception involves what Gendlin calls “recog-
nition feelings.” I see something familiar, say a table, and understand what it is
without having to think about it as such. Or as you gesture at me I pick up your
meaning; not through some intellectual analogy, but directly, because I am myself
a gesturing body that resonates to your actions, feels their meaning. All learning
is to an extent like this, wherein we “get” some meaning. (This comes out in the
word comprehend, the Latin prehendere meaning “seize” or “take hold.”) Learning
a new word, for example, is a matter of grasping how it is used, “much as one
imitates a gesture.”28 All of which is to say that the world we experience is always
already symbolically meaningful to us, most of the time.
My third point, finally, concerns the figure/ground structure of experi-
encing. Cézanne tells a story about wanting to paint a still life he found described
in a book. The setting includes bread rolls that appear to “crown” the napkins on
which they are sitting. Cézanne remarks, though, that it is impossible to paint
“crowned.” He must faithfully paint only the tangible details of the napkins and
rolls, and then wait for the intangible “crowned” quality to shine through the dabs
of paint.29 This illustrates the principle that, as Merleau-Ponty put it: “Meaning
is invisible.”30 The visible is “pregnant” with the invisible; while the invisible is
the “secret counterpart” of the visible, is its “inner framework”—or as we said in
chapter one, its soul. The meaning we experience is not itself tangible, but must
be symbolically mediated. The symbol is the line in the drawing, the voice in the
singing, the image in the dreaming. The sense these have, by contrast, “is always a
production of absent things.”31 In other words, what is tangibly present is always
pervaded by what is absent, by an intangible atmosphere we implicitly feel. (Intui-
tions come exactly from having a sense for this felt absence.) Or in our earlier
terms, the meaning of the figure, our interpretation of it, is itself mediated by
the felt ground. This figure/ground (theme/horizon, explicit/implicit, focus/field)
relationship is the basic structure of experience. I stress the importance of this
relation especially because, as I discuss next, the body is itself a kind of ground.

The Bodily Ground of Experience

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why
they exist . . . they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their
senses, their dreams.
—John (Fire) Lame Deer32

We have access to nature, said Merleau-Ponty, through that “vital relation” we

have “with a privileged part of nature: namely, our body.”33 Our divorce from
nature, whatever else it may involve, has surely been a progressive cutting of this
vital relation. Any hermeneutical effort to overcome our alienation must therefore

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 Beginning with Experience 59

also be a retrieval of our embodiment. This comes as no surprise, for the somato-
phobia of the Western tradition is a matter of historical record and present-day
experience. My own first deliberate efforts to become more inwardly aware of my
body were like trying to force a large balloon under the surface of a lake. Toward
the end of this section I will discuss some of the social factors that motivates us
to take such fearful flight from our bodies, so that we might better understand
this most central of issues for ecopsychology. For the discussion here, however, my
focus is principally on a positive reappraisal of the being of the body, specifically
on how it orders (organizes, commands) our experience, and on the intimate, felt
relationship that exists between body and world.
Historical prejudices against the body are by now well-known. Nietzsche
wrote of how Western thinkers before him “despised the body: they left it out
of the account: more, they treated it as an enemy.”34 Plato dumped the body for
suprasensuous Ideas. Later, the erotic body was seen as the Devil itself, the very
site of corruption. During the witch trials, the witch “had her sensualism burned
out of her.”35 The body, in general, was resented and feared because it linked us to
a fallen, beastly nature; imprisoned us in flesh. The Cartesian mechanizing of the
body and disembodying of the soul can in retrospect be understood as an attempt
to resolve this terrible dilemma. Today, the dominant model of the body is still
a scientific one: a physiological system with no significant relations to the world;
a material container for the mind (the latter of which can potentially be made
immortal, some claim, by being “downloaded” into machines);36 a corpse even.37
The history of our abandonment of the body has perhaps reached its extreme
in the appearance of what Robert Romanyshyn describes, in a frankly upsetting
essay, as two complementary bodies: that of the astronaut, the “masculine spirit
taking leave of a despoiled earth,” and that of the anorexic, “the dying, starving
body, the discarded feminine, left behind.”38
From out of this disturbing history our task is to reclaim a body that walks
on, and is nourished by, the living earth. Given that we are making of this a
psychological exercise, it makes sense to begin with Freud. The part of our per-
sonality that corresponds to nature Freud called the “id” (better translated from
the German “es” as “it”). Of the id, he wrote: “we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of
seething excitations. . . . It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it
has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about
the satisfaction of instinctual needs.”39 Freud thus feared that unless we repress
our instinctual id-body it will, as Alan Watts wryly put it, “turn out to be a wild
animal rutting and snarling in the squalor of its own excrement.”40 Civilization
may be a mess, but without it what “would then remain would be a state of nature,
and that would be far harder to bear.”41 Freud’s opinion is consistent with a long
tradition that equates our nature with irrational tendencies that must be either
controlled or broken.42 Indeed, by the time of the Age of Reason it was our very
animality that was considered to be at the root of madness; the insane person was

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 60 Beginning with Experience

robbed of humanity and thereby returned to a chaotic, autistic, animal state, the
“zero degree of his own nature.”43
A model of nature that identifies it with madness obviously makes a poor,
if not ironic, starting place for ecopsychology. Indeed, a great deal turns on this
point. For if our nature is chaotic then our experience has no intrinsic order. The
id, said Freud, is asocial.44 The part of us that deals with reality, the ego, is thus
wholly a product of whatever order a society imposes on top of, or molds out of,
our unruly id-nature. The assumption here, that the precivil body has no organiza-
tion of its own, that rational order must be pressed on it, is however a bias that not
all accept.45 Specifically, I believe that a better interpretation of human nature—
one more phenomenologically true—is to be found within the general camp of
humanistic psychology. What Freud did not recognize, humanistic psychologists
say, is the ongoing creativity of the human organism, its inherent wisdom, its
holistic knowing, its self-organization. This organism, then, is not to be confused
with the literal, material body of natural science, nor the Freudian body of chaotic
drives, but understood as an intelligent body which has a precisely attuned inten-
tional relationship with the “external” world, as we experience it from within.
That the body is self-organizing is obvious in the experience of hunger. For
hunger is the physical implying of feeding; it is a feeling that points to, intends,
calls for, or means eating. Eating, in turn, symbolizes and resolves the hunger.
Similarly, when feeling dull-headed in a stuffy room our bodies are telling us to go
outside for some air. Such cases of meaningful somatic direction, although quite
simple, are no different in principle from instances of more complex living. In
general, that is, our bodies are always sensing our whole life-situation and urging
us toward the next action that will, as Gendlin phrases it, carry our lives forward.
Every feeling is a holistic implying, a steering of our lives in some direction, a stir-
ring of the life force toward the unfolding of our existence, often in unpredictable
ways. The body is thus more truly a finely ordered living responsiveness, always
seeking some sort of symbolic completion for its needs or intentions, whether
the “hunger” be physical, social, emotional, developmental, intellectual, sexual,
spiritual, aesthetic, or whatever.
Gendlin has developed an experiential practice called “focusing” which
works with this natural ordering or demanding of the body, and illustrates it well.
(I should add, however, that it is only one possible mode of experiencing or felt
interacting—an inward directed conversation with “ourselves” that Gendlin calls
“self-responding.”) In the process of “focusing,” we turn our attention to our
bodies in order to get a single, diffuse feel for the whole mass of meanings that
are implicitly functioning in relation to some situation in our lives, the ground
of our experience. By attending to this feeling, by listening for the direction that
is coming from our bodies, we may then come to live more awarely. As Gendlin
says: “Your body enacts your situations and constitutes them largely before you
can think how. When your attention joins this living, you can pursue many more

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possibilities and choices than when you merely drive your body as if it were a
machine like the car.”46 I invite you, the reader, to now let me lead you through
an exercise in such “joining” with your own bodily living.47
In one sense, there is nothing special about focusing. It is simply a more delib-
erate way of letting our bodies guide us than is our normal custom. On the other hand,
most people are so unused to working in this way that it can be difficult, strange, or
even scary at first. To learn focusing, therefore, people generally need to have someone
teach it to them over a number of get togethers. (It is the more rare, bodily attuned
person who catches on straightaway, already being a “natural” focuser.) With these
comments in mind, the point of the following exercise is not so much to teach you to
focus, but only to give you a rudimentary sense of what it involves. I suggest you under-
take it only if, after having read through the instructions, it feels right to do so. If you
do not feel comfortable about doing the exercise, however, you might choose to notice
what that feeling is like.
The first part of the exercise is only to explicitly experience a “felt sense” or
feeling. Focusing works best if you are relaxed and undistracted, yet not so relaxed that
you cannot sense your physical body. Begin by bringing your attention into the center of
your body, to the zone that includes your throat, chest, stomach, and abdomen, Just pay
attention, in a curious way, to whatever you notice there: your breathing, some tense
spots, a warm sensation, whatever. A felt sense is a murky, unclear, subtle feeling about
some aspect of your life that forms in this sensitive zone of your body. It is physically
felt, but is also more than just a sensation, being meaningful in some way. You may in
fact already have a felt sense about something going on in your life: some quarrel with a
friend, event you are planning, issue you are concerned about. Or, as is not uncommon,
you may not feel much at all.
As a way to now deliberately engender a specific felt sense, pick two people in
your life, one of whom you get along with well, the other not so well. With your atten-
tion still in your body, imagine that the second person enters the room—and notice any
felt difference this makes. You might now feel some “butterflies” in your belly or tension
in your throat. Whatever your response, stay with the implicitly complex, globally felt
quality this person calls forth in your body: this is your experiencing of the person, your
feeling of what she or he means to you. Now imagine this person leaving; notice again
whether this brings any change in your body; and then bring the other person into the
room. How does this person feel to you? You may sense some easing of tension; some
warm, happy feelings perhaps. Again, the exercise is only to notice your experience—
what you feel in this interaction.
Once you have a hold on a felt sense, the process of focusing involves “sitting”
with this feeling. When making direct reference to a felt sense we are sensing much
more than what we already consciously know: those innumerable facets of background
meaning we have yet to put into words or move into some other kind of symbolization.
For either of the two people you chose to get a sense of, then, you might inquire into this
deeper knowing. Open ended questions are best. What is this feeling all about? What

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 62 Beginning with Experience

is so terrible/wonderful about this person? What does this feeling need from me? What
action would help it? The important thing is that you direct these questions toward,
and let any answers come from, the bodily felt sense, not your head. You may suddenly
realize who the person reminds you of, or what you appreciate about her or him, or
what you need to say to her or him. Such moments of awareness are signaled by a felt
shift in the body, a relaxing or resolving of the feeling, which signals a disclosure of
meaning, a moment of forward living. These shifts are the body’s way of saying “Yes,
that feels right’’ to whatever came. You may not have experienced such a shift here—
which because I am talking to you from this page and not in person is even more likely
than is usually the case. You may, however, be able to recall a time when some insight
just “came” to you that felt right—which is the same thing.
Following this excursion into the felt body, I wish to touch on several points
that the practice of focusing brings out.
First of all, many people are surprised to discover on learning to focus that
their feelings are so intricate, that they mean something, that their bodies are
ordered to spontaneously carry their lives forward (as just described in the above
exercise). Focusing is a deliberate way of “dipping down” into that bodily felt place
whence life-forwarding steps of change may come, where our organismic wisdom
resides. Even without being a “focuser,” however, most people can recall being in
some situation that “just didn’t feel right,” or by contrast that “just felt right.” This
feeling of rightness is an important touchstone for anyone who works experien-
tially. As Gendlin notes: “Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right
way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness. The very existence
of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and
what is right.”48 Hence: “The life process in us has its own direction and this is not
relative.”49 In other words, the life process has a certain autonomy.
We cannot impose whatever meaning we like on our experience, some story
we want to have as our own, for then we could be just whatever we choose. This is
why being authentic, being what we are, is not simply a matter of nonconformity,
but also of bringing ourselves before our experience and pursuing only those
­possibilities that arise from this felt starting place, the ones that are genuinely
“ours.” Similarly, we do not become free of our life difficulties by wishing them
away, but often must complete very precise, sensitive, and difficult experiential
steps that satisfy what our bodies are calling for. The felt sense, in other words,
adjudicates our responses to it. Feelings cannot be fooled or bypassed; they shift
only when rightly symbolized. When an expression is on the tip of our tongue,
our felt sense will keep rejecting the phrases we “try on” until the right words at
last appear and bring us that wonderful sigh of relief or outflow of energy. This
example also shows that our bodies understand language. While language use is
in important respects different from a behavior such as eating, it is also the same
inasmuch as they both carry life forward. Thus, the conversation or book that is
boring or senseless is the one that does nothing for our lives. By contrast, when

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 Beginning with Experience 63

a person says something that is deeply meaningful or relevant to us, it touches us

right at the center of our living or opens up some sense that helps move our lives
along. Or as Susan Griffin observes, “when a lie is told the body is cast into a state
of profound disturbance.”50 Language, then, is of the order of experiencing, and
not simply a stamp on it.51
The commitment I am introducing here—to the notion that all meaning is
grounded in the life process and that we feel in our bodies what is for or against
this process—is not currently in favor. The ruling assumption is “that there is no
nature, no human nature, no truth, and no rightness, other than whatever variant
has been programmed into us by culture.”52 Hence, relativism53 is widespread in
academia, as well as in much of our postmodern culture. Relativists must assume,
tacitly or otherwise, that human life has no significant organic basis, that nature
makes no felt claims on us. If we have no nature, no organic ties, then the meaning
of life is arbitrary, which is to say that it has no meaning at all (the nihilistic view).
Just so, the “postmodern body” has been described as a “de-natured” body or a
“dis-embodied” body.54 To the extent that postmodernists “resist incarnation,”
however, they are still very much in line with modern thought. They continue
to side against nature, in favor of a free-floating language and all-ruling culture;
they still seek “to obtain release from the world by transforming it and themselves
into a text.”55 Many recent thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, view the body
simply as a surface on which history imprints itself, a docile receptacle or mate-
rial substratum on which political power is inscribed. Thus, in the terms I have
introduced here, what these thinkers assume is that our experiencing is wholly
determined by the symbolic order, which is itself limited to cultural-historical-
linguistic forms. What they do not recognize is an organic, bodily felt, responding
moment within this experiencing. In other words, they do not allow for how sym-
bolic forms and experiencing interact in a life process. One of the consequences
of this is a tendency to locate meaning only in language, rather than in a broader
process of bodily living-in-the-world that includes language. Or it leads to the
deconstructionist conclusion that even language does not ultimately refer to any-
thing, that it only consists of formal distinctions that always break down under
scrutiny, that all meaning is merely an “effect” issuing from the play of signifiers.56
While the life process never stops making its demands, the shape our expe-
riencing actually takes obviously does have much to do with the specific social
practices and cultural forms—ideological, philosophical, religious, aesthetic,
scientific, historical, linguistic—that wind up “occurring into” these demands.
Our feelings, to be sure, are “always already culturally patterned.”57 In opposing
relativism, I am not therefore making an appeal for some “pure” realm of experi-
encing entirely unaffected by the symbol systems we publicly share. As Gendlin
remarks, “experience is always organized by the evolutionary history of the body,
and also by culture and situations partly organized by language.”58 There are many
experiences that are obviously nonlinguistic (at least in a narrowly verbal sense),

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 64 Beginning with Experience

such as meeting the eyes of a raccoon. It does not follow, however, that language
is not implicit in these experiences. For no matter the situation, we simply could
not understand the world as we do without all those background meanings that
have been formed in words. I have come to make sense of the world through a
history with language that leads all the way up to that wild encounter with the
raccoon. On the other hand, our experience is also thicker, more “intricate,” than
any words, concepts, theories, or existing forms; these do not, in other words,
wholly encompass our experience.59 With the raccoon, I am drawn into a unique
event of contact. The meaning disclosed in that moment is not only a matter of
prior social learning, but also of how available I am to the claim of the raccoon’s
otherness. The raccoon, too, is a symbol or form capable of stirring up feelings in
me—as am I for her or him.
I am dwelling on the topic of language because it is so crucial for ecopsy-
chology. Without an extralinguistic space within our experiencing, without an
opening beyond our previous symbolizations, the meanings we find in relation
to nature can never be other than what our existing language-forms already say.
When a person like John Livingston remarks that his feelings “cannot be force-
fitted into convenient categories of common . . . experience,”60 he is communi-
cating that he feels something more or other than what these existing categories
mean, even if a better language has yet to arrive. The latter may well come, how-
ever, if we are able to locate what Merleau-Ponty referred to as that “primordial
silence” or “mute presence” which exists “beneath the chatter of words”61—the
Gendlin-ian bodily felt sense from which original intentions and creative expres-
sions arise. Conversely, to “tell people that any saying must inevitably fail, that it
cannot help but fall into the old dead forms, is just another mode of silencing that
[which] in them . . . needs to speak.”62
A final point that the practice of focusing demonstrates is the unity of
body and world. “In the body,” says Hans Jonas, “the knot of being is tied which
dualism does not unravel but cut[s].”63 The body is the site of intersection of
inside and outside, self and world; it belongs to both realms and mediates their
relations. As I noted above, the felt sense has “a life of its own.” It is precisely
via our bodies’ implicit dialogue with the world, gathered in the felt sense, that
we feel the quality of our relationships with others, orient ourselves, and take
the actions we do. We sense our situations, say a social function, as a global
flavor, texture, energy, or mood. This felt sense is our tacit bodily grasp of what
is going on, what is relevant, what might happen, and so on. Most of the time
we just have our feelings “in-action” as they implicitly govern our lives, without
paying much attention to them. If I walk into a room and my stomach lurches,
however, I must consult my bodily felt sense if I am ever to discover what I am
so scared about and what course of action might be the right one. Without
doing so, I will just cringe in the corner, unaware of what the situation really
means to me.

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 Beginning with Experience 65

Whether I focus this feeling or not, it is not just an inner event, but a pre-
reflective sensing of my whole “outer” situation as I feel it from the “inside.” The
felt sense is thus a bodily knowing of how I am in-the-world that is prior to any
cleavage between inside and out (which are only metaphors for zones of aware-
ness or aspects of reality).64 In the language of Gestalt therapy, our “feelings are
not isolated impulses but structured evidence of reality, namely of the interaction
of the organism/environment field, for which there is no other direct evidence
except feeling.”65 Recall from chapter one that it is of our cultural pathology to
interiorize experience. The idea of an “organism/environment field” is meant to
suggest instead the intimacy or inseparability of the body-world relation—as in
the inhaling and exhaling of air. Our bodily felt intentions (as Merleau-Ponty
wrote) are the threads that connect us to the world. Assigning intentionality to the
body itself thus incarnates and enworlds the mind, so that it is no longer tucked
away up in the skull.66 Hence, body and world are originally together, and are only
isolated—turned into cadaver and object—in an act of reflective abstraction. As
we live them, in short, what differentiates body and world “is not a frontier, but
a contact surface.”67

Contact: The Process of Interacting

As human beings, our primarily dwelling is “outside” in the space of action

constituted by relations to things, plants, animals, other human beings,
ourselves, to heaven or earth in their totality.
—Medard Boss68

The unfolding of our lives is not just the flowering of some inner potential—as if
the only role of the outer world were to water our seed—but a process of interact-
ing with others in which we seek the best fit we can between our bodily intentions,
needs, or desires and what our environments have to offer. As Medard Boss
remarks, we are “at any given time nothing but in and as this or that perceiving,
instinctual, impulsive, emotional, imaginative, dreaming, thinking, acting, will-
ing, or wishing relationship toward the things which [we] encounter.”69 In my
relationships with others I invent and discover the meanings by which I both
grow and adjust to the world in which I find myself. Aside from this interacting,
there is no “me.” Contact, then, denotes the activity of ex-change, transaction,
meeting, fusion-across-difference, transmission, encounter, or engagement with
the world—without which no life or experiencing would be possible.
Contact is the opposite of in-difference. It is our being changed by inter-
acting with that which is different. The word “contact” therefore applies princi-
pally to those events in which we come in touch with the world and acquire a new
meaning—when the ground of our existence is altered (if only a little). We may be
affected by others on an implicit level, but only when we symbolize how we have

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 66 Beginning with Experience

been touched—perhaps by realizing years later how somebody cared for us, and
how much that meant to us—do we make explicit contact with this touch. Reality
is most fully given or revealed under ongoing conditions of good, organismically
satisfying contact; while we suffer a diminished and decaying reality under condi-
tions of weakened or distorted contact. Contact is itself one of the great mysteries
of the universe, as the variety of metaphors used to describe it suggests. In what
follows, I discuss a number of these metaphors, each of which has its own merits
and limitations.
The first metaphor is that of dialogue (conversation, verbal interaction). This
metaphor acknowledges the power of language (even if, primordially considered,
not all language need be verbal); it indicates the very real importance of having an
expressive “voice” for the making of contact. It also suggests the back-and-forth or
dialectical motion wherein we feel our impact on one another as we are “played”
by the subject matter of our dialogue. Dialogue does not, however, consist only of
words bumping into each other. Good contact insists that my words be truthful.
For example, when I recently told my wife, Jill, that “our marriage bond feels a bit
wobbly of late,” it named something we had both been sensing and opened up an
exchange of feelings which then deepened our bond. My bodily felt sense implied
some sort of contact, the saying of some words that belonged to the situation we
shared, that would restructure or carry forward our lives together. Where life lacks
contactful communication such as this it becomes overly routine, dull, and thin.
The second metaphor for contact is that of touching. Indeed, tactility inheres
in the very word con-tact: touching together, touch-touching. We talk of “being
touched” by someone or “getting in touch” with some part of ourselves. A pure,
disembodied consciousness could never experience anything because it is not
capable of touching and being touched, has no flesh. Contacting always occurs at
a boundary, in this metaphor the skin surface. Our skin, as Gestaltists observe, is
less a part of ourselves than it is an “organ” of the relationship between organism
and environment, delimiting (containing and protecting) the former and joining
it to the latter.70 It binds the organism both from and to the environment. Touch
is the paradigm for contact because it is a “close” sense, as opposed to “distant”
ones such as seeing or hearing, which more easily become bodiless or remote. In
the act of being touched we are vulnerable. As a metaphor for contact, touching
thus suggests the danger or peril that resides in the middle of ex-per-ience.71 Every
contacting is to some extent a risk, for it involves being changed and its outcome
is never quite certain. We are, accordingly, always balancing the need to grow and
change with the need to resist the intentions of others and maintain or conserve
our existing ground. In a hostile or unnourishing situation, the latter need takes
precedence; whereas in a friendly and giving one it is the former. I discuss this
topic below, so will only note here a major psychological issue of our time: that
for many people today the peril of contact feels too great, the fear of touching one

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 Beginning with Experience 67

another too large, for them to take “the reasonable risks which are part and parcel
of growing and living.”72
Eating metaphors, next, pervade discussions of experience. Hunger, appetite,
tasting, chewing, swallowing, vomiting, digesting, assimilating, ­eliminating—all
apply to how we relate to the “material” or “food” of our experience. We speak of
“soul food” and “toxic” experiences. The cyclical nature of hunger/eating makes it
a good model for the whole organismic rhythm of experiencing, as will come out
in the discussion of the final metaphor below, that is, a cycle or wave. Here I want
to focus on how the eating metaphor is a particularly apt one for ecopsychology—
for it connects experience to food: to plants and animals. As Paul Shepard remarks:
“Being human has always meant perceiving ourselves in a circle of animals. The
crucial event in this encounter has been ingestion. We have attended passionately
to this consuming force until the idea of assimilation has permeated the nature
of experience itself.”73 Gordon Wheeler criticizes the food metaphor—at least as
it was developed by the founder of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls—arguing that it
turns others into mere objects of oral aggression.74 I think it better, however, to
recognize that if we are to live, we have no choice but to eat others. As Perls himself
noted, it “is as impossible to feed off oneself psychologically as it is to feed off one-
self physically.”75 The real issue, then, is what kind of attitude we take toward our
food. A Cheyenne Indian saying—“let us all be meat, to nourish one another, that
we may grow”76—indicates how, rather than seeing the world only in its object-
being, it is possible to see the animals and plants we put on our table as kin, and to
therefore adopt a fiercely moral, celebratory, and nonviolent attitude toward our
food.77 With factory farms, supermarkets, and fast food, there is of course little of
this left, and it becomes progressively harder to sense that eating might be a form
of nature communion.
A last group of metaphors—a cycle, wave, or behavioral sequence—­
characterizes the whole process by which an experience begins in a feeling, excit-
edly builds toward symbolic completion or resolution, and dissolves back into the
ground of our ongoing experiencing. In addition to hunger, the sexual cycle is
often used as a model for this, illustrating as it does how an experience moves from
an awareness of felt need through the orderly stages of rising excitement, taking
action to satisfy or extinguish the need (orgasm), and integrating and withdrawing
from the experience. Each such experiential cycle, passing through a sequence
of phases or behaviors in self-organizing waves, forms an experiential whole or
gestalt, which is the basic unit of experience. Depending on the experience, these
cycles can last anywhere from a brief instant to the whole of one’s life (one’s life-
gestalt). The movement through waves of experience—and through waves within
waves—is the rhythm of life itself. Every cycle of experience is a step of living. I
therefore want to describe the different phases of these cycles in some detail, as we
move through them in complete or undistorted experiences.

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 68 Beginning with Experience

Action Final Contact

Mobilization Satisfaction/Assimiliation

Awareness Withdrawal

Feeling

An experience begins as a feeling or meaningful sensation (e.g., hunger)

arising out of the relationship between body and world (the organism/environ-
ment field), the ground of our experience. This ground consists of the past learn-
ings or meanings we have incorporated, the unfinished experiences (whether old
or freshly emerging) still pushing for completion, and the currently encountered
environment, with various figures flowing in and out of our focal awareness. Expe-
riencing is an interacting, so it is hard to say at any one time whether we or the
world is leading. From the side of the organism, an experience starts as a bodily
felt need that implies or prefigures some sort of future contacting in an environ-
ment that will consummate this need, be it eating, dancing, love-making, playing
outdoors, or praying to a deity.78 We do not just bodily anticipate our environ-
ments, however, but our environments also arouse or call forth our intentions,
offer us opportunities, place demands on us, and make our lives difficult. What we
implicitly feel at any given moment takes all of this into account, so that the need
contained in our felt sense is the one that is most urgent or highest in priority for
coping with our environment and carrying our lives forward at that point.
The next phase in an experiential cycle is our coming into awareness of the
bodily need of the moment, that is, of what has arisen in the first phase. Our need
becomes figural (“I am hungry”). This phase is thus an initial symbolizing or con-
tacting of what our bodies are implying or intending in some situation. It is fol-
lowed by a phase of mobilization, in which we prepare to take some action that will
put our bodily intention into motion. This involves readying ourselves (imagining
what we might eat, developing necessary skills, getting physically prepared, etc.)
and letting our energy build toward the coming action.79 An important theoretical
point is that we have the most vivid awareness and mobilize the most excitement
(life force) only for those actions that are organismically important. Any other will
suffer from a lack of motivation, interest, and vitality. Hence, whenever we force
ourselves to pay attention to something uninteresting (like a dull school lesson),
we feel bored and tired, our bodies refusing to lend their energy to the situation.
In the action phase we undertake deliberate efforts (e.g., walking to the
fridge) toward the fulfillment of our needs or intentions. What comes out clearly in

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 Beginning with Experience 69

this phase is how the primary orientation of our lives is outward, toward the world.
The “ex” of the words we use to describe our living marks this point: ex-perience,
ex-istence, ex-pression, e-motion (ex-movere). In Boss’s words, we body-forth our
existence. We bodily reach toward the contacts or relationships that will complete
our felt meanings (prefigurations, anticipations, expectations, purposes, aims,
desires, needs, intentions) and thus carry our lives forward. I live through my
body, not as an object inside of which I am stuck, but as a power for inhabiting
and disclosing a world, for engaging in the “forward-looking, problem-solving,
meaning-making activity”80 of working out the best resolution possible between
my needs, urges, dreams, hopes, and so on, and the actual conditions of my life,
with all of its contingencies, limitations, and dangers. Action-taking, moreover,
is necessarily aggressive, in the sense that it requires the taking of initiative. As
its etymology suggests, aggression is simply the “stepping toward” whatever is
needed or else in the way of our lives (whether frustrating or threatening). In its
nonmalignant form, aggression is thus not an evil but an essential aspect of any
vital existence. Without it we would never engage the world or get on in life; we
would lack any assertiveness, inquisitiveness, critical ability, self-confidence, or
creativity.81 (Pathological aggression, as I discuss below, derives from the frustration
of this intrinsic aggression, which then turns hateful and violent.82) It is the action
phase, finally, that most involves our free will. In it we make choices about what
kind of contact we will actually pursue and how we might get there.
Final contact, to use a biological metaphor, is the exchanging of material
across an osmotic membrane. To make good contact we must relax our boundaries
enough to allow something new “in” (eat the food) but not so much as to lose our
integrity.83 Thus do we surrender into an orgasm, dissolve into our grief, acquire
a skill, learn something, flow into an expressive movement, recognize ourselves in
another, receive some message, let some reality come home. In final contact our
experience takes meaningful form, our need is met, our question answered, our
tension released. This is the phase where we feel a shift in or restructuring of our
ground, where our experience comes to a symbolic point, where we are changed.
We may experience an “aha!” when a gestalt coheres vividly, but most contact
occurs more subtly, in everyday ways.
The postcontact phase of the cycle is satisfaction-assimilation, wherein we
enjoy an “afterglow” and “digest” the meaning of our experience. The meaning-
fulness of an event is a matter of whether and in what respects it carries our lives
forward or satisfies our bodily demands.84 (Hence, Perls’s simple formula that “the
meaning of life is that it is to be lived.”85) It is exactly this understanding that
overcomes the Freudian dualism between natural organismic force and human
meaning. For the organism itself seeks meaning, and it is our own most impor-
tant business in life to identify with this organism and find completion for its
intentions (overcoming dualism, recall, means giving mind back to nature). Every
completed gestalt is a finished meaning, which is then integrated into our ongoing

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 70 Beginning with Experience

ground of experiencing—on the basis of which ground we are always imagining or

interpreting the world as we do.
The last phase in an experiential cycle is withdrawal. The experience has come
to a close; it no longer holds our interest or our energy; it is finished. Having gone
through all the previous stages, we spontaneously pull back from contact into the
fertile void, where our sense of self diminishes, where we rest. It is in this phase,
having let the previous experience die, that our next experience is waiting to be born.

The psychotherapist Carl Rogers said that one of the qualities of mature persons
is that they are willing to be a process.86 Gestaltists similarly say that what we call
the ‘self ’ is simply the experiential cycle in motion, the contact process itself (the
functioning of the boundary in the organism/environment field). Or as Gendlin
puts it: “We are our felt experiencing.” We only know ourselves (are ourselves) in
our movements in and out of interaction with the world. I want to close, then,
with an exercise in noticing just this.
As with the previous exercise, the most important thing in this one is simply to
notice what you are experiencing (even if it is only your resisting of my suggestions).
The purpose of the exercise is for you to “try on” my description of the cycle of experi-
ence by attending to how you are experiencing this chapter. Recall the phases of this
cycle: feeling, awareness, mobilization, action, final contact, satisfaction/assimilation,
withdrawal. Now pay attention to what you are sensing in your body, and ask yourself
what you are aware of. Is this chapter holding your interest (is it appetizing) or is there
something else you need or want to be doing? How actively or energetically are you
engaging it? Do you drift off? What sort of contact are you making with it? Do you
feel touched in any way? Does it seem relevant or meaningful to you? Do you feel any
satisfaction? Do you pause to chew on and digest some piece of what I am saying? What
do you find objectionable, that is, what do you not want to take in? Do you withdraw
from the text when you have had enough? In short: How is this chapter interacting with
your living? What kind of experience are you having?

Psychopathology: Disturbed Contacting Constricted Existing Blocked

Living

Anyone caught in self-defeating patterns, malfunctioning character

structures, pathological repetitions, and so forth, feels these as painful. . . . it
is the very living of the organism not able to proceed. Right in the middle of
how pathological patterns are experienced . . . are the felt life-forces tending
toward resolution.
—Eugene Gendlin87

“Psychopathology” refers to the suffering (pathos) of the soul, and to the kind
of voice (logos) we allow it. That suffering is part of the human condition is

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 Beginning with Experience 71

contained in the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, and is an obvious enough fact
to anyone who reflects on the matter. Suffering, in other words, seems intrinsic
to experiencing itself. To be experienced, it is said, is to have suffered through; to
have had the vessel of one’s self repeatedly broken and reformed over countless
experiences. To change is to suffer a change. Gadamer, for instance, says that every
“experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation,”88 is some kind of nega-
tion. Otherwise we just remain the same old person we already are, with our same
old understanding of things. I believe, however, that he is partly wrong in this—
and for telling reasons. He is right inasmuch as he has identified those experiences
that force us to relinquish the security of our former beliefs or ways, disturb the
sedimented meanings to which we have grown attached, or touch us with some
painful truth. We will never grow or learn unless we are open to such experiences.
But he is wrong not to further identify in what way experiences also fulfill our
expectations. Our interactions do not just displace old meanings, but may also
satisfy prefigured ones. Here, again, a lack of appreciation of the organismic nature
of experiencing has lead to a misconception. In Gadamer’s view, for an event to
count as a genuine experience we must not expect it, we must be surprised and
disillusioned by it.89 What I have been suggesting in this chapter instead is that
our bodily felt needs are precisely the expectations or intentions that reach toward
the world to be specified and completed, so that our lives may both continue and
unfold. A child finding all kinds of new things in a pond is hardly a convincing
image of suffering. The theme I pursue under this heading, in fact, is that of how
much unnecessary suffering is engendered exactly from the violent disregard of our
inherent expectations (which are wrongfully thwarted) and in the struggle to get
these life needs met.
The line I wish to develop is as follows. I am persuaded (by the Buddha
and my own experience) that suffering is indigenous to an Egoic mode of exist-
ence (the capital E differentiating a pathological sense of Ego from a basic sense
of ego, the latter simply being the agent of the organism). As I discuss in the next
chapter, the Ego isolates itself from the ground of being, attempts to exist for
itself outside the flux of life, to become a permanent island in the swirling ocean
of nature—and suffers from the impossibility of the project. While the tendency
toward this suffering mode is given in the human situation, the attitude a society
adopts toward it is not. A society, that is, can develop ways to understand, find
meaning in, minimize, and move through suffering; or—at the other end of the
spectrum—it can choose to mystify, institutionalize, exacerbate, and exploit it.
I put our own society in the latter camp. (The emergence of a “socially engaged”
Buddhism indicates a recognition of this social factor.) In the account I offer
below, then, I discuss our suffering specifically as it originates in social antagonism
toward the life process. According to the view of this chapter, that is, pathology
is generated in the hurtful conflict between the demands of our own nature and
those of the life-denying and life-threatening social forces we encounter in the

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world—as well as in the subsequent chronic interrupting of our own life processes
that we ourselves perform as a means of survival.90 Ego grows, in fact, precisely in
response to hostile conditions, as a defensive structure that aims “to obtain love by
way of mastery in an unloving world.”91 While this may not yet be an adequate
account of the deeper spiritual nature of our suffering, it is nonetheless congruent
with one. For any route out of suffering will surely point the way back into life.
And any ecopsychology must surely do the same.
I have chosen five features of psychopathology specifically for how they
illustrate the relationship between suffering and the life process. Given the grossly
pathological state of our normalcy,92 I presume that readers will to at least some
extent recognize themselves in my discussion of them. My aim is to introduce
an interpretation of psychopathological phenomena that will serve the needs of
the rest of the book (even if it is by no means a complete account of these phe-
nomena). I need say that although the material to be covered here is not pleasant,
I do not want an immobilizing heaviness to descend on the discussion. Please bear
in mind, then, that I am venturing into these challenging places only because we
are already in them, and because we find more satisfying life options only to the
extent that we are willing to recognize this.

Creative Adjustment and the Destruction of Experience. As living organisms, we are

not just cogs in the machine of the world, but are naturally ordered to grow and
expand our boundaries through contacting an environment. The willingness or
ability of our environments to satisfy our needs or support our lives, however,
is highly variable and we must also accommodate ourselves to the demands that
others place upon us. To find the best ways forward in life, then, we always have
to creatively work them out in concert with the actual situations or environments
in which we find ourselves. The cycle of experience I described above is itself this
creative process, wherein through interacting with or contacting the world we
find novel solutions to the ever-renewed problem of maintaining and unfolding
our lives. Whether facing a math problem or a marital problem we must feel our
way toward just those answers—the new gestalts, learnings, structures, ways, or
understandings—that will dissolve the tensions in the field of our experience.93
What I am suggesting here (and elaborate further in the final section of this
chapter) is that the general hostility of our current social environment forces us
to make the most drastic of “creative adjustments.”94 I assume the reader already
has at least some sense for the assorted ways in which we get wounded in this
society, as these make up so much of the fabric of everyday life. They include, at
a minimum, the pervasive violations we pass on through the generations, often
unaware—abuses of a sexual, physical, psychological, or emotional nature, as well
as those resulting from drug- and/or alcohol addicted parents, neglectful parents,
and so on. Children are particularly vulnerable to being hurt, for they are “all
need.”95 Much violation of our nature occurs, as it happens, via parents using

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 Beginning with Experience 73

their children in a misguided attempt to gratify their own unmet, and so now
“frozen,” childhood needs. We are also widely hurt via social oppression—the sys-
tematic mistreatment of particular groups or communities. Racism, classism, and
sexism are the most recognized of these institutionalized abuses, although people
are discriminated against on an astonishing variety of bases. While it would be
possible to elaborate ad nauseum the manifold ways in which we hurt one another
in this society, my aim at this stage is only to introduce the idea of these violations
and to make mention that they themselves can all be understood as instances of
“naturism”: the global mistreatment of nature by our society.96
Good contacting occurs at an optimal experiential “distance.” Hurtful
contacts, by contrast, are either “too close” (dangerous, invasive) or “too distant”
(neglectful, absent). In other words, in situations antagonistic to our living, our
boundaries are either overwhelmed through direct intrusion or become unbear-
ably tense through starvation (or both).97 In such a setting, to openly express (or
even know) our needs or make life-forwarding contact with others becomes dif-
ficult, anxiety-filled, or unsafe. The creative adjustments we are then motivated to
adopt take the form of coping strategies that both distort our contact with others
and block our own life urges. A person, for example, may develop very subtle and
ingenious ways to manipulate others as a way to maintain some sense of control
in an otherwise chaotic or ungiving situation. Or a person who has learned to fear
open, face-to-face love, may adjust by becoming a fetishist who contacts others
via, say, their shoes, thereby preserving an experience of intimacy. Despite that
they are our best efforts at living, these kinds of creative strategies are nonetheless
all interruptions of our full experiencing, such that much of our common experi-
ence is incomplete, distorted, or deficient in satisfaction.
In order to further demonstrate this last point, I want to consider the gen-
eral creative adjustment known as desensitization. All self-interruptions can be
located somewhere along the experiential cycle (for our living consists precisely
of this cycle). Desensitization occurs at the beginning. It is the manipulating of
ourselves (e.g., tightening the surficial muscles of our bodies) in such a way that
we lose bodily feeling and blot out our perception of a hurtful world. When, for
instance, we feel unloved as a child or that our caregivers are rejecting our needs,
our bodies become a source of terrible pain and anxiety. We then adjust exactly
by renouncing these needs and fleeing our bodies—abandoning reality in order
to survive. Such desensitization reaches the point of “depersonalization” when it
penetrates to our very sense of self, and “derealization” when our felt disconnec-
tion from the world or divorce from reality becomes severe—two linked dissocia-
tive phenomena routinely experienced by trauma survivors.98 Desensitization is,
however, only one of many possible ways to habitually interrupt our experience,
as will become clear in my further discussions.
Self-interrupting creative adjustments have one further aspect worth noting.
When met with abuse or neglect children simply cannot understand it because it

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 74 Beginning with Experience

so contradicts their inborn expectation that they will be lovingly welcomed, held,
comforted, and attended to; it betrays an ancient pact that their caregivers will
nurture their growth. That is why it is so painful. The child, however, has to
make sense somehow. Why am I being punished and prevented from crying and
screaming? At an early age, the reality that our caregivers might not love us is too
painful and incomprehensible to let in. The meaning that children almost invari-
ably make out of their abuse is therefore that they must be bad, inadequate, wrong,
useless, unimportant, and so on for others to be so mistreating them. Their crea-
tive adjustment is to blame themselves. That children do this again and again
shows that we will do almost anything to preserve our relationships with others,
so central is our need for them. (Victims, in general, often identify with and find
ways to love those who perpetrate violence against them.) We create whatever
meanings we need in order to carry on.
Summarizing this unhappy discussion, R. D. Laing once said that only
by “the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to
live in relative adjustment to a civilization driven to its own destruction.”99 The
squashing of our own vitality, the distorting of our contact with the world, and the
adopting of a pained meaning system are our general solutions for adjusting to a
soul-punishing environment, to the “chronic low grade emergency”100 of modern
life. These are the strategies, said Laing, by which we destroy our experience.

Fear-Laden Rigidity: The Frozen Ground. The vision of a vital existence within an
experiential framework is that of persons who move flexibly and awarely from
experience to experience, making satisfying contact with the world, responding
openly and creatively to new life situations. Their figure-ground relationship is
elastic and reversible, such that they experience their lives hermeneutically: as a
forward moving dialectic between symbols and felt meaning, forever changing
their understanding of things as they continually enrich the basis of their experi-
encing. In a pathogenic environment, however, this original mode of experiencing
must be sacrificed because it is too dangerous a way to live. If our world is not a
place in which our trust and faith can flourish, then the need for security and con-
trol wins out over the need for open contact and growth. Our adjustments then
include finding patterns of living that seem to work best, all things considered,
and sticking to them for the relative safety or comfort they provide. We stop being
a process and instead “take refuge in stasis,”101 insist on a familiar world, cling to
the status quo. The fear is that to change or step out of our habitual patterns will
only stir up distress we would rather not feel or else make matters worse. From a
ground of hurtful experience we imagine that the same injuries we experienced
in the past will be repeated in the future (even if we sense these only as a gen-
eral dread or aversion), and interpret the world in this unchanging light. Thus
does Konrad Stettbacher call suffering “the fear-laden, painful anticipation of the
past”102 and do Gestaltists call neurosis a “fixation on the unchanging past.”103

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To the extent that we live in these fear-based patterns, our lives become
rigid, each pattern corresponding to a frozen ground or unchanging horizon
of experiencing. In those areas of our lives where we are so-patterned we are
not really experiencing because we are just repeating the same old stereotyped
­routines based on past experiences. Our feelings do not change because we have
made them unavailable for interaction, bound them off in a background that is
not modified, because not contacted, by present situations. That is, our inac-
cessible feelings are not actively functioning in a life process; all we have instead
are the symbolic patterns we keep enacting. When our experiencing is rigidly
symbolized or “structure-bound” in this way we do not freshly interpret our situa-
tions, but keep having the same old automatic meanings—the same old thoughts,
emotions, reactions, behaviors, and so on—over and over again. As Gendlin
says, we perceive only a “bare outline” of the present. Famously, for example, we
react to people just as we did to our parents, seeing only authority figures rather
than unique persons, and remaining in patterns of submission, anger, panic, or
whatever our particular obsolete responses may be. As this also shows, each such
­pattern contains within itself the “unfinished business” that led us to adopt it in
the first place.
Psychopathology, then, tends toward a constricted, unfree, contact-impov-
erished existence. In pathology, the symbolic moment of experiencing dominates,
that is, our lives become feelingless and formulaic—the form or shape of our
existence becomes fixed. (To repeat, a feelingless life is not necessarily one lacking
in strong emotion. What is frozen, rather, is the underlying, subtle, bodily felt
sentience needed to understand and shift—rather than stay stuck in—these emo-
tions.) Any life will involve making contact with the world in routine, day-to-
day ways, wherein we ride our already-acquired structures or habits. The more
severe our pathology, however, the more do these routines become all. When our
very survival seems at stake, making contact with that which is novel or different
(i.e., contact in the principle sense) becomes rare or alarming. We are resistant to
change because who we are, our interpretation of the world, is fearfully “locked
in” on a feeling level to which we have little conscious access.
Because pathology involves a restricted ground of available feeling and a
limited contact style it also involves a loss of self. The self exists to the extent that
we respond to and maintain our own process of felt interaction with the world.
Where our lives are frozen this process of experiencing is missing—and thus so are
we. We feel alien to ourselves, disorganized, out of it; the center does not hold.104
Some degree of depersonalization or soul loss is therefore a component of all suf-
fering. In “psychosis” the functioning of feeling is so distant and interaction so
curtailed that the contents of experience are overwhelmingly alien: hallucinated
voices, foreign invasions, and so on. Psychic disturbance, then, is a narrowing of
our manner of experiencing, a constricting of our openness. In depression, for
example, our sense of temporality shrinks to a meaningless present: the past does

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 76 Beginning with Experience

not nourish, the future does not invite. Our spatial world, meanwhile, narrows
down to the chair we are sitting in and the wall we are staring at. Our contact is
constricted and distorted in such a way that the world may reveal itself as only
so many disapproving faces, critical voices, and other confirmations of our own
worthlessness.

Alienation From and Conflict With Our Organismic Self. One of the main con-
sequences of adjusting to environments that are at odds with our nature is that
we come to live according to certain meanings—beliefs, concepts, rules, moral
injunctions—that replace our own organismic, implicitly felt meanings. Rather
than our bodily felt intentions we follow “introjected” social conventions. As Carl
Rogers understood this, the “experiencing organism senses one meaning in experi-
ence, but the conscious self clings rigidly to another, since that is the way it has
found love and acceptance from others.”105 The feeling of being unloved, as I
noted above, is unbearably anxiety-provoking, leaving us all alone in the cosmic
void. We thus agree to obey or adopt meanings opposed to our organismic self—
what Rogers called “conditions of worth”—as a way to minimize any threatening
difference between ourselves and others and so to secure some measure of love and
social belonging. Men, for example, are often alienated from their experience at
such an early age that they are guided almost wholly by introjected beliefs about
masculinity, duty, responsibility, and so on. Or as Alice Miller notes: “The more
successfully a person was denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the
larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and supply of moral prostheses has to be,
because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for
affection. Blood does not flow in artificial limbs.”106 The result of such bloodless
living is that “consciously we are moving one way, while organismically we are
moving in another.”107
What characterizes the process of introjection, in general, is the taking “in”
of experiences or meanings without having yet made adequate contact with them.
We take on another’s values, ideas, or modes of being without going through the
sequence of chewing on these, assimilating those aspects that feel organismically
right (in that moment), and then spitting out the rest.108 This happens in abusive
situations when our boundaries are violated and the abuser gets right “inside” us.
So long as the traumatic experience is unfinished we are then haunted by the inter-
nalized presence of the abusive other. The meanings we adopt in abuse are thus
imposed, forced in; they do not come from a life-forwarding process, but an over-
whelming one. As Perls et al. write of childhood introjection: “Whatever the child
gets from his loving parents he assimilates, for it is fitting and appropriate to his
own needs as he grows. It is the hateful parents who have to be introjected, taken
down whole, although they are contrary to the needs of the organism. Accompa-
nying this is the starving of the child’s proper needs and his repressing of rebellion
and disgust.”109

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 Beginning with Experience 77

As this last line indicates, alienation from our organismic self also means
being in active conflict with it. The part of the personality most opposed to organ-
ismic life is what Freud called the “superego” and what is popularly called the
“inner critic.” It is generated in a complex way, from our introjected “bad par-
ents,” from negative beliefs about ourselves we have inferred from our environ-
ment, and from aggression (hatred) we have repressed or disowned. It takes the
form of a hostile and critical voice that haunts us, squashes us, comes at us (and
yet which is “ours”), usually operating outside of explicit awareness. It is con-
stantly telling us how we are screwing things up, how we are bad, and what we
should be doing. Under the influence of the superego, we go to war with ourselves,
diverting our energy away from the process of growing, bending it back so as to
“jail” our rejected bodily impulses. Our own genuine needing or wanting then
becomes a source of anxiety, as we squeeze ourselves against our own spontaneous
bodily urges out of the terror that to really express ourselves or make any demands
on the world will lead only to further rejection and loss of love. We live not for
ourselves, but for the pseudolove of others; and then become increasingly guilty
both under the admonitions of our superegos and out of indebtedness to our own
unlived existence. The words of Ellen West, one of existential psychiatry’s most
famous cases, and who was later to commit suicide, portray vividly the nature of
these dynamic inner conflicts: “I feel myself, quite passively, the stage on which
two hostile forces are mangling each other.”110
The price we pay for alienating ourselves from the life of our own bodies is
great. First of all, we lose the vitality, spontaneity, and creativity that comes only
from being in touch with our organismic being. Our actions become repetitive,
feelingless, unconnected to organismic need. Like Ellen West’s, our lives become—
as Perls called it—a “self-torture game,” in which alien introjects battle it out
with now-alien organismic hungers (Freud’s id). We become unsure of ourselves,
confused about what we need or want, because we are without inner guidance.
Unable to make discriminations based on anything other than what we have been
socially programmed to believe or what other people tell us, we chase after one
thing, then another. Fighting against our bodies rather than letting them organize
our experience, our gestalt formation is weakened. Few of our interactions actually
satisfy our needs, and so we come to trail a growing bag of unfinished experiences
behind us, especially those involving the grief and anger our superegos chide us
against expressing. Lacking appetite, direction, bodily satisfaction, self-esteem,
outgoing energy, and a willingness or ability to express forbidden emotion, we
become prone to depression.
What replaces a bodily based existence is a verbal, intellectual, fantasy-
based one. In a hostile environment, divided against ourselves rather than directed
toward the world, we retreat into an inflated inner life. Dreams and fantasies
become the primary safe realm and are maximized accordingly.111 Our frustrated
or unwelcomed intentions are gratified or entertained only in fantasy—those of

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sex, adoration, fame, revenge, disaster, destruction, wealth, paradise, adventure,

the past, the future, and on and on—all of which become part of the ground by
which, in the absence of better contact, we distortedly interpret the world and
maintain our illusions. Identifying ourselves largely with this fantasy realm, much
of our energy goes only there, withdrawn from the senses and muscles we might
otherwise use for contacting the outer world. The other safe zone for us is the
verbal intellect. Perls was right to say that most moderns live in a “verbal trance.”
The intellectual, in particular, is often a person for whom only cognitive feel-
ings have survived, and who has adjusted by making a career out of this state. As
Bakhtin long ago lamented, however, intellectuals tend not to put their theories
into life, into the action phase of an experience, and thereby avoid becoming more
answerable to them. The “living, compellent, and inescapable uniqueness of our
actual life is diluted with the water of merely thinkable empty possibility.”112
According to Jeannette Armstrong, the Okanagan word for “insane”
describes, in part, the activity of being “in a state of talking talking inside the
head.”113 If and when we do manage to come down from our heads into our
bodies, what re-jects (or vomits out) our introjects is exactly a “thick organic
living process.”114 Those things that are toxic to the organism—inner abusers,
false beliefs about ourselves, hurtful social codes, empty ideas—are ejected as we
reidentify with our bodies, rediscover the world, and reown our existence.

Shame, Isolation, and the Loss of Sociality. An interactive framework puts a radical
stress on our inherent togetherness, interdependence, or sociality. Merleau-Ponty
called the subject a “project of the world” as a way to make this point (while also
granting to subjects their own unique perspectives on and intentions toward this
world). This also means, however, as I have been discussing above, that psycho-
pathology is not just an individual matter, but involves disturbances in the whole
social field.115 As J. H. van den Berg noted, psychopathology is at bottom the
“science of loneliness.”116 Only a being who essentially belongs with others can
suffer from isolation. When hurt by others, our basic social sense is damaged. Our
trust in relationships, our faith in the nature of things, and our belief in the safety
and goodness of the world—all are weakened.117 In what follows, what I want to
discuss, in particular, is how all chronic interruptions or absences of contact are
isolating, and how the emotion that goes with this feeling of aloneness is shame.118
Shame is the experience of having some part (or the whole) of ourselves,
some need or urge, some action or movement of ours toward contact with others,
disapproved of, ridiculed, refused, unsupported, violated, or unacknowledged by
our environment. Our natural desires are bad. We are exposed as “dirty,” defec-
tive, unworthy, despicable, not enough, not part of the human family or of this
earth. The feeling of shame is about as awful as anything we are likely to experi-
ence. When feeling shame we avoid eye contact, hang our heads, shrink. Other,
less obvious signs that we are experiencing or trying to relieve our shame include

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 Beginning with Experience 79

irritation, rage, competitiveness, addictions, attacking, blaming, power-seeking,

showing-off, perfectionism, gossiping, making excuses, lying, and so on. While
in an adaptive or functional sense shame does serve to limit socially undesirable
behavior, a society that is itself undesirable—that makes nature the adversary and
uses humiliation as an everyday child-rearing method—will universalize shame.
When our needs are unmet or refused they become “shame-linked,” that is, the
shame attached to our bodily intentions will stop us from bringing them forth
into the (now tabooed) contacts they imply.119 We disown or repress these unre-
ceived, rebuked, or nonaccepted parts, make them “not me”—this act then cre-
ating “holes” in us where specific voices and capacities, certain zones of feeling
or meaning, used to be or never came to be. Having introjected the shaming
messages of our social surroundings, moreover, the scolding and put-downs
of our superegos becomes our own private source of bad feelings. Thus do we
come to make contact with others from a sense of isolation, inadequacy (finding
ourselves wanting in comparison to others), and dread of further rejection or
unacknowledgment.
Since it is of the very nature of shame to hide, it has until recently been little
studied by psychologists, who have in this area concentrated rather on guilt.120 As
Gordon Wheeler suggests, the historical neglect of shame is also due to the fact
that it can be truly grasped only within an interactive scheme, as opposed to the
dualistic one that has dominated our psychological theorizing.121 Shame arises
from out of a break in the “natural connectedness between me and my surround,”
where others “refuse to receive me.”122 Wherever there is disharmony in a social
environment we may therefore expect the presence of shame and wherever there is
a sense of unity we may expect its absence. On this understanding, an individual-
istic ideology will be intrinsically shaming. As Wheeler suggests, under the reign of
this unhealthy ideology “the hallmark of health and ‘maturity’ becomes the ability
to manage, deny, and compensate for a constant background level of shame.”123
Prior psychological theorists, themselves “mature” in this sense, have thus only
been able to see shame as an emotion tied to an infantile, feminine, or regressive
dependency on others. Made sense of, rather, in relational or social terms, shame
is revealed as a ubiquitous, if not foundational, emotion in our culture—even if
many or most of us refuse to explicitly feel it.
The dynamics of shame are particularly evident in the creation of gender,
which is largely a product of shaming interactions. For both males and females
some ways of being are accepted, and so accentuated, while others are rejected,
and so disowned. In this way, shame holds our oppressive gender patterns and
social structures in place. Gender is thus itself “a codification or vehicle for shame
in our culture.”124 Boys are socialized precisely to be disconnected, which means
the way they are raised is unavoidably shaming of them. By an early age, most
boys have learned that they must be independent, which sets in motion a life-
long, shame-bound vicious cycle of not getting the support they need from others

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 80 Beginning with Experience

and fearing that they may not measure up to the male stereotype. Many men will
sacrifice their inner lives, even go to war and die, rather than face their shame
(so shameful is it to be ashamed). Females are shamed, in turn, by a society
that pervasively devalues their very femaleness. Noteworthy here are the soci-
etal introjects concerning women’s bodies and their perceived imperfections—
for which they must (apply) “makeup,” and so feed a multibillion dollar a year
cosmetic industry.125 Only in a society that has made it shameful to be “fat,”
moreover, does anorexia and bulimia become epidemic. Gender patterns, finally,
are further enforced by the oppression of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgen-
dered people, groups with whom it has historically been made shameful to in any
way be identified.

The Repressed Unconscious: Frustration of the Life Process. Ernest Becker writes that
psychopathology “is always fundamentally a problem of organisms which are crip-
pled, cramped, or blocked in their experience.”126 From my perspective, the most
essential feature of pathology is that it involves a frustrating of the life process.
Repression is the chronic nonliving, blocking, or reversing of our world-bound
energies or intentions; the contracting of ourselves against our own internally
directed expansion into the world; the nonrealizing or stopping of certain kinds
of implied relationships or contacts with others—such that we do not body-forth
our lives. As Boss notes, “relationships which are not openly admitted do not flow
through the bodily realm of existence in their movement toward the perceived
things. They come forth and remain within the sphere of the body, so that there
is a ‘jam’ instead of vibration.”127 We learn to deliberately intercept our bodily
intentions until this becomes habitual, falling out of explicit awareness. Our urges
then persist only in a cramped or dammed-up form—as bodily blocked sexuality,
anger, grief, fear, terror, love, joy, and so forth—which color our perception as
they relentlessly push in the background toward some final contact and closure.128
They are felt only as a ground of pain, as an aura of frustration, agitation, dissatis-
faction, fear, lack, incompleteness, and so on, which permeates our world.
What I am introducing here is an experiential theory of the repressed uncon-
scious. Gendlin writes simply that “the unconscious consists of the body’s stopped
processes, the muscular and physiological blockage.”129 What is unconscious are
the world-relations that are interrupted, unexpressed, not mirrored, unconsum-
mated, or concealed between us; yet which, as I just suggested, are present in
a jammed manner, as our implicit and unfocused bodily sensing of them. The
unconscious is thus a relational or interactive phenomenon.

“The unconscious” . . . is all those parts of experience that remained inchoate and
unarticulated, parts for which we never developed a full voice, for want of that
receptive intersubjective field that is requisite . . . for the full development/articu-
lation of the self. . . . experience that is felt but cannot be shared, represented,

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 Beginning with Experience 81

articulated, echoed, [symbolized,] and thus integrated into the whole social field
thus tends to become stunted and arrested at best, if it doesn’t disappear from felt
reality altogether.130

The zones of existence we block, shamefully disown, or never come to understand

are the ones our social environments are unwilling or failing to occupy, the kinds
of relationship they do not allow (which we then learn not to allow ourselves).131
These have traditionally included the sexual and aggressive regions of existence,
but as ecopsychologists we need, of course, to add the ecological (as I discuss
in chapter five when I revisit the notion of the “ecological unconscious”). The
rationalist attack on the unconscious may in these terms be criticized as a war on
the life process itself, as an opposition to uncontrollable organismic intentions
that want to move us toward those kinds of relationships regarded as threatening
to the existing social order.
The repressing of life is not, however, only the blocking of our original
intentions toward the world, but also the further interrupting of our healing inten-
tions. When hurt, we experience distressful emotions. We heal and make sense
of such hurts by then expressing these emotions and making the kind of contact
with others that they imply. When the child of some friends of mine got stuck
under a couch, for example, he screamed and hollered until rescued. My friends
then stayed with him in a relaxed and attentive way while he “cried out” the hurt.
As they acknowledged and mirrored the scary incident with him, his tears gradu-
ally dried, his experience came to a close, and he happily turned his attention to
other things.132 If he had been taught, however, that “boys don’t cry” or was told
to “shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about,” then he would not have been
able make sense of or assimilate the distressful experience because he would have
been denied a healing life process.133 (We are often unwilling to welcome strong
emotions in others, including children, because they symbolically call forth our
own unhealed pain, our own shame-bound and unfinished experiences that we
would rather not feel.) Hurtful contacts thus always open up an emotional expe-
rience which also persists bodily until allowed to finish, and which likewise may
become unconscious through habitual interruption. Resentment and hatred, for
example, are forms that anger takes when we prevent it from unfolding into the
kind of confrontational contact that would actually let it go.134 The incomplete
anger festers, grows corrosive or hostile, has a simmering and old quality. It then
gets unawarely channeled into all the crimes of which we are so aware, as well as
into acts of violence—both covert and overt—we commit against ourselves.
Experiential conceptualizations of the repressed unconscious differ signifi-
cantly from the traditional one, which depicts it as a container for unwanted psy-
chic contents. The initial problem with such a conception is that it unintelligibly
splits our experience, makes the unconscious a kind of separate mind within the
mind.135 For an experiential approach, the unconscious is an intrinsic aspect of

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 82 Beginning with Experience

bodily existence; it is our unaware sensing of the blocked and background living
that wants to come forth. In other words, when the unconscious is understood in
the mode of a remote repository full of discrete mental contents (ideas, images,
emotions), we come to think of mental phenomena as belonging in some dis-
embodied head-space. Understood rather in the mode of our world-entangled
bodies, psychological life becomes intensely somatic. What is unconscious to us
are our body’s relations to the world that we are not explicitly taking up and acting
on—living as we are, instead, in our narrow and automatic patterns.136
An experiential approach further criticizes the traditional model of the
unconscious for reifying experience by focusing on isolated contents rather than
seeing these as aspects of a felt process.137 When some content of experience—an
emotion, idea, memory, dream image—passes out of focal awareness (for what-
ever reason) it does not stay all neatly formed as it is. It does not get filed away as
a discrete entity, but instead melts back into the flow of our bodily experiencing,
goes into solution, as it were, to become “part” of the complex and holistic felt
ground of our ongoing interacting with the world. Contents may of course be
reformed (as in a memory) when some relevant situation or supportive context
draws them out, for they are still implicit in our experience. But the unconscious,
experientially conceived, does not strictly consist of such contents. Merleau-Ponty
thus called it “a retrospective illusion” to assume that what we become aware of
in a moment of insight exists ahead of time as unconscious psychic material.138
The practice of focusing, for example, does not involve unearthing buried con-
tents, but rather allows some unfinished feeling to be symbolized—in that very
moment—into consciousness. I want to associate the unconscious, then, not pri-
marily with images (as do Jungians), but rather with the life process, in which
images play the crucial role of life-forwarding symbols. Even the most dreadful
dream contents come to us as an invitation to some further living—for which our
bodily felt sense is always the touchstone.

Experiential Destruction and Ecological Crisis

The impoverishment of our experience is enormous. . . . Lacking . . . sensory

experience of ourselves, devaluing and perpetually in conflict with many
of the quiet, wordless, simple sensations that inform us at every moment of
the complexity and wholeness of our being, we hide in our thoughts, our
images, our self-images. We fear our sensations, paradoxically, as threatening
to our being. . . . if we arrogantly ignore the sensory messages that clearly
are instructing us that we need to cry, we may easily ignore with similar
arrogance the sensory messages and requirements of the earth.
—Deborah Rinzler139

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 Beginning with Experience 83

Testimonials galore give witness to the “destruction,” “impoverishment,” “attenu-

ation,” and “extinction” of our experience in modern times, as well as a chilling
“waning of affect.”140 We have entered the age of the “neurotically split person-
ality” say the psychotherapists141—an age of “bland numbness,”142 in which many
people’s “inner selves become silent and almost disappear”;143 an era pervaded by
a “sense of loss, of longing for something [we] cannot name, a feeling of being
off-center, of missing something.”144 In my view, a big part of the work of ecopsy-
chology has to go toward clarifying the connection—or as Chellis Glendinning
calls it, “the screaming link”145—between this morbid state of our experiencing
and our ecological troubles. The search for such illumination, in turn, means
inquiring into the general mistreatment of nature under current sociocultural
arrangements.
Paul Goodman wrote that if we are going to recognize the existence of an
“anti-social personality” then we ought to be willing to conversely identify an
“anti-personal society”—a kind of social field which in order to maintain itself
must destroy persons.146 Such a society as ours, to be sure, is a threat to personhood
in general, both human and nonhuman. This is not to suggest that the person is
without agency, to blame it all on “society” or “the system,” but rather to recognize
that the person always exists within a social reality that greatly influences how that
agency gets exercised, including in the service of repression. The very existence
of the repressed unconscious, suggests Joel Kovel, “reflects the split between the
human and natural world.”147 Hence, “to comprehend the unconscious . . . the
actual structure of the [human social] world must be given conceptual weight.”
As Kovel himself remarks, however, no adequate theoretical framework presently
exists to bring to light the complex relationships between our social institutions
and culture and our psyches.148 He offers, for example, that the most viable way
to synthesize Marxism and psychoanalysis is to recover from each of them their
hidden spiritual motivations, and then to marry them within this common spir-
itual dimension (a not insignificant point for some of my own efforts below and in
the chapters ahead, even if Freud and Marx enter only marginally into them).149 A
greater challenge still for ecopsychologists is to also bring the ecological dimension
into our understanding of psyche and society. How, then, to proceed?
My own strategy is to always stay close to nature and experience. In this sec-
tion, I therefore attempt to open up this topic by continuing to ask about our soci-
ety’s relation to the life process. My intention is not to entirely solve the theoretical
difficulty just posed, but rather to briefly see what this one conceptual thread—the
life process—might at this stage begin to show us, that is, how it might start to
help us tie our various crises together. I begin by focusing on the place of nature
within our economic system and finish by looking at the ecological crisis as a
problem of lost meaning or feeling, of our cultural nihilism. In doing so, I am also
using this section to introduce themes that will reappear in later discussions.

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 84 Beginning with Experience

The Economization of Reality. A recent newspaper ad by Fortune Financial reads:

“Garth Turner believes the world is about to fall apart. Find out why that might
be good for your investments.”150 An alarmingly frank statement, it embodies
the principle of the economization of reality: “the reduction of everything to
relations of exchange, . . . the ever-expanding power of money and the corre-
sponding decline in the spiritual and the sacred.”151 The aim of an economized
reality, as Wendell Berry comments, “is to separate us as far as possible from the
sources of life.”152 From an experiential perspective, what is most striking here is
the increasing extent to which economic forces structure our day-to-day living
or social relations, including the form that our families, work, and relations to
the natural world must take.153 In the efficient factory or rationalized office, for
example, “every manifestation of what is informal, spontaneous, or emotional is
ruthlessly suppressed”154 in the interest of keeping our nature-exploiting economy
on the roll.155 (Dilbert cartoons are funny only pathetically.) As Ray Rogers com-
ments, “The structures of everyday life and the structures that cause environ-
mental problems are one and the same.”156 In short, the relationship between
humans and nature, including the way we act toward our own nature, is almost
wholly “absorbed by modern economic realities.”157
Karl Marx used the notion of “commodity fetishism” to describe the capi-
talist condition wherein commodities are worshiped while human relations are
equivalently devalued or deprioritized. In more ecological terms: “Through the
massive inversion of reality that drives capital, we increasingly grant social standing
to dead things (commodities) and deny it to living things (humans and nature).”158
Capital, in brief, is “a set of processes and relationships which, through its necessity
to expand, draws life out of humans and nature.” As Rogers puts it simply, ours
is “a world in which living things die to make a dead thing grow.”159 It is hard
to imagine stating our society’s opposition to the life process in bleaker terms.
Our social relationships fall more and more under the influence of marketplace
competitiveness as a given sensuous reality is progressively replaced by an abstract,
rationalized, and administered one that silences nature’s claims and replaces the
living with the dead (including a living humanity with a deadened one).
The notion of commodity fetishism reveals capitalism as a perverse system
of social organization, a single system of violence directed at both human and
nonhuman nature. As Vandana Shiva writes: “More commodities and more cash
means less life—in nature through ecological destruction and in society through
the denial of basic needs.”160 The viciousness of this double violation of nature was
explored many years ago by Max Horkheimer: “Domination of Nature involves
domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of
external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate
nature in himself. Since the subjugation of nature, in and outside of man, goes
on without meaningful motive, nature is not really transcended or reconciled but

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 Beginning with Experience 85

merely repressed.”161 What Horkheimer and other critical theorists described was
a social order whose essential trajectory is precisely to become increasingly incom-
patible with or repressing of nature.162 The lone phone operator in a fluorescent-lit
cubicle whose performance is being monitored by computer is hardly unfolding
her or his existence as nature intended. Horkheimer observed that when we domi-
nate nature we inevitably get pulled into the arena of violence as we ourselves
are converted into instruments and resources (this is not to posit a homogenous
humanity lacking in social distinction, but to assert that no one escapes some kind
of mistreatment163). I call this vicious dialectic “the double violation of nature”
in order to emphasize this rebounding or mirroring effect. As Kovel describes it:

Our society is an immense machine constructed to extract wealth from the earth
through unlimited economic penetration. Its raw materials extend to nature (viewed
as “resources”), other societies, culture, and critically, the selves of individual
persons.164

Hence:

The great menace of capitalism, the one to which the entire ecology movement is
responsive, is that all of nature itself will come under the sway of the commodity and
be violated. . . . as the forest becomes a field which becomes a lawn which becomes
Astroturf, so is the human organism converted into a zone of commodification. . . .
In the emergence of the narcissistic character as the central figure of late capitalism,
we see this movement appear in the self.165

Because the capitalist order insists on economic growth, and because profits are
made by taking it out of the earth, (human) nature must be exploited on a per-
petually escalating scale. Trade agreements (GATT, NAFTA, etc.) are simply the
latest developments in this history of economic expansion, in which “ecological
rapine and human slavery are both means of lowering prices on merciless global
markets.”166 The workings of capital, that is, violate the nature of things in general.
And as Kovel here suggests, this process now shows up in humans as the universal-
izing of pathological narcissism.
The permeation of our culture by narcissistic features167 signals one of
the central psychological outcomes (and engines) of our historical mode of
relating to nature. While narcissism is usually discussed in terms of grandiosity
and self-absorption, I want to emphasize that at the core of the classic narcissist
is an utterly shame-bound person whose early needs were severely violated and
who consequently has only an abysmal sense of self. Narcissists are wounded
to such an extent that they have almost no sense of their own insides, their
own bodily felt living. They identify instead with grand self-images that act in

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 86 Beginning with Experience

fantasy to compensate for their terrible sense of inadequacy. They spend their
entire lives propping up these images and insisting brittlely that others be their
loving mirrors. The cult of celebrity—in which we adore and identify with
images of the rich, the powerful, and the beautiful, found in those glossy maga-
zines at the supermarket checkout—likewise betrays a pervasive sense of worth-
lessness in our society. On the whole, however, this condition is not a problem
for the running of a capitalist society, for feelingless, hungry narcissists are in
many ways perfectly adapted, if not tailor-made, for it.168 Having had their
own nature violated, and lacking much grasp of their inner motivations, nar-
cissists consume endlessly in a quest for lost selfhood, and, seeking self-esteem
­

through productivity, performance, ladder-climbing, and hollow expres-

sions of brute power, are all too prepared to participate in the ­technological
ruination of nature.
My depiction here of the ecopsychological implications of our economized
reality has been but a rough sketch. My purpose was simply to evoke a sense
for the all-around irrational mistreatment of nature under the dominance of our
economic system and, in the face of it, to draw attention to the importance of
reprioritizing the life process. John Rodman took up this point when he argued
that the motivations of radical ecologists are based in this life process, whose felt
authority they put above any economic calculus:

Acts of ecological resistance do not stem so much from calculation of enlightened

self-interest . . . as from a felt need to resist the repression, censorship, or liquidation
of potentialities that lie within both human and nonhuman nature. . . . the river
struggles against the dam like an instinct struggles against an inhibition or a social
movement struggles against a restrictive institution. The threat perceived by the
human ‘Friends of the River’ who try to prevent the dam’s being built in the first
place . . . is the threat of wildness being tamed, of a natural process interrupted and
distorted, of the ‘individuality’ of a natural being made to conform to an artificial
pattern imposed upon it, of repression in the most general sense.169

The legitimacy enjoyed by different kinds of argument is a matter of what ulti-

mately concerns us. If, like Livingston, we care for “the phenomenon of living”
more than we do for “the contorted belief system” of our culture,170 then argu-
ments from felt need, and against repression, will persuade us. If, moreover, the
narcissist is to Astroturf as the vital human being is to an undiminished forest,
then whatever we say in defence of nonhuman nature we may also say in defence
of human nature. If, on the other extreme, what most concerns us as a society is
the financial bottom line—a concern symbolized in that dominant monument
of our age, the banking tower171—then only economic and resourcist arguments
will do.

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Finally, I need note that we are not committed to a violent economic system
without reason. Environmentalists have long been frustrated by how easily “fear
for the economy” displaces “fear for the ecology.”172 I believe this fear is key. We
are born into a social world in which our need for personal viability or security
gets “met” by being twisted down along narrow economic pathways which then
become difficult to leave, for both emotional and structural reasons. We are just
too existentially vulnerable for it to be otherwise, at least for most of us. These
pathways, however, fail to bring us the release from fear we desire. For it is the
very pattern of relationships within the system of capital that generates our deep
and desperate insecurity in the first place. Thus, the whole historical dialectic
of double violating nature is essentially a compulsive and doomed search for an
ever-more-elusive sense of security, in which the repression and degradation of
human and nonhuman nature has become a strange and viciously spiraling end in
itself.173 To understand all this better I suggest we need a concrete mapping of the
connections between the form of our society, the nature of our experience, and
our relation to more-than-human reality. Chapters four through six are exercises
toward this end.

Nihilism: A Unifying Experiential Theme. Philosopher David Levin calls nihilism

a “collective and archetypal madness . . . that defines the spirit of our epoch.”174 I
suggest that our psychological and ecological crises are each manifestations of this
nihilism and so are essentially unified in it. Nihilism is a condition in which we
experience little meaning, depth, dimensionality, or transcendent bearing in the
world, and where we ourselves feel empty, cut-off, homeless, soulless; many of us
frantically trying to “be” somebody. As Jules Henry writes; “Life in our culture is
a flight from nothingness.”175 How might we relate our nihilistic pathology to the
life process and so to the ecological crisis?
First, Evernden claims that “although they seldom recognize it, [environ-
mentalists] are protesting not the stripping of natural resources but the stripping
of earthly meaning. . . . Ironically, the very entity they defend—environment—is
itself an offspring of the nihilistic behemoth they challenge.”176 Meaning, born of
interaction, is both found and made, is coconstituted, in the opening out of a life
process. That our society senses little meaning in the natural world is because our
concrete interactions with it are so restricted, because we do not make it relevant
or include it in our daily living. “The environment” exists, remarks Evernden,
precisely “because we have excised it from the context of our lives.”177 Where there
is no contact, participation, or experience, there is no meaning. And that which
has no meaning simply does not matter. By contrast, for many of those who have
indeed spent a life in open contact with nonhuman beings, the natural world is
peopled with beautiful and mysterious others deserving of respect and solidarity.
In this case, even arguing for the “intrinsic value” of nature seems a clumsy or

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 88 Beginning with Experience

not-quite-right affair, a strategy that betrays our nihilistic times. For as Romand
Coles suggests, value is not some quanta, but “emerges like breath exhaled under
water from encounters between self and other.”178
Perhaps the connection I am exploring here is most simply made in
R.  D. Laing’s oft-cited line that: “If our experience is destroyed our behaviour
will be destructive.”179 Nihilism is a frustrating cultural condition; it engenders
rage and (self-)destruction (i.e., an-nihil-ation). The more our living and feel-
ings are blocked, the more we are estranged from our own bodily-felt nature, the
more does the aggression within the life force press up against this repression;
hence “adjustment in our time involves an element of resentment and suppressed
fury.”180 As many have noted, violence often originates in repressed aggression
combined with an inner sense of shame or impotence. That is, acts of rageful vio-
lence can be seen, in part, as desperate attempts to assert one’s existence or person-
hood, so as to defend oneself against the painful feeling that one is a nothing or a
nobody. There is, furthermore, no shortage of literature describing much of the
male-driven mistreatment of the earth as an act of blind hostility, in which nature,
denuded of meaning to the status of brute matter, becomes the target for guilt-
free or morally sanctioned acts of violence. Barry Lopez, for example, writes that
the historical slaughter of wolves in North America is rooted in “theriophobia,” a
fear of the beast (within). All that has become violent, irrational, insatiable, and
disinhibited within humans is disowned from awareness and then projected onto
animals who do not themselves “rape, murder, and pillage.” This projection, notes
Lopez, has stuck particularly well to wolves, who when targeted for annihilation
are therefore asked to pay the price (as are all dogs who get kicked) for the distor-
tion and repression of life among men.181
Konrad Stettbacher calls our feelings “the guardians of life.” Rinzler like-
wise remarks that “the only safety and protection we can ever know is in our pro-
found connectedness with our sensory selves, as part of the living earth, warning
us of our danger.”182 As Audre Lorde has noted, however: “Within structures
defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional de-humanization, our feel-
ings were not meant to survive.”183 And as Heidegger suggested, this means that
our time is “no longer able to experience its own destitution.”184 One final way
to view the domination of nature, then, is simply as a “cruelty sanctioned by
tradition,”185 wherein we do not feel the impact of our violent actions. The
­narcissist is just unable to recognize the self or personhood of others, and thus to
value and care for life.186
In “beginning with experience” in this chapter I have also begun my efforts
to demonstrate the centrality of the human-nature relationship in all psycholog-
ical, social, and ecological matters. In my view, thinkers who wish to oppose the
destructive aspects of our society need to acknowledge the primary authority of
self-organizing nature—so that they may both more adequately gather the essen-
tial nature of our crises and, just as importantly, find this nature in their own

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 Beginning with Experience 89

experience as a source of guidance. Such privileging of nature is certainly not

unique to me, but is common to all radical ecologists. In its linking of the hatred
of nature to the hatred of women and in its opposition to panmechanism, for
example, ecofeminism has largely defined itself exactly by its life-orientation.187
Ynestra King writes: “In ecofeminism, nature is the central category of analysis. An
analysis of the interrelated dominations of nature—psyche and sexuality, human
oppression, and nonhuman nature—and the historic position of women in rela-
tion to these forms of domination is the starting point of ecofeminist theory.”188
What has yet to be developed, however, is what in the next two chapters I call a
“naturalistic psychology.”

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Chapter_03.indd 90 09/11/12 12:28 AM
 4
FROM HUMANISTIC TO NATURALISTIC
PSYCHOLOGY

The Irony of Humanistic Psychology

Fidelity to human order, . . . if it is to be responsible, implies fidelity also to

natural order.
—Wendell Berry1

In the previous chapter, my main psychological sources were humanistic. What

makes this camp of psychology valuable to ecopsychology is its experiential, inter-
active focus and the sensitive attention it gives to human nature. The irony of
humanistic psychology, however, is that it has come to cherish human nature
largely by distinguishing it sharply from the rest of nature, the latter eclipsed by the
human marvel into near irrelevancy. This situation is consistent with the general
tradition of humanism: “a style of thought or an attitude which makes the human
central, important, valuable, crucial, pivotal, wonderful, powerful—even miracu-
lous.”2 The original raison d’être of humanistic psychology was in fact to “resist
the reduction of humanness to Nature” by emphasizing such special human prop-
erties as will, freedom, and consciousness—and so, for at least some,3 to establish a
“radical break” with nature (seen as mechanically determined matter-in-motion).4
One of the first humanistic psychologists, Erich Fromm, wrote in 1941 that man’s
remaining ties with nature actually block “his full human development.”5 While
not all humanists would today agree with him, what can be safely said is that few
have taken the position that our humanity is most nobly realized exactly through
those natural ties that Fromm so regretted.6
This chapter and the next together make up a kind of hermeneutical
exercise aimed at such a vision. In them, I make the turn from humanistic to
“naturalistic” psychology. I have set myself the task, that is, of carrying forward
some of the biases within humanistic psychology that are enabling or fruitful for

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ecopsychology (e.g., its organismic focus and its interactive view of reality), while
leaving behind some of those that are blinding or false. Ecological thinkers have
brought much criticism down on humanism, calling it, among other things, an
“ideological fixation” on humans.7 When it comes to humanistic psychology, how-
ever, I would rather put it in dialogue with radical ecology in order to create
something that benefits from and filters out weaknesses in both of them. The
basic image of human nature that unites the humanistic psychologies is that of
a continual state of becoming, emerging, or unfolding.8 We are most human,
in other words, when perpetually transcending or growing beyond our current
mode of being. The problem from an ecological perspective is that this process
is largely disarticulated or disembedded from the natural world, and so lacks any
restraint or necessary commitment to an earthly place. Humanists often proclaim
our unlimited potential, sometimes even fantasizing of planetary omnipotence.9
To put it plainly, then, the ecologizing of humanistic psychology will require a
certain amount of deflation. Hans Peter Duerr writes, in this regard, that to be
able to “speak” with nonhuman entities “a person needs what the [Native Ameri-
cans] call ‘reverence.’ Humans must become unimportant before the other things
of nature.”10
I have already voiced my concerns about the natural scientific disclosure of
nature. The exercise in this chapter is thus to begin inquiring into the meaning
of nature in more psychological, primordial, and openly dialogical terms. I do so
by defining nature under three headings, namely, the natural world, the essential
qualities or character of some phenomenon, and the life force. This will then set
the stage for me to outline a naturalistic or nature-centered psychology in the
chapter to follow. In sum, I would note that the word “human” comes from the
Latin humus, meaning soil or earth. The naturalistic psychology I propose in the
chapters ahead attempts to stay attuned to what is indeed distinctive about being
human, while nonetheless keeping us grounded in the earth of which we consist.

On Nature and Human Nature

Many of the proposed solutions to the current ecological crisis are taken in by
traditional interpretations, ignore questions of hermeneutics, and so overlook
the underlying fantasies and prejudices that condition . . . our perception of
the natural world—and thereby also our interaction with the environment.
—Graham Parkes11

Hermeneutic inquiry arises out of some sort of alienation from meaning. Our
nihilistic era, however, suffers from a general loss of meaning across the board,
a condition both born and perpetuating of violence. My own interpretive and
rhetorical strategy is to counter this nihilism by taking nature as my theme, for it

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is in this direction that I feel the sources of meaning are to be found or rediscov-
ered, and our violence is to be understood. To do this, however, is to walk into
tricky territory, so ideologically misused is the notion of nature (e.g., capitalism is
natural) and so blunt a tool is it for justifying any kind of status quo (“that’s just
human nature”). The muddying of the whole idea of nature—to the point where
nature is said not to exist at all—is nonetheless exactly the point. The notion of
nature has been ideologically perverted precisely because it is so powerful, so very
much at the heart of it all, so decisive in how we understand and behave in the
world. Stronger still, it is because our society so poorly acknowledges and under-
stands the nature of things that we continue to grossly mistreat them, as I began
to argue in the previous chapter. Rather than give up on or renounce the concept
of nature as irremediably or unavoidably a product only of human discourse, I
therefore say that ecopsychologists need to make deliberate efforts to reclaim and
defend this “nature” against reactionary, conservative, or naive usage.12
We can all agree, I presume, that nature is a matter of interpretation. My
general ontological outlook—which I call plural realism13—is that there are innu-
merable ways of disclosing or interpreting reality. This position does not naively
suggest, however, that all perspectives are equally valid; it does not rule out criti-
cism and debate. What it does do is seek a “middle way” between the extremes.
Most notably, it is neither objectivism nor relativism. That different interpreta-
tions are possible, that many truths can coexist, refutes objectivism. That better
interpretations are possible, that our experience can always adjudicate the truth or
falsity of an assertion, or lead us into more satisfying contact with reality, refutes
relativism. Hence, to think of truth in plural terms is not say that anything goes. In
other words, as a plural realist I hold that many different interpretations of a phe-
nomenon are possible, but also that these will not all be equal in their truthfulness
or openness to the phenomenon in question (as Simone Weil writes: “Every being
cries out to be read differently”).14 How we understand nature, then, depends on
the quality of our relation to it, our mode of existence, the ground of interpreta-
tion, the historical and personal prejudices we bring to it. One way I see naturalistic
­psychology is therefore as a dialogue concerning different symbolizations of nature,
in which the participants must be willing to be changed, to work experientially,
in order to better hear and more faithfully respond to the phenomena of nature.
While, for example, I have learned a great deal about nature from Buddhism, the
practice of Buddhism is still largely human-centered.15 As Gary Snyder remarks,
there is little in the traditions of any of the major world religions, including Bud-
dhism, that addresses the question: “Well, what do you say to Magpie? What do
you say to Rattlesnake when you meet him?”16 Although different approaches or
schemes reveal nature in their own ways, my faith is that our comprehension will
benefit from an open dialogue among them—so long, that is, as we take our con-
cepts experientially, making an effort to practically embody them or see what felt
differences they make, rather than just bandying them about in the air.

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In an exercise such as this, where we are feeling out a large terrain, we

must speak broadly. For this section, I have chosen three broad categories within
which to discuss a number of meanings of nature, and thereby to establish a
basis for advancing a naturalistic psychology.17 (The boundaries between the
categories, however, are utterly permeable, and I have made no attempt to stop
the flow of terms across them.) The exercise is intended as a “first pass” or intro-
ductory treatment, on the understanding that much of what I talk about will
gain from the discussion in the remaining chapters. I am not, moreover, aiming
at a final or definitive account of this subject, but merely a sufficient one to give
credence to a naturalistic approach. Despite having read about it, for instance,
I have only the meagerest sense of what it is like to live as do oral, myth-telling
people, with all the things they know about the nature of the world.18 My
argument, however, is that this lack of experience need not stop me or anyone
else from engaging in a recollective process. For my own rhetorical purposes,
it would in fact do no good to spend my whole time quoting Black Elk. That
said, I do include a number of indigenous and anthropological voices in my
dialogue on nature, both because they so clearly give form or support to points
I want to make and also because they help evoke a sense, however vaguely, for
what has been lost.19

Nature as the Natural World

The knife of separation is cruel. I not only remember in a factual sense but
I can feel to this day the anguished frustration, the knowledge that I could
never—not ever—be more than a boy on the grass, excluded from [the world
of toads and frogs and newts] wholly and eternally.
—John Livingston20

This first category is what we simply call the natural world, sometimes including
ourselves in it, sometimes not. How are we to understand this ambiguity?

Creatures of Distance: The Gap. Speaking of his intimate relationship with an

Alaskan island, Richard Nelson writes: “There is nothing in me that is not of the
earth, no split instance of separateness, no particle that disunites me from my
surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself. The rivers run through my veins,
the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh, the sun’s
heat smolders inside me.” While in a less ecstatic mood, however, he elsewhere
admits that “as much as I love it [the island], I feel distant and disconnected, still
struggle with questions about belonging here. . . . Perhaps I want more closeness
than could ever exist for me.”21 Nelson’s struggle demonstrates what psychologists
recognize as the tension between our wish for fusion with the universe and the
inescapable fact that we are “creatures of distance.”22

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To overcome alienation and dualism is not necessarily to adopt a monism,

for we are never entirely coincident or “one” with others.23 As a means to under-
stand the human relation to nature I propose instead a kinship continuum,24 On
one end of this continuum I place the world according to Jean-Paul Sartre, in
which humans and nature are utterly void of common ground. The relation
between them, in Sartre’s view, is that of a totally free, hyper-Cartesian human
consciousness (Nothingness) standing in hostile opposition to a “massive, inert,
repulsive and nauseating ‘mother’ nature” (Being).25 At the far end of this con-
tinuum, by contrast, I place the world of the mystic in a state of nirvana. Report-
edly, in this blissful experience of total unity a person’s sense doors are closed, such
that from the outside she or he looks dead. Scattered between these two end points
lie the rest of us. Although, “end point” is perhaps not the right term; for kinship
denotes the experience of unity-within-separation, likeness-within-­difference,
continuity-within-discontinuity, or identity-within-differentiation. Sartre senses
no continuity between his own being and that of others, while the blissed-out
mystic experiences no difference (I presume). Thus neither the Sartrean nor nir-
vanic state count as one of kinship; they are better understood as asymptotes.26
Sartre and the mystic are not what I am primarily interested in, even as they
help me define nature as a world of others with whom we feel varying degrees of
kinship. (In fact, the likely Indo-European root for nature is gen, which among
its other derivatives—such as generate—gives us the words kin and kind.27) What
I wish to stress, rather, is that alienation is a state poor in kinship feelings, and
so that our estranged and divided society lies closer to the Sartrean end of things
(although I do not suggest nirvana as a necessarily ideal state either). We may
perhaps feel our kinship with the rest of the natural world only as a certain attrac-
tion or draw toward it; as a desire to sit our bones down on a piece of bedrock,
where we then experience a sort of inner soaring as we watch the gulls fly by.
Experientially, the route out of alienation is marked by an increase in such kinship
feeling: by a growing sense of commonality, solidarity, or belonging with others
of all kinds. What we yearn for, then, is to be on more familiar terms with other
beings, to be a part of it all—not so much for a feeling of pure undifferentiated
unity, but for a sense of comm-unity; not union, but comm-union.28 It is the
common ground we do sense with animals (human or nonhuman), plants, rocks,
water, and so on, that lets us say that “we too are nature,” while it is the feeling of
difference and distance that forces us to call nature a world of “others.” Nature in
this sense is “the whole ground of Otherness”29 and human nature the otherness
“we experience about ourselves.”30
The etymological meaning of distance is “stand apart” (di-stance). As I aim
to show in what remains of this book, it is of our human nature to wrestle with or
learn the art of distance. As an experiential concept, distance refers to nearness or
farness of contact, regardless of literal distance. To be aware of reality as such, to get
perspective on things, requires that we withdraw from our ontological medium or

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step back from being (or as Heidegger would say, that being itself withdraw from
us). Humans are able to feel awe and wonder because as creatures of distance we can
differentiate and contact the world in its sheer and inexhaustible otherness, grasp
it in its unfathomable mystery. Under the best conditions, we are creatures of right
or optimal distance: the distance where we make meaningful contact,31 where good
gestalts are formed.32 The crisis in our current relationship with nature is not, then,
one of distance per se, but of overdistance. Joel Kovel is accordingly critical of deep
ecology supporters who seek to abolish any sense of difference between humans and
nature, for this ironically “deprives humans of what is in fact our peculiar nature.
The dialectic, to be both part of and [experientially] separate from nature, is in fact
human nature.”33 The step back from being opens up an experiential gap—the
moment of separation—which is our human lot to negotiate, with all the beautiful
and tragic possibilities it entails. Shepard claims, in this regard, that it is “an atti-
tude of accepted separateness . . . which characterizes both the great naturalists and
primal peoples.”34 As Nelson reports, offering one example of this, for Koyukon
Indians “humans and animals are clearly and qualitatively separated.” Despite that
the “natural and human communities originated together in the ­Distant Time and
have never become completely separate,” there is still a “narrow gap . . . between the
worlds of humanity and nature.”35
In the human-nature relation, then, one sense of “human” is that of a
­community of human beings bounded by shared language, myth, custom, and so
on, as it collectively interacts with nonhuman others. As Sean Kane observes, in
archaic human societies this boundary is often physically marked by, for example,
the edge of the forest or the surface of the sea, where worlds meet and exchanges
take place.36 I leave it for Kane and others to detail what such primal life at
the edge of mystery is like. What I would emphasize is that kinship with the
rest of nature has traditionally been won by admitting of boundaries and then
dialoguing with the nonhuman presences on the other side of them, through
ritual, dream, myth, nonordinary states of consciousness, skillful everyday inter-
action, and so forth. This involves the working out of covenants, and the main-
tenance of a complex balance between the worlds, governed by taboos and rules
of exchange that guard against overexploitation. As Barry Lopez notes, “our rela-
tionships with animals were once contractual—principled agreements, founded
in a spirit of reciprocity, mythic in persuasiveness. Among hunting peoples in
general they consisted of mutual obligations and courtesies.”37 More generally
still, in such conversation humans relate not to some homogeneous or undif-
ferentiated Nature but to particular beings, to elk or beaver people, even as these
others themselves interrelate as an ecological whole. Experienced as kin, such
persons are approached with respect and confidence, for they are not seen as
adversaries.38 For us, on the other hand, the disappearance of this kind of intense
and respectful interaction has turned a narrow gap into a spiritual chasm, into
which we are now forever falling.

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Nature and Spirit. Cultural narratives around the globe signal the gap between
humans and nature in their stories of a human fall from grace, of a departure from
purity or harmonious unity, or of an introduction of separation and self-conscious
struggle between humans and the rest of nature.39 Our original sin, the mark of
shame on all humanity,40 comes from this essential sense of isolation or of being
cut off from the world of nature. Nature for us is that which we have lost; and we
experience this separation as a sense of lack, deficiency, or incompleteness on our
part. Hence the basic shame inherent in the human condition. In asking about
the human/nature relation we thus come to the “problem of man”; or as I prefer to
say; the question of nature raises the question of spirit. I use the word spirit, in this
instance, to refer to a mode of experience that tends in the direction of reunion
with nature or that works to overcome splits between realms of being.41 With the
exception of our own largely despiritualized society, spiritual practice has been a
prime, if not all-encompassing, concern throughout the record of human exist-
ence. I do not hesitate therefore to call the spiritual an essential form of experience
for humans. Or as Kovel puts it: “human beings are configured spiritually.”42 A
being who was already at one with nature would have no need of spiritual lessons
(or of “nature”). On account of how we stand in relation to the rest of nature,
then, it is of our own human nature to be spiritual.
The spiritual urge is so strong in us humans because in our incompleteness
we are bound to ask about the meaning of life and the ground of our existence. But
what is this ground? As a network of relationships the natural world is not a thing
at all, but a constant flux of interweaving processes, lacking in any permanence or
ultimate solidity. In standing apart from nature, this nonsolidity, groundlessness,
or “emptiness” to reality is revealed to humans as such—which makes us anxious.
In the face of the so-called void, the separated self or Ego then seeks security
through creating the illusion that it is an immortal substance exempt from the
law of change or impermanence.43 As an illusory structure, however, the Ego is
haunted by the void—by a sense of lack, emptiness, insecurity, or tenuousness;
by the agitated prospect of its own annihilation. As the word suggests, what we
ultimately a-void with our fearful and rigid life-patterns is the void. The fear of our
future death derives in fact from this implicit dread or more basic anxiety of being
suspended over the abyss at every present moment.
As David Loy has suggested, drawing on Buddhist and existential psychology,
“the most fundamental dualism of all” is that between the separated or isolated self
and the no-thing-ness or void that perpetually threatens its existence.44 From this
view, we see that the Ego is caught in an endless struggle between the desire to
exist for itself as a separate being and the desire to not exist, to be fused back into
the whole, so as to extinguish the pain of separation. The story of a schizophrenic
man who spends much of his time bowing illustrates this dynamic. Asked why he
bows, the man says he is balancing his emotions; when feeling isolated and lonely
he leans forward to be close to others, whereupon he immediately feels afraid and

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straightens back up, pulling away from contact—only to once again feel lonely and
to commence another bow.45 What this man describes is an oscillation between
those two well-known poles of life that I call our “twin terrors.”46 One terror is
that of being all alone in the cosmos, wherein the void looms large to the extent
of our Egoic isolation. The other is that of the death of our Egos, or of being
engulfed or overwhelmed by others—what has been called “annihilation panic.”
While few today actually contemplate the void, the twin terrors are the stuff of
everyday interpersonal relations. They are seen, in particular, in the lives of trauma
survivors, which often swing dramatically between states of intense attachment and
terrified withdrawal.47 It takes little effort, however, to see such dynamics in almost
anybody’s life: the anxious isolate (fearful of intimacy), the needy “codependent”
(fearful of independence), the addict (fused with her or his “drug”), and so on.
We may also experience the void whenever our lives are in transition or limbo—
when we switch careers, get divorced, lose a loved one, develop an illness, or leave
home for the first time—when we can no longer hold onto our old identities and
relationships and must instead confront a distressing gap in the continuity of our
existence.48 While I can only demonstrate it in this limited way, my point here is
that the spiritual conditions of human existence, based in our distanced relation to
nature, while they may be a-voided, can never be escaped.
One of the nature-violating hallmarks of our own society, then, is that it does
not adequately attend to the spiritual region of existence. Significantly, our repressed
fear of the void, our hidden ontological insecurity, then gets translated into (among
other things) a fear of nature: a million tentacles, creepy-crawlies, microorganisms,
or hidden beasts—alien and fearsome others—threatening our vulnerable and pre-
carious Egos. Indeed, Horkheimer wrote that the “history of Western civilization
could be written in terms of the growth of the [E]go,”49 its rational functions being
employed to dominate and control nature (whether id or wilderness) in an endless
and self-defeating search for security. As Kovel notes: “Egoic experience gravitates
toward paranoia, and does so precisely because of the splitting and domination
conjugated into it. . . . The concrete effects . . . are the repression of the body and
the inevitable return of the repressed. Ecologically, nature turns into wilderness
which must be ‘tamed,’ that is, paved, converted into Disneyworlds or simple raw
materials. . . . Ego is thus the specific antagonist of any emancipatory project. It
is what an ecologically sensitive practice must overcome.”50 In short, because the
Egoic mode is so antagonistic to and split from nature, ecopsychology is called
toward a spiritual mode, one that would overcome Ego.
To finish this discussion I wish to speak briefly about three aspects of spir-
itual life that will be relevant to discussions ahead. First, as Loy suggests, the anti-
dote for fear of the void is to become the void. In other words, spiritual practice is
the dissolving of Ego and the realizing of ourselves in relation to others. I imagine
all “nature lovers” know the experience of at least temporarily releasing their Egos
outward, so as to spontaneously flow with birds, trees, wind, sky, water, rock,

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moss, flowers, insects—in which they feel a relative loss of self-density, noticeable
for its peacefulness, spaciousness, vividness, or at least its freedom from a more
confined Egoic mode of existence. Sartre’s world, by contrast, is imbued with
the dread and unreality of existential isolation. Thus, while there are many ways
of being spiritual, all of which involve discipline and work, it is not difficult to
gather that the more we identify with the greater rhythms of life, the more com-
munity, common ground or kinship we sense, the less anxious we will be, because
less attached to our own individual atom. Second, spiritual life confronts death.
The question of nature brings the topic of our death aversion, our impoverished
comprehension of the interplay between birth and death in the larger stream of
life, right to the fore. As Gary Snyder teaches, to “acknowledge that each of us at
the table will eventually be part of the meal,” rather than being a source of disgust
with self, humanity, and life, can be a way into the sacred, celebratory, and sac-
ramental side of existence. The fact that life unavoidably involves death-dealing
can be taken, that is, as a spiritual challenge: as an invitation to understand “the
play of the real world, with all its suffering,” to realize that all “of nature is a gift-
exchange, a pot-luck banquet” at which we ourselves are both gift and guest.51
Third, spiritual life is the development of our capacity to love. As Fromm wrote:
“The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of
shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety. The deepest need of
man, then, is to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”52
To be loved is to have our being affirmed, to feel connected to and embraced by
others; love is thus the source of our ontological security, of feeling grounded
in our own being.53 To love others is to identify their interests with our own,
while nonetheless maintaining our distance from them, so that they (and we) may
unfold their own particular natures, or be.

Nature as Mysterious Birth, Genesis, Growth, Unfolding. “Nature” comes from the
Latin word natura, which means birth. Hence the widespread (though apparently
not universal) association of nature with “mother” and the feminine; and its rela-
tion to such words as natal and pregnant. (The Latin for mother—mater—is in
turn the source for such words as matter and matrix.) The Greek word is physis or
phusis, which similarly means the process of genesis, growing, a-rising, e-merging,
opening up, unfolding—as in the blossoming of a flower.54 Such words make
the link between nature and life. Note also how nature in its primordial sense
is a process, is a verb. Nature as a noun, as physical matter, is thus (as Heidegger
observed) nature in a “restricted sense.” The natural world is fundamentally,
therefore, a field of arising-and-passing phenomena or appearances, a myriad of
unfolding-and-dying interactional events.
How are we to grasp this primordial sense of nature? We might begin by
noticing the countless cyclic phenomena in the world, such as breathing, the
rising and setting of the sun, the turning of the seasons, or the life cycle of a

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plant, animal, river, or mountain. The character of the bear, in particular, has
through much of human cultural experience been a “mentor in birthing and dying
in the endless cycle of becoming,” a “master of renewal and the wheel of the
seasons”55—as she rotates across the northern sky in the constellation of the Great
Bear or goes “underground” to den for the winter, emerging once again in the
spring (perhaps with the new life of cubs). Indeed, the verb to hear means to
bring forth or give birth. We may also return here to much of what I discussed in
the previous chapter. All complete experiences are an arising from out of the felt
ground and a passing away back into it, a forming and dissolving of a gestalt, a
contacting and a withdrawing. Our human experiencing, as I took pains to say,
is but a cyclic process within the vaster natural world. “The naturalist,” says John
Livingston, “sees a wild animal as one among uncountable ephemeral corporeal
emergences, one minor miracle to remind us of the ineffable whole.”56 So might
we see ourselves.57
All phenomena arise from out of a larger field or ground, as plants perhaps
teach best. They all, therefore, have a hidden dimension: they are mysterious. The
natural world, as a play of appearances in which the things that are disclosed to
us are rooted in what still remains closed, is intrinsically mysterious. Think about
the origin of things. Dream images are given, emotions just come up. We may say
something and then ask ourselves Where did that come from? Symbols, in other
words, emerge spontaneously into the space our existence helps to hold open; they
float to the surface, according to an order of things that is beyond our reckoning.
The much talked about “Dreamtime” of Australian aborigines, while difficult for
us to understand conceptually, is apparently something like a time out of time that
lies within evident reality; it refers to a perpetual emerging of the world from out
of a mysterious depth or earthly dreaming.58 To speak of mystery is to say that the
world contains invisible grounds, unseen forces. In fact, the early Greek thinker,
Heraclitus, claimed that nature itself “loves to hide.” Or as Kane writes, the minds
or intentions of the ecological complexities of nature “prefer to be kept hidden.”59
Archaic myths, he says, do not explain the why of it all, but are rather stories
about the links or relationships among things, the general patterns of the natural
world (as in, to use a minor example, “red sky at night, sailor’s delight”). More to
the point, myth-telling peoples have injunctions against attempting to eliminate
mystery, against bringing everything out into the open, for such acts encourage a
destructive or meddling hubris.
It is the business of Ego, however, to break “itself off from the mystery.”60
The rise of the Ego through Western history has accordingly been paralleled by a
shift in the way the natural world has displayed itself to us, becoming increasingly
distant, hard, literal, mute, static, passive: unmysterious. While, for example,
modern people perceive the world as a kind of picture that stands in front of them
and recedes away from view,61 the experience of Medieval people was more like that
of being in the picture, as is indicated by the (to us, odd looking) absence of linear

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perspective in their art. Although it is hard to imagine, people felt themselves mys-
teriously immersed with other beings and with their language “in something like
a clear lake of . . . ‘meaning.’”62 Today’s scientific project of total unconcealment is
an offense against the things of nature (including ourselves) because it attacks the
mystery that is essential to them and only invokes them to further withdraw from
us, thereby taking us all that much more out of the picture.63 The idea of nature
as otherness, then, implies an opacity, polydimensionality, or wildness that asks
to be respected. Barry Lopez writes of wolves, for instance, that: “No one—not
biologists, not Eskimos, not backwoods hunters, not naturalist writers—knows
why wolves do what they do.”64

Nature as Any (Personified) “Other.” Although the historical Buddha spoke a lan-
guage known as Pali, the word used for nature within Buddhist thought is most
often the Sanskrit term dharma (spelled dhamma in Pali). Dharma is a multifac-
eted word denoting an all-pervasive reality. What I would draw out here is that
among its usages the term signifies any phenomenon: any kind of being that arises,
stays awhile, and passes away. Hence, we may speak of “a” dharma, or “a” nature,
to refer to whatever is borne by the mind,65 that is, to whatever appears in our
awareness as some “other.” Buddhism adopts, then, what is called a phenomeno-
logical ontology, the view that whatever we experience (phenomena) has some
manner of reality. In our own time the predominant understanding of nature,
of the real, is that of matter. The many nonmaterial phenomena that stubbornly
persist in our experience are then given a derivative or secondary status, degraded
to epi-phenomena. Hence, for a recollective project such as this I suggest that
a phenomenological ontology is imperative. We might do our best to adopt a
kind of mythological consciousness, wherein “anything of existential significance
or displaying affective power is important and hence real. For example, dreams
are considered real events, and the emotional impact of dreams about deceased
persons accounts for the absence of a strict separation between the living and the
dead. . . . The world is not measured by consistency but by existential import.”66
We need also admit that: “In a multiple world I too am multiple. Otherness is
inside and out, a part of myself and a part of the outside world.”67
What this all means is a loosening up of our grip on the real. To say that
nature is “other” means that we exist both in and as our felt relations to ­whatever
symbolic otherness we encounter, in whatever realms or modes of experience
we may be open to—whether private or public, ordinary or nonordinary. Thus,
any so-called spirit-being—whether a critical superego, bear-spirit, angel, bad
introject, malevolent possession, dream figure, ancestor, transpersonal guide,
or hallucinated sound—may be taken simply as a hidden presence or spectral
force in our lives, one that visits us, helps us, possesses us, haunts us: claims us
somehow.68 Eugene Gendlin writes that the bodily felt sense “comes between the
conscious person and the deep universal reaches of human nature where we are

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no longer ourselves.”69 The otherness that Jung attributes to the unconscious may
also be read, then, as the autonomy that Gendlin attributes to the body (in its rela-
tion to the world). This autonomy of the body-unconscious leads, moreover, to
a paradox that is well known to anyone who does inner work: that our ­experience
is not exactly “ours.”70 “Like the fox in the forest which is not mine just because
I see it, so the fox in the dream is not mine just because I dream it.”71 In inner
work, we are asked to “own” our experience, feel our feelings, while nonetheless
dis-identifying from what we experience, creating an aware or detached distance
from it, imagining it as another person. Doing so opens up the needed space to
then converse with it, make contact with it, and—paradoxically—achieve greater
closeness or intimacy with it. In the practice of focusing, for example, we often
symbolize a feeling by allowing an inner image to emerge from it, whether this
image be a block of ice, a scared little boy, or a prowling wolf. We then enter into
a relationship with this imagined and personified other—as it is still felt in our
bodies—getting to know it, seeing what it wants, getting close to it, working out
conflicts with it, and so on.72
One of the additional things focusing demonstrates, then, is that the per-
sonification of otherness is indigenous to the psyche.73 We do recognize the living
quality of nonhuman beings, their inwardness, whether these others be an inner
image, a cat, or an old pair of hiking boots. It is a great irony that so many psy-
chologists have described personification as “primitive” or childish animism; for
no good therapist (it seems to me) can ignore it. This shows how easily one of the
most obvious and significant tendencies of the psyche can be pushed aside by an
objectivist view. We may love others, and feel loved by them, only if we under-
stand them as persons.74 As I discussed in chapter one, moreover, there are efforts
afoot to revive an animistic sense of things, which has always been the common
sense among indigenous peoples. A traditional Hopi belief, for instance, is report-
edly that “humans emerged into the world as corn does,” and so, conversely, that
corn ought to be treated as newborn persons.75 If this seems too outlandish an
idea, we may simply recall that one of the goals of hermeneutics is to grant others
their own voices and intentions.
In a well-known reflection on a path through a field he walked as a boy,
Heidegger wrote that “the message of the Fieldpath speaks only as long as there
are human beings who, born in its air, are able to hear it. . . . The danger threatens
that men of today remain hard of hearing to its language.”76 Following Heidegger,
we may understand or imagine the natural world as a communicative and personi-
fied body, even if we have trouble hearing its speech. In my own experiences of
conversing with nonhuman others, the moment of contact arrives like a window
opening: I feel a sudden resonance, where a message unmistakably comes through,
as when a Raven flew onto a nearby branch of a hemlock to tell me who is boss
and whose world I should be paying attention to. Such experiences need no justi-
fication beyond themselves—for meaning is transmitted in them, and I feel a clear

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 103

change in my existence, in the way I sense things following them. The more I am
able to attune myself to the natural world the more I discover that it is correspond-
ingly attuned to me. Like being in a great big dream, relevant messages are being
spoken everywhere, telling me things I need to hear, and to which I need respond.
I offer this modest testimonial only to suggest both the very ordinariness of such
earthly communication and its utter mystery.77

As a final note, I wish to clarify how I will hereafter use the term natural world.
Although I call any “other” a natural event, I still wish to employ the “natural
world” as a shorthand for that realm of wild and diverse processes found most
fully, though not exclusively, in relatively unhumanized places, where a richer
community of beings is present. To make this relative distinction I will therefore at
times refer to the “wider” or “larger” natural world. At other times, however, I will
use “natural world” and “nature” without qualification, unbothered by the ambi-
guity. What matters most, from my perspective, is the quality of our experiencing
among the various realms of otherness, a point I hope to make evident enough
regardless of terminological difficulties.78

Nature as Essential Quality, Way, Character, or Order

Bears and tigers . . . [are] revelations of bearness, of tigerness, of wildness.

—John Livingston79

I have already spoken of certain qualities of the natural world, such as its inherent
mystery. Given that all phenomena interrelate to comprise a single whole, people
everywhere have intuited that there is a general way to this mysterious world of
changing appearances. Big words like Phusis, Tao, Being, Great Mystery, Logos,
Dharma, God, and so on get used for it. This sense of nature will come out further
below when I discuss the next category of nature, a general organizing force in the
world. We may quickly get a feel for it, however, simply by pointing to the prin-
ciple of karma, some version of which is recognized across cultures. Karma means
action. Roughly speaking,80 to harm others is to harm or bring down misfortune
and suffering on oneself. Good karma, on the other hand, bears the fruit of good
luck, grace, or release from suffering. Buddhists, Christians, and primal peoples
(among others) all say something like this, although the last group is more likely
to talk about proper or nonviolating actions in relation to nonhuman persons
as well, or at least to do so in more local detail. Plainly put: “The natural world
responds to us in a universal language. If we’re behaving badly, the world will tell
us.”81 That is its nature.
Moving from the character of the natural world, to that of particular ­entities
within that world, nature here refers to the essential qualities, calling, virtues,
­excellences, or life of a being. Dharma means “that which bears its own nature. . . .

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 104 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

The blazing of the sun is its characteristic.”82 All dharmas are said to sustain one
another by keeping to their own unique modes of being. In its primordial sense,
phusis denotes the unfolding of entities as a whole whereby they can emerge “of
their own accord from out of themselves—coming forth uncompelled from con-
cealment.”83 That is, the essential nature of an entity is the way it organizes itself,
implies its own further living, even if it is externally compelled to deviate from this
nature. James Hillman remarks that each animal has its own kind of self-display,
and that “the animal’s urge to self-revelation is reason enough for its creation. . . .
the animal continually reminds that the play of creation is revelation.”84 All beings
also have their own characteristic liveliness. The things we experience as being most
alive are those that self-emerge most intensely, with the greatest energy, motion,
brilliance, or power (this idea coming from the Greek word for life, zoe, which is
a characteristic of, or equivalent term for, phusis).85 What we normally regard as a
living being, say a squirrel, is simply a self-emergence that stands out for the capti-
vating or striking way in which it exhibits itself—in contrast, say, to the less lively
sidewalk on which it hops.
What the essential nature of some entity may be is obviously debatable or
subject to different interpretations. I would only repeat here my commitment
to the notion that we can know the nature of things more or less authentically.
Indeed, another meaning of dharma is that which it is “right” for something to
be.86 We will not always agree on what makes for the nature of a little brown bat
or a silver maple, but there will be better or worse readings of these, depending on
the conditions of our relations to them. In the stories of indigenous peoples, ani-
mals and other nonhuman beings are often portrayed with distinct personalities
that convey their essential characters. Such narratives vary from place to place, but
the attempt to understand and respect the nature of local beings does not. In any
case, what I would hope we can agree on is that different beings must have their
own natures because we draw on them metaphorically to understand ourselves
(e.g., “I am a rock”) and because they have lessons to teach us—a topic I consider
at some length in the next chapter, and so leave aside for the time being.
What, next, are we to make of human nature? I suggest we can deviate from,
or be ignorant of, our essential nature, but that it will ultimately call us back or be
rediscovered as we deepen our experience. I showed this in the previous chapter
when I discussed the inherent life-forwarding orderliness of our bodily nature,
and under the heading above when I talked about our spiritual nature. What
follows is a discussion of three aspects of human nature that builds on or adds to
these earlier discussions.

Our Hermeneutic (Poetic, Life-Forwarding, Symbolic, Metaphorical, Sense-Making,

Relational, Dialogical, Playful, World-Disclosing, Caring) Nature. Hermeneutics
refers to the very motion of human existence, the process of experiencing itself.
The long list of parenthetical adjectives in my title here shows how rich or

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 105

multifaceted I feel this idea to be. I will not go over what I have already said about
hermeneutics. What I do want to get at, however, is a sense for how it is of our
nature to understand, or to grasp the meaning of things; to create symbols or
metaphors from out of our dwelling in or experiencing of the human/nature gap;
to sing, dance, and play in the mystery; to care for being, the process of living;
and to celebrate and converse with the cosmos, helping to keep all the world in
shape or in balance. There is no positive way to prove all this, for the truth of our
hermeneutic nature lies in our felt sensing of it, in our experience of “rightness” as
we come home to it or feel it near.87 As with so much of what I discuss here, these
are among the most obvious of things to most indigenous societies.
As hermeneutic beings we are poets by nature. In order to best make this
point I need to back up and note that this is so only because the natural world as
a whole is poetic. The early Greek word for poetry, poiesis, refers to the bringing
forth, making, or creative revealing of beings from out of the hidden or earthy
depths of reality. As a continually changing emergence of the myriad forms of
being, physis, primordial nature, is a mode of poiesis; it is poetic in its sheer beauty,
suchness, or presencing—radiating forth, just now, in the swaying of these branches
or the graceful breaking of this wave. “Physis is indeed,” said Heidegger, “poiesis
in the highest sense.”88 Prior to any human speaking, notes Sean Kane, “a world
of poetry . . . already fully exists, in the darting red streak of a sapsucker or in the
rainclouds gathering ominously over Hecate Strait.”89 This is a crucial message for
ecopsychology, as previous psychologies have so far “refused to see that the animal
kingdom is first of all an aesthetic ostentation, a fantasy on show, of colors and
songs, of gaits and flights, and that this aesthetic display is a primordial instinctual
force laid down in the plasma.”90 Hillman rightly says that psychologists have
instead degraded animals to mere symbols for our own “lower” instincts, denying
to them their own self-displaying natures. According to Owen Barfield, the hall-
mark of poetry is movement, the unfurling of meaning or stretching out toward
life.91 Thus, the cloud “poetizes” because it goes “beyond itself to what is no longer
itself.”92 We recognize poetry, moreover, by the experiencing of aesthetic pleasure,
which, as etymology suggests, is a “breathing in” of the beauty of the cosmos.93
If nature is essentially poetic, and if we too are nature, then humans have a
place in nature’s creativity, in its motions, in its birthing of new forms. As Robert
Avens notes: “Physis, in her psychic aspect, is . . . the ultimate source of thought,
language, poetry.”94 If nature were not ordered poetically, then metaphor-ing—the
carrying forward of meaning and life—would not be possible.95 Human nature
is the felt process of completing needs, meanings, or intentions as they “phusi-
cally” arise in the interplay between body and world, creatively giving them some
symbolic form.96 Thus, the artist who is “pregnant with things needing form”97
describes all of us. We must agree with Freud, then, when he said that “a human
being in the spirit of all times [is] an artist.”98 Or as Paul Goodman put it, the self
is the “artist of life”; it plays the “role of finding and making the meanings we live

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 106 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

by,” of creatively responding to the demands of existence—even if the “verbalizing

personality” of our times now uses a most unpoetic speech.99
The early Greek word for art is techne, from which we get our word
­“technology.” Although our modern technology obscures this point, techne was
originally also considered to be a mode of poiesis, that is, of poetic deliverance.
It referred to the unique way that humans, as participants in phusis, bring into
appearance forms that are already latent within nature and that we are called on to
assist into being—artworks, poetry, myths, rituals, craftworks, clothes, tools, and
so on.100 Techne in this sense is thus a secondary kind of poiesis, for what comes
into being does not arise solely from out of itself, but also with the assistance of,
or dependence on, humans. It is a working in concert with or serving of nature,
and so in early Greek times had a life-giving and life-enhancing meaning.101
As a skillful know-how, techne was thus not only a making but also a finding
and allowing into being of hidden entities that are ready to emerge—as when a
sculptor imagines the prefigured shape, lying within a piece of wood, that wishes
to reveal itself. These notions give some sense for what the poet Hölderlin meant
when he said that: “poetically, man/Dwells on this earth.”102 Heidegger cited this
line when he claimed that humans are essentially dwellers on the earth, poetically
caring for being and so “safeguarding . . . each thing in its nature.”103 Thus, while
it is indeed human nature to be involved in the transfiguration of the natural
world, our making of things is most originally an artful response to a call that
originates from within this world itself.
Calvin Martin suggests that hunter-gatherers understand themselves to
be “cosmic artificers.” Keepers of “formulaic stories, the narrators and symbol-
izers of the blueprints of creation,” they “believe themselves responsible for
repeating these tales in order to keep them alive and, further, to regenerate the
system.”104 That is, it is our nature, our deepest calling, to articulate and tend
to the cosmos, to call forth or lay open the world by means of ceremony and
ritual, storytelling and myth.105 Heidegger came to this theme by saying that
through our poetic attending to things we mortals participate, along with the
earth, the sky, and the gods, in the gathering and illuminating of the world. This
world-disclosing process is at the same time a playful celebration, an expression
of the “simple, flexible characteristic of our human be-ing to care for others, to
laugh, dance, and sing in otherness.”106 This point comes across in an instruc-
tive story in which all the beings of the world gather for the purpose of clarifying
their natures or ways of serving Creation. The beavers’ job is to look after the
wetlands and streams, the worms burrow through the earth so as to keep the soil
in shape, the deer slide through the woods, always keeping a watchful eye on
what is happening. The humans, however, are perplexed about their role. It falls
on all the other creatures, therefore, speaking in chorus, to remind the confused
humans that their purpose is to “glory in it all,” to praise and give thanks for
Creation itself.107

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 107

General Species Characteristics or Needs: Our Transhistorical Human Nature. This is

the “nature” that has come in both for so much misuse and abuse. I need to state
right away, then, that I am attempting in this book to walk a middle path between
the modern emphasis on the general (or universals) and the postmodern stress on
the particular (or differences). Here, I would speak to what can be said in gen-
eral about human nature, without in any way denying to people their particular
natures. Indeed, it is shaming and wounding not to have our unique qualities or
differences acknowledged and affirmed. I would assert, however, that it is in a sim-
ilar way hurtful not to have our general nature, our common species needs, also rec-
ognized and honored. (Please note that I am using the word general in the sense of
“approximately universal.” We come into the world with all sorts of things already
going on, and do not always experience the world quite the way that humans do in
general. I will have more to say about this in the last section below, but will make
the obvious remark here that knowledge of the general need not obscure that of the
particular.) Those who deny the existence of a human nature—either strongly (we
have no nature) or weakly (we have a multipotential nature)108—say that the vari-
ability of culture makes it impossible to assert anything about humans in general.
To anticipate a discussion in the next chapter, my response to this denial is that it
misconceives culture, for a reason I have already indicated: the organization of our
experiencing runs deeper than any particular culture.109 Cultural practices, sym-
bols, forms, beliefs, rites, and so on are essentially ways of cultivating, completing,
or carrying forward our nature; they are not “imposed on nothing,”110 but rather
interact with or “enter into” our needs, our natural intentions or felt expectations.
It is the forgetfulness of transhistorical needs, in fact, that permits a culture to so
violate them, for that which is unremembered or unheard becomes either neglected
or transgressed. As I use the term, needs are not closed instincts. They are always
situational, felt in concrete instances of body-world dialogue. Insofar as we share
a human situation, though, certain needs will arise in general. These are the non-
negotiable, unremitting demands that govern our unfolding.
Calling this sense of nature “transhistorical” suggests that it is prior to any
particular historical situation, traceable to the prehistory or past of our species.111
Experientially, the past is not a receding time line but is rather incorporated
into our ongoing living. Merleau-Ponty writes that his personal existence is “the
resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is therefore another subject beneath
me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in
it. This captive or natural spirit is my body.”112 This body is an “anonymous and
general existence” that is involved in a “communication with the world more
ancient than thought.” Our bodies, in other words, bear the past within them
and so anticipate or are prestructured for the world. For Gestaltists, “the body
is full of inherited wisdom—it is roughly adjusted to its environment from the
beginning. . . . in its emotions it has a kind of knowledge of the environment
as well as motivations of action; the body expresses itself in well-constructed

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 108 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

purposive series and complexes of wishes.”113 We have an inborn sense or preun-

derstanding of how, in general, things are supposed to go. Or as Gendlin notes:
“What is planned for in the organism is as real as the organs of the body.”114 The
body implies “a whole vast maze of behaviors and the environmental ­circumstances
in which the behaviors would occur.”115 We arrive already unfolding “very highly
organized interaction patterns,”116 expecting that suitable responses will be forth-
coming from others or that certain kinds of presences will be on hand. Medard
Boss spoke of the “inherent world-relations,” “pre-given world patterns,” or
“inborn potentialities for relating”117 that organize our emergence or arising as
human beings. To deny these relational patterns is to posit a strict discontinuity
with our past and an extreme historicism. On the contrary, nature is precisely
that which “resists history.”118 This is especially noticeable in infants, whose
enormous dependency needs originate outside of history, even as these infants
are entering into history.119 In general, infants need love, safety, good mirroring,
empathy, freedom for self-expression, approval, close physical contact, respect,
comfort, and so forth. Unless these “early universal patterns” (Gendlin’s phrase)
are satisfied, we inevitably suffer narcissistic injury.
Perhaps, as this last sentence implies, the best way to gather that we have
species needs is to witness the suffering that ensues when they are not met. Indeed,
my discussion in the previous chapter about the violation of our nature would
have been senseless if we did not have such needs as can be either satisfied or
frustrated. The champions of cultural difference do not tend to ask about what
sorts of wounding may be occurring within all of this cultural diversity. While,
for example, Balinese reportedly do not weep at funerals, this does not mean
that they can just do away with the need to mourn after experiencing a loss. As
Thomas Scheff observes: “The absence or curtailment of mourning in a society
would show that mourning was unnecessary only if it were also shown that no
deleterious effects followed. None of the studies of cultural variation even address
this problem, much less conduct research on it.”120 My own sense is that the more
we come to recognize the general ways in which people get hurt, the more we will
discover the common human being hidden inside the diversity of cultural forms.
One of the main ways we today become aware of general needs is by tracing lines
of suffering back to those events where these needs were negated. We know, for
example, that we need to be loved because it hurts so deeply to be unloved. “Hos-
pitalism” among infants taught us that babies need to be touched and interacted
with. Meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before someone like Victor Frankl
came along to say that we need meaning in our lives, for we have entered the
painful age of nihilism.121 As a final example, the worldwide epidemic of trau-
matic stress has made a whole host of developmental needs readily apparent, such
as those for trustworthy social relations and support in developing basic human
powers such as boundary setting and handling one’s emotional life.122 Indeed, if
we had no nature then trauma would have no meaning.

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My conviction, in short, is that the more we do come to recognize our

wounds and feel our suffering, the more will we come to understand our nature.123
Our society, though, is often motivated not to recognize suffering (and so not
to understand human nature) since to do so is both hard to bear and generally
not “good for the economy.” It is worth noting, in this respect, that although
child sexual abuse has been widespread since at least the turn of the century, it
was ­considered rare by psychiatrists and psychologists right until recent decades,
and is still viewed as a hoax by many people.124 It is a sad paradox, furthermore,
that our needs often become unclear precisely to the extent that they are unmet.
We are not quite sure what we are looking for until we see it or find it; our intentions
are vague until symbolized by the arrival of the needed things. When these things
are unavailable, all we have is an unspecified, achy feeling. How very hard must
it be, then, to know our needs in relation to other-than-human beings. Shepard
writes: “Modern life conceals our inherent need for diverse, wild, natural com-
munities, but it does not alter that need. Evidence for this deprivation is so omni-
present that we cannot see it directly, since much of it is expressed as psychic
distress and social disorder. Masking the effects of deviating from the world to
which we are adapted is the universal act of modern denial.”125 As a society, we
have learned to adjust to certain developmental deprivations for so long that we
simply do not recognize these as such.126 When it comes to our needs for con-
tact with the natural world, then, we are born as if into an ecological and cul-
tural vacuum, feeling only an inarticulate anguish. The meeting of these needs
is so wholly muffed that it is difficult to identify them; and our society’s human-­
centered prejudices eternally point us elsewhere.
There are many general, transhistorical needs we can and do know about,
some of which I mention throughout these pages. Our bodies, moreover, still
carry the knowledge of our buried needs, of our unactivated interactional pat-
terns. The ecopsychological task is to put some symbols to our “eco-suffering”
and thereby to gradually name some of these vital demands. As a project of critical
hermeneutic retrieval, this cannot but be a process of working from felt hunches
and intuitions. It also means finding ways to re-create conditions under which
these needs may be more readily recognized and met. I return to all of these mat-
ters in the discussions ahead.

Basic Goodness: Our Original Nature. The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa
wrote that every “human being has a basic nature of goodness which is undi-
luted and unconfused.” Thus, when “we hear a beautiful sound, we are hearing
our own basic goodness.”127 This so-called original nature may not be obvious
to all, especially today, but it is nonetheless discoverable. Buddhist practice is
exactly about awakening to this our “true” nature. Beneath “all the busyness of
thought,” writes the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, there lies “a sweet, healing
silence, an inherent peacefulness in each of us, a goodness of heart, strength, and

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 110 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

wholeness that is our birthright.”128 Without recourse to Buddhist literature and

practice, however, we find similar conclusions among humanistic psychologists,
who commonly believe that it is of our deepest nature to be creative and loving.129
Experience shows over and over again that as people heal from old wounds they
inevitably recover more and more of this basic nature—they find their “inborn
sanity,” their love and compassion, waiting for them, as it were, under all the
old hurt. I have myself regularly experienced that when shame-bound people
(i.e., most of us) allow themselves to be touched by an affirmation of their good-
ness, their grief instantly emerges. Their pain spontaneously comes out of the
background to be healed once they experience a respectful enough context in
which their innate beauty can finally shine forth. Indeed, I regard humanism’s
generous view of human nature as a valuable balm for our wounded times.130 It is
also in line with the notion, stressed by deep ecology, that all of nature is intrinsi-
cally worthy. The beauty of nature is our own. To say otherwise is to tacitly accept
the idea that human nature cannot be trusted and must be repressed.131 In light of
the decidedly unlovely human behavior enveloping this planet, I thus suggest that
it is helpful to adopt the view that: “human beings are marvelous creatures with a
tremendous capacity for harmonious relationship with the environment. We just
happen to be wildly off the track right now.”132
Our original nature contrasts with what is referred to as our second or histor-
ical nature. So much of what gets attributed to human nature is in fact this derivative
nature. “Original” and “second” nature are used, roughly speaking, to refer to our
nature before and after it has been affected by socialization or history. Second nature
is an important critical theoretical notion, as it draws attention to how our nature
is deformed through social domination.133 Negatively, it signifies the automatic
habitual patterns, the blind and rigid behaviors, the life-denying meanings, that have
become sedimented into our bodies, forming our surface character, as a crust over
our more spontaneous and lively selves. In a nonnegative sense, however, it simply
refers to the fact that nobody lives outside of history and so our nature is always
elaborated in the terms of our own time and place, for better or worse. Some degree
of “character” is inevitable in any life, as we all suffer a more or less distant relation to
our own Buddhahood and must struggle with the essential precariousness of being
human. Our original nature, however, can be felt. It serves as the deep ground for all
healing work, for overcoming the distortions of our second nature. I believe that it,
along with the goodness of others, is in fact what makes healing possible.

Nature as Life Force or Sacred Power

Everything, including us, has . . . life force in it. We’re the same as everything
else. Only our form changes, because everything has to reveal itself in a
different form so that this wonderful creation can be.
—Jeannette Armstrong134

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 111

This final category is the aspect of nature having to do with force or power. When
we talk about nature, we normally mean the first two categories, namely, “the
natural world” and “the nature of things.” Nature conservation documents are not
known to talk about the life force. In discussing it, therefore, ecopsychology may
bring in a sense of nature normally overlooked, one that is especially experiential.
Many different terms are used for it, and as always there are no final interpreta-
tions. We can be sure, though, about the category itself.

The Powers of Nature. As expressed in Native American traditions, nature is the

Great Mystery, an intangible creative power or life force, of which all beings are
said to be manifest.135 Physis also originally meant the power that emerges or that
permeates all beings.136 We speak of the creative or fruitful powers of the land.
Or we might say, as did the Lakota medicine man Lame Deer: “There is power
in a buffalo—spiritual, magical power—but there is no power in an Angus, in a
Hereford”137 (domestication, in other words, has knocked much of the life essence
out of the animal). Humans themselves resist oppression due to “forces within the
person that are mysterious and out of reach of society.”138 That all beings—from
stones to caterpillars—exhibit life force is a basis for feeling our kinship with
them, in the sense that we “don’t own life, we just take its shape and then pass it
on.”139 We all share in the life force, as a common breath that circulates via the
interactions among us. Life force, moreover, is not a substance separate from or
added to the events of nature, but is intrinsic to them. That is why it is the process
of contact itself that energizes, enlivens, or gives rise to each of us.
For indigenous peoples generally, the natural world is populated by spir-
itual powers. As Nelson comments of the Koyukon view, the “more potent these
powers are, the more demanding they become of human deference and respect,
and the more numerous are the ways of showing it.”140 The blessings of these spir-
itual powers, furthermore, are “given only to the reverent.” These are, of course,
matters from which our Western society is enormously removed, and my own grip
on them is that of a novice. What I understand is that our life among others is
one of “constant spiritual interchange,” where through various kinds of contact-
making the powers or meanings of nature are transmitted. Thus, a person may
acquire the powers of a plant or animal by eating it; or a shaman may contact
a “power animal” for the purposes of healing; or a vision quester may sit at a
“power spot” and cry out in the hope that a spirit-being will respond to her or
him in some way. Calvin Martin notes that a common Native American belief is
that our “humanity remains incomplete and unhinged” until we have received
such empowerment from other-than-human beings.141 On this view, nature is
itself “the primordial religion,” wherein everyday life involves humans in sacred
processes and exchanges with other-than-human beings.142 Thus did the ecologist
Stan Rowe say that: “The scalpel-wielding hands might tremble were scientists to
entertain the belief that spirit is inherent in all things.”143

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 112 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

A Healing Force. If nothing else, ecopsychology is an effort to understand the

healing powers of nature. As Peter Mathiessen writes: “By seeking to dominate
[the natural world], the white men set themselves in opposition to a vital, healing
force of which they were a part and thereby mislaid a whole dimension of exist-
ence.”144 Among primal peoples generally, health is an omnipresent concern, for
it is believed to be a function of one’s relations with the natural world. Illness
arises out of some imbalance or improper state of interaction with the powers of
nature, while health and healing follow from being in right relation.145 While the
“developed” world has had little use for such ideas, David Abram suggests that
their truth is glaringly obvious:

With thousands of acres of nonregenerating forest disappearing every hour, and

hundreds of our fellow species becoming extinct each month as a result of our civili-
zation’s excesses, we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our
culture, from increasingly severe immune dysfunctions and cancers, to widespread
psychological distress, depression, and ever more frequent suicides, to the acceler-
ating number of household killings and mass murders committed for no apparent
reason by otherwise coherent individuals. From an animistic perspective, the clearest
source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned
violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only
by alleviating the latter will we heal the former.146

I take Abram’s remarks about our bad karma very seriously. As I discussed in
chapter three, the life force wants to move events in certain directions; we know
the way of this life force by the feeling of rightness; and it is by following this way
that we are lead to health. These broad principles certainly apply to the situation
outlined by Abram, as being in right relation to the world involves listening to
what is called for in our interactions with others. The life force can also be felt,
however, in practices that are less directly or concretely involved with the goings-
on in the wilderness; where this force is channeled within or limited to a space that
is more narrowly focused on human interactions and interests. For the purposes
of illustrating the very presence of this spirit force I wish to discuss my own general
experience with some of these practices, all the while recognizing the very real
ecopsychological need to expand the focus of them.
In all four of the experiential trainings I have undertaken, a similar optimal
attitude is required, namely: being aware of or concentrating on what one is expe-
riencing; finding the right distance from this experience; and keeping a curious,
allowing, welcoming, kind, and caring state of mind toward it.147 It is this atti-
tude that frees up the life force. Each of these practices, moreover, takes place
under particular conditions that affect how the life force is experienced. In Vipas-
sana meditation, for example, one adopts a posture that includes closed eyes, a
straight back, and a relaxed body.148 With an equanimous attitude one then moves

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 113

one’s awareness throughout one’s body, observing whatever sensations are arising
(whether pleasant, unpleasant, or in-between), and making efforts not to develop
cravings for, or aversions to, any of them. The openness or yielding provided by
this nonreactive and aware attitude allows the life force to then go to work on
burning up old negativities in the mind, releasing energy that is locked up behind
rigidities and compulsions, untangling knots in one’s body, and gradually dis-
solving one’s Egoic solidity and illusions of separateness. Because I go through
this kind of subtle process on a daily basis, the autonomous reality of the life force
is simply incontestable to me. This is the same autonomy I mentioned in the
previous chapter, albeit in a different context, when I discussed how our bodies
urge us in a prolife direction. As my teacher says, the job of the meditator is not
to fix anything, but rather to “leave it to dharma.” The word dharma directly
translates as “the bearer.” Dharma is the life force that sustains or supports us,
carries us forward, gives us strength, bears us onward, liberates us. As a meditator,
one gradually comes to feel borne along by this force, like being buoyed up by
that wonderful oceanic sound made by grasshoppers and crickets in late summer.
Said Heidegger, those who are existentially daring, who hold themselves face-
on into the abyss, are “sustained by that on which they expend themselves”149 (a
notion found in all sorts of spiritual traditions). By meditatively going into one’s
suffering one is supported by nature in going through that suffering, in widening
out a ground of inner peacefulness and strength, or opening up a clear and loving
space within which a continual stream of new phenomena may then enter, arise,
or show themselves.
Although Vipassana meditation is a way of getting to know the life force
by means of an exploration of the interaction of mind and matter within one’s
own body, Buddhist practice is not confined to the meditation hall. The idea is
to take what one learns there out into the world, where the task of life becomes
to meditatively work toward the happiness of all beings. Historically, this has
not always converted into an active pursuit of reciprocal relations with the nat-
ural world, which is why an eco-Buddhism is now emerging along with ecopsy-
chology. My point, however, is that I believe the life force, the Dharma, the
Great Mystery, all to be the same, even if some traditions or practices feel this
spirit force within a relatively restricted field of otherness. What is more, the
fact that the responsive and respectful attitude one adopts within these various
experiential practices seems to be roughly the same suggests that this attitude,
the one that serves the life force, that allows things to heal and flourish, is the
one that is called for by nature, whatever the sphere of otherness happens to
be. Even the more narrowly focused experiential practices, then, teach an atti-
tude that I think readily translates into a more-than-human realm: a posture of
patient listening to the voices one finds both inside and out, of aligning oneself
with what needs to happen or will do no/least harm, and of opening oneself to
the claims of others.150

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 114 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

An Erotic Force: Desire. In the formation of our selves, a residual reality is created
outside ourselves, a reality we have lost, feel as a lack, and so desire.151 This reality
is “nature,” which, as Joel Kovel notes, is “the generic object of desire.”152 Charles
Bergman writes: “We are drawn to nature, impelled by some desire, like body
moving to body. And if, for Western culture now, in the late twentieth century,
desire is experienced primarily as an absence, . . . even a wound, it must be that
the longing for nature is more intense, more poignant, more cut with a sense of
its own inevitable impossibilities, than ever before.”153 The life force, as desire,
thus has a basis in separation itself, is “a pull or polarization between things that
have been separated.”154 Such an understanding of desire puts it on a spiritual
or ontological footing. As against a purely biological conception of desire, Kovel
thus calls it “the roiling of indwelling nature striving toward spirit.” Spirituality
is then “the desire for being,” for a melting of Ego and an opening of the self
toward all reality (Jung’s “thirst for wholeness”). We do not normally think about
desire in such spiritual terms, for the very reason that our natural desires have
become so repressed and problematic in our despiritualized society. Indeed, the
“sphere of the political economy as a whole . . . may be seen as a gigantic and self-­
contradictory negation of desire.” That is, “the extreme degree of binding imposed
by the culture necessary for the accumulation of capital has alienated desire itself,
has twisted it about, and made it spectral and monstrous.”155
We need to make a distinction, therefore, between what Kornfield calls
skillful and unskillful desire. The former “is directed by love, vitality, compassion,
creativity, and wisdom” and includes “desire for the well-being of others, the desire
of awakening, the creative desires that express the positive aspects of passion and
beauty.”156 Pathological desires, on the other hand, include those of “addiction,
greed, blind ambition, or unending inner hunger.” These find no true satisfaction,
do not tend toward spirit, but only multiply or carve themselves deeper with each
round of desiring; they do not aim to care for, but rather to possess, control, or
suck dry the other. Significantly, however, underneath our unskillful desire we will
always find “a deep spiritual longing for beauty, for abundance and completeness.”
This “underneath” is the felt place where we touch down into the true needs of the
soul which underlie all of our surficial and painful desires. What the experience
of desire tells us, then, is both that felt-separation from nature is definitive of our
psychology and that the less our desiring is supported the more will it lead us into
trouble or manifest itself as an ever-deepening longing. Longing is exactly “the
heightening of appetite confronted with a distant object, in order to overcome
distance or other obstacles.”157 Our society’s desperate search for spiritual under-
standing—for which the popular psychology or New Age section of any bookstore
may stand—speaks to just how great this longing has become.
We are led, finally, to the notion of Eros, which reveals itself precisely as
our bodily desires. David Levin refers to Eros as “an immortal aspect of Physis:
the sheer energy and ecstasy of Being.”158 Freud called it the love instinct, its

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 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology 115

aim being “to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus—in short,
to bind together”159 or reunite what has been separated. For Gestaltists, Eros
is the excitement of vividly felt creative living, transpiring right at the contact
boundary between organism and environment. Our bodily intentions all imply
some desired relationship, and so are essentially erotic160—the erotic life is life
itself. (Hence the connection between Eros and Psyche in Greek myth.) Terry
Tempest Williams calls the erotic life a “making love to the world that I think
comes very naturally.” Both she and Audre Lorde distinguish the erotic from the
pornographic by the absence of feeling in the latter, by a “denial of the power of
the erotic.”161 Hence, even our daily “intercourse” becomes pornographic when
it lacks “engagement of the soul.” It is also true to say that the nonerotic life does
not play, for “play is the erotic mode of activity,” the essential way of being of a
satisfied humanity, freely delighting or finding pleasure in life.162 (Indeed, every
animal is a “mode of play,” says Hillman.) As the child analyst D. W. Winnicott
has it: the “natural thing is playing.”163
That one sense of nature is that of an erotic force means that when we
repress our desires we negate our own essence, alienate ourselves from our natural
powers, and deny our “deep hunger for communion” any satisfying food. Hence,
Norman O. Brown’s remark that “mankind, in all its restless striving and progress,
has no idea of what it really wants. . . . mankind, unconscious of its real desires
and therefore unable to obtain satisfaction, is hostile to life and ready to destroy
itself.”164 As Freud demonstrated, however, desire is “immortal.” When repressed
it does not disappear but returns via neurotic symptoms. (“Drive out the natural
and back it comes straightaway,” observes Gaston Bachelard.165) Thus, while we
may well use different terms to interpret the phenomenon of desire, as a transhis-
torical force it cannot be interpreted away.

Freedom and the Life Force. If the life force organizes or directs the shape of events,
or courses through all beings in the way they body themselves forth and interact
with one another, then what role does human agency or freedom play in relation
to this mysterious force? The short answer is that our freedom lies in our being
able to choose whether or not we “obey” the demands of the life force. We pay
the price of suffering, however, if we decide against it; for there is no opting out
of nature. As Percy Shelley said, freedom is “sweet bondage.”166 From the per-
spective of the previous chapter, we are most free when we work to realize those
creative possibilities, in whatever situation we may find ourselves, that satisfyingly
answers what our bodies are asking for; that is, when we are able to maintain an
open, contactful, and responsive relation to the world. We are least free, on the
other hand, when our lives are rigidly set in unconscious habit-patterns. On this
view, the image of humans presented by deterministic philosophies (i.e., those
which deny freedom) is in fact a pathological one. To be totally determined is
to have no free room in which to act, is to have no “breathing space.” Citing

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 116 From Humanistic to Naturalistic Psychology

Kierkegaard’s line that the “self of the determinist cannot breathe,” Levin writes:
“Breathing beings will suffocate unless they have space to breathe; a space, as it
were, of possibility. Breathing beings will also suffocate unless they have time to
breathe: a time that is not so pressing that it becomes impossible to breathe.”167
Anyone who knows what it is like to feel anxious or pressured—states in which
it is hard to breathe—knows how claustrophobic our lived space can become and
how tightly a dreaded future can squeeze in on us, such that we lose our ability
to creatively and freely respond to the present moment.168 Our deliberateness or
agency, by contrast, depends on our maintaining a free and open realm in which
to act or relate to others, on keeping a clear temporal and spatial distance between
ourselves and the other-phenomena of our lifeworld. One of the tasks of experi-
ential psychotherapy is to open up this existential clearing, to differentiate and
back off the underdistanced otherness that presses in on us, or operates covertly
in our background, so that we may then become more aware of it and enter into
a freer or more caring relationship to it. For all of us, the more open this clearing
becomes, the more are we able to use our freedom in making good contact with
others, and so serving the life force of nature.

Although I have taken a relatively large block of text to stake out some terms
for discussing nature, the goal of this interpretive exercise was not to promote
Buddhism or humanistic psychology or Koyukon understanding or Heideggerian
thought, but only to employ these to begin revealing a naturalistic landscape. I
have been especially concerned to show that, as Snyder put it, “When humans
know themselves, the rest of nature is right there.”169 I trust that I have established
at least a minimum starting place, then, to pursue the outlines of a naturalistic
psychology.

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 5
NATURALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY: A SKETCH

“If We Truly Experience Needs . . .”

If we truly experience needs that are in the long run incapable of satisfaction
within the framework of a system dedicated to paving the world with
asphalt, then it is no merely utopian exercise to loosen up the imagination
so as to envisage an alternative world in which such needs might find
satisfaction.
—John Rodman1

Throughout this book I am aiming to build up a sense for the centrality of the
human-nature relationship in human existence, thereby disclosing this relation-
ship as an ultimate concern. What I propose for this chapter is to pencil-in the
main contours of a kind of psychology that would be of assistance to this concern.
The discussion is divided into three sections: “Naturalism” introduces the general
spirit of this psychology; “Life as a Hermeneutic, Sense-Making Journey” its
­general principles; and “Nature and the Human Life Cycle” its general content.

Naturalism

There is a nature of things, including human nature, whose right

development can be violated.
—Paul Goodman2

[Human] nature leads into nature—the wilderness—and the reciprocities

and balances by which man Lives on earth.
—Gary Snyder3

Together, these two statements—one by a psychologist-sociologist (Goodman), the

other a poet-ecologist (Snyder)—summarize much of what I mean by naturalism.
117

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 118 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

Naturalistic psychology, as I am drawing it together, interprets the psychological

in terms of the natural: approaches psyche in terms of both the natural ordering
of our experience and the natural “others” who are prefigured in, or who call
forth, our experiencing. It does not ignore the kind of problems with which other
psychologists are occupied, but it reads these along naturalistic lines. The danger
of the title “naturalism” is that it might be confused with a materialistic or natural
scientific philosophy, which also goes by this name. And yet it has just too much
resonance with what I am proposing—that psychologists be naturalists—for me
to use any other. As Erazim Kohák has observed, moreover, the term does have a
more generic meaning, suitable to my purposes:

By speaking of “naturalism” in a generic sense . . . we shall mean any philosophy

which recognizes the being of humans as integrally linked to the being of nature,
however conceived, treating humans as distinctive only as much as any distinct spe-
cies is that, but as fundamentally at home in the cosmos. . . . By “nature” in a
similarly generic sense we shall mean the nature presented in lived experience, the
primordially given cosmic context in which humans find themselves and to which
they themselves belong in their bodies and minds, as humans are in fact aware of it,
whether thematically or not, in their daily lived experience, not as it appears in the
theoretical nature-constructs which seek to capture it.4

It is thus with an with an emphasis on the lived experience of human-nature

continuity, and not on the models of natural science, that I am adopting the title
of naturalism.
In forwarding a naturalistic psychology, I am essentially giving a psycho-
logical name to some perennial notions and articulating my own take on them.
The idea that there is something right or meaningful or imperative or moral about
lining ourselves up with a transcendent order of things is of course very old. For a
recollective project, however, such a return to old ideas makes good sense. Again
and again we must assert that to be claimed by the natural order means to belong
to it, to be limited by it, and to feel its demands within our bodily experience.
Only by allowing this—that we are of the natural order—will we ever come to
respect the claims and limits of the larger natural world, for we will have then
taken our place within it. Christopher Lasch writes, by contrast, that the “intel-
lectual basis . . . of the modern cult of technology” is “the celebration of dis-
embodied intelligence,” an “incorrigibly escapist . . . fantasy of total control,
absolute transcendence of the limits imposed on mankind.”5 Western history has
in general been one of progressively rubbing out or concealing the claims and
limits of nature.6 According to Donald Worster, even the science of ecology has
now become “permissive,” with many scientists saying that there is little inherent
organization in the natural world and so not much reason to limit the human
modification of it.7 We live in a world, notes Shepard, where “humility and [a]

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 119

tender sense of human limitation is no longer rewarded. Yet we suffer for the want
of that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue.”8 In view of our
society’s consistent denial and narcissistic hatred of limits,9 I am thus advancing
a naturalistic approach that focuses precisely on such limits, and so aims to send
up some sparks around what I believe is terribly at stake in our historical times.
Important to this undertaking is the convergence from manifold quarters
on the notion of releasing ourselves to or serving something that is not strictly us.
Fritz Perls, to begin, called the ego the servant of the organism (thus reversing the
usual Freudian view).10 Here, the lower-case “ego” refers only to that free agency
which, as an aspect of the organism, deliberately sets the boundaries and performs
the actions that will satisfy the needs of the organism (and which, whether as
ego or Ego, is the individual sense of “human” in the human-nature relation-
ship). “Serving soul,” writes Hillman, “implies letting it rule; it leads, we follow.”11
Ellen Chen likewise calls Taoism a religion that serves life by following “the way”
of nature.12 For Heidegger, we are servants of being or agents of possible world-­
disclosures. The Buddha, for his part, did not actually call his followers ­Buddhists,
but dharma servants (or wayfarers). Knowing that, in his own words, one “lives
unhappily who has nothing to venerate and obey,” he committed himself to living
“under the Dharma, honouring and respecting that.”13 Certainly the idea of
serving God is familiar to all. From the German word Gut, the original meaning of
“God” is “the Good One.” Peter Mathiessen suggests that in this sense it is close
to the Native American “Great Spirit” or “Great Mystery.”14 Says one primer on
Native American spirituality, the “greatest of all lessons of the medicine wheel” is
that the essence of our humanity is “to be found in service to others.”15 Or as the
Koyukon Indians believe: “the proper role of humankind is to serve a dominant
nature.”16 These are among the oldest, or at least the most basic, of intuitions
about  the essential business of humanity. Naturalistic psychology, accordingly,
calls  for a humbling of the self, an admitting that we emerge from and are
beholden to serve a natural world much deeper and greater than our individual or
personal selves.17 A narcissistic culture, however, takes the reverse view, insisting
that the world of nature serve it. When I look out on the dense buildings and
roadways covering the earth and imagine instead living in a culture that genuinely
serves nature, that would rather praise than pave, my grief rushes up inside me.
The truth of the need to serve nature, I suggest, is in the tears.18
What, indeed, does a naturalistic approach have to say about culture?
It ­certainly disagrees with the view that as cultural beings we have transcended
nature or left the apes behind. But it does not go on from there to make “­culture”
some sort of enemy we need to get away from if we are ever to become more
natural. Both of these positions only reinforce the human/nature dualism. An inter-
active view of nature and culture sees them, rather, as internally related moments
within a unified and processual reality. From the Latin cultura, “culture” referred in
its earliest uses to the tending of natural growth.19 In this sense culture is essentially

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 120 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

a verb, a cultivating, a kind of techne or artful attending to the life process.20 When
we conceive of culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied
in symbols,”21 such symbol systems may therefore be looked at in terms of how they
serve the natural world and complete our own bodily nature. As Mary Midgley puts
it: “What we build into our cultures has to satisfy our natural pattern of motives.”22
Note, moreover, that an interactive model reframes the old nature/nurture debate.
The issue is not whether traits are innate or whether they are acquired (or some
aggregate of the two), as if these were wholly distinct options, but how cultural pat-
terns reorganize or affect our nature and how our nature always anticipates certain
kinds of culturing. What matters, in other words (and to repeat a by now familiar
line), is the reciprocity or dialogue between body and world, in which person and
environment do not begin as independent entities making their separate contribu-
tions (as psychologists have historically conceived of them), but as poles within a
single interactive process of being-in-the- world or meaning creation.23
Naturalism, then, does not mean turning away from culture but being all
the more demanding of it. Erazim Kohák writes that “culture is not the contradic-
tion of nature but rather the task of humans within it.” It follows, furthermore,
that the relationship between nature and culture is asymmetric. Our bodies are
prior to any one culture, even as they anticipate a culture. As the grounding or
governing moment of human existence, our own bodily nature thus “reserves the
right to judge culture, and resist and revise it.”24 We often mistake the plasticity
of human culture for the plasticity of human nature, entranced by the spectacle
and variability of the former, while neglectful of the constraints and claims of the
latter. Knowing this, we may examine our culture for just how willing it is to adjust
itself to nature’s demands. “A healthy culture,” says Wendell Berry, “is a communal
order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals
the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to
the earth and to each other. It ensures that the necessary restraints are observed,
that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.”25 Snyder also remarks
that it “has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wil-
derness.”26 It is a simple fact that our culture is mostly geared to meet the needs
of the political economic body, rather than the given needs of the body of nature.
Naturalistic psychology, accordingly, cannot avoid criticizing this culture; and to
this I turn more thematically in the final chapter.

Life as a Hermeneutic Sense-Making Journey

Remaining within the hermeneutic circle, can we found it on nature?

—Marjorie Grene27

As creatures of distance, we live in an interpreted, culturally mediated, historically

changing world, and yet as creatures of nature we also live in a world that claims

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 121

us from both below and outside of human history. I would like the idea that we
are hermeneutic creatures to embrace both of these worlds—the historical and the
natural—as one. So far, however, most hermeneutic thinkers have emphasized only
that we belong to history. As Marjorie Grene remarks, “the stress on historicity
seems to entail ignoring nature.”28 More strongly, Shepard writes that “the idea of
history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat.
It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to a stage upon
which the human drama is enacted.”29 Not Wind and Crow, but history now
teaches us our lessons. In arguing against biological reductionism, Heidegger spoke
rather oddly of “our appalling and scarcely conceivable kinship with the beasts.”30
The mistake he made was to assume that affirming our kinship with other ani-
mals plunges us immediately into biologism. To the contrary, Grene argues, against
Heidegger, that not to acknowledge our animality itself “constitutes an ontological
omission,” that is, it misses an essential aspect of our being.31 My own project is
exactly to articulate human existence within the process of life: to ground our his-
torical meaning-making, or to formulate our experience, entirely inside the body of
nature. This section aims to add some further weight to this undertaking.
In referring to life as a “hermeneutic sense-making journey,” I am invoking
the presence of the wing-footed Greek god Hermes, the go-between the divine and
mortal spheres, deliverer and interpreter of messages from the gods to humans.32
For all his mythological richness, however, my sense of the hermeneutic mode of
existence comes less from the actual character of Hermes than from what herme-
neutics has made in his name.33 I start with the bias that all humans have an
inherent desire to understand deeply. The same assumption is made by saying that
a “thirst for experience is a part of all life,” or that human existence “is innately
disposed to an extremely broad experience.”34 Meaning may be invisible, yet it is
what we live for. Humans are beings who are simply unable to live in a cosmos that
does not—somehow—make sense. Clifford Geertz notes that chaos is a condition
in which events are uninterpretable; where our intellect is baffled, our suffering
unbearable, or our moral problems defiant of insight.35 Chaos is intolerable; it
nakedly reveals the void while offering no bearings. Thus, the more chaotic and
insecure our world gets, the more must we devise symbolic means to keep our
balance and ward off our nausea. The Cartesian search for absolute foundations,
for instance, betrays an anxious existence whose sense-making is directed toward
gaining control over or stabilizing a fluid and threatening reality, toward stilling
the flux. Many delusions, if not all of them, are ironically based on this need
to make sense, where our anxieties will not permit us a less distorted grasp of
reality. The less existentially unified we are, the less tolerant we are of ambiguity
or of contrary views, and the more insistent we are that our concepts be final,
our world be unchanging. In short, then, it is by questioning into the process of
sense-making that I wish to help find a way through to a more ontologically secure
and so less violent mode of understanding—one that is experientially rich and in
which nature, of course, figures prominently.

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 122 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

According to Paul Ricoeur every hermeneutics is, “explicitly or implicitly,

self-understanding by means of understanding others”; while Hans-Georg Gad-
amer offers that it is only through others that “one learns one’s own nature and
limits.”36 What follows is a discussion of three principles, related to these basic
interactive ideas, which I believe will be helpful in developing ecopsychology;
three broad strokes I have placed on my own naturalistic canvas. The first holds
that we are ordered by nature to participate ever-more widely in the world; the
second that our language is always a “singing” of this world; and the third that
all phenomena intertwine or mirror one another as a common “flesh.” The virtue
of these principles lies in their universality, in how we can apply them to what is
familiar or agreed on in our current situation and then, with the understanding
so gained, use them to open ourselves up and sense our way into those strange
and possible places we are attempting to recollect (where I assume these principles
still hold).

Ever-Widening Spheres of Meaning and Participation

Only the support of the familiar and common understanding makes possible
the venture into the alien . . . and thus the broadening and enrichment of
our own experience of the world.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer37

The title for this principle comes from Shepard, who writes that psychological
maturity “celebrates a central analogy of self and world in ever-widening spheres
of meaning and participation, not an ever-growing domination over nature,
escape into abstraction, or existentialist funk.”38 The principle is that we are
innately moved to differentiate and enter into progressively more encompassing
realms of otherness, to dialectically widen out the ground of our being or the
spheres of our understanding, thus developing an ever-growing horizon of
­awareness. It refers to the opening out of a life process, the moving into deeper
and wider contact with the world, the building up of a sense of common ground
or of belonging with others (“the widening and deepening of love”),39 in the
process of which we ourselves emerge, step by step, as the unique persons we are
called to be. That human psychological development or individuation progresses
as a relational project, as a process of bonding with and then separating from
others, is well-recognized.40 The ecopsychological maneuver is simply to assert
that this process wishes to continue beyond the human realm, that our humanity
is incomplete until we have established our kinship or social relations with
the larger natural world and so satisfied our longing to feel at home in or at
peace with the cosmos as a whole. As Abram writes, the human body is a “form
destined to the world . . . a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in
things, in others, in the encompassing earth.”41

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 123

The successful graduation into ever-more subtle and complex realms of

relationship occurs only under conditions in which we are able to maintain a
differentiated rather than a split relation to others. As psychoanalyst Nancy
­Chodorow writes: “Differentiation . . . is not distinctness and separateness, but
a particular way of being connected to others. This connection to others, based
on early incorporations, in turn enables us to feel that empathy and confidence
that are basic to recognition of the other as a self.”42 “Differentiation” refers to
a process in which conditions are sufficiently good that we can open up some
distance between ourselves and others, while not losing a sense of shared being or
interconnection. Words like “separate” become ambiguous or problematic here,
for although differentiation does involve a sort of separation, this separation is not
a total break.43 Indeed, it involves the incorporation of others, wherein having
made good contact with them we come to experience their presence “internally”
even in their physical absence. This is how a sense of kinship is born. Thus, when
infants disrupt the field of infant care by separating from their caregivers, they are
(under good conditions) engaging in a process of discovering-and-inventing an
ever-widening reality to which they can belong.44 Harold Searles, taking up this
topic in an ecological context, wrote that psychological well-being is won not only
by differentiating oneself from other humans but also by progressively differenti-
ating oneself from one’s nonhuman environment, “while developing in proportion
as [one] succeeds in these differentiations, an increasingly meaningful relatedness”
to it.45 Splitting, on the other hand, is a defensive reaction emanating from a sense
of basic insecurity and inadequate differentiation.46 It occurs when our experi-
ence is still dominated by our own unmet needs, our “own exclusive subjectivity,”
which prevents us from reaching the stage of being able to recognize both the
personhood of others and ourselves mirrored in them, and so achieving “a wider
and more generous world view,” an “enlargement of empathy and transcendence
of the self.”47 Not surprisingly, splitting is the basic mode of Ego, the form of self
that dominates nature, while differentiation belongs to the way of a spiritualized
existence, which increasingly recognizes itself in the otherness of nature.48
As a hermeneutic unfolding, this journey of ontological expansion is one
of making the unfamiliar or alien familiar, learning how it is similar to ourselves.
We lean into novel or unfamiliar territory from that edge where the familiar leaves
off, taking support from the relatively safe relations we have already secured.
The “ventures of autonomy” undertaken by infants, in which they explore the
space away from their caregivers and then return for what Margaret Mahler calls
“emotional refueling,” is perhaps the most visible example of this. In like fashion,
we enter into or make sense of the world in increments, circularly enriching an
experiential ground that makes still broader understanding, belonging, and com-
munication possible. This process is well-described by anthropologist Colin
­Turnbull in his discussion of the first decades of life among the Mbuti hunter-
gatherers of Zaïre. He characterizes these years as a series of rebirths, in which the

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 124 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

person progresses “from one womb to yet another,” each of these analogous to the
former, yet experienced on a new or higher plane. The child thus moves through
a series of developmental matrices that begin with the mother’s actual womb and
then extends outward to the mother herself; to the interior of the dwelling-hut;
to the village camp; to the children’s playground; and finally to the surrounding
forest. Each transition to a new realm of otherness is the crossing of a critical junc-
ture, a leap into the unknown. Thus when the mother for the first time brings her
child out of the hut to greet the camp (both of which are spherical in shape), the
“infant learns that there is a plurality of warm bodies, similar in warmth (which
is comforting) but dissimilar in smells and rhythmic movements and sounds. If
it is disconcerted enough to cry in protest, its mother immediately takes it back
[to the hut] and puts it to her breast. Thus an initial model of predictability and
security is reinforced.”49
Note how the mother’s caring actions help the child to navigate the latter’s
relation to the void. We are best supported to grow or phusically emerge as a dif-
ferentiated being when we remain grounded in that sense of wholeness that comes
from being lovingly connected to others.50 To stand apart as an autonomous self
is otherwise to risk a terrifying aloneness. A good developmental process, then, is
one that “emphasizes relationships to others, so that intensified separateness does
not maroon but establishes the self as ever more unique and yet more fully bonded
to nonselves by chains of interaction, kinship, dependence, cooperation, and com-
pliance.”51 Against our modern prejudice, Tim Ingold argues that hunter-gatherers
generally do enjoy a kind of individualism, but unlike our own, theirs is “grounded
in the social totality.”52 As he describes it, the un-folding of a life is at the same time
an en-folding of others into one’s own being—thus confirming Winnicott’s observ­
ation that the assimilation of good others as a caring and affirming inner presence
is essential to the capacity to enjoy or tolerate solitude.53 In our own shaming
society, we face the problem of the “mass” person or weak individual who lacks the
inner security to break out of his or her conformity or confluence with the crowd.
As individuals, we fear living—emerging as a differentiated self—because we lack
the ontological security to do so, because it puts us too close to the void. We then
also fear dying—the dedifferentiating of ourselves—because we have not yet lived.
Existentialists typically look down on this fearful “herd” mentality, counseling us
to courageously stand out from a meaningless nature, and so face the abyss. What
they generally don’t do, however, is trace the origins of our mass fear (as well as our
grandiose, shame-based, limit-denying fantasies) to a loss of loving relations. They
thus turn our sense of isolation into an essential fact of existence rather than a cre­
ation of our despiritualized and denatured historical condition.
Bearing these thoughts in mind, I also wish to conceive of this journey as
a spiritual project. Under good conditions, it is the evolution of desire as the life
force presses us on toward spirit, or the dissolution of Ego as we make good contact
with others.54 Using the notion of “the primitive” not pejoratively but as a way to

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 125

evaluate civilized society, Stanley Diamond writes that “the primitive self cannot
be reduced to an [E]go but is the result of a hierarchy of experiences, incorporated
into an increasingly spiritualized being as maturation proceeds from birth through
the multiple rebirths symbolized in the crisis rites, to ancestry of others.”55 Good
conditions, as I define them, are those that do not lead to a reification or halting
of experience, but rather allow for ongoing growth at the contact boundary, this
being a zone of experience that is balanced between the twin terrors of isolation and
fusion. Such conditions generally allow our desires to change their nature as the self
is gradually transformed from an early state of near-total dependency on the service
of others to one in which the wish to ourselves serve others is increasingly realized.
In other words, the equilibrium won through the meeting of a need or completion
of an experience is immediately disturbed by the further stirring of the life force, as
it urges the self ever-more deeply into the world. “Here desire takes on the shape of
Eros, or love, and unifies the self with object in ever-widening totalities.”56 Under
bad conditions, on the other hand, our desires do not only remain a spur to further
growth and challenge, but also become overfrustrated. The world then becomes a
dangerous place from which we must protect ourselves and toward which we harbor
some measure of hatred, our fears now fixing others into threatening aliens.57 In this
case, the experiential field cannot differentiate but, tragically, must split.
As a final point under this principle, I wish to stress that the spiritualization
of the self is also its sociation, the widening of its social horizons, as the discus-
sion above has already suggested. To be sociated is to derive our identity from
our embeddedness within a society. “Living through participation in the life of
others, the inner self becomes a congregation of the Other.”58 Parents are only one
form of otherness in this journey, even if we get stuck on them in this society. To
the growing child, parents play the role of nature, the source of being, but do so
only as one phase or occasion in the larger human-nature dialectic that is human
nature. As Kovel notes, viewing parents in this manner places our (albeit crucial)
interactions with them within a spiritual framework and opens the possibility for
a psychology that looks beyond (human) familial relations.59 More specifically, the
work of ecopsychology is to develop a psychology that embeds humans within a
more-than-human society. The anthropocentrism that has so far prevented psy-
chologists from doing so is an enormously blinding prejudice, which because
it ignores our need to differentiate and relate to nonhuman others, contributes
to that state in which the natural world remains a largely homogeneous and so
threateningly alien presence.60 In traditional societies where humans are but a
minor presence in the landscape, not attending to social relations with the natural
world is unthinkable. For the Mbuti, for instance, social life is permeated by one’s
relations to the forest. All Mbuti, young and old, “talk, shout, whisper, and sing
to the forest . . . , addressing it as mother or father or both [depending on how
they feel at the moment], referring to its goodness and ability to ‘cure’ or ‘make
good.’”61 For the Koyukon, similarly, “the environment is like a second society in

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 126 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

which people live, governed by elaborate rules of behavior and etiquette. . . . The
surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended.”62
Nelson tells a story of being with an elder who at one point begins speaking in
earnest to a bird. “For how many thousand generations, I wondered, have people
spoken and prayed to natural beings around them, as a customary part of daily
life? At any other time in human history, this event would be as ordinary as talking
to another person.”63 Going to the heart of the matter, he remarks that the failure
of this kind of “understanding in our own culture is where the depth and poign-
ancy of our own loss lies. Losing the recognition of spirituality in nature may be
the most important transformation of the human mind in all of human history.”64
That “nature is a social place”65 is especially evident in the words spoken by
a Navajo elder, Old Torlino, just before telling part of the creation story:

I am ashamed before the earth;

I am ashamed before the heavens;
I am ashamed before the dawn;
I am ashamed before the evening twilight;
I am ashamed before the blue sky;
I am ashamed before the sun.
I am ashamed before that standing within me which speaks with me.
Some of these things are always looking at me.
I am never out of sight.
Therefore I must tell the truth.
I hold my word tight to my breast.66

Recall that the emotion of shame is associated with our very social sense. I do not
read the shame expressed here as neurotic, but as the humbling of a self before
the whole society of nature, an admitting of the fallibility of one’s humanity, of
one’s capacity to do harm or show disrespect, at a spiritually significant moment.
If, moreover, Old Torlino is able to feel some shame before the natural world,
then we may speculate that in a violent society such as ours the discovery of a
tremendous well of shame, including that related to our mistreatment of other-
than-human beings, is an event waiting to happen for most of us. As Turnbull
suggests, to be truly dedicated to Spirit is also to be dedicated to Society or to the
greater social Self.67 If nature is itself a social place, then the ecological crisis is
both a spiritual crisis and a pathological disturbance in this largest of social fields.

Singing the World: Language . . . Meaning . . . Nature

The landscape and the language are the same. For we ourselves are landscape
and are land.
—Conrad Aiken68

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 127

Twentieth-century Western philosophy, in both continental and analytic tradi-

tions, has made language the key. As M. C. Dillon suggests, however, this has not
overcome but merely extended the reign of dualism, for now it is language that is
divorced from the rest of the world. Dillon focuses particularly on what he calls
“semeiological reductionism,” most exemplified by Derridean deconstruction, in
which all sense-making is believed to be trapped and endlessly refracted within the
play between linguistic signs, such that no reference is even possible to a reality
outside of or transcendent to human language. I suggest that to adopt such a view
would be the demise of ecopsychology; for it makes no room for the meaningful-
ness of the natural world outside of a purely linguistic constitution, nor, more
fundamentally, does it admit to the origins of language from within this world,
as an expression of it. What I wish to do here, then, is show what both ecological
concern and phenomenological insight can bring to the debate on language, and
the relevance of this topic for a naturalistic psychology. If, as Abram suggests,
our current understanding of language and our forgetful manner of speaking are
implicated in our alienation from nature, then as ecopsychologists we surely need
a better grasp of the relationships among language, meaning, and nature. As with
the nature/culture cleavage generally, the point is not to champion or pursue a
reality free from language, or a language that is somehow purely “natural,” but to
recover a sense for the power of language as it serves and arises out of nature. To be
sure, I feel that our symbolically starved bodies are hungering for more satisfying
words, ones that will better disclose our inherence in the body of the earth, as well
as make sense of our suffering. To address this situation is to enter into a massive
topic in its own right, as people like Abram have skillfully begun to do.69 In what
follows, therefore, I return to the subject of language only for the purpose of
bringing to light the one specific principle that concerns me here.
Merleau-Ponty, in naming this principle, held that “words, vowels and pho-
nemes are so many ways of ‘singing’ the world.” Different languages are thus
different “ways for the human body to sing the world’s praises.”70 What does he
mean by this? Most simply, our linguistic intentions arise or issue from our bodily
felt participation in the world, and so our verbal expressions are a “singing” of
that world. Speech and thought, said Merleau-Ponty, are “the perceptible world’s
explosion within us.”71 In other words, the feelings that come up in us as we
interact with the world need to symbolically burst out of us, like a big laugh that
erupts from us when we see something funny, or, indeed, a song that demands to
be sung, that spontaneously comes to us, overflows us, in a moment of pain or
joy. To reject dualism is to realize that when we speak we are always giving voice to
some worldly situation in which we are immersed, speaking from inside the world.
This also means that as we come to live in a world more and more dominated
by human artifacts, the world our language sings is increasingly a technological
one. For the moment, however, I want to use the idea of “the world” in a broad
sense, as “the natural world.” “Indeed,” remarks Abram, “if human language arises

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 128 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this lan-
guage ‘belongs’ to the animate landscape as much a it ‘belongs’ to ourselves.”72
Heidegger is remembered for saying that language is the “house of being.” He
did not, however, call this house a human prison. Language, he said, borrowing
from the poetry of Hölderlin, is “the flower of the mouth. In language the earth
blossoms toward the bloom of the sky.”73 Language is in this case a phenomenon
of nature: it has sensuous, earthy roots, yet also the clarity and lightness of the sky.
Hence, Merleau-Ponty’s line that “in a sense . . . language is everything, since it
is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the
forests.”74
What I have said so far is not the whole story, for words do not just come to
us via some direct pipe from the natural world. Rather, there is a circular relation
between the two. Merleau-Ponty held that “the body is, so to speak, predestined to
model itself on the natural aspects of the world. But as an active body of gestures,
of expression, and finally of language, it turns back on the world to signify it.”75
Language, in this view, originates as a kind of gesture that draws its meaning from
our contact with the world, but our perception of this world is itself structured by
the language already sedimented into it. That is to say, our linguistic symbols not
only make the world intelligible but in doing so also change the world, bringing it
forth in a way that favors a particular view or interpretation. The Merleau-Pontian
interpretation I want to forward here is that language, on the one hand, and the
phenomenal world, on the other, form two open systems which mirror and feed
one another; that the world knows itself as it is reflected in language, and language
knows itself only as it is reflected in the actual world.
Much current thought about language traces back to the structuralist Fer-
dinand de Saussure, who observed that language systems are not composed of
independent linguistic elements but rather form organic totalities, with internal
relations among their parts.

In English, for instance, the sounded word “red” draws its precise meaning from
its situation in a network of like-sounding terms, including, for instance, “read,”
“rod,” “reed,” and “raid,” and in a whole complex of color terms, such as “orange,”
“yellow,” “purple,” “brown”; as well as from its participation in a still wider nexus
of related terms like “blood,” “rose,” “sunset,” “fire,” “blush,” “angry,” “hot,” each
of which holds significance only in relation to a constellation of still other words,
expanding thus outward to every term within the language. By describing any par-
ticular language as a system of differences, Saussure indicated that meaning is found
not in the words themselves but in the intervals, the contrasts, the participations
between the terms.76

Dillon calls this ecological characteristic of language its “infra-referentiality,”

indicating how all terms refer to one another within the given system. Following

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 129

Merleau-Ponty, however, he goes on to further identify the “extra-referential”

character of language, noting that signs (or sign systems) also refer to the world
outside of this language.77 That is, the sense that words or phonemes reveal is not
constituted by these alone, but in how they correspond to and make us aware of
differentiations present within the world itself, how they bring to light some of the
meaning that inheres in the way the things themselves internally relate. “Red” and
“orange” have meaning not just because of linguistic play but because of apples
and oranges (as it were). As Abram has noted, Merleau-Ponty “comes in his final
writings to affirm that it is first the sensuous, perceptual world that is relational
and weblike in character, and hence that the organic, interconnected matrix of
any language is an extension or echo of the deeply interconnected matrix of senso-
rial reality itself.”78 It is thus only because we perceive the world itself as a kind
of language—a field of expressive shapes, movements, sounds, tastes, smells, and
so on—that human language, as an elaboration and ramification of this worldly
logos, is even possible.79 The great power of language inheres precisely in the cor-
relation and interaction that obtains between these two systems, in the gestalt they
form together. As a form of symbolization, language thus does have a privileged
relation to truth, a unique power of disclosure, because every word, while always
referring to the phenomenal world, also takes its place in a universe of historically
sedimented speech, such that when we use any one word this whole linguistic uni-
verse is brought along with or implied in it.80 (Music, painting, dance, and other
nonverbal modes of poetizing do of course reveal meaning in important ways that
verbal speech cannot. They nonetheless lack the systemic power of the latter.) This
structure of double reference gives language its symbolic pliability and specificity,
in that the vast infrareferential systems that make up our languages offer great
flexibility and nuance in signifying or disclosing the world.81
Envisioning language thus, as a system that intertwines with and emerges
from the world we experience, helps us to see how the alternative view could
arise that language is a closed system unto itself. For the felt link between the
two orders has become weakened to the point where language now appears to
float somehow above the world we perceive—not of it, with it, or in it. As many
continental thinkers have dealt with it, “language may now be said, in Roland
­Barthes’s words, to ‘celebrate itself ’ rather than to celebrate the world.”82 For
Jacques ­Derrida and his followers, all signs endlessly refer to still other signs, such
that the meaning of a text can never be decided or made present, being forever
deferred.83 Linguistic signs, that is, do not mediate our contact with the world
but continually put it off.84 This development is part of that modern syndrome in
which the symbolic or formal loses its grounding in the experienced or felt. Gendlin
therefore criticizes Derrida for assuming that word-use is governed by formal dis-
tinctions alone (schemes, kinds, logical constructs), rather than by an organic body
sense that connects our speaking to our worldly situations.85 What Derrida and
other current thinkers do not recognize is the functioning of experience in our

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 130 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

languaging, the shifting and unfolding of concretely felt meanings in steps of

forward-moving living (it is this very lack of recognition, in fact, which makes the
claim that meaning is forever deferred understandable). As Dillon further notes,
the Derridian view is unable to account for the origins of language. Considered
as the sole ground of meaning (even if this meaning be a mere mirage or effect),
language must simply always have been.86 In the view I am adopting here, this
enacts the mistake of making what is derivative primary.87 That is, seeing language
as a closed system cuts it off from its worldly source, turns it into a system without
origins. To the contrary, Merleau-Ponty unequivocally described the world as a
cradle or a pregnancy of meaning, the “direction of all directions.”88 He there-
fore put language after the perceived world as his primary theme, claiming that
language is in fact founded on this world. “In the end,” he said, “language must
signify something and not always be language about language.”89 In chapter two
I discussed how all language is figurative, in that discourses appear only by taking
on some of the world’s figure, body, or physiognomy.90 To give another example,
the meaning of the words psyche, soul, anima, and spirit all come from “breath”
or “wind,” which evokes the way that life force, meaning, energy, and so forth,
circulates through the world, belonging to nobody and everybody.91 Critics like
Dillon suggest that (post-)structuralist thought constitutes a denial of this original
meaningfulness of the world and an intellectual retreat from it in general.92
It is worth noting that for primary oral peoples (peoples with no knowledge
of writing) it would be virtually impossible to think of language as something that
is closed off from the natural world. This is because the structure of their words
and their stories explicitly derives from their concrete surroundings; the outer
world tangibly lends form to and inspires their speaking. The languages of oral
peoples are anchored in or held by their environments, not by systems of writing.
As Walter Ong has observed, the advent of writing disrupts this ­relationship.
For it acts to pull language away from the wider terrain in favor of a focus on
the written word, thereby putting a new psychic distance between people and
their environments and creating an interior mindscape entirely unknown to
oral cultures.93 Alphabetic literacy, in particular, has contributed to opening up
the extreme distance that we now experience between ourselves and the natural
world. As Abram notes, early writing systems consisted of glyphs or depictions
of nonhuman entities (birds, sun, etc.), and so still acknowledged the more-
than-human source of human language. The phonetic alphabet, however, is a
stripped-down system of writing based on sound alone, on syllables and vowels;
its characters (ABC . . .) make no reference to actual things in the world.94 It
thus definitively “short-circuits” the relationship between our speaking and the
land. In other words, with the alphabet, our indebtedness to the natural world
as the original site of all meaning is swept away. As Abram comments: “Only as
the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river,
begin to fade.”95

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 131

So this is our situation today: through a historical process of withdrawing our

language from the land, we have reached the point where many thinkers now pro-
claim that our confinement within the written text is simply the way it is. This is not
an acceptable situation for ecopsychology. If we are to reconnect our minds with the
natural world, then we must reconnect our language with it as well. We must sing a
more-than-human world. Ong and Abram are both careful to suggest that a return
to primary orality is not necessary (even if it were somehow possible). Ong empha-
sizes that the shift from orality to literacy has not only entailed losses, but also what
he sees as gains: an interior, introspective life, for example, and an awareness of the
individual as distinct from the communal structures in which she or he is immersed.
He would have us move forward with the gains, while also recovering an under-
standing for the primacy of the oral mode. Abram, for his part, writes that “there can
be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our
task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all its potency, and patiently,
carefully, writing language back onto the land.”96 Abram has also spoken of the
need to refrain from writing certain stories down, but to preserve them by simply
speaking them aloud or enacting them, regularly, in the earthly places where these
stories dwell (in the places where their more-than-human characters and events have
a secret relevance related to the natural unfoldings in the land).97 For if we and the
earth are indeed to enjoy a reconciliation, he believes we will in fact have to periodi-
cally reenter a kind of oral mindscape. What can be safely said, in any case, is that
the naturalistic task of returning language and meaning to the wider world is an
experiential one; it will require that we expand our perception of, and dialogue with,
other-than-human reality. As I discuss next, a good first step in undertaking this task
is to recognize just how human-centered our current speaking is.
Given that all languages correspond to their speakers’ perception of the
world, the limits of our language are set by the limits of our perception.98 If our
engagement with others is narrowly or narcissistically focused, if the sphere of our
care extends little beyond ourselves, then the world we sing will be correspond-
ingly small and self-involved. To be sure, the language we speak today is increas-
ingly entwined not with rivers, moss, and turtles, but with a web of cars, TVs, and
telephones. The mechanical devices embedded in our social practices—clocks,
steam engines, railways, hydraulic systems, telephone exchanges, computers,
and the like—have, for example, been widely used by modern psychologists as a
source of metaphors for describing the human mind.99 “In the modern world,”
says Shepard, “where machines have largely replaced animals, it is perhaps inevi-
table that they should be treated as totems and seen as models of what we are.”100
David Leary calls this phenomenon—wherein we speak of ourselves and the rest
of the world in terms of our own artifacts—the “boomerang effect.”101 Even as
our words aim outward, little comes back to us but our own devices. This is
a dangerous situation. Calvin Martin claims that words “are too perilous to be
uttered out of a genuinely earthy context; they are too inherently powerful to be

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 132 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

left unmoored, unaffiliated with place and the sentient beings there.” Language,
cut off from the wider natural world, goes its own delirious way. Or as Marcel
Detienne writes: “As soon as mankind ceases to ‘reverberate’ to the world, the
sickness penetrates language,” which becomes “the victim of illusions produced
by words.”102 Because our speaking is so disjunctive with the earth’s own voices,
Martin suggests that we have in a very real sense become less-than-human.103
The task, then, is to reopen the circuit between language and the larger
world in order to permit into our language a vital return flow of meaning. In
this, we again need acknowledge a crucial asymmetry: the living world outside of
human language, the world of creeks and porcupines and leaves, even if revealed
through language, is the given, primary reality, the ultimate social context to
which our speaking must in good health remain faithful. As with much else of
significance to ecopsychology, models of such faithfulness are best found among
indigenous persons. Speaking of the Okanagan, for example, Jeannette Armstrong
writes that “the land taught us our language. The way we survived is to speak the
language that the land offered us as its teachings.”104 Sean Kane refers to the myth-
telling of archaic peoples as a poetic “dialogue with nature,” “an affectionate coun-
terpoint to the earth’s voices.” A myth, he says, “is the power of a place speaking,”
conveying events as much from the perspective of the spirit world as the human.
Such oral myths, moreover, are typically complex in the middle, but with “no pro-
nounced beginning or end.” This openness at the edges, then, deliberately allows
for an influx of meaning from the surrounding wilderness.105 We of the modern
world are not myth-tellers, at least not of the oral sort described by Kane. We are,
however, still people who, being of the natural order, are claimed by nature to use
our language in its service. As Merleau-Ponty taught, the “call to language . . .
originates from beyond language in an unspoken, or silence, that appropriates us
or demands . . . a singing expression.”106 Language is not a closed system of verbal
forms, but a mode of poetizing, of allowing for the disclosure of new meanings,
new forms, in our dwelling on or listening to the earth.107 Authentic speech, that
is, is a response to our felt sense of what in the world needs to be said, to the
“unspoken aspects of the world that seek expression.” As before, I suggest that the
demand for such speech gives us our embodied starting place.

Psychic Correspondence: One Flesh

The body . . . offers to him who inhabits it and senses it the wherewithal
to sense everything that resembles himself on the outside. . . . If it touches
[things] and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself
visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs,
because each exists as an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to
the order of things as the world is universal flesh.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty108

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 133

Shortly before his death, Merleau-Ponty noted to himself that: “A philosophy of

the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.”109
Such a philosophy, in other words, would provide the ontological basis for a
psychology that reaches beyond the human sphere: for an ecopsychology (as we
would say). But what is “flesh”? Merleau-Ponty had yet to finish working out
this difficult metaphor at the time of his death, so there is no complete saying of
what he meant by it. I do believe, however, that much of what this term implies
is readily graspable once we enter into an interactive or ecological framework. For
it points to how all phenomena interweave as a single cloth or “common tissue,”
how they are mutually informative in their commingling with one another—this
being possible only because they are of the same elemental stuff.

The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should
need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth,
and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing.110

As the element of being itself, flesh is a medium more primary than mind and
matter, which are differentiations within the flesh. In this case, language, too, is a
kind of flesh; one that is “less heavy,” or “more transparent,” than other kinds.111
As we saw above, language and the perceived world, although different, are not
discontinuous. Rather, they resemble one another and are meaningful exactly in
the way they reflect one another as different sorts of flesh.112 Our bodies, moreover,
are made of the same flesh as the world and the world shares in the flesh of our
bodies.113 Just as we speak of a shared or common humanity, so may we thus speak
more broadly of a common flesh. I consider this Merleau-Ponty’s way of saying that
“we too are nature,” of conceptualizing our embeddedness in, or continuity with,
the wider natural world.114 Something in us vibrates to the cry of wolves, to the
play of bears; we are not some purely inward, acosmic stuff, but rather of the same
flesh as bird song and snow. A deeply buried preunderstanding of our oneness
in flesh is exactly what permits us to touch or understand one another. In other
words, the nature or style of flesh is such that contact is possible. It “has a porous
quality that allows, even requires, a coming and going through it; by definition,
flesh ‘breathes’ or seeps, as well as containing or separating.”115 Given that the
flesh is a single elemental fabric, each instance of contact is, furthermore, a case of
flesh touching itself, of its folding back on or differentiating and mirroring itself. A
calloused hand is thus flesh knowing itself as skin contacts (touches and is touched
by) the rough surfaces of ropes and ladders, a delicate one as skin contacts the
smoothness of pen and paper. To gather in this way the commonness or ­generalness
of flesh has a decentering or transpersonalizing effect on the self, for all perceiving
becomes not the activity of individuals, but of the world itself.
While Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of the flesh may be an original con-
tribution to Western philosophy, his ideas by no means stand alone. The poet

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 134 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, wrote that we “are set down in life as in the
element to which we best correspond” and, moreover, that “when we hold still
we are scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us.”116 It is this theme
of a correspondence between ourselves and others that I wish to pursue. At the
heart of this philosophy is the idea that like can only touch like; that we can con-
tact the world only when able to sense in ourselves something that resembles or
resonates with it.117 Bruno Snell held, for example, that “man could never have
come to experience a rock anthropomorphically if he had not also experienced
himself ‘petromorphically.’ ”118 “Things,” in other words, “have an internal equiva-
lent in me.”119 Bringing this principle into an ecological context, Shepard writes:
“Wild species are true Others, the components of wilderness, and at the same
time are the external correlates of our inmost selves.”120 The visible world, in
other words, provides the tangible symbols to call forth or connect us with the
intangible aspects of our own being. “We are selves composed of sleeping figures,”
says Shepard, “each a secret that can be awakened in acts of correspondence.”121
Other animals have always been used for human self-understanding, from totem
animals to everyday metaphors (e.g., sloth, weasel), where some aspect of the ani-
mal’s nature corresponds to or matches some quality in ourselves. The “otherness
of stones and stars,” meanwhile, “are models for thinking our humbleness in the
universe, and they are the key to the strangeness of ourselves.”122
Having introduced the principle of “one flesh,” I wish to use it in what
remains of this discussion to revisit a number of psychological notions, and so
show further what a nondualistic and naturalistic psychology might look like. All
of the interactive concepts I introduced in chapter three still apply. Here, I am
only adding to that discussion.
Projection, first, is normally spoken of in negative tones. It is taken to mean
the act of attributing some psychological content from inside ourselves to the out-
side world, such that we misperceive things. We anthropomorphize or personify
our pets, think everyone is out to get us, or otherwise fill the world with fancy
imaginings that exist only in our heads. No doubt our perception of others is often
faulty. But the usual understanding of projection suffers both from a persistent
dualism and from a limited and dismal view of imagination. Most important,
our being is never located “inside” ourselves to begin with, but (as I have dis-
cussed at length) is always in-the-world, as a field phenomenon. Thus, how we
imagine the world is not just a solipsistic act but is based on what sort of style of
relating we have so far established with others, on how we are currently knotted
into the world’s flesh. We do not pollute things with our subjectivity; rather, they
show up somehow in the light of our worldly existence. Medard Boss observed,
in this regard, that “when the phenomena of my world confront me they reveal,
of their great store of meanings, only those to which my perception—in the state
of my existence at that time—is open.”123 We may note, then, that projection
certainly does have something to do with how we are attuned to the world, but

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 135

this attunement is a function of the ground of our existence, not some mech-
anism inside us. In this view, imagination is not simply a discrete mental faculty
for making things up.124 It refers instead to how all of our perception involves
more than what is just immediately given to our senses, for we always participate
in what we experience, imagining events in the context of the experiential back-
ground or felt biases we bring to them, the clearing our existence holds open. A
snake may appear frightening to us, for example, because ours is the kind of exist-
ence wherein we imagine such animals biting us. We make sense of the world,
that is, in a way that corresponds to the condition of our own existence, seeing in
the world (projecting) that which resonates to the possibilities we can imagine
from within the context of our own experiential history. Stated still otherwise: the
visible surface of reality is the symbolic clue to its invisible depths, and it is only
through imagining these depths that we reach into the hidden flesh of the world
and so make contact with others at all.125
What, then, of projection in a negative sense? Consider the case I men-
tioned in chapter three, in which the person who slaughters wolves was said to
repress all that is violent, irrational, insatiable, and disinhibited in himself and
then to project these qualities onto wolves. I suggest that the real issue here is
not projection per se, but the quality of this projection and the poverty of con-
tact that obtains under a repressed condition. For even if his own “beastliness”
is repressed—or, rather, precisely because of this—the wolf-hater’s existence is
implicitly attuned to the “beast”-like qualities in others. Wolves get singled out
because their nature actually does correspond, if only trivially (i.e., because they are
wild and predatory), to those qualities negated by the hunter. The wolves, that is,
serve as the slimmest symbolic cue for calling forth the blocked and ugly meanings
in the background of the hunter’s life. The bias created by these off-base meanings
then reveal the wolves in a relatively distorted or untruthful way. Where there is
little contact with others, as here with the wolves, the imaginative component of
our experience might therefore better be called fantasy. As Stephen Levine notes,
imagination “is the means by which we reach out and connect with otherness,”
whereas fantasy “ignores actuality in creating images of pleasure or pain.”126 The
way to dissolve fantasy projections is thus not to eliminate projection, but to
make better contact with the world, thereby converting “fantasy” into “imagina-
tion” and owning our repressed feelings. The idea within a hermeneutic frame-
work, to repeat, is that we can perceive others more faithfully only by more openly
approaching them, letting them “talk back” to us, and so revising the imagina-
tive biases by which we (necessarily) perceive them.127 This amounts, in turn, to
thickening up the sense of fleshy connection between us, recognizing ourselves in
them, feeling our own flesh caught up with theirs. Indeed, Lopez remarks that we
have broken our ancient contracts with other animals in two main ways: through
a failure of everyday contact and through a related failure of imagination.128
In a similar vein, the environmental researcher Tom Fleischner has called natural

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 136 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

history an “antidote to projection” (“projection” in the negative sense), natural

history being “the honest and honorable practice of learning as directly and expan-
sively as possible from Nature.”129 The more experienced we are, the more com-
plex or richly woven our existential ground, the more are we able to imagine the
world truthfully (all else being equal). Philosopher George Santayana noted, in
this regard, that our imagination, if it is not to be pure fantasy, “needs to be fed
by contact with external things and by widening vital rhythms.”130 We might ask
ourselves, then, as I do in the next chapter, about what is feeding our imagination
today.
The next notion I wish to consider is the repressed unconscious. I will not
repeat my remarks from chapter three, except to remind the reader that what we
repress are our world-bound intentions or meanings that are not completed, wel-
comed, acknowledged, or affirmed by others. In short, we become unconscious
in those areas where our existence is not mirrored, and so where we cannot see or
come to know ourselves. Repression, as Robert Romanyshyn says, thus “character-
izes that condition of living in which experiences, which find no anchor in and/
or reflection by the world, slip away from the world and are buried beneath it.”131
How might we apply this understanding to the idea of an ecological unconscious?
I suggest, first of all, that within an interactive or interrelational scheme, distin-
guishing an “ecological” component of the psyche is a rather arbitrary or rhetorical
business. I suggest, also, that calling the ecological unconscious (as Roszak does)
a “repository” of “the living record of cosmic evolution,” to which we need “open
access,”132 is in fact a dualistic way of conceptualizing it (for reasons I discussed in
chapter three). The type of nondualistic view I would rather adopt here holds that
we are born with certain kinds of world-relations or interactional patterns already
bodily implied. To my mind, this view shifts the stress to our worldliness, to how
we are attending to the process of moving into ever-widening spheres of meaning
and participation. Gion Condrau and Medard Boss write: “Those world-relations
which are prevented from being realized appropriately in an intentional, interper-
sonal manner must carry themselves out in the dark, mute spheres of existence
where there are no thoughts or words, i.e., primarily in the somatic realm.”133 One
way of understanding the ecological unconscious, then, is in terms of our frus-
trated or unconsummated inherent relations concerning the more-than-human
world, relations which continue to be bodily implied under the encrustations of
Western society and so which may still figure in our dreams and creative imagina-
tion. Rather than discuss further what these relations might look like, however, I
leave this topic for my discussion in the final section on “nature and the human
life cycle.”
Our unconscious existence, in general, is sensed by us as the blocked or
blind life that wants to come forth into some specific form. It is a feeling of being
haunted by things not yet conscious, an aching for meanings not had, prefig-
ured contacts not made—not only in relation to the human sphere, but also the

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 137

more-than-human as well. The image that comes to my mind is that of a vast

world, a million implied relations, collapsed or imploded in on a single isolated
center: the repressed body. Today, with all these world-relations blocked or unre-
ciprocated, with so much life unlived, distorted, and jammed in our bodies, it is
no wonder that many people are suffering from chronic illnesses. This is also why
one of the most important roles of a psychotherapist is to welcome and make a
living connection with those parts of the client she or he has shamefully repressed
or disowned. The therapist keeps the client’s process company, mirrors her or his
experience, right at the edge where something is becoming conscious, where some
life wants to body forth into contact.
Moving on to the topic of dreams, we may again witness the general interac-
tive manner of flesh. While dreams are often thought of as subjective events that
belong entirely to the dreamer, as a projection of the dreamer, a philosophy of the
flesh supports the idea that dreaming and waking worlds are better seen as inter-
twining or corresponding realms of being. Medard Boss was emphatic that we do
not have dreams; rather, dreaming is a mode of existing in its own right.134 Here,
therefore, we do not collapse the dream world into the waking world but maintain
that crucial dialectical or mirroring distance between them. This also fits with
the notion that symbols in general express “a kind of correspondence between
different worlds while maintaining a distinction.”135 Hillman thus asks: “Can we
leave the [dream-] animal out there in its otherness and yet retain its psychological
import and our kinship with it?”136 His own answer is that:

animals come into our dreams as guides, helpers, and saviors. . . . they teach us
about something, but they are not part of us. The bear dream that one man had
corresponds with his own earthy, shaggy nature, and therefore he can feel an affinity.
But that bear is not his own shaggy nature. That reduces the bear to just a piece of
himself and insults the bear—it interprets the bear away. The presence of the bear in
the dream corresponds to qualities of the human soul, but is not reducible to it.137

My own training as a Gestalt therapist is to interpret dreams by identifying with

the various dream elements in turn, acting the dream out as in a live drama,
sensing how the various elements resonate metaphorically with one’s own exist-
ence, and so gathering the dream’s message in terms of what personal meanings it
calls forth. While for some this method may well turn the dream into the sole pos-
session of the dreamer, the Gestalt therapists Erving and Miriam Polster argue that
such interpretation can also involve an interplay between, on the one hand, recog-
nizing what aspects of oneself are “echoed” in the dream image and, on the other,
a “healthy respect” for what qualities the dream image itself offers or brings to the
dreamer, how the image exceeds the dreamer. They argue, that is, for a recognition
of the “kinship” between the dreamer and dreamed.138 Hence, when after paying
much attention to crows in my neighborhood, dream-crows start entering into

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 138 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

my night existence, I feel that I am being visited, not that I am merely projecting
myself.139 It is this fleshy reciprocation between ourselves and the otherness we
experience, so well-exemplified in dreams, that is at the paradoxical or ambiguous
heart of all experience: that our experience is ours, yet not ours; that in order to
make contact with it we must identify with it, yet dis-identify from it; and that we
are as one with the otherness we experience, yet different.
Finally, I return to the notion of kinship. I have left this notion for last
because, as we have seen, a philosophy of the flesh suggests that kinship exists
between all sorts of realms of reality, where there exists some common ground
or likeness between them but where they necessarily maintain their distance and
difference. In fact, in every moment of contact or act of correspondence we experi-
ence some commonality, sense the other as like unto ourselves. What is familiar
is family. Following Merleau-Ponty, perception is “the mode of relatedness that
separates us from ourselves and thereby brings us into contact with the things that
teach us about themselves and ourselves.”140 For ecopsychologists, it is vital to
note, in this respect, that prior to domestic times “animals served as delicate signs
of the way the world goes, as elaborate metaphors and symbols, as spiritual beings,
and as themselves.”141 As Gary Snyder asks:

What do we learn from Wren, and Hummingbird, and Pine Pollen, and how? Learn
what? Specifics: how to spend a life facing the current [salmon]; or what it is to
perpetually die young; or how to be huge and calm and eat anything (Bear). But also
that we are many selves looking at each other, through the same eye.142

Shepard gives particular emphasis to how, in the northern hemisphere, bears

have since prehistoric times played a special role in the human imagination, with
bear myths tackling “fundamental questions of human existence.” He and Barry
Sanders note that although every animal reflects some aspect of our humanity,
the bear is a unique mentor in that her skills, personal qualities, and activities are
so varied—and so resonant with our own.143 As they also comment, “The most
persistently and widely told tale ever devised to entertain and educate” is perhaps
the story about a woman who married a bear.144
“To be kindred means to share consciously in the stream of life.”145
Entering this life-stream, as I discussed above, is a process of graduating into ever-­
widening spheres of social belonging. We most easily feel kinship with those who
are closest to or most like ourselves, such as our parents and siblings. An expan-
sion of self-understanding, however, requires that we develop our kinship with
other-than-human beings, each species of which seems “to know a secret and to
be wise in the metasocial fabric of the world.”146 Many animals, like the bear, are
familiar enough that we can find metaphorical common ground with relative ease,
whereas, as Shepard notes, plants generally have lessons for older, more subtle,
minds.147 What we are able to recognize as kin will always be a matter of how

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 139

we are in our own particular ways attuned to the world. In general, however, the
“highest order of maturity” is achieved, suggests Searles, when one is able to relate
to, find likeness in, what on the surface seems “most unlike oneself.”148
The general effect I have been after under this heading is the realization that
all  things correspond to (reflect, echo, mirror, metaphor, resemble) one another
and  only because of this have sense for us. This realization is common in the
worlds of indigenous peoples, where the likenesses or analogies among things are a
source of constant learning, where all things are potential symbolic mirrors—as
is endlessly worked out in such instruments as the medicine wheels used by some
Native North Americans.149 The world experienced by primary peoples is often
described as one with fluid boundaries, such that no absolute lines can be drawn
among human, animal, and spirit realms; a world of metamorphoses, shape-
shiftings, transformations. Joseph Epes Brown writes of the Lakota world that “the
correspondence between levels of reality are as if one were the reflection of the
other;  they flow into each other in a manner that expresses a total, integrated
­environment.”150 A naturalistic psychology would explore these correspondences
or resonances, would be a project of learning to recognize ourselves in what was
formerly alien, of shifting ourselves along the kinship continuum or deepening
our  perception of the unity of the world’s flesh. It would also emphasize that
­hyperdifferentiation or splitting is a possibility given in the very differential structure
of the flesh, and that when we harden our boundaries, and so attenuate our sense of
kinship with others, we suffer a spiritual loss.

Nature and the Human Life Cycle

Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not
the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is
right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings,
a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the
discipline of natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of
receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation
of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan
membership and small group life, and the profound claims and liberation of
ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship.
—Paul Shepard151

Paul Shepard maintained that an “ecologically harmonious sense of self and

world . . . is the inherent possession of everyone, it is latent in the organism.”152
All humans, he said, are naturally ordered to undergo a psychogenesis in which
“inherent predisposition” and “right experience” combine so as to key our speech
and thought into the natural world.153 The prospect he advanced is that today’s

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 140 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

high levels of stress and trauma, war and strife, social alienation, and ecological
dysfunction are therefore the consequence of our having strayed from a general
form of social life that is more in tune with the claims of wild nature and better
suited to fulfilling our own generic expectations or needs.154 Such ideas have
greatly influenced my own, and it is to them that I wish to devote this section.
Whether Shepard got all the details right seems to me beside the point. What is
appealing is the vision of an unfolding of human life into ecologically mature
adulthood, in which caregivers, mentors, and other-than-human beings provide
good symbolic nutrition for completing the gestalts that the child’s maturing body
are organizing at any given time, thus revealing to him “the meaning of his own
impulses, by providing them with an aim.”155 It is a vision in which our inherent
world-relations find the specific kind of responses from others that will satisfy
them, thereby lighting up the way to self-knowledge and to a sense of cosmic-at-
homeness. I do not believe humans to be strangers on this earth. All along in this
chapter I have in fact been working on the assumption that we all desire to be
nurtured into loving relations with the cosmos, and that the achievement of same
is a very real possibility. In what follows, therefore, my aim is to briefly consider
some of the specifics.
Because this is an exercise in matters transhistorical, I must make some addi-
tional precautionary remarks. First, I think the idea of an inherent psychogenesis
that includes other-than-human beings gains strength once we recognize a number
of unfair prejudices working against it. Most obviously, developmental psycholo-
gists have effectively shut out the world of butterflies, ponds, and porcupines—a
condition little changed since Searles first remarked on it forty years ago.156 It has
thus not occurred to researchers, furthermore, to ask about the possible ongoing
harm of being restricted to domestic, human-dominated settings—as opposed to
the more wild, multispecific sorts that have been the norm for all humans up until
only recent times (considered on the scale of the deep past of our species). One
important exception is the psychologist Gene Myers, who claims that the essence
of our humanity lies not in our discontinuity from the rest of nature, as is normally
assumed, but in our ability to sense our commonality with it all. Seen from this
reverse perspective, maturity is the outcome not of transcending our animality or
participation in nature, but of realizing it ever more fully.157 Indeed, to see life as
a quest for meaning and belonging on the largest of social scales is, as Edith Cobb
said, to reorient psychology toward our “total relations with ‘outerness,’ with
nature itself.”158 And then there is the prejudice that to posit a need for “nature” is
romantic or nostalgic, the deluded product of an infantile longing for lost origins
that never were. As I have discussed above, and will elaborate further below, my
response to this charge is that our experience suggests otherwise. Finally, consider
a comment made by the chief engineer for the Three Gorges hydroelectric scheme
on the Yangtze River in China: “If we return to nature we cannot develop.”159 He
meant economic development, of course. Yet “development” is a metaphor whose

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 141

original meaning was biological, that is, natural. Insofar as it is prejudiced against
nature, “economic development” is thus an oxymoron.160 Indeed, I suggest that
the engineer gets it exactly backward; for it is only by “returning to nature” that
we can truly develop.161
That our bodily nature is self-organizing supports the kind of suggestion
made by Shepard that we carry a preknowledge of what will be right for us as
we extend ourselves out into the world, even if the particulars of this knowl-
edge may be open to interpretive debate. My aim below, in this regard, is to put
some relatively sure detail to the three principles I discussed above (ever-widening
spheres; singing the world; one flesh). The more these principles are illustrated,
and so reciprocally fleshed out, the more will they make sense, and the more will a
certain scheme of human life become apparent. As with any other cyclic phenom-
enon, a human life is not without inherent organization. If nothing else, finally,
I would stress that our psychological development is not only a process of going
through our maturational sequences, but also of signifying the world—of coming
to understand ourselves in relation to a more-than-human universe. This makes
the topic of “nature and the human life cycle” of potential relevance to anyone
who thinks about this relation. In what follows, I walk through the life cycle,
focusing on the nature of infancy, childhood, and the adolescent transition into
adulthood. This is another huge topic in its own right. I ask the reader, therefore,
to bear in mind that my intention is not to offer an exhaustive treatise, but only
an evocative sketch.162

Loving Mirrors for the Infant. That we are fleshy mirrors for one another is never
more evident than in infancy. For it is through those intense and decisive inter­
actions with her or his caregivers that the baby’s self takes shape. Infant and care-
giver are caught up in each other’s being in such a way that simply undercuts any
dualistic view of reality. The voices of caregivers awaken the infant’s first smile;
their faces reflect and give form to her or his first feelings.163 Parent and infant
famously exist in a state of mysterious synchrony, of mutual experiencing, where
there is a “feeling mainline” between them.164 Whereas early infants were once
thought to be nonrelational or passive, a more recent view is that they are percep-
tually discriminating and interactive right from the start.165 While newborns may
not be reflectively aware of their difference from others, they nonetheless do live
in their interactions, searching for nurturance from a source outside themselves.166
The caregivers’ mirroring responses, nurturing acts, and energetic adjustments,
moreover, symbolize for infants the latter’s preverbal experiencing, thereby car-
rying it forward. Infants make sense of their own experience, that is, primarily
through their caregivers, as this is something that they are at birth not yet able
to do for themselves via their own self-responses (at least that is what it seems).
Indeed, these exchanges are part of the process whereby infants begin to satisfy
their inborn desire to discover the world’s meaning—what has been called their

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 142 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

“cosmological urge.” Even the child’s play with her or his own body is what Erik
Erikson called “autocosmic play.”167 This urge is evident also in those moments
where infants interact with their nonhuman surroundings, as when, for instance,
they interrupt their feeding in order to curiously gaze at something interesting, say
a cat, that has caught their attention. Feeding, we may therefore note, is “capable
of being usurped by a deeper hunger, namely the search for a comprehensible
world.”168
All these interactions are far from arbitrary, however. For as Gendlin writes:
“Much more arrives at birth than a blank tablet. . . . The human infant implies
the breast and the mother. . . . Infants come with good mothering already implicit,
interpersonal communication already ongoing, the complexity of syntax already
in place. They need not first be made from perceptions.”169 There is what Jean
Liedloff calls a “continuum” between caregiver and child. Even if the baby refuses
the breast, as sometimes happens, the baby-breast relation is still a general inter-
action-pattern of our species, and the fluid in the mother’s breast still implies the
infant in turn. When infants contribute their poetic babble to the dialogue at a
social gathering, moreover, and cry in protest when taken away, it is hard not to
recognize their “innate desire to be included in shared activity, to be acknowl-
edged as a participant in the linguistic community.”170 Infant and caregiving
environment are, then, a single field of mutually anticipated world-relations. As
Goodman notes, the infant is a helpless being only when seen in isolation from
the total social context that her or his existence implies. Regarded as part of the
whole prefigured caregiving field, the child is not helpless at all.171 Of significance
to ecopsychology is the distinct possibility that the relational field implied by the
infant’s body also includes a richness of other-than-human beings. Although the
most important relational matrix for the infant is no doubt human, Shepard sug-
gests that the nonhuman setting for that nexus is thus also highly significant. He
speaks of:

a surround of living plants, rich in texture, smell, and motion. The unfiltered,
unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and
tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and water, the voices of animals and insects
and humans—all these are not vague and pleasant amenities for the infant, but the
stuff out of which its . . . grounding [in the matrix of the earth], even while in its
mother’s arms, has begun. . . . it is a world bathed in nonhuman forms, a myriad of
figures, evoking an intense sense of the differences and similarities, the beckoning
challenge of a lifetime.172

In Winnicott’s memorable words, “the whole procedure of infant-care has as its

main characteristic a steady presentation of the world to the infant.”173 We may
note, in this respect, that it is not at all unusual for parents to take their infants

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 143

outdoors in order to introduce them to blue jays, squirrels, and such,174 and to let
them get into all those earthy things close at hand.
Reflecting on a lifetime of experience, Harold Searles wrote: “I am con-
vinced . . . that lovingness is the basic stuff of human personality, and that it is with
a wholehearted openness to loving relatedness that the newborn infant responds to
the outside world.”175 Jean Liedloff likewise notes: “The feeling appropriate to an
infant in arms is his feeling of rightness, or essential goodness. . . . All babies are
good, but can know it themselves only by reflection, by the way they are treated.
There is no other viable way for a human to feel about himself; all other kinds of
feeling are unusable as a foundation for well-being.”176 I cannot imagine an infant
who does not need to be loved simply because she or he is. For such is the foun-
dation for loving relations toward both ourselves and others. The world-relations
called for at this time are thus those reliable, responsive, and adaptive ones that will
hold a safe space for infants and preserve their core feelings of continuity, trust,
and innocence. No two babies are exactly alike; we enter the world with different
genes, past karmas, destinies, personalities, or whatever. It is for this reason that I
also emphasize the general need to have our specific needs lovingly recognized and
adapted to by our caregivers. As Mary Ainsworth has documented, empathic and
responsive caregiving177 has a “buffering” effect even on infants born with consti-
tutional difficulties.178 Among most primal peoples, a continuous maintenance
of closeness, and attendance to the infant’s particular needs, reportedly results in
children who are securely attached to their caregivers (i.e., who have a sure emo-
tional tie with them) and so who cheerfully and freely explore the transitional
space away from them.179 Much study on attachment and separation by Western
researchers also supports the idea that genuine independence is won only by having
our early dependency needs well-met, despite the still frequently held belief that
doing so only “spoils” children (especially males) or actually prevents them from
becoming independent.180 For the anxiously attached infant, who was perhaps
forced to “grow up,” life will predictably be marred by insecurities of all kinds,
and much of life may be spent seeking little more than proof that one exists.181 I
stress this point because so many serious psychological disturbances surface in the
wake of abuses occurring at this vulnerable stage in life. The so-called borderline
personality disorder, for example, which involves chaotic or crisis-filled interper-
sonal relations and a severe fear of abandonment, is often traced by clinicians to
poor attachment experiences in infancy, including situations in which the young
child was punished for taking steps toward autonomy182 (as well as to situations
of early sexual and physical abuse).183 Borderline personalities are also prevalent
among men who batter their female partners—a significant finding given the cur-
rent crisis of domestic violence.184 In contrast to the traumatized infant, then, it is
the well-loved baby who is generally able to spontaneously move on to the further
stages of childhood with a relative absence of unfinished infantile business.

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 144 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

A Childhood Immersion in the “Natural World.” Naturalists Gary Paul Nabhan and
Stephen Trimble are not shy about claiming that “children need wild places” (nor
is child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who comments in the introduction to their book
that all “young people ache for nature”).185 The view worked out by these and other
authors is that in childhood the innate urge toward meaning creation and social
belonging takes the matrix of the earth as its locus. In a much-celebrated study
on “the ecology of imagination in childhood,” Edith Cobb wrote that “there is a
special period, the little understood, prepubertal, halcyon, middle age of childhood,
approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve—between the strivings of animal
infancy and the storms of adolescence—when the natural world is experienced in
some highly evocative way, producing in the child a sense of profound continuity
with natural processes.”186 Cobb was convinced that what children want most is
“to make a world in which to find a place to discover a self,” and that their natural
surroundings is the terrain in which to do it. Having graduated or separated from
the earlier field of infant relations, children’s emerging gestalt-making powers now
direct them toward an aesthetic encounter with nature, for a joyful and wonder-
filled revelation of creeks, groundhogs, and tadpoles. This period is a time that calls
for imaginative play and wonder, for total absorption in and free exploration of the
world. “The child learns that all life tells something and that all sound, from the
frog calling to the sea surf, issues from a being kindred and significant to himself,
telling some tale, giving some clue, mimicking some rhythm that he should know.
There is no end to what is to be learned.”187 Just as we bond to caregivers in infancy,
so do we—in this new phase of symbiotic immersion in the green world—need to
become bonded to the earth. The “child must have a residential opportunity to soak
in a place, and . . . the adolescent and adult must be able to return to that place to
ponder the visible substrate of his own personality.”188
Because the childhood need for nature is poorly recognized by most psy-
chologists, I wish to make a couple of methodological remarks. First, I mentioned
above that one of the main ways we discover needs is by tracing back along lines of
suffering. The other is by paying attention to the fresh promptings of the life force:
to where our bodily energy is genuinely pointing, to what is becoming newly
figural in our awareness, to what tastes like nutritious or satisfying food. Within
an experiential framework, especially, wherever there is spontaneous interest in
the world, there we recognize an organismic need. For me, then, it is enough that
(given supportive conditions) children are in general highly curious about and
attracted to the world outdoors. They are themselves clearly saying what they need
next in order to build up their existence, widen their self-boundaries, add fur-
ther experiences to their life-gestalt, or discover-and-invent their “own increasing
reality.”189 As Myers notes, in this regard, “the animal emerges for the infant and
young child as a truly subjective other whose immediate presence is compelling
. . . . cultural practices do not just create out of whole cloth (or fail to create)

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 145

wonder at animals. Rather, such practices encourage or distort a process already

functioning in its own way in the child.”190 Shepard also comments: “That chil-
dren are interested in animals seems self-evident, . . . one of those ‘givens’ which in
the past has not aroused the curiosity of psychologists.”191 Certainly, the contin-
uing preponderance of animal characters in children’s story books would support
these views. This leads to my second methodological remark, which concerns,
again, the human-centered prejudices of researchers.
In Myers book on children and animals, he discusses a number of these preju-
dices, saying that psychological theorists have to date “systematically obscured the
importance of other species in our development,” making them irrelevant or sec-
ondary to humans in the making of the child’s world.192 I will not try to repro-
duce all of Myers’s helpful commentary, but only briefly highlight a few points. He
discusses, for example, how the child’s early and spontaneous sense of continuity
with animals is erased by cultural lessons that lead to the creation of a “categori-
cally human self.” We are all familiar with the lowly status granted to animals (we
insult people by calling them pigs, or rats, or just plain “animals!”). “The nursery
school,” says Myers, “is replete with boundary disputes, evaluation of the ‘wild’ or
the ‘animal’ body, and with rigid distinctions, sometimes motivated out of a need to
put at a distance that which is morally disturbing.”193 These biases against animals
are then institutionalized in theories in which the chosen end points of develop-
mental—rationality, self-consciousness, and so on—all involve an outgrowing of
childhood animality. Because these theories measure maturity by the achievement
of distance from an animal existence, they rule out from the start any consideration
of the importance of animals to the child’s growing self. The theories split the child
into a simple animal body and a disembodied intellect, thereby making invisible
the meanings that children might form in direct bodily felt contact with animals.194
Against the assumption that the child’s self is made only in the society of human
language-users, Myers argues, by contrast, that a “sense of connection to the animal
and by extension to a subjective [personified] ecology is a telos, or end, of develop-
ment. It is a prepotent potential, and we might do well to consider its value.”195
The broad task of childhood is play. From an experiential perspective, play
is not just nonserious or trivial activity (as the cognitive development theorist
Jean Piaget would have it)196 but a means for extensive learning. Some degree of
cultural transmission always takes place in the form of play, as in “playing house.”
For primal societies, especially, childhood play is allowed a central place. As Eaton
et al. discuss it:

In hunting and gathering societies play is the main activity of children throughout
their waking hours, in contrast to other types of societies in which chores and
schooling occupy large amounts of children’s time after the age of six. Also, for
hunting and gathering societies, the period of middle childhood—ages six to twelve

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 146 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

or so—is characterized by the encouragement of independence, . . . initiative, . . .

flexibility, . . . and self-reliance, but not of obedience and responsibility [i.e.,
duties].197

In other words, there is a general lack of authoritarian parenting, especially of the

sort that would humiliate the child, but a high degree of freedom given over to
the child for play. In these societies, children learn through imitating the gathering
and hunting activities of the adults, figuring out thereby which plants and animals
make the best food, and coming to know the local natural history. There is thus
little formal education. Rather, cognitive, physical, social, and emotional skills are
acquired through all sorts of play, including the observation of adults and older
children performing the everyday scenes of life, such as butchering, copulating,
birthing, and dying.198
Of the many areas of play that characterize childhood, perhaps the most
significant for our purposes is the imitation of animals. On the basis of much
ethnographic study, Calvin Martin concludes that contact and reciprocity with
nonhuman animals expresses a “universal human urge.”199 In childhood this urge
is met in the form of play. Myers writes that translating “the shape of the animal’s
body into one’s own—the key continuity—may be a broadly shared characteristic of
childhood” across cultures.200 “In the immensity of time,” adds Shepard, “humans
acquired, deep in their hearts, the expectation that animals signify. Insofar as they
mediate between our conscious selves and the archetypal figures of our innermost
being, childhood is a time of ‘archetypal reminiscence’ dependent on animals.”201
Anthropologist James Fernandez has likewise suggested that games of imitating
animals are part of our “normal growth.”202 Through the playful recognition of
themselves in the animal, children increasingly resolve their own inchoateness.
For Myers and others, the reason why animals have a critical place in the life of
children is because they:

appear to be optimally discrepant social others . . . , offering just the right amount of
similarity and difference from human pattern and other animal patterns to ­optimally
engage the child. . . . animals are symbolic for the child . . . in the sense of ­confirming
the child’s own uniquely human self and representing and furthering the living,
feeling self in a more vivid form than can other kinds of carriers of meaning.203

That is, children innately anticipate the kind of symbolic nutrition offered by
animals. By this period the ground has been prepared for them to undertake the
metaphorical leaps in self-understanding, and the widening of their social cir-
cles, that animals offer to them. In this way, their lives are carried forward into
new realms of existing. “Each kind of animal gives concrete representation to an
ephemeral and intangible element of the human self such as assertion, intimi-
dation, ­affection, doubt, determination, kindness, anger, hope, irritation,

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 147

yearning, wisdom, cunning, anticipation, fear, and initiative. Only when these
feelings are discovered outside the self and then performed can such intense but
elusive ‘things’ be made one’s own.”204 In enacting other animals, moreover, chil-
dren not only feel closer to them, but clarify for themselves just how they are not
like animals. As Myers suggests, this has the effect of preserving the animal’s other-
ness, of establishing a kinship based on shared qualities rather than pure identity.
In such play the “vital natures of animals are encountered—and become our best
defense against the conspiracy that animals are only machines or artifacts, and
therefore against the lie that we ourselves are made of cogs, wheels, and wires.”205
In developing a connection with other animals, finally, children expand their own
existential fields of care, not only to include these animals, but also the local ter-
rains and larger ecologies to which they belong. (As Myers notes, the dilemma
today is that to assist children in recognizing animals as genuine “social others,”
while also introducing them to a world that routinely violates animals, is to set
them up for a good deal of grief. Hence: “If society were to really grasp what is
at stake in child development, we might well reduce exploitation of animals to a
minimum dictated by a stricter sense of necessity.”206)
What is perhaps most generally missing in our own Western childhoods is
a culture of wilderness, wherein stories, rituals, everyday language, and day-to-day
activities are all richly embedded in a more-than-human world. Trimble notes, for
example, that:

Pueblo Indian children learn about connections to the earth through virtually every
experience in their culture. Beginning at about three years of age, Pueblo boys
dance in their village plazas as animals, transforming themselves into the spirits of
antelope and deer. They wear gray fox skins, deer-hoof and tortoise-shell rattles,
parrot feathers, antler and horn headdresses, and skunk-fur gaiters. A little later, the
girls may dance as parrots or buffalo mothers. The words of the songs, the symbols
painted on costumes, and the choreographed gestures all connect the dancers with
the earth: corn, clouds, the sun, rain, lightning, thunder, rainbows, evergreen trees.
Life, growth, harvest.207

Despite my own joyful childhood experiences along the forest trail, I can little
imagine what a difference in my perceptual universe it would have made to have
been a member of such a culture as the Pueblo’s—nor what it might have meant
for the next phase of the life cycle.

Adolescent Initiation into a Sacred Adult Cosmos. One of the main tasks of a natural-
istic approach is to identify those natural claims that are not being acknowledged
or met by our society and to highlight the trouble this is creating. Our general
misreading of the nature of adolescence provides a strong case in point. Having
studied the human life cycle in a variety of cultural settings, Turnbull writes of

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 148 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

adolescence that he “cannot think of a single culture . . . that handles this crucial
stage of life more abysmally than we do.”208 While it is normal for us to view ado-
lescence as a troublesome period that youth and their parents have to just survive
somehow (or even as a kind of “mental illness”—sometimes officially209), other
societies recognize it as a stage of great significance for both social and cosmic
renewal, in which elders are called on to provide the cultural assistance necessary
for youth to undergo a powerful symbolic rebirth into adulthood. As Turnbull
thus notes: “Most of the adolescent behavior that is so puzzling to adults would
be comprehensible if only they searched for the proper symbolic key.”210 In ado-
lescence the carefree days of childhood wane as our maturing bodies ready us for
the challenge of confronting our society and forming an adult identity, becoming
part of our society in a new way. Our bodies naturally acquires sexual significance;
we become highly sensitive to how others see us; and our minds search for a way
to understand a cosmos that now bears down on us mightily. Struggling under the
multiple burdens of physiological revolution, identity crisis, and spiritual awak-
ening, it is not surprising that adolescents have developed a reputation for being
difficult. I refuse to believe, however, that adolescents are “crazy” by nature; I
argue instead (as do others) that the tragic mess our society makes of this stage
of life demonstrates just how impoverished is its understanding of the cultural
demands that our human nature makes on it.
A “humanistic” assumption of this book is that people are always making
the best creative adjustments they can between their organismic needs and the
situations in which they find themselves. We may well ask, then, about the general
needs of adolescents; the kind of cultural conditions that are required to optimally
meet them; and the creative adjustments that youth make when these conditions
are lacking. This is essentially what Erikson did in his classic and still-valuable
studies on youth. The following passage from Identity: Youth and Crisis sets the
stage for much of what I want to discuss.

In youth the tables of childhood dependence begin slowly to turn: no longer is it

merely for the old to teach the young the meaning of life. It is the young who, by
their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented to them has some
vital promise, and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm those who
confirm them, to renew and regenerate, to disavow what is rotten, to reform and
rebel.211

As this passage suggests, it is of the nature of adolescents to “talk back” to society

(just as the saying goes). And this is because adolescence is the stage in life where
our social status comes to a decision point, where we explicitly search for a form
of social life or way of being that will satisfy our desire for a comprehensible
and life-giving world. Youths offer their enthusiasm and faith to society, agree
to regenerate or ensure the continuation of that form of society, only when it

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 149

appears to offer them roles and ideals worthy of their fidelity. This fidelity, which
Erikson describes as the naturally emerging power (or “vital virtue”) of youth, can
come to fruition or complete itself only if there is a “true community” available to
house it—one to which the adolescent may genuinely be loyal or “true.” Adoles-
cents are “desperately seeking for a satisfactory sense of belonging,” for a “defined
personality within a social reality.”212 When, however, their elders fail to provide
satisfying means to incorporate youth into the social whole, it is of the wisdom
of their rebellious bodies to refuse that society, even if they themselves don’t quite
understand what they are doing.
Much of the adolescent activity that disturbs adults may thus be seen as
forms of creative adjustment to an unsatisfactory situation. Gangs and cliques, for
example, are “pseudo-societies” or “micro-societies”213 that youths substitute for
adult society, creating for themselves a community to which they can indeed be
true. Gangs, said Erikson, are a “defense against a sense of identity confusion,”214
as these offer a more satisfying identity for youth than is possible through mem-
bership in a corrupt or unwelcoming society-at-large. Even a “negative identity”
is preferable to a bankrupt one, and even deviancy can be a form of loyalty to one’s
own nature.215 Some adolescents adjust by withdrawing inwardly, while others
become manifestly disturbed, disintegrating under their psychospiritual load.
As Erikson argued, if we do not understand the need for (giving and receiving)
fidelity, we will instead confirm the youth “by every act of the correctional or
therapeutic authorities as a future criminal or a lifelong patient.”216 That is, rather
than recognizing the intertwined needs of youth and society, our adult society
effectively punishes and shames adolescents for how it has failed them. Instead of
listening to the feedback offered by adolescents through their distress-filled activi-
ties, and taking responsibility for that distress, our elders call for more police and
discipline. Punk rock and grunge music are adolescent ways of singing the world,
are a kind of voice of nature. Adolescents, in other words, are natural mirrors for
a society, even if our own society generally refuses to see itself in them, and even
if our society is itself a broken mirror for reciprocally showing to adolescents their
own “true” selves. Looking for a world to believe in, noble values to uphold, and
cosmic meanings to embrace, the last thing adolescents “need” is wrong-headed
social judgment.
In the general unfolding of adolescent life, two regions of existence that are
highly figural, and so much in need of societal recognition, are the sexual and spir-
itual.217 I thus want to consider these two in turn (even if they are tightly linked).
First, the sexual. Sexual maturation spontaneously turns adolescents into a new
kind of being, and so creates a discontinuity in their existence, makes them unfa-
miliar to themselves, at least to some degree. The bodily changes occurring at this
time bring their ontological insecurity to a new apex and make them extremely
self-conscious for that reason.218 The pursuit of social acceptance by adolescents
thus includes the desire for an identity in which their sexual being is actively

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 150 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

affirmed, thereby bringing acknowledgment or celebration to the actual state of

their youthful existence. For the most part, however, our society is not the kind that
affirms sexuality as something good and sacred; and as a result many adolescents
feel ashamed of their naturally emerging sexuality (for shame is the experience of
feeling oneself rejected in the mirror of the other, or what amounts to much the
same thing, not being mirrored at all). This is all pretty well-known. I raise the
matter, though, in order to contrast our own society’s handling of sexuality with
that of some traditional societies (and also because leaving it out of the account
would be another form of nonrecognition). Turnbull writes that: “In other cul-
tures, where each stage of life is seen as having its own contribution to make to the
well-being of society, adolescence is no exception. Instead of individual curiosity
in sexuality being treated as shameful, it is encouraged to flower into exuberance,
and that individual exuberance in sexual potency is then transformed into joy
with the realization of the individual’s wider social significance as a life-giver.”219
The anthropology literature is full of descriptions of sexual play among children.
As Eaton et al. note, “a free and playful attitude toward sexuality during childhood
is our ancestral heritage and may be most compatible with optimal psychological
development.”220 The comparative religion scholar Mircea Eliade further notes
that “for the entire premodern world, sexuality too participates in the sacred.” In
pubertal rites of initiation the sacredness of sexuality is revealed, thus lending the
sexual play of childhood a spiritual meaning.221
Initiation rites, indeed, have been a traditional response to the spiritual
needs of the pubertal human, in which females and males, in their own ways,
undergo transformative experiences and are introduced to the sacred teachings of
their communities.222 This is not to say that initiation rites in all times and places
have been or are universally virtuous. The ritual mutilation of female genitals, for
example—performed today on millions of girls and women around the world,
particularly in African nations—is a hideous act of violence aimed at controlling
the emotions and sexual behavior of women.223 Many anthropological accounts,
moreover, describe male initiations that are terrifying and bloody ordeals.224 What
I wish to emphasize, then, is only the need for adolescent rites, and the importance
of finding/inventing ritual forms that genuinely meet this need within the context
of our own time and place. Good rites are “spiritual levers” that help propel the
maturational process.225 Adolescents, in short, need to be taken through a “pow-
erful, tightly structured gestation,” that will “tutor their suffering and dreaming,”
and “guide their feelings and fidelity.”226 As Eliade notes, “the experience of ritual
death and the revelation of the sacred . . . exhibits a dimension that is metacultural
and transhistorical.”227 In my own terms, I would assert that our bodies sponta-
neously organize themselves for or expect spiritual initiation. As above, we may
support such an assertion by witnessing our basic interest in them, including the
pervasive “initiation hunger” within our own society (about which, more below).
Eliade comments that ethnologists frequently remark on the “intense interest”

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 151

with which novices listen to mythological traditions and take part in ceremonial
life, or the avidness they show in pursuit of the significance hidden within the
myths they are being introduced to. What also led Eliade to call rites of passage
“an existential experience that is basic in the human condition” was his recogni-
tion that even when initiatory patterns “lose their ritual reality,” as they did in
the West during the middle ages, they nonetheless persist in the mode of literary
motifs in eagerly consumed stories.228
It is not my intention to offer much detail on the topic of adolescent initia-
tion rites, as there is much existing literature that already does so.229 I will only stress
a number of points important for my purposes. The first is that such initiation is
crucial for the sociation of the individual. Initiates in primal societies go through
a process of separation from their families, of ritual death or descent, only through
which process are they reborn as members of the wider community, their social place
consolidated and recognized in a ceremony that usually follows on their return. The
form of rites vary widely from culture to culture, of course. What is common, how-
ever, is that they reveal to initiates “the sacredness of life and of the world,” as it is
conveyed to them, for example, in origin myths. On a vision quest the initiate may be
visited by a tutelary spirit or discover new planes of existence through ecstatic experi-
ences. As Eliade notes, indigenous peoples generally believe that to live is to share in
the sacrality of the cosmos. It is only through this ritual second birth into the spiritual
realm, therefore, that the initiate attains full social standing as a human being.
One of the valuable contributions made by Shepard to this topic was his
insight into the important role played by the earlier stages of the life cycle in
readying the adolescent to comprehend this sacred dimension of ultimate mean-
ings. Hence, the adolescent:

will not put his delight in the sky and the earth behind him as a childish and irrel-
evant thing. He will graduate not out of that world but into its significance. So,
with the end of childhood, he begins a life-long study, a reciprocity with the natural
world in which its depths are as endless as his own creative thought. He will not
study it in order to transform its liveliness into mere objects that represent his ego,
but as a poem, numinous and analogical, of human society.230

Each stage of life lays down the preunderstanding for grasping the next. In this
case, myths “and spiritual and cosmological concepts are communicated by allu-
sion to a [now] familiar natural world.”231 The result is a form of spirituality that
is tied to or grounded in a more-than-human place, one that initiates have already
learned to love and feel themselves a part of.232
It is at this stage of life, moreover, that we are ordered to gather the meta-
phorical nature of reality as such; to achieve a symbolic level of perception. The
adolescent passage is thus also “a transition in the imaginative faculty from a literal
to a figurative place, from familiar temporal reality to the dreamtime.”233

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 152 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch

Beginning in adolescence and continuing throughout life . . . metaphor and symbol

in poetry and song as well as all other arts and myth . . . result . . . in the intellectual
realization that things have more than a face value. Guiding the young in this work
is the cultus, with all of its exercises in tutorial, myth, ceremony, and test, tradition-
ally employed to open doors into maturity. A rich, literal knowledge of animal life
is fundamental to this process, generating a respect for the natural community as a
higher language, as clues toward wisdom in the immense panoply of nonhuman life,
to which mature adults will look for the terms in which to describe a cosmology.234

For myself, I am most able to experience the world in an explicitly symbolic way
when I am lucid dreaming, in which I am aware that I am dreaming while still in
a dream state. In the days following such dreams the taste of lucidity permeates
my waking life, such that my existence becomes more spacious and filled with a
kind of luminous glow. Every being I encounter is potentially rich in meaning, has
some important message, some secret link to my own life. I thus imagine a mature,
earth-based spiritual life as one in which one feels enveloped in a mysterious-yet-
familiar world; where time and space easily slip out of their Cartesian dimensions;
where a million little resonances keep one paying attention; and in which new
revelations continually reform one’s sense of the possible. As many seekers today
still understand, a symbolic perception of the world lifts one out of one’s Ego
into a larger cosmic drama in which nothing, including oneself, has that substan-
tial reality of the literal viewpoint. To undergo a symbolic death and rebirth, for
example, takes the sting out of one’s literal death. As Eliade notes, it even gives it
a positive value, for one realizes that death is merely the end of a mode of being,
a stage in the transformation of all things. And as Erikson observed, “healthy
children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”235
Not initiation into a sacred adult cosmos, but all sorts of perversions of it
are what we in the modern era generally live out. For us, it is senseless hazings
and literal descents rather than elaborately symbolic ordeals ritually completed.
“In many tribal cultures,” writes the men’s work leader Michael Meade, “it was
said that if boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the
skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture.”236 Good initiation
rites are designed to creatively resolve the tension between youth and society in
a way that is meaningful and of benefit to all. In their absence, social pathology
blooms—a notion well-captured in the suggestion that overcrowded prisons are
“houses of failed initiation.”237 Writes Meade:

underlying the surface structure of schools, fraternities, sororities, maternity groups,

military organizations, street gangs, rap bands, crack houses, meditation centers and
prisons lie the bones and sinews of initiatory rites and symbols. Whenever life gets
stuck or reaches a dead end, where people are caught in rites of addiction, possessed
by destructive images, compelled to violent acts or pulled apart by grief and loss, the

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 Naturalistic Psychology: A Sketch 153

process of initiation presses to break through. The most important reason to study
rites of passage may be to see in the events erupting in the streets and at the borders
and crossroads of our post-historic era the archaic energies of life renewing itself.238

At the heart of much of our modern trouble, that is, the life force is still pushing
toward the completion of the initatory gestalt. “Instead of ritual descent and emo-
tional resurrection,” however, it is often the case that “complete death occurs;
actual corpses pile up.”239 We may speculate with great seriousness, then, about
the tremendous potential value of finding our way back to or reappropriating rites
consciously enacted.
The human life cycle does not of course end at the beginning of adult-
hood. I have concentrated on the earlier stages of life both because of their forma-
tive significance and on account of the space restrictions of this chapter. In brief,
however, we may note that adults themselves need to be needed, gaining their
satisfaction through guiding the next generation and undertaking projects that
are of service to others. Under good conditions adults ripen with age, continuing
to learn lessons from a world still experienced as a constantly novel presence. They
may then arrive at old age not as crippled and unwise adolescents, but as “memory
banks, keepers of the lore and genealogy, healers, accumulators of useful social
lessons (especially childrearing and the resolution of disagreement)” and tutors in
ceremonial matters.240 In their own way, by their proximity to death (and so to
the spirit world), the old may also revitalize society, especially through their special
connection to the young. A satisfying life, then, sees our basic desires met. “As the
needs of adults in their prime to initiate and carry through their projects become
fulfilled and age begins to reduce physical powers, desires are for seeing one’s
loved ones succeed, for peace, for less variety in experiences, to feel that things are
moving through the cycle of life with less help from oneself, and ultimately, with
no help, as the last of life’s succession of desires is fulfilled and is replaced by none
but the wish to rest, to know no more, to cease.”241 As Nietzsche said: “all that is
ripe . . . wants to die.”242

Despite the brevity of my presentation here, I hope to have demonstrated (or at

least raised the possibility) that the human life process contains a great deal of
underlying, naturally ordered demand; that there is much inherent structure to
our human lives, and that this sets limits on us or gives us our place to be. My
aim, in any event, has been to lay out a rough ground against which to contrast,
and so better understand, the current situation within our own society. In the next
chapter, it is to this needful situation that I more focally bring my naturalistic and
experiential framework, in an effort to articulate the practical and critical tasks it
implies.

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Chapter_05.indd 154 11/9/12 12:23 AM
 6
MAKING SENSE OF SUFFERING IN A
TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD

Technological Progress: The (Paved) Road to Happiness?

Man can survive in appallingly anti-continuum conditions [those contrary to

his transhistorical expectations] but his well-being, his joy, his fulfillment as a
whole human being, can be lost. . . . the life force, in its ceaseless tending
toward repair of damage and completion of the developmental phases, among
its instruments employs anxiety, pain, and an array of other ways of signaling
that things are wrong. Unhappiness in all its forms is the result.
—Jean Liedloff1

In complicated times it is all the more helpful to have simple ideas. Like other
ecological thinkers, my interest lies quite simply with the flourishing of all life—
with a condition we might call happiness. The Buddhists say “may all beings be
happy,” which I hear as “may all beings thrive according to their own natures.” In
the previous three chapters I presented an interpretation of our own world-bound
nature and of what the satisfactory unfolding of a human life generally entails. I
also worked from the assumption, definitive of Buddhism, that if we are to find
real happiness we have to know something about the basis of our suffering. Today,
moreover (unlike in the Buddha’s time), this means making sense of our suffering
in a technological world. For this final chapter, then, I wish to more focally con-
sider this general task to which my naturalistic and experiential approach points.
I begin in the present section by examining the idea that currently rules over
our society’s thinking about what will make us happy, namely, technological
progress. Norman O. Brown remarks that what humankind “is doing seems to be
making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”2 Indeed, if
the idea of technological progress is backward, as many argue, then I must make
it the main butt of my own critical thought. The very process—technological

155

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 156 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

progress—that is meant to enhance our lives will be seen in fact to betray “an
impatience and even disdain for life, a contempt and defiance of our bodily, that
is mortal, earthly existence.”3
Not only the Buddha, but the likes of Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Marx,
Freud, and the advertising industry all agree that the goal of life is happiness. This
only makes sense, for we all want a good life, want to feel satisfied.4 Indeed, one of
Freud’s central findings was that the “whole world may be against it, but still man
holds fast to the deep-rooted, passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of hap-
piness.”5 Where these various sources differ is over the route toward this happiness,
and on the prospect of getting there. These days, it is primarily the advertisers who
get listened to, for it is generally assumed that our happiness has something to do
with technologically delivered commodity wealth, that “the good life is the goods
life.”6 We need to note at this point, therefore, the close connection between eco-
nomic and technological principles. A technologized reality, in other words, is an
economized reality. To use Marxist terms, technological progress is of the essence
of the capitalist mode of production,7 is of a piece with its development. Associ-
ated with technology, then, is the steady concentration of wealth in the hands
of the ruling class, the (in my terms) double violation of nature, the perpetual
expansion and intensification of the capitalist marketplace, and in general, the
relentless imposition of capitalist social relations. What I say about technology in
this chapter thus carries on from my remarks at the end of chapter three on the
economization of reality. Given that the promise of technological progress enjoys
so much economic power and such a strong hold on the popular imagination, it
will serve us, next, to consider the history of this promise.
In his book Progress Without People, David Noble8 traces this history to an
ideological transformation that occurred among monks in ninth-century Europe.
It was at this time, observes Noble, that the “useful arts”—cloth-making, agri-
culture, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, mathematics, sculpture,
and so on—were drawn into the Christian mythology of redemption. These arts,
previously kept well out of the realm of religion and transcendence, suddenly
took on a new significance, now being regarded as a vehicle for the salvation of
“man” (women being excluded from the project of redemption), that is, for the
restoration of his lost perfection and prelapsarian powers. What was to become
modern technology thus had a religious and a masculine meaning right from the
start, emerging as both a historical and salvationary force in the same stroke. It
was not until the scientific revolution, however, that the “religion of technology”
was brought “from the margins of Western history to centre stage, where it has
remained.”9 Francis Bacon, in particular, gave bold definition to the masculine
millennial project of modern technology. Human suffering, he said, was a need-
less scandal. Through the elevation and improvement of the “mechanical arts,”
directed toward the torture, inquisition, and subjugation of a female nature, it
would be possible, he argued, to relieve “the inconveniences of man’s estate”10 and

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 157

to finally erase man’s sins by returning to him his divinelike powers. This religious
theme was then carried into the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century,
in which engineers were viewed as the “priests” of a new epoch, and in which
the project begun in the ninth century was given its new name under industrial
capital: “technology.” At this time, worker opposition arose in Britain to the way
that machines were being used by capitalists in creating a system of social domina-
tion that involved deskilling, wage slavery, and the destruction of communities.
It was then, suggests Noble, that “middle-class apologists and optimistic econo-
mists” invented the idea of inevitable technological progress (as well as that of the
virtue of competition) as a way to induce paralysis in this “Luddite” opposition
to technology, and to prevent its recurrence. “Society” was similarly “discovered”
as an entity that existed apart from the people who comprised it, having its own
autonomous, “natural” laws, operating on the “hard logic of the market and the
machine.” In short, social progress and technological progress were equated and
the system of capital promoted as an automatic process for delivering human hap-
piness, “so long as people allowed it to follow its natural course.”11
Of particular note is Noble’s argument that the doctrine of technological
progress derives its ideological strength from its abstract and future-oriented
character, that is, from the manner in which it deflects attention away from the
concrete and present moment. In other words, a high-altitude narrative about
progress is used to explain away obvious human, social, and ecological losses as
necessary costs along the way to a better future—those who suffer are enjoined
simply to “look for future deliverance.” Felt experience thus becomes largely irrel-
evant as the present tense is progressively replaced by fatalism and futurism, and as
fantasies about technological development replace our contact with actual reality.
This makes for a “proudly irrational framework,” wherein we are told that we can’t
stand in the way of progress, even if it kills us, so sacrosanct and inevitable is it.
In today’s secular society, technophiles now use an openly religious vocabu-
lary. “We are as gods,” some of them say, speaking (especially in magazines such
as Wired) of the powers made available to them by the “new” technologies. “In
space exploration, they are joining the angels; in artificial reproduction they are
regaining Adam’s male-only procreative powers; in artificial intelligence, they
are overcoming the curse and the mortal bondage of the body; in genetic engi-
neering, they are becoming once again God’s partner in creation; in cyberspace
they are recovering their rightful dominion over the universe, omniscient and
omnipresent.”12 Technosalvationism, in sum, is the “shared delusion” of our age.
In contrast to the optimism of today’s techno-boosters, it is helpful to con-
sider the pessimism of Freud, who said that between happiness and unhappiness,
the latter “is much less difficult to experience.”13 According to Freud, the three
sources of human suffering are “the superior powers of nature” (“She destroys
us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us”),14 “the feebleness of our own
bodies,” and conflicts within human society.15 Given this situation, he believed

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 158 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

the best thing a person can do is become “a member of the human commu-
nity, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, [go] over to the attack
against nature, subjecting her to the human will”—even if humans shall “never
completely master nature,” including our bodies. Social problems, too (the third
source of suffering), may be traced to “a piece of unconquerable nature,” namely,
our own hostile human nature which causes us to battle one another. We must
therefore include ourselves in the attack on nature; that is, “every civilization must
be built up on the coercion and renunciation of instinct.”16 Hence, the “principle
task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature,”17 both
outside and in. With such views, Freud hopelessly dichotomized nature and cul-
ture, making our own organismic intentions the forces against which we must
defend ourselves, and aligning himself with the idea of progress. Having made a
necessity out of dissatisfaction, he concluded that the “programme of becoming
happy . . . cannot be fulfilled.” Rather, in exchange for the “security” offered by
civilization, we pay the price of “a loss of happiness through the heightening of
the sense of guilt.”18 What is admirable about Freud is his blunt acknowledgment
that the technological domination of nature, even if necessary, brings no joy. In
this respect, his vision is more honest than that of the optimists, for he did at least
witness what was later to be called the “revolt of nature.”
The revolt of nature is an aspect of what, in chapter three, I called the
double violation of nature, and is a simple though compelling notion for refuting
the promise of technological happiness. It was first named as such by Max
Horkheimer, who saw civilization as a project of putting down or managing a
nature increasingly in revolt, a revolt that is reaching “its peak in this era.”19 It
is an easy enough notion to grasp. We experience the revolt of our own nature
as our body’s painful rebellion against repressing social and cultural conditions.
I spoke in the previous chapter about the revolt of adolescent nature, and in the
discussion above about the revolt of Luddites. Examples are endless. Much of
the experience of depression that is widespread within Western culture can, for
instance, also be read as a revolt of nature, our bodies saying “no” to the crushing
demands and abuses of modern life. The revolt of nonhuman nature, on the other
hand, manifests as mutating bacteria, mudslides, droughts, and the ecological
crisis in general.20 “As more of nature is domesticated and controlled, it becomes
more compressed and dangerous. In the [atom] bomb, all the former wildness is
concentrated . . ., pushed to an explosive end in the very heart of minerals them-
selves.”21 As William Leiss writes: “A vicious circle results, imprisoning science
and technology in a fateful dialectic of increasing mastery and increasing con-
flict. The attractive promises of mastery over nature—social peace and material
abundance for all—remain unfulfilled.”22 Any open recognition of the revolt of
nature would spell disaster for the existing social order, as this would amount to
an admission that technological progress is not the path to a heavenly future it is

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 159

promised to be, but an ideology for safeguarding a vicious status-quo. The revolt
of nature must therefore be mystified, as is done in at least two general ways.
The first is by manipulating or taking advantage of it. As Horkheimer
argued, the “prevailing forces of civilization” use the revolt of nature “as a means
to perpetuate the very conditions by which it is stirred up and against which it is
directed.”23 The corporate world, in particular, has learned with a vengeance how
to manipulate the revolt of nature. To take an obvious example, it profits from the
alienation and interpersonal distance engendered by capitalist social relations by
selling us the telephones we need in order to “reach out and touch somebody.”
Phones and other such commodities then “become necessary, a sign of progress, a
proof of prestige for those who ‘own’ them.”24 Or the pharmaceutical companies
sell us the antidepressants that gets us back to work. Peter Breggin says of psychia-
try’s appropriation of suffering: “The mental health professions, led by psychiatry,
have rushed into the void left by the default of the family, the schools, the society,
and the government. . . . By diagnosing, drugging, and hospitalizing children,
psychiatry enforces the worst attitudes toward children in our culture today and
exonerates those adult institutions that need reform.”25 As for the ecological crisis,
the cooption of the environmental movement by the corporate sphere—recently
dubbed “greenwashing”—immediately comes to mind. “Corporate environmen-
talism” is mostly a public relations exercise that portrays large corporations, such
as car companies, as friends of “the environment” and that tends to redefine social-
ecological problems in purely technical terms.26 In an article that seeks to debunk
the notion of “green capitalism,” furthermore, Joel Kovel notes: “So seamless is
capital’s current moment of triumph, and so absent any appreciation that there
might be alternatives to it, that the thought of whether its stewardship of the earth
will necessarily bring about ecological catastrophe . . . scarcely enters anybody’s
consciousness.”27 Whenever “jobs” are pitted against “the environment,” finally,
the chance is missed to see the link between the revolt of human nature and that
of nonhuman nature.
A second way the revolt of nature is controlled is by means of what has
been called “mental health” oppression,28 which is a blanket social force for the
repression of it. An important ecopsychological point is that psychoanalysis was
born only when the revolt of nature within the individual could no longer be
ignored. Freud claimed that history itself has the character of an ever-increasing
neurosis.29 As civilization advances, our desires are frustrated more and more,
not only by external pressures, but by our own internalized social authority,
the superego. The result is massive psychic derangement. What Kovel calls “the
mental health industry” is, then, the bureaucracy that has evolved for managing
this crippled desire.30 “Mental health” oppression refers to all the ways we are
made afraid of seeming or actually becoming “crazy” and so entering this “mental
health” system. To behave contrary to the rigidly prescribed patterns that keep the

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 160 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

social machinery running is to risk being called “nuts” or being institutionalized

for “losing control” of oneself. The effect is to keep our spontaneity in check and
our problems all “inside.” It is shameful31 to be “weird” or different from the
norm. There is an unwritten law, furthermore, which says that strong emotions,
particularly distressful ones, should not be expressed; to be emotional is to be
“weak,” “hysterical,” or “out of control.”32 The control of emotion, by contrast, is
associated with people in positions of higher status and power, such as corporation
heads (or psychiatrists). What is diagnosed as madness, moreover, is often more
truthfully an attempt at healing, misperceived because of its high emotionality
and seemingly bizarre nature.33 Drawing on the work of Aihwa Ong, Ray Rogers
has discussed the phenomenon of Malay factory women experiencing hantu spirit
possessions, which results in epidemics of fits and “fugue states,” as they move
from a peasant culture to the culture of industrial factories. As Rogers observes,
“those who operate the factories characterize these fits in terms of hysteria, thereby
pathologizing and individualizing these conditions, and denying them their social
significance.”34 Indeed, it is a tragedy that so many who refuse to “behave,” and
who protest their oppression in a passionate way, must live in fear of being called
“nuts” or even being sent off to the hospital.35 Eco-activists face a specific version
of this fear. For as Noble notes, the ideology of technological progress is used
to “define the bounds of sanity, of respectable discourse, of reasonable behav-
iour.”36 He comments, in this respect, that the relative merits of Luddism were not
debated; rather, Luddites were “condemned as dangerous and demented.” Those
who care about spotted owls and grizzly bears, meanwhile, are all still liable to
being called eco-nuts, eco-freaks, wackos, flakes, misanthropes, and other terms
of mental dismissal.
To put it plainly, then, the progress of technology leads not to the fulfillment
of our nature but to a natural rebellion that the ruling powers of our society must
constantly turn to advantage, administer, or outmaneuver. With this argument I
have aimed in this short opening section to introduce a naturalistic line of thought
for unmasking the ideology of salvation through technology. Recalling the points I
made in the previous chapter, I suggest that a naturalistic approach nakedly reveals
the absurdity of believing that human happiness could ever be gained through the
“progressive” immiseration of the rest of the natural world. (What, for example,
becomes of our need to belong to and serve the natural world when our dominant
ideology tells us that the natural world belongs to and is meant to serve us?) As
Albert Borgmann has argued, the nature-dominating technological agenda none-
theless exploits our desire for happiness, promising us exactly what we most want
even as it fails to deliver it. In the next section my task is to bring this criticism that
much further home by bracketing this promise and taking a look at what kind of
lives we actually live under technology, how we actually experience it. My goal is to
thoroughly demonstrate the deep dissatisfaction and experiential impoverishment,
essential to the functioning of capitalism, that betrays the promise of technology as

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 161

a lie.37 This sets the stage for the third section, in which I take up that ever-pressing
question, What is to be done? Borrowing from Borgmann and others, I suggest
that what a naturalistic and experiential approach leads to, broadly speaking, are
practices that work with the life force in deliberately countering the pattern of
technology. I want it to be very clear that such counterpractice does not involve
getting rid of technology, but rather overcoming its current resourcist ontology
and putting it back where it belongs: in the artful service of life. I also want to
reemphasize my belief that it is the practical work of ecopsychology that will form
the most fruitful basis for its theorizing. The most constructive theory will emerge,
in other words, as we change ourselves in practice and as we develop concrete
interventions capable of opening up new insights and avenues of understanding.
To counter modern technology means refusing to live for an abstract future, and so
recovering our lives in the concrete present. To make contact with present reality,
however, is also to confront the painful feelings that are masked or numbed-out
by our technological mode of living. In the final section, which concludes this
book, I therefore address what I feel is an important aspect of this work: learning
to collectively bear, find meaning in, and move through the suffering we inevitably
uncover in the course of counterpractice.

Suffering Under Technology

We are as highly developed in psychopathology as in technology.

—Jules Henry38

Although we can no doubt develop a psychology that identifies our need for
­contact with wildlife, for rites of passage, and so on, the recognition of needs by
psychologists has never been a guarantee that they will be met. For our society is
not structured to care for life, to attend carefully to relationships and honor the
growth or sacred unfolding of things. To be “successful” in today’s society, one
does not serve nature but rather the expansion of capital.39 It is for this reason
that ecopsychology will lack the necessary teeth to have much influence unless
it is accompanied by critical thought or social analysis. Drawing on the concepts
and traditions of my own naturalistic and experiential approach, I am here taking
technology as the theme of my criticism. My basic critical strategy is a familiar
one, namely, to frankly expose the suffering that is veiled by a reigning ideology
and to generate in the reader some antipathy for this situation.40 More exactly, I
am aiming toward a sort of critical theory that takes a nonanthropocentric vision
of happiness as its starting point (sketched out in the previous two chapters) and
rejects the ideology of technological progress (something that Marx, for one, did
not do). The initial challenge, however, is to find a pattern in our experience of
technology that can then be countered in practice.

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 162 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

As a way to enter into this challenge, I begin with Fredric Jameson’s remark
that we are:

at the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger’s ‘field path’ is after
all irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the green revolution,
by neocolonialism and the megapopolis [sic], which runs its superhighways over
the older fields and vacant lots, and turns Heidegger’s ‘house of being’ into condo-
miniums, if not the most miserable unheated, rat infested tenement buildings. The
other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature at all.41

Jameson struggles to name what is now the “other” of our society, but claims
that it may vaguely be conceived as the global network of power and control
that comprises the world economic and social system of late capitalism—as it is
embodied in technology. In his words, “technology may well serve as an adequate
shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power
of dead human labour stored up in our machinery, . . . which turns back on and
against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian
horizon of our collective as well as individual praxis.” The problem presented here
by Jameson is that we are underdistanced from the forces of technology and capital,
and so that we lack free ground on which to get our critical footings.42 Drawing
on the work of Heidegger, Borgmann, and others, however, I suggest below that
there is a specific pattern within the dynamics of technology, the discernment of
which does help provide some of the necessary distance to win a degree of libera-
tion from it. What I stress, then, is the vast difference between, on the one hand,
a life patterned to the needs of human and nonhuman nature, to the rhythms of
the life cycle, the land, the passage of the seasons, and, on the other hand, a life
patterned to the needs of a technological society, to the rhythms of the market and
machine. Because technology patterns or structures our lives it is no mere neutral
set of instruments, as some like to claim. Rather, it determines—to the extent that
we agree to live it—the sense, form, and telos of our existence. To recognize a pat-
tern in technology is therefore to start making sense of it, seeing through it, and
being more aware of the great disjunction between the promise of technological
progress and the reality of our lived experience.

The Pattern of Technology. The former premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, said
that “Quebec is a vast hydroelectric plant in the bud, and every day millions of
potential kilowatt-hours flow downhill and out to sea. What a waste.”43 Heidegger
claimed that the essence of our late modern epoch lies exactly in this technological
mode of understanding. “Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy
source for modern technology and industry.”44 Or: “the earth now reveals itself
as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.”45 In other words, nature
has for us become what Heidegger called a “standing reserve,” in which all beings

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 163

are leveled down to just so much extractable, transformable, exchangeable, trans-

portable, raw material. Notice how in the following passage, in which Bill McK-
ibben quotes a biotechnology spokesperson, animals are not so much objectified
as “resource-ified.”

Brian Stableford . . . promises that the “battery chickens” of the future, “whether
they are being used to produce eggs or meat,” will look very different from the
birds of the moment. In fact the accompanying illustrations shows them looking
like—well, hunks of flesh. This is because thanks to biotechnology, we might design
chickens without the unnecessary heads, wings, and tails.46

“Before civilization,” says Shepard, and certainly before biotechnology, “animals

were seen as belonging to their own nation and to be the bearers of messages and
gifts of meat from a sacred domain.”47 An initial point toward naming the pat-
tern of technology, then, is that it involves more than just the addition of tools to
our kit, but a profound alteration in how we perceive the natural world. Whereas
a natural scientific mode of relating to nature reveals entities as brute objects, a
technological mode degrades the being of things even further by revealing them as
mere fodder for the megamachine. As Carol Bigwood notes, moreover, this shift
in understanding constitutes a historical reversal, for (recalling the early Greek
terms) techne “is no longer phusical but phusis in our modern age is technical.”48
The reversal of which Bigwood speaks is that from “technology” understood
as the human art of belonging to, participating in, or serving nature to nature
understood as the servant of technology, as that which is dominated, controlled,
formed, and put into order by humans. As Bacon put it, nature is “forced out of
her natural state and squeezed and molded.”49 Biotechnologists, for example, aim
to take over the original birthing powers of nature, to turn the genesis of life into a
kind of purely human technology. The attempt, in general, to replace the creative
powers of nature by those of a technology serving only human ends is increasingly
converting the bio-sphere into a techno-sphere. As a mode of revealing, then,
technology does not allow beings to spontaneously show themselves in accord
with their own internal demands, their own rhythms of emerging and passing
away, but rather forces or “challenges” them into being in a way utterly contrary
to their essential natures. “The earth itself can show itself only as the object of
assault. . . . Nature appears everywhere as the object of technology.”50 Technology,
that is, is no longer a calling forth, a vocation, but a provocation of the earth.51 As
an exercise of ruthless power, however, this project is doomed. For as Heidegger
remarked, in driving the earth “beyond the natural sphere of its possibility,”52 by
exceeding its limits, technology “devastates” or “exhausts” the earth. When it vio-
lently insists that the earth make itself wholly available and extractable, the tech-
nological mode does not let the earth rest or withdraw back into itself, but robs it
of its nourishing mystery, burns it out. Precisely these words may also be used in

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 164 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

reference to human beings, who within a technological frame are understood as

“human resources,” or as “mere disposable factors of production and accumula-
tion,”53 the result of which is the devastation and exhaustion of our humanity.
Having introduced the idea that technology currently signifies our whole
manner of relating to and unconcealing reality, we may now consider what Albert
Borgmann means by “the pattern of technology.” In formulating this pattern,
Borgmann added to Heidegger’s views the notion that resources are themselves
refined into or disclosed as technological devices. A device, in turn, divides inter-
nally between a machinery aspect and a commodity aspect,54 the latter of which is
produced by the machinery. Borgmann uses the notion of a device very broadly.
He claims, for example, that under this device paradigm an “animal is seen as a
machine that produces so much meat. Whichever of its functions fails to serve
that purpose is indifferent or bothersome.”55 (Notice how this sheds light on the
passage above about headless chickens.) Similarly, at “pop concerts, reality is torn
apart into a gigantic, intricate staging machinery and an alluring, hypercharged
commodity.”56 What strikes me as most significant about this division of reality is
that it acts to progressively eliminate or impoverish our world-relations. We may
illustrate this point by observing the disappearance of world-relations which fol-
lows on the introduction of a new device—a central heating system, for example.57
Consider that prior to central heating many households relied on a wood-
burning stove, and that this stove was (and for some, still is) the focus for a world
of bodily and social engagements. Trees in the forest had to be felled; and logs
sawed, split, and stacked. This all had to be done, moreover, with an eye to the
weather and the turning of the seasons. The lighting of the stove would mark the
morning and fill the air with the smell of wood smoke. In the evenings, finally,
people might gather around the stove to stay warm, tell stories, or play music. The
point of this example (which I have obviously presented in a much-abbreviated
fashion) is not to romanticize country living. It is simply to notice how our world-
relations are altered by devices. The device in this case is a central heating system,
which is a machinery for providing the single commodity of heat. In short, the
furnace, gas lines, and fuel industry take over the web of living relations that for-
merly made up the wood-stove’s world, leaving the householder only to adjust the
thermostat and pay the bills.
Speaking more generally, what I want to suggest is that in the course of
replacing our world-relations by machinery, whole regions of existence just drop
out or find no symbolic satisfaction. As Borgmann notes, rather than “the full-
bodied exercise of skill, gained through discipline and renewed through intimate
commerce with the world . . . our contact with reality has been attenuated to the
pushing of buttons and the turning of handles.”58 Part of the pattern of tech-
nology is for the machinery to become increasingly concealed, the perfect device
being something like a panel of knobs and a screen, with an elaborate machinery
hidden behind it. While, as I argued in the previous chapter, the natural unfolding

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 165

of a human life involves making more and more of the world familiar and mean-
ingful, the machinery of devices is designed precisely to be unfamiliar. To the
extent that it is hidden, this machinery is simply not experienced, and to the extent
that it takes over our living relationships, it therefore makes the satisfaction of our
cosmological urge an impossibility. The pattern of replacing vital relations with
machinery, that is, frustrates our world-making needs and so desiccates our reality.
What remains of our lives, according to Borgmann, are the two principle
activities that correspond to a reality now split between machinery and commodi-
ties: labor and leisure. Labor—a degraded form of “work”—consists of the con-
struction, maintenance, and operation of the machinery, while leisure consists of
the consumption or uptake of the commodities produced by it, wherein the real
happiness is meant to be had. The pattern of technology, then, refers to the progres-
sive replacement and/or substitution of our world-relations by, in labor, slim rela-
tions with an ever-more hidden and unfamiliar machinery and, in leisure, shallow
relations with ever-more pervasive commodities—the overall effect of which is to
dissolve the meaningful fabric of our lives. As notes Borgmann, “our once profound
and manifold engagement with the world is reduced to narrow points of contact
in labor and consumption.”59 I do not suggest that this pattern is the only way to
understand our society, as there are many aspects of our social arrangements that it
does not especially bring out.60 What is fruitful about it, however, is that it helps
tie together both technological and economic themes.61 Our increasingly thin and
meaningless laboring at the machinery and equally thin and meaningless consump-
tion of commodities do not make us happy, for they do not offer us the kind of deep
and wide contact with others that our bodies inherently demand. They are, however,
the essential activities of a capitalist society, for they do create profits.

Necessary Suffering. Considered as a social system hostile to life capitalism is not

simply disinterested in meeting our transhistorical needs. Rather, it has a real
interest in actually fostering suffering, that is, an active opposition to genuine
happiness is intrinsic to it. Kovel’s words are to the point: “Were people either
happy or clear about what they wanted, then capital’s ceaseless expansion would
be endangered.”62 Using the pattern of technology as my scheme, it is to this neces-
sitating of dissatisfaction that I wish to turn next.
Part of the promise of technology is that it will alleviate our suffering by
relieving us from toil. It would be ungrateful, to be sure, not to admit that cer-
tain instruments bring great benefits. Nonetheless, many of our burdens—the
­Baconian “inconveniences of man’s estate”—are the inescapable demands placed
on us by our own nature and by the natural others who address us. To be relieved of
these burdens is, then, to be relieved of life itself. As Medard Boss writes, when we
are disburdened “what is left is not just something negative, a nonburden, but the
end of a life-giving engagement. . . . If a human being is deprived of such engage-
ment, totally unburdened, he is robbed of the possibility of continuing to [exist]

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 166 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

as a human being.”63 I believe this point goes very far, extending into many areas
of social and cultural life that I will not pursue here (including the deskilling,64
alienating, and unemploying of the labor-force, and the general overburdening of
women with emotional duties that compensate for the dehumanizing effects of
capitalist relations). What I want to suggest is that within an economized reality
we are relieved of life exactly so that weakened or less satisfying versions of it can
then be sold back to us for profit.65 Take, for instance, the supermarket. It is a
general human need to be skillfully engaged in the gathering/hunting, preparing,
and presenting of food.66 When this need is well-met, a meal is more likely to be
a “ritual of gathering and remembrance, a communion in which the offering and
the eating of food bonds us together into a community and installs us within the
circle of life and its seasons.”67 A frozen dinner from the supermarket can be eaten
after only six minutes in the microwave oven. Yet the consuming of such a disbur-
dening and inconsequential commodity (perhaps in front of the TV set) hardly
elicits our thanks; nor does it call forth a sense of our sacred membership within
the community of all earthly beings, some of whose bodies we eat.
This returns us to that central feature of capitalist reality: commodity fet-
ishism. The aspect of commodity fetishism that is important to consider here is that
it involves an active mystification of our needing.68 It is as if all our needs were such
that they could be satisfied only by commodities; as if every felt intention pointed
to a bottle of Pepsi or a jet ski. Unsure about our genuine needs, we interpret them
according to what is both available and promoted to us for the meeting of them. As
William Leiss suggests, in order to maintain this state of affairs, the economic order
must [. . .] then guard against our becoming aware of needs lying outside the field
of commodity consumption: “Filtered through layers of commodities, the natural
and human environment is progressively simplified, more smoothly ordered; the
abrasive particles which might disrupt the flow of everyday normal experience—
which might stir modes of feeling not dependent on the acquisition of [goods]—
are trapped and removed.”69 Thus, for example, the tourist machinery serves up
the natural world in commodity form, as scenery viewed through the windows of
a tour bus, accompanied by postcards, travel guides, mass-made mementos, and
so on. With such a thin experience, something like ecological consciousness is
not likely to arise. Likewise, people must be convinced that the meeting of their
nonmaterial needs—as for love, security, privacy, freedom, and so forth—are all
bound to the purchase of commodities.70 Our freedom, for instance, is supposedly
realized when we are in a position to choose among a wide range of commodities.
The Lotto 6/49 television ad asks us to “Imagine the Freedom” and then right away
feeds us images of people recreating with the expensive toys they have bought with
their lottery winnings. Finally, it is not only that our “needs” must be met by com-
modities, but also that they must expand so as to keep up with the expansion in
the production of commodities themselves.71 One way this is done is through the
breaking down of existing needs into ever-more finely disconnected and numerous

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 167

part-needs. Our lives then become an endless series of point to point correspond-
ences between increasingly discrete needs and commodities. Thus do we purchase
a plethora of bathroom products to meet a vast array of grooming needs—all of
which have become components of our need for interpersonal respect, which has
itself become a kind of “scarce resource that can only be appropriated through a
fortunate selection and combination of the newest items in the marketplace.”72
Judged on the basis of our clothes, possessions, and the way we “sell” ourselves to
one another, even we become just “another commodity offered up for consump-
tion on the open market.”73
Note that a dominant general mode of contact in our society is now con-
sumption. The universal, unburdened consumption of commodities is in fact the
fulfillment of the promise of technology.74 Some portion of the goods and services
we purchase do of course offer real satisfactions.75 The smell of an old cotton
sleeping bag reminds me of just how much joy and contentment I truly have
experienced. I reserve the term consumption, therefore, for the process of using “up
an isolated entity without preparation, resonance, and consequence.”76 It is a style
of interaction which, to greater or lesser extents, has the character of an addiction,
wherein any stirring of felt need or bodily tension leads straight away to the intake
or enactment of the “drug” to which we are fixated. Consumption, accordingly,
is a mode of experience that amounts mostly to tension relief, and not to any
restructuring of the ground of our existence or carrying forward of our lives. It
follows the same basic pattern of fleeting satisfaction over and over again. When
we consume we do not unfold or expand our lives or deepen our understanding of
the cosmos. To the extent that a commodity is disposable, moreover, we may well
wonder about the depth of contact, or life-transforming meaning, it could ever
offer to us. Knowing all this, it is all the more appalling to recall the words of the
retailing analyst Victor Leblow, spoken following the Second World War:

Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our

way of life, that we convert the buying and using of goods into rituals, that we seek
our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . . . We need things
consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.77

Here is a naked admission that the ethical duty to consume was dictated not by
any primary interest in happiness, in the demands of nature, but by the need to
maintain the capitalist way of being at a certain phase in its historical develop-
ment. Indeed, the truth of the matter is closer still to the lines suggested by Kovel.

Monopoly capital, perpetually assaulted by the contradictions stemming from over-

production, wants nothing more than a society of [people] not so dysfunctional that
they cannot work or too sick to consume steadily, yet never satisfied either. The sugar
with which capitalist industry loads its products is, to be sure, an obvious ruse to

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 168 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

induce a chronic state of unsatisfaction. However, it would never matter in slightest

unless it were offered to a sensibility that is bound to remain unsatisfied, one that
will move on to new objects, to more commodities under the guise of food.78

In other words: “Capitalism works by not working.”79

For more insight into this capitalist business of success by failure, we need
only look to basic economic theory, where it is rationalized. More specifically,
what we find in the first chapter of those introductory economics text books are
ideas about nature. Human nature, first of all, is characterized by unlimited want.
It is of our essence, that is, to be in a perpetual state of insatiable, limitlessly
escalating, commodity-seeking desire. If this be our nature, goes the argument,
then the social and economic system most “naturally” suited to it is capitalism.
By a peculiar twist of logic, when we technologically ravage nature in an attempt
to meet our limitless wants we are in fact being faithful to our own nature.80 I
have earlier stressed the importance of debating our symbolizations of nature,
on the view that there are always better or worse interpretations. Here, we see
that economists legitimate a violent economic order by relying on a bogus and
unexamined theory of human nature. As Leiss notes, human nature is identi-
fied with “a state of radical, irreducible ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ or ‘deficiency.’ ”81 What is
evident to me is that these are precisely the terms that describe the state of shame.
Neoclassical economic theories build into their view of human nature a sense of
ever-increasing need, and so of ever-increasing lack.82 The reason they must do so
is straightforward enough: capitalists profit by selling commodities; to sell com-
modities we must “need” them; hence, the system of capital is motivated to keep
us “needy”—empty, hollow, and ashamed. In other words, by organizing society
such that we can find little real nutrition for our deepest organismic hungers, our
economic system creates the insatiability that economists then interpret as the
essential human condition. Imagine, instead, if the first page of all economics text
books were revised to say that human nature consists of praising and giving thanks
for creation, of singing and dancing the cosmos, and of finding spiritual fulfill-
ment through collectively caring for life and dwelling within our earthly limits. All
the pages that followed would then have to drastically change. As is, by defining
economics as “the study of the use of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human
wants,” these texts set nature up as merely that from which scant resources must
be wrested in order to supply the “upward spiral of production and consumption”
on which rides an insatiable humanity.
Another way of criticizing our economic theories is to say that they enshrine
and contribute to the inflation of Ego, the nature-dominating form of self, and
so normalize a state of spiritual emptiness. This reveals capital as a sort of anti-
spiritual force or as “a kind of flowering of Egoic being.”83 What results, however,
is not the extinction of our spiritual needs, but the emergence of certain obses-
sions within our secular society that amount to painful attempts to satisfy the

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 169

relentless spiritual impulse. Rather than witness this impulse, the corporate world
invests in the delusions and cravings born of its frustration. In order to better get
at this point, I wish to briefly look at four spiritually based delusional tendencies
within our society, as identified by David Loy. The spiritual task, as considered
here, is to find a way to resolve the anxiety of separation, wherein we feel the
cosmic gap as a dread of annihilation and as a feeling that there is something
wrong with us, that we are not real, that we are not enough, that we are lacking.
One delusory route toward “being somebody,” or overcoming our spiritual lack,
is the quest for fame. When reality becomes equated with the glamorous world
of celebrity, sold to us through every pore of the mass media, “to be unknown is
literally to be nothing.”84 We fantasize, therefore, that fame will bring us the ado-
ration and recognition we need to overcome our shame and unreality (remember
the song: Fame!). A second delusory attempt at resolution is romantic love. In this
case, we see our love partners only in the light of how they might fill in our own
lack, might complete us, save us, make us whole, take us off to paradise.85 Such
fantasies make for hefty sales of pulp romance novels, soap operas, and pop music,
but certainly not for the attainment of spirit. The third trend identified by Loy is
what he calls the money complex. Here, we desire money as a means to happiness,
and then make the acquisition of money a religious end in itself, even while doing
so may make us miserable. Finally, the very idea of technological progress also bears
a strong spiritual undercurrent, as I discussed in the opening section. The techno-
logical enterprise, says Loy, is “our effort to create the ultimate security, by trans-
forming the entire world into our own ground.”86 In this event, the whole earth
will testify to our reality. The idea of progress is the projection of a “lack-free time
somewhere in the future” when the technological task has finally been completed,
when we are saved. As Diamond has suggested, the idea of progress simply does
not arise within “primitive” culture, for it was born precisely of the disequilibrium
within the civilized world. For primal peoples progress “is a reality of personal
growth, of progress through society, not of society.”87 Only a chronically nonsat-
isfied people are driven to fantasize about future fulfillment. And only a death-
denying people are obsessed with using their technology for building immortality
projects such as banking towers. The idea of progress is thus founded less on the
aim of going to somewhere than on fleeing from “our own lack-shadow.” As an
effort to take over the world, in fact, technology “is a meaning-system without any
ultimate meaning, because lacking any vision of cloture [sic] between humankind
and cosmos.”88 It is poor food, in other words, for our cosmological hungers.

The Anticulture. Within a naturalistic framework, culture is viewed as a culti-

vating. From this perspective, our own technological culture is—in the main—an
anticulture.89 That is, it does not provide good symbolic forms (practices, beliefs,
stories, etc.) for meeting the expectations of our own unfolding nature nor for
keeping the balance with the more-that-human world. I hesitate to say much

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 170 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

more on this point, feeling that I have already made it in a number of places.
Given the centrality of the nature-culture interaction to my arguments, however,
I wish to add a few more brief thoughts.
First of all, much of our shared symbolic life consists of the outpourings of
what Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry.” Mass cul-
ture—what we would today call the whole sphere of entertainment, news, adver-
tising, tourism, electronic reality, and “information” in general—was in their view
a mechanically produced stream of commodious amusements, unabashedly calcu-
lated to be consumed rather than to offer any sort of “meaningful explanation of
life.”90 Kovel has also taken up this criticism, drawing particular attention to the
ideological function of mass culture: “It would be a grave mistake to think that the
aim of the culture industry is to produce objects of real utility, enlightenment, or
gratification. Rather, its concrete goals are to mystify, to titillate, and to frustrate;
to take from people the organs of their own cultural resistance and to keep them
hungry, restless, and confused, frantic in search of leisure, greedy for new com-
modities, and incapable of understanding much less changing their world.”91 I
am not inclined to make my criticisms as strongly as does Kovel, having had some
fine experiences in movie theaters and other such venues. I assume, furthermore,
that the reader is well aware that a great deal of what is produced by the culture
industry is rubbish. It is, though, the very obviousness of the superficiality of the
bulk of mass culture that concerns me. As Horkheimer and Adorno note: “The
triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to
buy and use its products even though they see through them.”92
Daniel Boorstin calls advertising the characteristic rhetoric of technology.93
Odd as it may seem, advertising is thus the definitive voice of our epoch, for in it
“the promise of technology is presented both purely and concretely and hence most
attractively.”94 Thus, advertisements that say “Drink Lots of Pepsi—Get Lots of
Stuff ” now tell us what we stand for. As with the consumption ethic, the advertising
industry arose at a historical time when a surplus of commodities threatened to slow
down the forward march of capital. Advertising, then, is a rhetoric of consumption
which relies for its persuasive power on our dissatisfied and insecure condition,
taking advantage of our unskillful desires. As Jean Liedloff observes: “Advertising
has learned to capitalize on the longings of the [love] deprived public by holding
out promises which seem to say, ‘If you had this you would feel right again.’ ”95
As a dominant form of symbolization, then, advertising is not much interested in
our healing and growth—as is an authentic culture—but in selling us the goods
any way it can. Again, many people seem to know all this. Yet we are not generally
inclined to ask what an authentically life-serving culture might look like, nor to
question the economizing of our reality. Consider, for instance, a television adver-
tisement for a sport utility vehicle in which an earnest voice-over announces that it
will “save your soul.” Perhaps more than any other I have seen, this ad shows both
how utterly vacuous is the promise of technology and how deep is our yearning.

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 171

My discussion on anticulture would be incomplete without considering the

device of television. For as Borgmann suggests, “television remains the purest,
i.e., the clearest and most attenuated, presentation of the promise of technology.”
It appears to maximally unburden us, freeing “us from the fetters of time, space,
and ignorance,” while also involving us in the nonstop celebration of commodity
consumption that is television advertising.96 The internet or virtual reality may
soon replace television as the reigning symbol of technology’s completion, yet
it is my impression that TV still dominates the experience within most modern
households.97 What I wish to explore, in any event, is the huge role that tel-
evision plays as a replacer of world-relations. Consider a claim from an ad for
a TV station called The Life Network: “You don’t have to live in the wilderness
to experience the wonder of the great outdoors,” because their “visually stun-
ning programs” will bring “nature’s most spectacular sites” to your living room.
Thus can the very network of life now be consumed from the couch. Television’s
hidden machinery makes the whole world, including (it seems) the best bits of
nature, fantastically available, so that we never need to get out of our pajamas. As
the great disburdener, it makes virtually no demands on us, asking us to expend
no more energy than is necessary to stay breathing and flip channels. The catch,
though, is that in bringing us the world, television leaves us without a world of our
own. As the principle of “ever-widening spheres” states, when an existence is real-
ized in broader and broader circles of social belonging, the world’s otherness can
be articulated into a concrete network of meaningful interrelationships. TV, on
the other hand, “articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened
image surface within itself.”98 For the experiences on the screen, even though we
can see them, are not our own.

Normal Deprivation. The “most dangerous tendency in modern society,” says

Wendell Berry, “is the tendency toward the encapsulation of human order.”99 The
danger Berry cautions against is the inclination to create a world consisting purely
of humans and their artifacts. For when nonhuman life gets excluded, and so made
alien, it inevitably gets destroyed—and yet it is just this excluded life that is essen-
tial to our own.100 Ray Rogers describes the history of this encapsulating process
in terms of a progressive “decoupling” of human society from the wider society of
nature. As the west increasingly denied nonhuman beings any social standing, its
connection to the natural world gradually shifted from one of “embedded” social
relations to today’s commodified and alienated relations. Rogers now sees this
disembedding process coming to a kind of absurd completion in Martin Lewis’s
promotion of decoupling as “the most ecological course for human society.” In his
book Green Delusions, Lewis makes the case for a ­“Promethean” environmentalism
that would “accentuate the gulf that sets us apart from the rest of the natural
world,” that is, that would conserve nature by placing it at an extreme distance
from human society.101 Decoupled humans would then conduct their lives in a

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 172 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

“social, economic and technological milieu almost wholly removed from the intri-
cate web of nature.” What he does not adequately consider, though, is whether
we would be happy.102
For all the hyperstimulation it provides, the quality of reality within a tech-
nological society suffers from a definite sameness. As the wild world is increasingly
squeezed to the margins, it is replaced by a monotonous landscape of subdivisions,
shopping malls, and electronic games. “The loss of wild others,” writes Shepard,
“leaves nothing but our own image to explain ourselves by—hence empty psychic
space.”103 In a naturalistic sense, then, our experiential options are actually quite
minimal.104 We have in a sense been deworlded, not by being plucked by a scientist
from out of our living context, but through the destruction of it. Thus we may ask:
What is left of that nonhuman world or relational field our bodies imply or antici-
pate, and which we need in order to make earthly sense of ourselves?105 What is now
available to be symbolically called on in the making of ourselves? What sort of self-
understanding do we form in interaction with the flesh of our own devices? (Recall
the discussion in the previous chapter regarding the predominance of the machine
metaphor.) In short, given that we exist not inside our skulls, but both in and as our
world-relations, does not the denuding and violating of the natural world denude
and violate our own minds? I submit that there is just nowhere in the great chain
of decision making within a technological society where these kinds of questions
get asked, where the deleterious experiential effects of replacing wild others with
machines and commodities is properly considered—precisely because the pattern
of technology itself sets the terms of the discourse. A large number of ecologically
minded people have, however, thought long and worried hard about just these mat-
ters. Naturalist E. O. Wilson, for instance, writes that “on Earth no less than in
space, lawn grass, potted plants, caged parakeets, puppies, and rubber snakes are
not enough.”106 Insect ecologist Robert Michael Pyle likewise uses the phrase “the
extinction of experience” to describe the loss of personal contact with wildlife that
follows on the extirpation of local habitats.107 Reminding us of the principle of “one
flesh,” Shepard writes, finally, that “our children, growing up with an inadequate
otherness from which to rebound the elements of self, are in danger of becoming
less than human.”108 Having largely destroyed a beautiful and mysterious world, we
are less able to know our own corresponding beauty and mystery, all reality decaying
to the mundane level of a video arcade. In the spirit of these witnesses, I suggest
that most people in a technological society suffer from a form of “violent lack”109 or
experiential starvation; and that it is for ecopsychologists to highlight this condition.
My naturalistic argument, as always, is that our transhistorical environ-
mental needs cannot be bypassed without generating trouble. Historian William
Irwin Thompson argues, by contrast, that “those who were good at living with
trees are on the way out, and those who are good at living with video display
terminals and silicon tubes will be selected for. So cultures are actually selecting
for a new post-natural environment.”110 In this view, there is no problem here,

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 173

for nature is nothing but “the horizon of culture.” Again, I believe this is a bad
i­nterpretation of nature. As our world is technologized and denuded of wild
others, we do not “evolve”; rather, we suffer and then creatively adjust. As Shepard
argues, our transhistorical urges are met in “perverted forms in modern society:
our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertain-
ment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine
instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or
otherworldly religion instead of ecosophical cosmology.”111 We settle for partial,
secondary, or substitutive gratifications—we do the best we can, even when our
best still has much pain and destructiveness in it. I believe that studying many
of our contemporary behaviors as creative adjustments to an antinatural world
would go a long way, therefore, toward discerning the transhistorical needs that
are being thwarted by our society. John Livingston comments, for example, that
the intensity of the house plant business expresses “a deep and primal need” for
contact with other forms of life. “The geranium on the tenement windowsill is
both an offering to the mysterious tidal pull of some distant biological memory,
and a heartbreaking cry for help.”112 Indeed, the promise of studying such creative
adjustments is that we might better hear this cry.
Some argue, nonetheless, that we are not experientially deprived at all. They
say, for example, that the “computerized sensory immersion”113 of virtual reality
can in fact be richer, more thrilling, than the unsimulated reality of the natural
world. Video games are widely available virtual realities of today, while something
like Star Trek’s holo-deck is the promise for tomorrow. Other kinds of artificial
realities also offer experiences otherwise unavailable. At the West Edmonton Mall,
for example, we can (on any day of the year) rent a rubber tube and take a ride
on simulated rapids; towel off; and then go for a walk down an artificial version
of Bourbon Street, New Orleans.114 If our “wildest,” most fantastic dreams can be
virtually or artificially realized, if we can “improve” on reality, then why not do it?
So go the arguments. Borgmann makes an important point when he observes that
such arguments rely on dualistic biases. Hence, “‘experience’ no longer denotes a
decisive encounter with reality but a certain subjective state engendered by what-
ever objective reality.”115 What we experience is an inner event, the result of so
much sensory stimulation acting on our brains. The reality of the “outer” world,
in other words, is a matter of some indifference.116 Against this view, I posit the
alternative one that “the real is progressively given in contact.”117 Reality organismi-
cally unfolds and is built up through our interactions with the world’s otherness.
I said earlier that whatever we experience has some manner of reality. The term
reality is used here, then, in a relative sense—as a designator of the strength or
weakness of our contact with the world. To be more “in touch” with reality is to
make better contact with, or to be dis-illusioned about, the situations in which we
find ourselves. What is most “real,” in this view, are the felt meanings we gather, or
gestalts we form, in active, embodied, and concrete dialogue with the larger world

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 174 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

of which we are a part.118 The strongest, most satisfying reality, in short, is gener-
ally found-and-made in ever-widening spheres of meaning and participation,119
and not simply in consumptive relations with a commodious, artificial, smoothed-
over reality. To the virtual reality company whose motto reads “Reality isn’t enough
anymore,”120 I therefore respond that there isn’t enough Reality anymore.

Contesting the Pattern: Counterpractice

One can only insert oneself into [the social world] by taking one’s place in the
future-oriented productive juggernaut. But this now seems without any sense;
the relation to the earth as raw material is therefore experienced as empty
and alienating, but the recovery of a valid relation to the earth is the hardest
thing once lost; and there is no relation to the absolute where we are caught
in the web of meanings which have gone dead for us.
—Charles Taylor121

Given that modern technology pervasively, consistently, and perniciously patterns

our lives, it must, says Borgmann, “be countered by an equally patterned and
social commitment, i.e., by a practice.”122 Being in essential agreement with this
view, I wish to use this section to present my own thoughts on what kinds of prac-
tice make sense from within an experiential and naturalistic framework, wherein
the life process is regarded as an ultimate concern. The aim of counterpractice
is to engage the word in a manner that lies outside the pattern of technology,
thereby winning both a freer relation to technology and a more satisfying or con-
tactful relation to reality. Counterpractice means clearing a non-technologized
space for recovering and engaging in what are essentially human-natural activities;
for meeting our transhistorical needs while at the same time dealing with our his-
torical problem (or the problem of history). It means working with the life force,
with the energy that is still in us, to take those small steps that feel right, given our
specific interests and starting points. Master political programs, issued by central,
theory-producing individuals, are against the spirit of an experiential approach.
This is not to say that theories are unimportant, as they do play the crucial role of
helping us to interpret modern life and consider our possibilities. An experiential
approach, however, gives equal weight to taking guidance from our own particular
experience of the concrete situations in which we are actually living our lives.
What experiential practice highlights, in short, is the finding of just those specific
actions that will both satisfy our living and contradict the repressive aspects of the
existing social order. (To repeat, countering technology does not mean somehow
eliminating it, but rather contesting its current pattern and reclaiming it as an
artful serving of all life. While it is not my intention to lay out a specific program
for building straw-bale houses and windmills, I do want this point to be clear.123)

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 175

We need to remind ourselves that there is nothing inevitable about tech-

nological progress. Its “naturalness”—like that of the capitalist market place—is
a kind of second nature, and, like any other pattern that we unconsciously and
rigidly enact, its “laws” can always be disobeyed through aware and free action. As
Noble comments, technological progress is not natural but political, it is “some-
thing people plan for and struggle over,” something that reflects “social choices
made by those who have the power to choose”124 The exercise, then, is to ask what
we might do with whatever is left of our own agency and power so as to deny
to “technical devices . . . the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and
lay waste our nature.”125 My own hope lies, in fact, with the possibility of large
numbers of people developing a better gut-felt understanding of our technological
existence and learning to deliberately refuse the ideology of progress—in ways
ranging from the most intimate and personal to the most public and broad-based.
There is no point in being naive about the forces geared against such a possibility,
but no point in ignoring this possibility either.
Countering technology also means countering its future-orientation by
attempting to embody what ultimately concerns us in this very present moment;
it means refusing to turn our lives into a mere means to some end that never
arrives. The charge is made, though, that any such antitechnological effort simply
amounts to a foolish escape into the past. What this mistakenly assumes is that
counterpractice entails winding the clock backward, tracing a direct line in reverse;
when what it really involves is breaking or contradicting rigid patterns so as to lib-
erate the life force and find creative ways to respond to the present. “We can’t go
back” is a resigned belief which leans on the ideology of linear progress in order to
avoid looking at current possibilities.126 The answer to “we can’t go back” is that
our bodies, being wild, have never stopped making their transhistorical demands,
and that the natural world is still asking to be faithfully sung, still making its own
demands. Going back really means going in—into the body, into the flesh of the
world, and into a kind of mind-set where we are awake to the solicitations and
commentaries being made by a more-than-human world. It will do us no good to
say that this moment has passed us by.
Part of the problem for us ecological thinkers and activists, says John
Rodman, is that “we lack a suitable myth that comprehends and integrates our
feelings and perceptions, articulates our intuitions, allows our actions ritual
status, and makes us intelligible to ourselves in terms of an alignment with a
larger order of things.”127 What, then, might counterpractice contribute to this
situation—where our ruling symbols lack meaning and our “ecological” feelings
lack symbols? Joseph Campbell writes that the “most vital, most critical func-
tion of a mythology is to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in
integrity, in accord with himself (the microcosm), his culture (the mesocosm),
the universe (the macrocosm), and that awesome ultimate mystery which is both
beyond and within himself and all things.”128 In this chapter, I have identified

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 176 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

one of our society’s dominant mythologies with economic/technological progress.

For “progress” is a narrative that tells us—even if few people probably “buy” it in
these its baldest economic terms—who we are (commodious individuals); what
our ethical duties are (production and consumption); what our relationship to the
cosmos is (technological); and what life is all about (progress). The social good
is served, says the myth, when the Gross Domestic Product goes up, and this is
accomplished when individuals maximize the satisfaction of their limitless wants.
Hence, self-interest constitutes our main social bond. As Loy remarks, however, all
of this makes for a defective myth.129 While it certainly does serve the mythological
function of providing a story to direct our energies, and even while many do see
it as a noble venture to serve future generations, “progress” ultimately provides
no spiritual satisfaction, no cultural framework to integrate the individual into
the cosmos, but only an increasing sense of lack and conflict. Pointing us in a
better direction, the poet Robert Bringhurst writes that “Real myths are rich and
nourishing. One of the things that makes them nourishing is that they are stories
about others, about forces greater than ourselves.”130 Satisfying myths, that is, sing
a more-than-human world. None of us knows exactly what kind of cultural story
might ultimately replace the myth of progress. Inasmuch as counterpractices aim
to expand the field of our existence or realm of our care, however, I suggest they
are a way to actively foster the imaginative narrating or dreaming of a world that
includes June bugs and ring-billed gulls, and so to welcome the eventual coming
of a “real myth.”131 They are also a way to do the healing work—essential in my
view—for recovering the ability to create and enact such myths, that is, to sym-
bolize from, and live on the basis of, our own experience.
What makes this project so difficult is precisely that it is up against the tech-
nological war on (human) nature. Our civilized society has lost the bearings once
provided by the larger natural world, our bodies, and earth-based mythologies.
Creative adjustments to this situation come in the form of otherworldly, mate-
rialist, hedonistic, adventure-seeking, narcissistic, absurdist, literalist, scientistic,
dystopian, apocalyptic, survivalist, technosalvationist, nihilistic, just-getting-by,
economistic, reform environmentalist, and other life philosophies. Among all
these, a genuine reconciliation with nature is strangely invisible. Recreation in
nature is acceptable, but balanced and respectful coexistence with other-than-
human beings—the general prescription of radical ecology and ecopsychology—is
simply not admissible as a societal aim. Thompson writes, in a related way, that
“nothing seems to be able to stop industrialization. . . . Like an enormous flood
sweeping through a narrow valley, the torrent seems to pick up everything which
stands in its way to include it in its own behavior. As you see romantic poet,
anarchist, communist, and hippie swept up and floating in the rushing stream,
you can see that the revolt cannot stop the flood but only lend a little color to the
floating debris of history.”132 What I would emphasize about this historical flood
is how it weakens us as individuals as we struggle just to stay afloat.

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 177

Being a psychological thinker, my concern is with what kind of shape we

are in. On this, historian Russell Jacoby writes: “The modern individual is in the
process of disintegration. To forget this is to abet the process not aid the resist-
ance.”133 Witnessing this disintegration all too well, Horkheimer and Adorno
lamented that our times simply lack “a revolutionary subject that might usher in
the reconciliation of humanity with inner and outer nature,”134 so far advanced
is the process of psychic fragmentation. While my own outlook is less grim than
theirs, I do regard the destruction of our experience as a core ecopsychological
issue. As James Masterson observes, the so-called “ ‘personality disorders’ . . . are
not only increasingly prevalent among people seeking professional help today,
but also reflect major psychological themes in American culture at large: fear of
abandonment, emphasis on the self to the exclusion of others, difficulties in inti-
macy and creativity and with the assertion of the real self.”135 One of the main
elements of counterpractice I discuss below, then, concerns the historical need
to strengthen our humanity—to get the water out of our lungs, as it were—so
that we may indeed break the pattern of technology. As I discuss in the final sec-
tion, such strengthening will be necessary if we are ever going to voluntarily face
our suffering rather than continue to flee its message and increase our pain. As I
discuss shortly, furthermore, I believe that simple, unambitious practices can also
play an important role in this process.
In what follows, I first consider the basic function of counterpractice, that
is, to provide a focus for our lives among the dispersing effects of our techno-
logical society. I then look more closely at the kind of political orientation that a
naturalistic and experiential approach invites. Given the fundamental nature of
ecopsychology’s subject matter, its practices will inevitably overlap with those of
other therapeutic and political ventures. Within my own approach, what distin-
guishes ecopsychological practice is explicit care for nature and experience, for the
life process, for the natural moment of our existence—not just for getting us into
the outdoors. I am therefore interested in promoting a wide range of practices,
even if some will be less obviously “ecopsychological” than others. My discussion
is more or less speculative, and necessarily broad, but not without a certain degree
of experience on my part, and not without existing examples to point to. My aim
is limited, then, to offering one formulation of the work that needs to be done, in
the hopes of thereby contributing to it.

Focal Practice: Disciplined Engagement136 What first of all characterizes all coun-
terpractice, as I am using the term, is that it both takes the form of a regular dis-
cipline and helps bring our lives into focus, providing them with a center. These
are its baseline features. Through such practice, we rediscover a world outside
of labor and consumption, where deeper satisfactions or more life-giving mean-
ings may be experienced. There are no prerequisites for such practice other than
that it be life-forwarding for the person involved. My daily meditation practice,

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 178 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

for example, has opened up a universe of understanding and a sense of spiritual

grounding that has nothing at all to do with the consumption ethic. As Gary
Snyder has remarked, “The practice of meditation, for which one needs only ‘the
ground beneath one’s feet,’ wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the
mind by the mass media and supermarket universities.”137 Borgmann envisions a
restructuring of our society not through any “external and violent blow,” but by
way of just such practice—by discovering for ourselves, and building an allegiance
to, the good life that the forces of technology have progressively replaced with
machinery and commodities.138 If this sounds like an old pitch (meditation, vol-
untary simplicity, etc. have been around for a long time) I think that’s because it is.
What Borgmann adds to the cause is his elucidation of the pattern of technology,
which he hopes will provide motivational fuel for focal-practices, including ones
that are explicitly political. What I would add even further (as I discuss below),
is that these practices become more possible when they include a commitment to
the healing of practitioners, so that the latter are more capable of counterpractice
in general.
In the sense used here, a discipline does not involve blind obedience to a
coercive force. It is rather a freely chosen commitment to a form of regular prac-
tice that is of felt benefit, even if it may involve some difficulty. If technology is
know by a pattern of disengagement, counterpractice is known by a pattern of
deliberate contact-making. It is thus in the choices we make between either disen-
gaging from or engaging with reality that we confirm or protest the rule of tech-
nology. One way of understanding a focal practice is to say that in it we become a
participant rather than a spectator. So much of our experience today is of a vicar-
ious sort—we watch movies in which other people exercise their dramatic skills,
listen to music played by musicians who are not us, read books by authors who
tell us of their spiritual quests, and so on. Focal practices, therefore, would include
joining a theater group, meeting weekly with friends to play music, or taking up
a concrete spiritual practice. These would counter the pattern of technology to
the extent that they call for acquisition of skill, fidelity to a discipline, the broad-
ening of sensibility, the making of good, bodily felt contact with others, and the
preservation and development of life-giving tradition.139 There are, however, any
number of things that people might do as counterpractices. Shepard writes, for
instance, that what “we can do is single out those many things, large and small,
that characterized the social and cultural life of our ancestors . . . and incorporate
them as best we can by creating a modern life around them. . . . given the pieces,
the culture will reshape itself.”140 He lists a large number of such pieces, ranging
from “participant politics” to “regular dialogue on dream experience,” all of which
are possible areas for the practical recollection of our nature. Inasmuch as any
practice provides satisfaction for arrested world-relations, then, I think it fitting
that ecopsychology get behind it. For as people start to enjoy real food, the TV sets
and chocolate bars (in my experience) just spontaneously fall away.

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 179

An essential general practice for ecopsychology is to bring into focus the

nonhuman life—of which there is often a surprising amount—that still remains
within the interstices of our technological society. Richard Nelson, who has made
this his own practice, remarks in an interview:

Anyone can have [a] sense of moral and spiritual engagement with a place. One of
the deep sources of that is to choose a place and focus on it in some way or another.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your backyard in the city, or Central Park, or a farm field. It’s
to find a place in which you can feel deeply engaged, and then go back to it over a
long period of time. . . . I think there’s something very very important about that
engagement.141

Ten minutes by bike from my house142 there is a piece of land known as the Leslie
Street Spit. Built of construction rubble, it was originally intended to form an outer
harbor for the city of Toronto. While the planners were trying to decide what to
do with the landform, plants started to take root in the soil dumped on it from the
construction of a subway line. Now it is a park, rich with flowers, coyotes, musk-
rats, terns, cottonwoods, and other plants and animals, surrounded by a powerful
body of water than meets a beautiful sky. It is also the destination for regular visits
by my friends and me. I mention this place because, with rebar and slag jutting out
all over the place, it is no pristine wilderness. Yet with every visit, it offers its gifts.
On a recent trip, my wife and I looked up from studying a flower to find ourselves
in the middle of a flock of ring-billed gulls feasting on June bugs that filled the air
close to the ground. We felt right inside a feeding event, as if standing upside down
on the surface of a lake watching a school of fish eat minnows. It was an exciting,
funny, graceful, awful experience, whose meanings are still reverberating within
me. And it is just the kind of nontechnologized encounter that is easily available to
anyone who would make of such trips a counterpractice.
Counterpractice also entails a commitment to understanding others not as
mere objects, resources, and consumers, but as ensouled persons with something
to say. This, to be sure, is not the easiest of practices in a deanimated world. The
great long-term significance of making such an ontological shift, however (one
which I again feel will require much healing along the way), is that people “do
not exploit a nature that speaks to them.”143 Abram suggests, in this respect, that
we assume there is “some manner of spontaneity and sentience,” some mode of
aliveness, in all we encounter. He then recommends the practice of not speaking
disrespectfully to or about anything.144 Ursula LeGuin also writes: “Perhaps it is
only when the otherness, the difference, the space between us (in which both cru-
elty and love occur) is perceived as holy ground, as the sacred place, that we can
‘come into animal presence.’ ”145 Practices that are dedicated to place are so impor-
tant because they involve this kind of sacrilizing process, wherein through skillful
dialogue with a specific locale it is allowed to disclose itself in its deeper meanings.

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 180 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

Bioregionalism, ecological restoration, urban habitat renewal, and other such

practices all involve this kind of intimacy, where the aim is to create social forms,
develop technologies, and undertake projects that let the local ecologies be. Living
in responsible and reciprocal relation to the land has always called for what the
Anishinabe activist Winona LaDuke calls “intergenerational residency in place”—
as there is just no substitute for local knowledge gained through firsthand expe-
rience and passed down through the generations. Indeed, the final overcoming
of dualism will be a mending not only of the split between mind and body, but
between mind and place. (Enforced dislocations of indigenous and other peoples
are so cruel precisely because the enforcers assume the existence of a mind/place
cleavage, whereas the people being dislocated often do not.146)

Coming Back to Life147 The ecology movement works to defend and restore life
on earth. The promise of ecopsychology is to assert that humans themselves par-
ticipate in this life, and to encourage the work that brings us back to it. My own
strategy is to criticize our society on the basis of its antagonism to the life process,
and then to argue for a kind of politics that explicitly makes what Dorothy Din-
nerstein has called “a deep turn toward life.”148 Whatever actions I am involved
in, I want them to be healing and satisfying, for those are the kind that the life
process calls for, that are meaningful; I want to act in ways that are at the same
time a defense and restoration of human life. As I reviewed in chapter one, there
is a growing recognition that when activists try to mobilize people on the basis
of fear, guilt, and shame, they may well be adding to an immobilizing despair,
apathy, and denial. What follows, then, are my own thoughts on what a difference
it makes to our practice when our political acts are grounded in a dedication to, or
appreciation for, our nature and our experience.
I have already suggested that a pivotal issue for ecopsychology is the weak-
ened state of our humanity. As the biosphere crumbles, so do we. The dreadful
possibility is that we are sliding into a state in which most people are too dis-
tressed, are not in any kind of shape, to ever turn their attention to the better-
ment of society. Christopher Lasch refers to the emergence of a “minimal self,” a
self that “contracts to a defensive core,” that retreats from any kind of emotional
commitment to long-term causes, its main task being day-to-day survival. “The
hope that political action will gradually humanize industrial society has given way
to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold
one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.”149 I heard an author
of a book about the unhealthy speediness of our society say that: “If we can’t save
society, at least we can save ourselves.” For the beleaguered self, the need to work
for social change simply does not become figural, for the conditions are not right
for the organism to feel this as its most pressing need. The “permanent emergency
of the individual” — “unable to think beyond itself ” — “blocks the permanent
and social solution.”150

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 181

As a result of the disintegration of the self, politics in our times has largely
been replaced by therapeutics—a development much bemoaned by many radi-
cals. As Jacoby suggests, “the depletion of political concepts in favor of psycho-
logical and subjective ones is a by-product of the scramble for the remains of
human experience.”151 Recall that the workings of capital require that the personal
sphere become inflated, that we become ever-more needy. This is partly why the
field of psychology looms so large in our age, and why social issues tend to get
reduced to psychological ones. Within the circles of humanistic psychotherapy,
for example, it is often assumed that personal transformation will somehow “mag-
ically extend” to the rest of society. As Isaac Prilleltensky notes, in their groups
“humanists nurture each other and foster the belief that a better world is inevitably
coming, without intervening in the real world.”152 Social activism becomes a kind
of group therapy session. As much as anything else, what is perhaps revealed by
the culture of personal growth is simply a “growing despair of changing society,
even understanding it.”153
A first step toward addressing this matter is to recognize that it is not only
a moral issue, but a political issue in itself. What “needs to be criticized and con-
demned,” writes Lasch, “is the devastation of personal life, not the retreat into pri-
vatism. . . . The trouble with the consciousness movement is not that it addresses
trivial or unreal issues but that it provides self-defeating solutions” (because it
does not address itself to the social structures that brutalize personal life in the
first place).154 If people are preoccupied with their own growth or survival, I think
it is only fair to say that this reflects how very little our society is itself occupied
with their growth and survival.155 In my view, the best way to encourage indi-
viduals back toward society is therefore to be all the more attentive or sensitive to
their personal experience. In this, I am agreeing with a large number of thinkers
who argue that social movement toward greater freedom and happiness will occur
only if the “subjective conditions” are suitably prepared.156 To concentrate on pre-
paring these conditions is not the same as flattening out the psyche-society dialect
in the psychologistic manner I just discussed. It is rather to give the personal
sphere its due.157 Roger Gottlieb writes that “the flaws of both communism and
advanced capitalism can be overcome only if ordinary people achieve sufficient
power and self-knowledge to shape social life in terms of the wisdom of their own
experience and the demands of their own true needs.”158 This requires, in turn,
that they develop (1) an understanding of how their lives have been deformed
by their society, and (2) the capacity to act on that understanding, including the
inner ability to make judgments independent of authorities and experts. (These
two tasks clearly act in concert, for we take up a critical theory of society only to
the extent that we are capable of bearing what it is trying to show us; and such
a theory itself arises from or is complemented by our independent judgments
or symbolizations of our own experience.) My discussion of the pattern of tech-
nology was addressed to the first of these tasks. A technological society, like any

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 182 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

other, organizes our experience in a way that is consistent with or that corresponds
to it. As many have noted, competitive, commodity-hungry, individualists are by
their very essence not drawn to radical politics or cooperative action. To work
from and toward a different understanding of ourselves, one that is both truer to
our nature and incompatible with the order of technological society, is therefore a
way to gradually turn ourselves out of this society and to energize ourselves toward
the transformation of it. The challenge, as Paul Goodman expressed it, is “to live
in present society as if it were a natural society.”159 Developing the ability and sup-
port to do so is the topic for the rest of this section.
Among the many efforts that people are making to better our society and
its relationship with the natural world, the role I see for ecopsychology is to create
the contexts that will help people recover their own nature and experience. This
means, furthermore, being respectful of the position from which each person
might begin such a recovery. If the life process be our concern, then I believe all
people are entitled to keep themselves above what I call the healing threshold.160
Below this critical threshold our lives spiral downward, we fall through the cracks
and self-destruct, we lack the support (both inner and outer) to get on top of our
pain and find our bearings. Above this threshold, our lives move forward, we gain
strength, we enjoy the necessary support to learn, grow, and expand the spheres
of our social concern—as we are naturally ordered to do. I am myself dedicated
to creating a society in which all people are generally able to remain above this
healing threshold (such a society being as far as I allow my utopian thinking go).
The Buddhist Ken Jones takes a similar position: “The unequal burdens of [kar-
maic] conditioning are compassionately recognized as well as the sacred individual
freedom to relinquish them. Spiritual egalitarianism therefore honours individual
differences and the importance of each person being able to develop their poten-
tial in their own unique way and at the pace proper to them.”161 My own vision is
that of a society in which each person is supported in unfolding her or his life in
the direction that her or his specific existence implies, whether it be to heal from
childhood trauma, lead a movement to end poverty, or guide adolescents through
their initiation rites. While I have no wish to add to the long list of elaborate
political programs that never make it off the page of the text, I do want to mention
two general areas of practice, already underway, that are indeed designed to help
build a life-oriented society. The first includes the work of all those communities
or forums that offer support for the beleaguered self. The second includes all those
efforts that are contributing to the development of a culture that is responsible to
the human life cycle.
Efforts to support the beleaguered self include the community workshops
and other initiatives I discussed in chapter one which attempt to provide emo-
tional and spiritual ground for activists and concerned citizens. Because my own
experience in this area is primarily with a peer self-help psychotherapy group
­(Re-evaluation Counseling) and with the worldwide “focusing” community,

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 183

I will base my discussion primarily on them. What is crucial about these two
c­ ommunities—and others like them—is that they provide contexts within which
we can re-emerge as human beings and turn our attention toward the larger world.
I can think of three important ways that they do this.
The first is that they offer training in recovering our ability to work from
our own bodily experience, to hear our own inner voice. If the violence of the
modern world alienates us from this voice, then reconnecting with it is a coun-
terpractice of historical significance. Overcoming dualism is no easy thing, no
mere philosophical exercise, but a practical task that asks us to give ourselves
over to the worldly demands of our bodies and to go through the often painful
and scary process of thawing out our own flesh. We generally prefer to stimulate
ourselves—to get excitement into our deadened bodies through bungee jumping
and watching horror movies—rather than to resensitize ourselves. To the extent
that we can do the latter, however, the benefits are tremendous, for (among other
gains) we reclaim a centre for ourselves. Nothing compares to being able to speak
our own truth, to having confidence in our saying because of the sureness of our
feeling. There is an astonishing difference between going through life on the basis
of stuck patterns, old ideas, introjected beliefs, habitual reactions, other people’s
opinions, superego warnings, expert advice, and archaic fantasies versus being
aware of what we are bodily sensing in any given situation and listening for the
needs, insights, fresh symbols, creative resolutions, and dialogical responses that
flow from this source of organismic guidance. The goal of the focusing community
is to make a space for all those bodies who are interested in working in this latter
way, on the assumption that a society full of people capable of doing so will bear
very little resemblance to the society of today. Meeting regularly with a “focusing
partner” is one of the main forms of practice that comes out of this commu-
nity. The person who introduced this popular self-help practice, Eugene Gendlin,
writes: “The political context I am concerned about is the individual’s own self-
guidance by an inner source. Without this we cannot hope for any better political
forms than we have now and have had throughout history.”162 In helping people
to revitalize the concrete, experiential side of life, the focusing community is in its
own way thus endeavoring to generate a populace of more capable social agents.163
The second way these efforts contribute to the making of a life-oriented
society is that they locate social change work within the life process, making it
part of the good life. The commitment is to develop, in Joanna Macy’s words,
“practical methods for embarking on social action, and sustaining and enjoying it,
so that it is no longer seen as a daunting, demanding exercise in self-sacrifice. . . .
so that our work for the world runs like an ever-refreshing stream through our
lives.”164 In other words, the intention is to create conditions under which we can
both discover what particular social action will be meaningful for us and acquire
the emotional support to then do it. In this case, our organismic energy flows
into the action because it meets a genuine need to engage the world on a matter

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 184 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

that concerns us or in which we are interested. Re-evaluation Counseling (RC)

is a worldwide network of communities dedicated to personal healing and social
liberation, and to stressing the lively relationship that obtains between the two. To
support healing, it teaches nonprofessional peers to counsel one another, primarily
through weekly meetings with a partner in which each person takes a turn in the
roles of “counselor” and “client.” To support social change it holds workshops and
develops theory about ending various forms of oppression. Personal counseling
and social struggle are seen, moreover, as complementary and mutually enhancing
activities. That is, the more we take action in the world, the more do we break or
contradict our rigid, fear-based patterns. This leads to the emergence of the painful
or distressful feelings that were hidden inside the pattern, which if addressed in
counseling sessions may then find their healing resolution (rather than develop
into conflict and burnout). Conversely, the more good counseling we receive, the
more alive and clear-thinking we become in our activism. Outer and inner work
thus unfold dialectically, to the benefit of both person and society.165 I have myself
witnessed many people within the RC community, through just these processes,
develop rich world-relations, regain their personal powers, and take great love and
skill out into the world.
Finally, the RC and focusing communities are dedicated to creating non-
violent and caring environments—shelters from the storm—within which people
may recover their inherent nature. Both communities foster relationships in
which people listen to one another respectfully, empathetically, and nonjudgmen-
tally, and in which one’s basic goodness and creativity are routinely mirrored. In
such a climate, people feel supported enough to take personal risks, let go of old
patterns and self-interruptions, go into painful shame-linked feelings, and make
more open contact with others. Because these communities bring many people
of different backgrounds together, they also provide forums to learn about other
people’s life experiences and perspectives on the world. Within RC, in particular,
great efforts are made to understand the common wounding that underlies all
forms of oppression. As is widely recognized, the psychological dynamics between
oppressor and oppressed groups form complex interlocking systems, wherein,
for example, the oppressed introject and so “carry” the projected inferiority,
­weakness, rage, and so on of their oppressors. This is not the place to examine
such dynamics. It is worth noting, however, that oppressors are generally reluctant
to give up their “power” because “they are personally threatened, not simply with
material loss but more significantly with patterns of managing their emotional
lives. Given an equalitarian system, they would be called on to deal with their
anxieties, angers, guilts, self-hatreds, and desires in new ways they cannot trust.
They are thus committed to the styles of interaction that have lifted them to
the position of superiority.”166 Because the RC community understands all this,
it brings great compassion to both those in the role of the oppressor and of the
oppressed (including an understanding of how we can occupy both roles because

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 185

of the multiple and interwoven nature of oppressions). It thereby encourages

the emotionally charged work of surrendering oppressive attitudes, forming alli-
ances with other groups, and recovering our humanity as we spit out the introjects
that have distorted and harmfully limited our nature. I wish to emphasize, in
sum, that it is only the strong affirmation of the inherent worth and lovability of
all humans that makes this kind of work possible, as this provides the necessary
context to sustain people, to ensure that they feel connected to others, as they
come into contact with their feelings of shame and insecurity and as they attempt
to forge links with previously hated and feared groups.
The second general area of counterpractice I want to highlight does not
exclude the supportive ones I just discussed, but has a different focus, namely,
attending to the human life-cycle. Here, the work is more recognizably “ecopsy-
chological,” in that the intention is to recollect our human nature in its fullness,
a goal which emphatically includes cultivating mature relationships with a more-
than-human, living reality. If not us, asks Audre Lorde, “who else will feed [chil-
dren] the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?”167
In my own terms, who but us will intervene to meet their transhistorical needs?
Childhood today seems more and more about abuse and neglect rather than about
loving delivery into the life stream—a situation that social workers, therapists,
developmental psychologists, governmental agencies, child advocacy groups, and
other bodies seem hard pressed to reverse. Every little bit helps, however. And
I believe that ecopsychology’s little bit is to hold out a vision that honors the
unfolding of human life as a phenomenon of nature and then to take action in
support of it. Most of the parents I know are isolated and stressed. Ecopsycholo-
gists might thus contribute as much to the making of an ecological society by
allying themselves with today’s overburdened parents and assisting with the care
of their young as by trying to transpersonalize the self-sense of adults. The practice
of the wild surely includes holding babies well. One way to counter the pattern
of technology, in other words, is to nourish those who might do a better job of
it than we do. While there is much that could potentially be done in this area,
for the discussion here I will concentrate on two examples of practice that seem
important to me: environmental education among children and wilderness rites
among youth and adults.
Environmental education stands out for me because letting children play
in wetlands and forests (as their bodies are naturally organized to do) could
play such a key role in the developmental life of children. Unfortunately, envi-
ronmental education largely conforms to the pattern of technology, at least as
currently practiced where I live. In a recent review of Canadian environmental
education, Constance Russell, et al. describe a basic tension within this field.
Roughly speaking, a minority of educators favor approaches that recognize “the
value-laden nature of education; the importance of cultural and ecological diver-
sity; the combined movement toward social and environmental justice; and the

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challenge to anthropocentrism.” The majority, on the other hand, are essentially

committed to the status quo. As Anne Bell comments, “environmental education
as it is widely practiced today, emphasizes above all the provision of information
and the resolution of problems associated with pollution, waste reduction and
disposal, and ‘resource’ management. Issues are understood primarily in terms of
science, economics and pragmatic reforms geared in the first instance to human
utility. Technocratic rationality predominates.”168 Environmental education is
increasingly becoming science education, and its curriculum is largely driven by
free, industry subsidized materials. It is thus less an opportunity for world engage-
ment—for playful exploration and unstructured discovery of a living nature—
than a “top-down . . . didactic teaching of pre-packaged knowledge,”169 in which
the pedagogical goal remains the technical mastery of reality. Its curricula also
adopt big-picture approaches that use such abstract models as Spaceship Earth,
nutrient cycles, and energy flows.170 The middle-sized phenomena of traditional
nature study, of mucking about with frogs and bugs, is replaced by CD-ROMs
that deliver information to computer screens about managing planet earth.
In the main, then, environmental education is not a form of counter-
practice. It could be, however. Russell, et al. speak appreciatively, for example,
of “such school-based initiatives as habitat restoration, energy and waste audits,
and bird and tree surveys,” which indicate “a desire to situate [environmental
education] in the immediate life contexts of students and in the intimacy of lived
relationships with other life.”171 Given both the developmental need for immer-
sion in wild nature and the fact that almost all children go to school, I think that
much is at stake in the shape taken by environmental education. A naturalistic
and experiential environmental education would design its curriculum not to sat-
isfy industry but to reclaim a technologically obscured region of existence, one
that is known by the excitement of incorporating wild others into a growing field
of significant relations. As Gary Snyder comments, “It’s not enough to be shown
in school that we are kin with all the rest: we have to feel it all the way through.”172
Although environmental educators need not be ecopsychologists, ecopsycholo-
gists do need to be involved in environmental education. Indeed, my hope is that
the work of ecopsychologists will become sufficiently influential that they can
help to remove the handcuffs from those teachers who do wish to more concretely
engage their students with the natural world, but whose lesson-plans, dictated
from above, keep it otherwise.
In the previous chapter I made my views apparent about the need for ado-
lescent initiation rites. One of the problems facing adults, however, is that we
ourselves lack the knowledge and skill to mentor youth in the ways their nature
demands. Stephen Foster and Meredith Little founded the School of Lost Borders
precisely for this reason—to train elders in the work of leading wilderness rituals.
As more people undertake such training, and as this work spreads, I am hoping
it will do much to orient adolescents toward the natural world as the ground of

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 187

their being and as the original domain for spiritual initiation. Amongst all the
noise of technological adolescence, vision quests and other wilderness rites are
counterpractices capable of bringing a transformative focus to the lives of many
a confused youth. As Foster notes, such rites, which includes guidance from a
council of caring elders, provide “an invaluable opportunity to make a difference
in how at-risk youth see their future.”173 This kind of rite work, furthermore, is
not just for adolescents. In his The Four Shields: The Initiatory Seasons of Human
Nature, Foster (with Little) lays out an entire psychological model based on the
seasons and other metaphors drawn largely from the natural world, and in which
all the stages of life are incorporated. I myself undertook a wilderness quest at the
time of my marriage, and the vision and understanding I gained on it remain a
continual source of guidance and strength as I paddle my way forward in life. Rite
work, in fact, explicitly involves all three of my naturalistic principles. It supports
people in finding their place in both human and more-than-human society (i.e.,
in widening their spheres of belonging and responsibility); in perceiving a world
beyond the boundaries of strictly human reality, and so in beginning to sing (or
even “creatively mythologize”)174 this wider world; and in learning to see their
own lives symbolically mirrored and bound up in the flesh of all living things.
All manner of rite work—an annual wilderness fast, for example, to refresh one’s
vision and maintain one’s connection with the psyche of nature—can thus form a
strong basis for counterpractice.

In sum, ecopsychology is a psychological intervention aimed at contributing to

the transformation of society by encouraging or providing for the recovery of our
nature and our experience, for the regaining of lost world-relations and life-mean-
ings. It is an effort to remember that, and how, we are a part of the big life process;
to get us back into the service of all life. What unites the diversity of counterprac-
tical examples I offered in this section is their commitment to a more life-oriented
cultural and social order. Examples, however, are only that. I am myself working
toward becoming a wilderness rite of passage guide. Depending on one’s cultural
background and life-experience, however, a wilderness rite may be the last thing
one is interested in undertaking, or that seems feasible. I also envision forming an
organization for psychotherapists (“Ontario Psychotherapists for a New Society”)
that would advocate for social change based on the privileged knowledge thera-
pists have about what our current society does to our humanity. I think we need
keep an open mind, then, about just what forms our practice will take. If Freud
got us onto the couch, where might ecopsychology get us to?
Whatever shape our practice does take, there can be little doubt that we
need a lot more of it. That is why I have stressed the need to make the work
attractive, which in turn means that it be supportive and that it have some life
in it, some revitalizing juice. We can only hope that this kind of practice gains
momentum. We might also take comfort in the fact that the process of change is

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 188 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

quite mysterious. Despite my emphasis on the losses of the modern era, in order
to be humble servants of nature we do not need to be all sorted out nor living in
profound relation to Wolf and Eagle; we only need to be present. To come back to
life is to realize that it is a process, one that involves taking countless steps that we
can never quite predict, but which are most surely taken when grounded in con-
tact with presently felt reality. Regardless of one’s starting situation, to serve nature
is to sense what the life force is asking for, what wants to unfold, move, happen, or
come next. Today, moreover, perhaps more than at any other time, I believe that
to be a servant of nature is to learn the essentially human art of bearing pain and
suffering—as I discuss next.

On Bearing Pain and Suffering175

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings too many pains,
disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot
dispense with palliative measures. . . . There are perhaps three such
measures: powerful distractions, which cause us to make light of our misery;
substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances,
which make us insensitive to it.
—Sigmund Freud176

Understanding comes through suffering.

—Aeschylus177

Rather than putting down the revolt of nature, I have said that we need to join
it—need to join with the life force in rebelling against the repressive and exploita-
tive aspects of modern society. Revolts are messy, though; and to join this one is
to feel the pain and suffering that the pattern of technology both generates and
acts to hide. Indeed, in the discussions above I have depicted the domination of
nature as an entirely backward solution to the problem of pain and suffering. In
the environmentalist’s thinking about what it will take to reverse the ecological
crisis, I suggest that this is a terribly overlooked factor. In this section I thus want
to discuss the age-old truth that we can know ourselves, know our humanity, only
if willing to consciously learn from our suffering. But how to bear it? The healing
that goes on in a psychotherapist’s office involves contacting those painful feelings
we have previously been unable to bear, but which in a more supportive context
can now be awarely experienced and completed. The same principle applies in all
healing work: that the ground for the work—inner, interpersonal, physical, moral,
conceptual, spiritual, ecological—must be strong enough so that we can maintain
a sufficient distance from our unpleasant feelings to both tolerate and move through
them. For the most part, our society lacks such contexts; it offers cotton candy and

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 189

pills instead. It is thus no wonder that we have become so apathetic, for apathy
(a-pathos) is precisely an insensibility to suffering. I suggest, in short, that we are
just not going to be able to get it together, or do the radical work, unless we enjoy
better self-knowledge—and that this implies creating the loving conditions under
which we can feel, and so discover the meaning of, our pain and suffering. In the
previous section I discussed some of the forums and communities that presently
offer these kinds of conditions. What I concentrate on here is the specific need
to make the bearing of pain and suffering a central principle of ecopsychological
work. Gary Coates suggests that we view our historical suffering as an invitation to
undertake a kind of rite of passage, through which we might renew our culture.178
All such rites, however, involve preparation. As Venerable Myokyo-ni writes, the
first step toward wholeness takes place “in the training yard, learning to bear with
oneself, to bear emotional onslaughts, becoming gentle and stronger, acquiring
not Bull-strength but bearing strength.”179
Life strives toward happiness; suffering is a message that we’re going the
wrong way or that some painful state of affairs needs our attention. Our suffering,
then, is a kind of life compass and teacher. Even the most vital people move
their lives forward by responding to the tension of those bodily felt desires that
urge them to take some action, make some sense. In a way, then, we are always
making sense out of suffering. Inasmuch as we do not, our tensions inevitably
grow. Hence, a society that knows little about suffering, that does much to avoid
it, will know little about life (and so little about happiness). Consider, on this
note, the biopsychiatrist Donald Goodwin’s remark that “anxiety has no more
survival value than a tension headache. Its elimination would be a blessing.”180 I
understand anxiety as our feeling for the void. It thus both motivates the spiritual
search and emerges strongly in people who have been traumatized and isolated.
I understand tension headaches, furthermore, as symptomatic of repressed emo-
tion, such as grief and anger. To argue for the “elimination” of these is therefore
to grossly ignore their potential meaning. It is also to adopt that self-defeating
approach for disburdening ourselves of suffering—itself rooted in anxiety—which
I call “the strategy of violence.”
The strategy of violence is to deal with the problem of pain and suffering
by trying to annihilate what are perceived as the sources of distress. Richard
Slotkin suggests that a dominant myth in the United States is that of “regenera-
tion through violence.” Originating with Puritan colonists, this myth holds that
a new society is to be made through exorcising or attacking dark (corrupt, bad,
threatening) forces, whether these be located in nature, Native Americans, Satan,
or North Vietnamese. It, too, is a defective myth, however, in that it leads not to
any kind of satisfaction, but only to a spiral of increasing violence and increasing
guiltanxiety.181 All death, no rebirth. This myth, then, is part of the cultural back-
ground of a society that has become a kind of killing machine. My concern here is
with how we turn this killing attitude toward ourselves, using drugs, for example,

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 190 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

as “a weapon against the void.”182 Ours is a society that for the most part attempts
to annihilate pain, to self-destructively go to war with it (whether the target be a
recipient of our “projections” or our own bodies), rather than to recover the life
that is locked up inside it. Why might this be so? Having started this chapter with
a simple idea (happiness), I wish to also finish it with one: that we choose the
strategy of violence only when we lack the contexts necessary to bear our pain and
suffering, and so to stay above the healing threshold. When the pain of life is too
great to bear, we use our aggression against it. All repression, for example, is a life-
diminishing act of aggression against our natural selves. Drugs and alcohol desen-
sitize or temporarily soothe us. And so on. The strategy of violence does not satisfy
us precisely because it is not a positive search for fulfillment but a last-ditch quest
for release from pain. The “fateful question” for our times is thus not, as Freud
held, whether the instinct for life can win out over the instinct for death (the latter
of which is an erroneous construction183), but whether or not we will choose to
find collective ways to bear our pain and suffering, to strengthen ourselves, so that
we can then stop negating life and instead get back to it. In the hope that we will,
and in the face of all the evidence that we won’t, I offer the following remarks.
To stay above the healing threshold we need a context for containing our pain
that is larger or stronger than the pain itself (recall, for example, the contexts neces-
sary to do the oppression-work within the RC community). Given the enormity
of our pain, I suggest that our society needs very strong frameworks indeed. The
strongest contexts, moreover, will in some sense always be spiritual. The recovery
movement involves much spiritual practice (e.g., twelve-step programs) exactly
because this puts people’s pain into a more tolerable context. As the Gestaltist
James Kepner also comments, the “reality of trauma and abuse, with its horror,
hideousness, and inexplicable quality, simply cannot be held and made sense of
within the individual person.” Thus, “most survivors find some compelling need
to develop a transcendent spiritual or philosophical framework.”184 This comes
as no surprise, as religious symbols have traditionally helped people understand
the cosmos in a way that makes their pain endurable. “As a religious problem,”
says Clifford Geertz, “the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid
suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly
defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, sup-
portable—something, as we say, sufferable.”185 Our technologized and economized
society does not encourage the creation of such cultural frameworks for bearing
pain and suffering—only for avoiding and trying to kill it. This seems to me a fatal
state of affairs. It is not my place to prescribe specific spiritual practices. I think it
fair to say, though, that we are today called by nature, by the voice of our own pain,
by the cry of the earth, to reoccupy the spiritual-ecological dimension of existence.
I have already mentioned efforts by people like Joanna Macy to promote
spiritual practice and understanding within the ecology, peace, and social justice
movements.186 The Green Party activist Ken Jones does not mince words: “only

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 191

some spiritual kind of conviction and training have the strength to bring about
the necessary radical shift.”187 Or as Ram Dass has said, such training is necessary
if we are to “keep our hearts open in hell.”188 Among the various dimension that
make up my own practice, the most powerfully healing and strengthening have
been those tied to a routine of Buddhist meditation and study. I have come to be
less resentful of my pain, realizing that the work of life is exactly to learn from this
suffering: to see how it attunes me to the pain of others; to develop the capacity
to disidentify from it and so “breathe it through”; and to make out of it whatever
small piece of work is mine to do in this lifetime.189 I do not doubt, then, that
the spread of such practice would be of great benefit to all—as would many other
kinds of such practice. Whether our society undergoes a positive spiritual shift,
whether it gets on top of its pain and violence, is obviously a matter that goes well
beyond whatever interventions ecopsychologists might make. What I do want to
stress, however, as a central theme of my own, is that the spiritual condition of our
time is largely defined by the shame and isolation of the terrified Ego. The Cath-
olic author Michael Higgens, in commenting on the hellishness of the twentieth
century, characterizes hell precisely as a state of isolation (and so heaven as a state
of communion).190 I thus believe that the most basic requirement of a strength-
ening spiritual practice for our times is that it include a supportive response to this
widespread condition of shame and isolation.
Shame is perhaps the hardest emotion to bear. When workaholics stop
working, for example, they often feel engulfed by a sense of worthlessness, and so
dive once again into further work. The more we matter-of-factly acknowledge the
feeling of shame, however, and so give up the shameful feeling of having to run
from it, the more compassionate will we become as a society. This is because shame
is the emotion of rejection and isolation; to respectfully listen to shame is to hear a
cry for love and community, for acknowledgment of both the goodness and full-
ness of our nature. Tuning into this cry—to those common feelings of inadequacy,
inferiority, badness, unlovability, fear of abandonment, and so on—could thus be
an ecopsychological undertaking of great historical significance, going right to
the emotional core of our society. Our historical economic development, writes
Kovel, “was won through the destruction of community. . . . From its basis and
origin in the differentiated unity of primitive society, subjectivity has undergone
a ‘progressive’ atomization and conflictual intensification with the intrusion, first
of the state, then of the capitalist market, into the organic relationship between
self, others, and nature. This results in the isolated, deeply problematic subject of
today.”191 Hence: “A more or less universal separateness characterizes being under
capital.”192 As so many people have realized, overcoming this loss of sociality is a
matter of rebuilding community.193 What is also called for, though, is acknowl-
edgment of the terrible feelings of shame, hate, grief, and so on that the history
of desociation has engendered. Whatever form our practice takes, I simply believe
it needs to make room for the bearing of these feelings. The practice needed to

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 192 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World

transform this society, then, may look less like sitting on a meditation cushion and
more like holding hands.
And what of the natural world? Bearing pain is always a matter of placing
it in a larger context so that it both loses its overwhelming power and is given the
space it needs to move. Several years ago I entered into some emotionally stormy
waters. After one particularly sleepness night spent with my demons, and feeling
all tight with my pain, I made my way to the kitchen for a mug of tea. I was sitting
there alone when a cardinal began to whistle outside the window. “The cardinal
still sings,” I whispered . . . and then started to cry. The thick beauty of that song,
the cool, pungent early morning air, and the crystallizing words that arrived on
my lips, all combined to lift me out of my Ego—out into the enduring life stream
beyond my own narrow existence—so that I was finally able to let the healing tears
roll down my face. I am sharing this story for two points it illustrates. The first
is that the more isolated we are the more pain we feel, that is, the more personal,
cramped, and unbearable it becomes.194 The second is that making healing con-
nections with nonhuman others can involve the simplest of acts. Plainly put, any
practice that helps reembed us within the society of nature, or expand the field of
our care, cannot but help us bear our pain and suffering.
I vividly recall an Ojibway elder who, while talking before a group of
people, said that he lacked the courage on his own to get up in front of a crowd.
His strength came from his relationship with the spirit of Bear. If, indeed, it is
our nature to seek empowerment from other animals, what more appropriate
animal to lend us strength and help “bear” our pain than the bear? (Although
there is apparently no etymological link between the verb “to bear” and the lum-
bering animal we call a “bear,” the phonetic link is a fruitful one. Indeed, Hillman
notes that such phonetic resemblances may “indicate profound connections.”195)
Shepard writes that our fascination and fear of bears suggests an “urge to be reu-
nited with something lost and treasured, seen in the animal that most resembles
us. It is almost as though in him we can see how great is our loss of contact with
ourselves. Perhaps the bear can still serve as a pilot and messenger.”196 More gen-
erally speaking, I would note, if only suggestively, that if we are to consciously
experience our historical suffering as a kind of rite of passage, we had best make it
a prayer to the whole natural world.
Contrary to modern myth, the technological domination of nature does
not relieve but ultimately exacerbates our suffering. Just what combination of
contexts might provide the support for this wounded society to now bear its pain
and suffering, for people to give up the fantasy of technological salvation and so
come back to earth, is not something that can be predicted. Despite all my tenta-
tive commentary, my aim in this section was primarily to raise this topic, to stir
up some areas of thought, and not to give any answers. I have attempted in this
book to illustrate an approach that puts its faith in the process of feeling our way

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 Making Sense of Suffering in a Technological World 193

forward, not in coming up with the master solution. It is the natural governance
of this process that is my greatest source of hope.
Last night I was in the pub talking with local environmentalists about
their depression and despair. They also talked about their sense for the beauty
and wonder of life, and their uncertainty about how to communicate that to
the public, how to speak from their passion. As the discussion unfolded into the
night it became clear to me that the work of ecopsychology is to help us “come
out” as human beings. To come out is to say: “Yes, this is what I am; no apolo-
gies.” A human being is a servant of nature, a plain member in the community
of all life. For us today, however, to stand up and say this with an open heart is
to make ourselves vulnerable; is to risk ridicule. We can nonetheless be confident
in our vulnerability. As a psychotherapist I know that all people need to love and
be loved, that they all suffer in some way or other, and that they are all basically
good. As an ecopsychologist, I can now say with equal confidence that all people
need to experience themselves as a part of the natural world, need to understand
their own naturalness. The more we can, as ecopsychologists, build our alternative
vision of humans and nature, the bolder we will become in encouraging others to
speak out for a society that is consistent with this vision. Indeed, the promise of
ecopsychology is to be a force for the therapeutic, recollective, and critical work
that will help to make such a society a reality.

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Chapter_06.indd 194 11/9/12 12:37 AM
 Part III
ECOPSYCHOLOGY TODAY

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey
player plays where the puck is going to be.
—Wayne Gretzky

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Chapter_07.indd 196 09/11/12 3:14 PM
 7
A DECADE LATER: STILL RADICAL AFTER
ALL THESE YEARS

Looking Back, Looking Forward

I wrote Radical Ecopsychology in the late 1990s, a time when ecopsychology was
still riding the wave of excitement generated by the Ecopsychology primer released
in 1995.1 While I shared in this excitement I also felt that ecopsychology faced
specific conceptual, methodological, and political challenges that made its suc-
cess as a field far from assured. My goal with Radical Ecopsychology was therefore
to make a contribution that would help both to define the radical character of
ecopsychology and to set it on some firm intellectual footings. I was concerned
with how ecopsychology might develop, not wanting to see it absorbed into the
mainstream or stalled for lack of scholarly follow-through. In this new chapter,
then, I reflect on how ecopsychology has actually developed in the last ten years
and offer my thoughts on how I see the project today.2 In many ways it is better
positioned to get on its feet now than it was a decade ago. This is partly due to
efforts made by various people to keep the field alive and partly due to historical
trends that make ecopsychology increasingly attractive and viable. My concern
nonetheless remains unchanged: to keep the possibility open for an ecopsychology
skillfully at home with its own radicalness.
If all thinkers have one main thought, mine is that ecopsychology is an
inherently radical project. Everything I have written since Radical Ecopsychology
continues to sing this song.3 One of the questions I get asked about my work,
however, is whether using the word radical is such a good idea, given that it can be
associated with extremist politics. My usual response is to say that being a radical
simply means regarding our collective problems as deeper or more thoroughgoing
than the mainstream view appreciates or is willing to recognize. To be a radical
ecologist is to hold that the ecological crisis has deep cultural, social, economic,
political, historical, philosophical—and psychological—roots. My argument is

197

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 198 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

merely that ecopsychology has this radical nature, that it sprang from and essen-
tially belongs to the radical ecology movement. Indeed, to practice ecopsychology
is consistently to stumble onto its disruptive philosophical and critical implica-
tions. For example, ecopsychology is about relating or integrating psyche and
nature, yet the conceptual dualisms of inside/outside, mind/body, subject/object,
immediately stop us in our tracks. Hence, the philosophical task I discussed in
chapter 1. If I were writing the book today, I would actually enlarge the philo-
sophical task to make it more radical still, for the dualism between psyche and
society also falls once the psyche is turned inside out (as I discussed under the
heading of the critical task). An ecopsychology that faces the psychological dimen-
sion of the ecological crisis head-on will not pretend that the psyche—as an inter-
relational phenomenon—can be disentwined from either nature or society, and
hence psychology from either ecology or politics (or thus from political ecology).
Such an ecopsychology quickly winds up in territory radically different from that
of normal psychology. But for me this is the only way that psychology with an
ecological ontology or nondualistic view of reality can make sense. In short, I call
ecopsychology radical because it is radical.
I have suggested that ecopsychology is best thought of as a psychological
politics aimed at creating the subjective conditions for an ecological society.4 (If
it is not playing this role then what exactly is it doing?) Another reason to keep
ecopsychology radical is that we are otherwise unlikely to get an accurate under-
standing of our existing society and so of the radical work necessary to transition to
an ecological one. With the Great Recession still reverberating around the globe, it
is becoming ever clearer that ours is what James O’Connor calls a “specifically capi-
talist” society, one that remakes the world in the image of capital, subjecting every
nook and cranny of reality to the logic of profit, capital accumulation, and com-
modification; a society, furthermore, that sets in motion “a self-perpetuating spiral
of ecological and human destruction”5 as it wastefully converts public or common
wealth into private riches. I remain convinced, then, that an ecological society
must be a postcapitalist one and hence that ecopsychology must incorporate the
discourse of ecosocialism. The challenge nonetheless remains: how to win an
­audience or avoid being a marginal movement when using terms such as socialism.
I think there is a way forward with this challenge. As I discussed in
chapter 2, it is a matter of rhetoric, of persuasive speech. The question, then, is
how ecopsychology can stay radical (as I think it must if it is not to contradict
its own first principles), while also appealing to or moving a mainstream audi-
ence, both academic and popular. First of all, I do believe that strong scholarship
is necessary. Ecopsychology is often dismissed as a flaky or lightweight field, its
radical message thereby lost. I find this sad and ironic because in its questioning
of so much that is taken for granted in the modern world ecopsychology actually
calls for scholarship of the most demanding and creative kind. Without a founda-
tion of such radical scholarship we have nothing to stand on, don’t really have a

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 199

field, and therefore cannot hope to persuade others to our cause. If, for example,
mainstream psychologists don’t see the relevance of political economic questions
then we need to carefully demonstrate how psychology is already saturated with
political economic meanings, and how these relate to ecological issues. I imagine
a text for an academic audience entitled Invitation to Ecopsychology precisely as a
way to initiate scholarly dialogue at this level.
Beyond the need for strong scholarship, I think there are several other
points to consider. Being a radical ecologist has always involved a certain paradox:
that to get a seat at the table of respectability one generally has to stifle one’s
true feelings and viewpoints.6 I believe, however, that this paradox is weakening
because historical events are making the radical view appear more and more sen-
sible. The modern world has reached a point in history in which the false promises
and grossly exploitative nature of the capitalist system are steadily being recog-
nized. Richard Heinberg’s popular book The End of Growth, which essentially
announces the grinding down of capitalism, would not have appeared even a few
years ago. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster’s guide What Every Environ-
mentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism likewise seems of this moment. As I
write this, the Occupy Wall Street protest is in its third week. Climate change
and peak oil loom darkly over the future. And because of all of this, the need and
desire for alternative social arrangements are growing louder, the Transition, local
food, and new peasant movements being three widespread responses. I think the
possibility thus exists for a well-crafted radical ecopsychology to speak to a large
audience if it can line its praxis up with the grain of history, discerning the kind of
social changes implied by current times rather than proposing something entirely
discontinuous with them.7 Despite that ecosocialism might for some people pro-
voke fearsome images of the communist horde, when it is looked at openly with a
mind to our present needs it does in fact have many attractive elements and give
numerous clues to the nature of an ecological society, as I attempt to demonstrate
in ­discussions below.
What may help to make the image of a postcapitalist ecological society even
more attractive is if the case for it can be made with some psychological skillful-
ness and sensitivity. Ecopsychologists are lovers of life, whether life is expressed as
nature or as psyche (two terms that increasingly merge in the mind of the ecopsy-
chologist). If we can speak against the life-negating aspects of capitalist society
and in favor of a life-serving one, using a rhetoric that is not alarmist or militant
but rather attuned to the struggles, anxieties, and longings of modern existence,
then the radical view may indeed take root. Ecopsychology is a response to the
profound ecological and psychological illiteracy that accompanies the modern
alienation from nature.8 Ecopsychology radically conceived adds the idea that
this alienation also involves political illiteracy. One of the remarkable features
of modern society is how thoroughly the capitalist system shapes our lives and
yet how poorly this system is generally understood. To my mind, part of the art

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 200 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

of being an ecopsychologist is thus to offer political education that is informed

by critical theory but that uses the language of soul and of life. It is a matter of
translating radical political ideas into language both inviting and digestible for a
relatively depoliticized audience; I think this can be done.9
A few words, now, on how I regard Radical Ecopsychology itself ten years on.
As I read the book today I find that its overall intent remains current in my mind,
although I would no longer make some of my arguments in the same way. It was
originally written when I was a doctoral student and carries the flavor of intellec-
tual and personal discovery I was immersed in at that time. It is clumsy in places,
and undeveloped in many ways, yet as I stressed in the preface my goal was not to
offer a fully formed radical ecopsychology but rather to suggest some definition,
lay out what I thought were ecopsychology’s main tasks, and point to the kind of
intellectual traditions that could help establish the field. I also wanted to show
how existing psychological theories and practices could be appropriated in the
building of ecopsychology, demonstrating some of the continuities with anthro-
pocentric psychology as well as some leaps into new territory. In all these areas,
I think the book still has merit. For better or worse, I have thus chosen to leave
the text unrevised, except for a few tweaks to correct some minor inaccuracies.
Were I writing the book today perhaps the main difference I would make
would be to include more ecosocialist thought. Even though I was quite explicit
in chapter 6 about the unity of modern technology and the capitalist system, I
would now call the chapter “Making Sense of Suffering in a Capitalist Society”
and use socialist ecology as the main means to achieve critical distance. It is tre-
mendously significant that psychology and the environmental movement have both
been slow to confront capitalism. Tim Kasser and Allen Kanner note, for example,
that until recently the topic of consumer culture has been suspiciously avoided by
psychology, due not only to psychology’s individualistic bias but also its history
of collusion with consumer culture and its marked nervousness about criticizing
­capitalist society.10 The environmental movement has likewise tended to work
within the terms set by the system of capital (e.g., carbon markets as a solution to
climate change) rather than identify this system itself as inherently ecodestructive.
­Environmental ­organizations that receive corporate funding are also disinclined to
bite the hand that feeds them. ­Capitalism, in short, is the proverbial elephant in the
room. If ecopsychology is to be a marriage of psychology and ecology then I think
we need to wrestle with the elephant, even if this demands of us a certain finesse.
For this chapter I have chosen to discuss four ecopsychology-related devel-
opments from the last decade as a way both to update the reader and—by dialecti-
cally playing my comments off these developments—to clarify further the radical
nature of ecopsychology and the praxis that belongs to it.11 The first development
is the emergence of conservation psychology and also the increasing involve-
ment of environmental psychology in promoting “environmentally sustainable
behavior.” With rare exception, environmental and conservation psychologists

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 201

are explicit about their allegiance to conventional scientific psychology, tending

to distance themselves from ecopsychology. For me, this stance sharpens the dis-
tinction between mainstream and radical psychological approaches to the human-
nature relationship, effectively inviting ecopsychology to take its own stance.
I argue that ecopsychology is a transformation of psychology rather than just an
unproblematic application of conventional psychological strategies to “environ-
mental problems.” The second development is the launching of the Ecopsychology
journal under the editorship of Thomas Joseph Doherty. Doherty has proposed a
“second-generation” ecopsychology, which would acknowledge the spirit and heart
of “first-generation” ecopsychology while also lending legitimacy to the field by
embracing conventional data-driven research.12 While this approach is admirable
in its attempt to bridge the radical and the conventional, I think it is for the same
reason not able to give a satisfying definition of ecopsychology. What Doherty’s
proposal does helpfully do is create a second moment in the history of ecopsy-
chology to dialogue about what shape the field should take. The third develop-
ment is the steadily growing interest in ecotherapy and the growing number of
practices being identified as such. In the same year that the Ecopsychology journal
was launched (2009), the book Ecotherapy was published. As with the journal, this
anthology was intended to rejuvenate the field, being framed by the editors Linda
Buzzell and Craig Chalquist as a follow-up to the 1995 Ecopsychology primer. For
my purposes, the significance of reflecting on ecotherapy is that it forces us to think
about what characterizes ecopsychology’s praxis and how to develop it further. The
final development is the appearance of the field of Integral Ecology, which led to
a book by that name by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Michael ­Zimmerman (also, as
it happens, published in 2009). Based on the controversial work of Ken Wilber,
Integral Ecology poses particular challenges to ecopsychology. Sticking to my gen-
eral approach in this chapter, I take the encounter with Integral Ecology as one
more opportunity to illustrate the historical significance and essential radicalness
of ecopsychology, but this time in dialogue with a field more akin to it than are the
mainstream psychologies. I conclude the chapter with some reflections on the chal-
lenges that to my mind lie ahead for ecopsychology, these generally having to do
with the theoretical and practical work of integrating psyche, nature, and society.

Situating Ecopsychology: What about Environmental

and Conservation Psychology?

A question that hangs over ecopsychology is how it relates to mainstream

­psychology, particularly environmental and conservation psychology.13
In chapter 2 I suggested that ecopsychology differs from environmental
psychology because the latter does not sufficiently break with convention
in the ways that are required of ecopsychology. A number of environmental

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 202 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

psychologists continue to work on the goal of using psychology to foster “environ-

mentally sustainable,” “environmentally responsible,” or “pro-environmental”
behavior,14 though this is only one of many research areas within environmental
psychology (in a major environmental psychology text, the three chapters
in the section on The Future have the following titles: “Personal Space in a
Digital Age,” “Toward an Environmental Psychology of the Internet,” and “On
to Mars!”).15 Because environmental psychology lacks an exclusive focus on
promoting care for the natural environment, a group of psychologists decided
to found the new field of conservation psychology. In a working ­definition
of conservation psychology proposed in 2003, Carol Saunders described it
as “the scientific study of the reciprocal relationship between humans and
the rest of nature, with a particular focus on how to encourage conserva-
tion of the natural world.”16 Saunders distinguished conservation from envi-
ronmental psychology along a number of lines, including that conservation
psychology is not a subdiscipline of psychology but rather a “superfield” with
a strong conservation mission that cuts across all of psychology and related
social scientific disciplines. Susan Clayton and Gene Myers similarly define
conservation psychology as a specific focus available to all of psychology, “an
‘identity’ open to every psychologist” who wishes to exercise their “personal
responsibility toward the planet.”17
What do environmental and conservation psychologists make of ecopsy-
chology? Perhaps no one has considered this question more than the environ-
mental psychologist Joseph Reser. Starting with an oft-cited article published
in 1995, Reser has consistently expressed respect for ecopsychology’s “mission
statement” and “passionate concern,” going so far as to say that “[i]f environ-
mental psychologists do not consider and address the spectrum of issues raised
by ecopsychologists . . . seriously and urgently, they will have truly lost their way
as well as their credibility.”18 However, to the same serious degree that Reser
is sympathetic to ecopsychology he expresses caution about it. He speaks, for
example, of the:

vexed issue of where and how . . . conservation psychology situates itself with respect
to ecopsychology and its myriad forms. . . . There are many psychologists working
in the environmental arena who have serious reservations about a seeming psycho-
logical and conservation initiative and movement (i.e., ecopsychology) which draws
from, in part, very mixed popular culture, new age, anti-psychiatry, and analytic and
psychoanalytic roots, and often spiritual emphasis and application. . . . [M]uch of
this enterprise is incongruent with, if not inimical to, the research- and evidence-
based practice of applied psychology, environmental management and planning,
and conservation sciences. . . . [T]here are clear costs with respect to who will join
a collaborative research venture and field [i.e., conservation psychology] which does
not clearly situate itself with respect to ecopsychology.19

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 203

Reser’s remarks cut two ways. On the one hand, he recognizes the significance of
the topics raised by ecopsychology but shares the scientific mainstream’s reserva-
tions about granting the field the status of psychology. On the other hand, he
laments the narrow mindset and academic politics within psychology that have
prevented it from taking up these same topics:

The very nature of academic psychology in many universities is very experimental,

traditional, and suspicious of what might be seen as popular culture notions of
psychology. So even to express an interest in something like ecopsychology was dif-
ficult for a student to do and equally difficult for many staff members to broach or
respond to in an even-handed and informed way. While environmental psychology
has achieved reasonable respectability and status in those quarters where it is now a
known field of psychology, this only came about when environmental psychology
was also being seen as a science and as undertaking good, credible experimental
research.20

These comments—which suggest the uphill battle ecopsychology faces within the
academy, especially because environmental psychology itself had to win respect-
ability as a scientific discipline21—were made by Reser in reference to the period
leading up to his 1995 article. Reser does believe, however, that there is some
degree of openness today within psychology to the ecopsychological viewpoint
due to a gradual recognition of its merit and to the increasing gravity of the eco-
logical crisis.22
Two psychologists who are indeed open to ecopsychology are Susan Koger
and Deborah Winter.23 In their text The Psychology of Environmental Problems they
suggest that although “ecopsychology is often ignored by mainstream psycholo-
gists and even treated with contempt by some,” this can be attributed to the fact
that ecopsychologists tend not to be scientists but rather “clinicians, therapists,
and philosophers” who look at “aspects of human experience that are difficult to
measure.”24 Koger and Winter are nonetheless hopeful that scientific research on
the ecological self “may empirically validate some of the claims of ecopsy­chologists,
and thus put it in more direct view” of conservation psychologists. Given this posi-
tion, they make a point of disagreeing with my idea that ecopsychology needs
to “give up psychology’s attachment to various forms of objectivism.” While
acknowledging that quantitative methods have their limits and drawbacks, they
“believe that the psychology of environmental problems will progress as measuring
tools are developed for what was previously believed to be unmeasurable.”
As mainstream psychologists who are generous in their treatment of eco-
psychology, Koger and Winter present an instructive case. To me their approach
demonstrates that a meaningful gap still exists between what even sympathetic
members of the mainstream can make of ecopsychology and the kind of vision
of ecopsychology I offer in this book. In evaluating ecopsychology, the starting

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 204 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

point for Koger and Winter is quantitative empiricism, which means that ecopsy-
chology has to prove itself to conventional science if it wants into the clubhouse.
This is exactly the bias I have wished to challenge.
(As a point of clarification, however, I am not an all-out foe of empirical
science, as I state at several places in this book.25 When I urge a move away from
objectivism I am using that term to refer to the philosophical position that there
is some singular, ahistorical, unbiased framework by which objective truth can
be determined and knowledge claims assessed.26 In fact, Koger and Winter make
statements indicating they themselves do not hold this view.27 Radicals tend not to
oppose empiricism in its entirety but rather the objectivist ideological restriction
of truth to the arena of conventional empirical research alone. My own discussions
in this respect have been directed at raising the hermeneutic question, so that the
history of and ontological prejudices within modern empiricism may be evaluated
in relation to the ecopsychological project,28 and so that the various meanings of
interest to ecopsychology but obscured by mainstream science may be revealed.)
Koger and Winter clearly care about ecopsychology and wish to help validate
its claims. I am not convinced, though, that the form of scholarship they propose
is the most suited to do this. Missing from their account is any real acknowledg-
ment of the serious debate over psychology’s image of itself as a science29 and of
what Thomas Teo calls “psychology’s hermeneutic deficit,” its relative blindness
to or disinterest in its own entrenched biases and unquestioned modes of inter-
pretation.30 Most obviously at work here is the quantification bias, which feeds a
drive to convert the unmeasurable to the measurable. As an exercise in returning
soul, depth, and spirit to the world—qualities that indeed resist measurement—
ecopsychology must champion approaches that are adequate to these phenomena
while simultaneously protesting the modern “disqualifying” of the universe which
contributes to the destruction of human and earthly worlds.31 While Koger and
Winter do make room for experiential data (and include in their discussion of
ecopsychology a moving testimonial from Terry Tempest Williams and a lovely
poem by Mary Oliver), this allowance is not pursued with much force, being over-
shadowed by their commitment to conventional psychology and by the minor
presence in their text of hermeneutical and critical approaches.32 Finally, what
from my perspective is most absent from Koger and Winter’s discussion is a rec-
ognition that the very notion of ecopsychology actually constitutes a challenge to
psychology not just to apply itself to solving “environmental problems” but, more
radically, to transform itself in the face of them.33
What might this transformation involve? In my reading, Reser and Koger
and Winter are essentially saying something like: “We think ecopsychology is
important but let’s make sure to keep it psychology.” By contrast, consider the
words of one of ecopsychology’s earliest voices, Robert Greenway: “I have argued
for many, many years that ecopsychology is not just another psychology. But most
of the people interested in ecopsychology are either therapists or psychologists.

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 205

So they’re always trying to claim ecopsychology as a kind of psychology. I’ve

always tried to resist that because I think it’s something unique.”34 My own view
is likewise that in crossing psychology with ecology a new entity gets created that
is nothing narrowly psychological.35 As Greenway notes, ecopsychologists them-
selves do not always see it this way exactly. I do believe, though, that if environ-
mental and conservation psychologists are typically quite clear that they are not
doing ecopsychology, then this invites ecopsychologists to be equally clear in the
reverse direction. Rather than trying to assimilate ecopsychology to psychology,
the task is to articulate just why and how ecopsychology is something radically
different.
First of all, it is no accident that ecopsychology uses the word ecology rather
than environment. The subversiveness of ecology as both a science and a philos-
ophy of interrelationship has long been recognized.36 Whereas mainstream envi-
ronmentalism tends to treat “the environment” dualistically, as a realm external
to human life that must be well managed, the radical ecology movement takes
“a more critical and transformative perspective that reconceptualizes the place of
humanity within the larger system or whole.”37 For me, then, ecopsychology is
equal parts psychology and radical ecology, integrated into an approach never
seen before: a psychology for an ecological society. This does not mean that
mainstream psychology or mainstream environmentalism have no relevance for
ecopsychology; it is only that they do not go deep enough or adopt a truly eco-
logical mode of thought and practice. Ecopsychology is not about solving “envi-
ronmental” problems but rather understanding how psyche and nature internally
relate, how they are the interior and exterior of the same phenomenon. It is about
refusing all dualisms or splittings of reality (nonduality perhaps being ecopsy-
chology’s main pivot), seeking integrations instead. As I noted above, to turn the
psyche inside out is alone to radically transform psychology, both philosophically
and politically. In short, as an ontological perspective that regards all phenomena
as interrelated, ecology—and hence ecopsychology—blows our praxis wide open
in a way that mainstream psychology could presently just not tolerate.
A second reason why ecopsychology implies a transformation of psychology
is because it was born of crisis—ecological, psychological, and social. When in
a crisis, the way forward is to identify the conflicts or contradictions that are
generating the crisis, and then to work on the change, growth, or transformation
required to resolve it. Ecopsychology came into being not just because of a crisis
of the biosphere but also of psychology itself. Psychology’s goal of human well-
being is not only contradicted by its anthropocentric neglect of the well-being
of the earth38 (the link between these two arenas of well-being being a common
basis for ecopsychology) but also, and in a directly related way, by its conformity
with nature-dominating social and cultural systems that generate human suf-
fering (the links here being the basis for critical psychology). Just as the contradic-
tion between capitalism and (human) nature needs to be resolved through social

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 206 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

transformation, so too must the contradictions internal to modern psychology be

resolved through a radical transformation of psychology itself.

Ecopsychology as a Transformation of Psychology

To illustrate what I mean by an ecologically transformed psychology, I want to

discuss a number of overlapping dimensions that I have identified in my own
ongoing formulation of ecopsychology. As with the exercise in chapter 1 on
identifying the main tasks of ecopsychology, I phrase the dimensions here in terms
of what I think ecopsychology is (or needs to be) doing.

Overcoming Dualism: The Researcher’s Subjectivity. As noted above, everything

ecopsychology does, one way or another, involves overcoming dualism or
mending the dissociation of realities, starting with the psyche/nature dualism.
Classical modern science, by contrast, starts precisely by presuming a dualism
between subject and object. Everything it does, then, involves trying to eliminate
or manage subjectivity, so that a value-free objective world can be revealed. If,
however, subjectivity and objectivity interlace, if there is an internal relationship
between researchers and their research, then the reality revealed by conventional
science—which no doubt has its own important kind of truth—is not in fact
free from subjectivity but is tied rather to a particular form of it (calm, cool,
collected, rational, etc.) that is itself embedded in particular social practices and
interests. As hermeneutics teaches, the subjectivity of the researcher is always part
of the horizon of any research whatsoever. We may thus regard modern science as
one general way of handling reality because it is one general way of configuring
the subject-object interrelation. We may thus furthermore regard ecopsychology
as a field that differs from mainstream science by its taking up of this interrela-
tion consciously. Rather than trying to eliminate or restrict the subjectivity of the
researcher, ecopsychology is in many ways about developing it in new directions,
making a clearing thereby for perceiving realities undetected by normal scientific
consciousness. This may entail, for example, developing the ability to perceive the
soul of the natural world, its animate quality, its depth—so that one may then
describe such things. This practical demand on the researcher turns out in fact to
be an ancient one, for in classical Greek times and much of Western history the
life of philosophy or theory making had the therapeutic intention of cultivating
and educating the soul of the theorist.
In our own times, a recent example of an approach that radically includes
the researcher’s subjectivity is the method developed by Robert Romanyshyn that
“keeps soul in mind.” Romanyshyn contests the subject/object dualism by directing
the research process to the researcher’s unconscious and thereby to the objective
claims that are made on the researcher through their own deep subjectivity. This is

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 207

not a method of simple confession but rather of allowing ­oneself to be drawn into
the work of the research through one’s wounds or complexes, through a kind of
love for or “erotic tie” to the work, and then engaging in imaginal dialogues that
give a voice to that in the world which has been lost, forgotten, or marginalized.
According to Romanyshyn, working with dreams illustrates this approach best,
as dreams are always asking the dreamer to release their ego’s hold on the status
quo.39 Just so, research with soul in mind requires of the researcher that they
release their narcissistic attachment to what they want the research to be about
and to allow the soul of the work to dictate the outcome instead. In this way, says
Romanyshyn, the research sinks into the depths of the divide between subject
and object, resulting in a deepened sense of objectivity arrived at through deep
­engagement in subjective dynamics.
I could give other examples of research approaches that deliberately incor-
porate the researcher’s subjectivity, and which, like Romanyshyn’s method, have
potential value for ecopsychology.40 My point in this discussion, however, has
been that overcoming dualism means legitimating such methods and, further,
arguing for their necessity if new realities are to be disclosed, as this requires, cor-
respondingly, new forms of subjectivity in the research process. As I discuss next,
such approaches also place the research and researcher explicitly back within the
life process.

Making Room for Life and Natural Wisdom through Lived Experience. This is a
topic I covered at length throughout this book, so I will here just quickly gather
some important points. I argue that an experiential approach is crucial because it
is through our experience that we contact and interpret the claims of nature. The
marginalization and mystification of subjective experience in modern times, and
the rise of an “academic-corporate-government elite”41 who tell us how to think and
live, is then central to our alienation from nature. Learning to work skillfully with
bodily felt experience is in this light both a therapeutic and a political act. If we
find in our bodily experience not so much the workings of a machine but rather a
source of wisdom and guidance that comes from the force or spirit of life, a crea-
tive force that calls for healing, growth, liberation, and resistance to oppression,
then can our scholarship make room for this natural moment we find within our
experience? Appreciating that the body senses and carries knowledge about the
situations in which we find ourselves, can we allow new ideas or theories to be not
just the achievement of a disembodied mind but a development of the whole
organism/environment field, a formulation of what the world is asking for? To
be sure, I think research can be seen as an act of living, as a process that dips into
the experiential knowledge that is right there in our bodies—by virtue of the fact
that these bodies are themselves both intelligent and inside the world or of it.42 If
we pursue our intellectual, moral, and aesthetic hungers, our bodily felt interests,
and make a place in our experience for the otherness, the responsiveness, of life

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 208 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

itself—trusting in this—then we are researching in a manner quite different than

mainstream psychology.

Countering (Self-Contained, Rugged, Commodious, Possessive, Methodological) Indi-

vidualism. The self-contained individual celebrated in Western culture is generally
held by ecopsychologists to be a historical form of self thoroughly implicated in
the ecological crisis, and is to be contrasted with an ecological or interdependent
self.43 The rugged individual conquers and exploits the earth while the commo-
dious individual takes compulsive pleasure in consuming it.44 Both of these indi-
viduals are starkly Egocentric, so neither is able to enter into ecologically mature
relations with the world. The critique does not stop there, however, as psychology
has itself championed individualism, both as a cultural value and as a methodo-
logical principle.45 This means that for ecopsychology the discipline of psychology
must again be placed within the critical picture.46 As an example of the thor-
oughgoing transformation of psychology that needs to be undertaken if it is to
counter the ideology of individualism, I wish to consider here the recent book by
Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation. Watkins
and Shulman begin by noting: “Though we have been trained as psychologists, we
have each found it necessary to defect from professional interpretations focused
entirely on individuals and families, and on mental constructs separated from
the cultural, social, and economic worlds in which they are embedded.”47 Their
book is an exercise in rethinking the goals and practice of psychology in a world
traumatized by economic globalization, legacies of (neo)colonialism, ecological
ruination, war and genocide—all of which “mark this era as one requiring extraor-
dinary critical and reconstructive approaches.” Watkins and Shulman use as a
metaphor for their work the idea of “assisted regeneration,” a term they borrow
from an ecological practice that helps damaged lands recover biodiversity and
that is “based on a deep trust in the regenerative capacity of nature.” In short, in
the kind of psychology they advocate the psychologist is viewed less as an expert
with scientific models applied from the outside and more as a guide in creating
conditions in communities that free up the life in the people who dwell there to
creatively foster social and personal regeneration. “Here the role of the psycholo-
gist becomes that of a convener, a witness, a coparticipant, a mirror, and a holder
of faith for a process through which those who have been silenced may discover
their capacities for historical memory, critical analysis, utopian imagination, and
transformative social action.” Such a research approach “seeks to democratize the
generation of understanding” by placing the process of knowledge creation largely
in the hands of ordinary people working together. While empirical methods are
not excluded, this kind of psychology emphasizes research that is life-filled: partic-
ipatory, dialogical, artful, and action-oriented. Founded on an ethic of relatedness
and interdependence, and embracing the growing number of grassroots psycholo-
gies emerging on the margins of Western psychology around the world, it asks of

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 209

psychologists that they make themselves vulnerable. This includes being willing to
disrupt disciplinary boundaries, “allowing debates and research in disciplines such
as anthropology, education, performance studies, cultural studies, art, religion,
sociology, and philosophy to enrich theorizing about the practice and research
of psychology.” Finally, Watkins and Shulman highlight the devastating effects
of colonialism and globalization on human-place relations, insisting that libera-
tion psychologies “also be eco-liberation psychologies that attend to the mutual
interdependence of the natural and built environments, animals, and humans.”
In many respects, I think Watkins and Shulman have presented the psy-
chology of the future, given the radical nature of our times. Lest it be said, though,
that such cultural and community-oriented approaches deny the sovereignty or
dignity of the individual, I think what they propose actually achieves the opposite.
As I noted in chapter 4, anthropologists such as Tim Ingold observe that a sense of
individuality and autonomy may be strengthened by rich communal ties, whereas
it is the lonely, isolated individual of our own culture, suffering from a gnawing
emptiness and crippling doubts about their worth, who is prone to the defense of
mass conformity.48

Disclosing New or Alternative Ways of Being-in-the-World. I have described eco-

psychology as a hermeneutical project, in that it offers alternative interpretations
of nature and human nature. Borrowing loosely from Charles Spinosa, Fernado
Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus, we could say that one is called to interpret or disclose
our being-in-the-world differently than the mainstream when one experiences
historical discomfort—a discomfort with the understandings offered by one’s his-
torical epoch, including those, in this case, within mainstream psychology. In
order to resolve this discomfort, one must then turn to neighboring, historically
occluded, or marginal traditions in an effort to find practices that embody a dif-
ferent understanding of reality. Neighboring practices (e.g., from other cultures
or disciplines) may be “cross-appropriated,” past practices may be revived, or
marginal practices may be “recognized as important.”49 I believe this way of con-
ceiving the kind of interpretive process ecopsychology is engaged in helps clarify
further its non-mainstream character. Taking these three categories of practice in
turn, we may note the good reasons for engaging in each of them, as well as the
risks involved in doing so. With respect to cross-appropriating neighboring tradi-
tions, one immediately thinks of ecopsychology’s relationship with indigenous
cultures. The obvious reason for engaging with such cultures is to contact spiritual
traditions in which the natural world is viewed as animate or sacred; the risks,
meanwhile, are a delusory romanticism and cultural thievery. In terms of reviving
past practices—whether engaging in neo-paganism, recalling the experience of
the anima mundi, or using a scythe to cut the lawn—I see these as opportunities
to recollect transhistorical aspects of our nature and also to respond to the cur-
rent historical moment. The risk, again, is a certain romanticism (more on this

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 210 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

topic below). Finally, with respect to recognizing marginal practices as important,

this clearly speaks to the attraction many ecopsychologists feel to relatively non-
mainstream forms of psychology (e.g., depth, humanistic/experiential, transper-
sonal). Indeed, if ecopsychology is radical by nature then this attraction should
come as no surprise. Watkins and Shulman draw on non-Western psychologies
for good reason, while in the West itself it is precisely on the periphery of the
anthropocentric mainstream that one finds many schools of psychology with good
ecocentric potential (as I tried to show in this book). The greatest risk appears in
this instance when the practices involved are really marginal relative to the profes-
sional psychology, such as various forms of New Ageism. I think, however, that all
of the risks discussed here are simply part of the territory for ecopsychology, and
that a challenge for the field is to find skillful ways to address them.50 But the fact
that ecopsychology may seem “far out” to some does not in itself invalidate this
move into risky territory, for an ecologically transformed psychology is bound to
seem strange or unusual at first.51

Overcoming the Historical Displacement of the Aesthetic and Moral by the Cognitive
and Instrumental: Decolonizing the Lifeworld. Just as ecopsychologists are often
attracted to marginal modes of psychology, so do they tend to value modes or
regions of experience that have been pushed to the edges of psychological dis-
course: the sensuous, intuitive, emotional, spiritual, oneiric, mythological, ritu-
alistic, poetic, and so on.52 While the displacement of these modes is generally
attributed to the rise of the modern age, I want to introduce the idea here that
the culprit is not just some stationary worldview (scientific, rational, industrial,
etc.) that defines the age but rather a specific dynamic that steadily increases this
displacement, namely, the historical development of capitalism. This dynamic has
been examined in exhaustive detail by the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, whose
account of the colonization of the modern lifeworld by the capitalist political
economic system provides a highly persuasive interpretation both for validating
ecopsychology’s desire to recall marginalized regions of existence and for arguing
in favor of a radical politicization of psychology.53 For Habermas, the lifeworld is
the everyday world of cultural meanings and traditions, ethical attitudes, artistic
expressions, stories, social relations with nature, and so on. The system is that net-
work of money and power which parasitically draws the life out of the lifeworld,
relentlessly invading non-marketized regions of our lives and rechanneling them to
efficiently meet the needs of this system (an obvious example being the commodi-
fication of the Christmas celebration). Through this historical process, the three
main value spheres or orders of life—aesthetic-expressive, moral-practical, and
cognitive-instrumental—get split apart, with a cognitive-instrumental approach
to the subjective, social, and natural worlds coming more and more to dominate,
and with the aesthetic-expressive and moral-practical approaches to these worlds
increasingly diminished and degraded (so that now “greed is good”). As David

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 211

Kidner notes, for example, when art is no longer integrated into the lifeworld and
“becomes split off from nature in this way, it loses the ethical force which derives
from its capacity to express the order of nature, leaving a moral vacuum that
allows it to be quickly assimilated to economic relations,” thus trivializing the role
of art.54 According to Habermas, finally, a world ruled by cognitive-instrumental
rationality in service of the system gives rise to a number of social pathologies,
including a loss of shared meaning, a deepening sense of alienation and demorali-
zation, a spread of social disintegration and instability, and a growth in personal
suffering or psychopathology.55
Habermas’s critical theory invites a particular framing of radical politics,
wherein the realms of subjective and artistic experience, morality and practical
action, and science and reason are integrated, which simultaneously requires a
de-colonizing of the lifeworld or reclaiming of everyday life from the intrusions
of the system. The implications of such a politics for ecopsychology are, I think,
enormous. For if ecopsychology is to participate in the decolonization of the life-
world in its efforts to integrate psyche and nature then it is fair to point out how
psychology (as all science)56 has itself been colonized by the system and adopted
the dissociated cognitive-instrumental mentality used historically in the domina-
tion of (human) nature. The kind of psychology that would undo the dissociation
of aesthetics, morality, and science would have to operate much differently that
the psychology of our day, conceiving of itself more as a cultural and political
project and—as in the case of Watkins and Shulman’s liberation psychology—
adopting methods that include the full range of being human as opposed to that
portion allowed within value-neutral psychology. When one recognizes how
the trivializing of art, degrading of morality, and dehumanizing of science have
been good for none of these three,57 the idea of integrating them becomes highly
attractive. Indeed, as very challenging as it may seem, this way leads to a possible
­rapprochement between empiricism and its critics,58 for an empiricism that
included aesthetic and moral-political elements would be a form of science that
achieves distance from nature not just to manipulate it but rather simultaneously
to find more mature and beautiful ways of being in intimate relation with the
more-than-human.59 A hermeneutically sensitized empiricism will to my mind
always be needed for answering questions about relatively impersonal dimensions
of reality. But in a more integrated lifeworld it would no longer be for empiricism
alone to validate all truth claims. We could even argue that empirical findings
would themselves need to be validated subjectively, aesthetically, practically, or
ethically. On this note, it must be said that although conservation psychology does
lead with an ethic of care, such an ethic is not intrinsic to psychology when it is
still conceived as a scientific discipline. By contrast, for all approaches that adopt
an ecological, dialogical, or interrelational view of reality (e.g., hermeneutics,
feminist psychology, Indigenous methods, Buddhism, and, as I discuss below,
­dialectics), ethics are not added-on but inhere in the very fabric of how the world

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 212 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

is understood, with moral obligations to others being an unavoidable feature of

our interdependencies or kinship with one another. It is these kinds of approaches,
then, that I suggest are required in order to attempt a genuine decolonization of
the lifeworld.

Thinking and Practicing Dialectically. Within radical ecology and ecopsychology an

ecological worldview is often contrasted with a Newtonian-Cartesian one. Socialist
or Marxist theorists, as it happens, similarly oppose mechanistic and reductionistic
views of the world. A very positive development, to my mind, is the convergence
of ecological and socialist thought taking place due to the realization that in their
resistance to modern views of reality they share a dialectical view of reality. I shall
say more shortly about the meaning of dialectics, but consider first David Harvey’s
observation of “the remarkable commonality of the dialectics (as both ontology
and epistemology) present in Marx’s argumentation in, say, Capital, and those prof-
fered, in one form or another, across a fairly wide spectrum of ecological writings.”
Thus: “The alternative to the Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockeian view is given in a dia-
lectical ontology which can perhaps unify the Marxian tradition with the emerging
consensus about appropriate ontology in ecological theory.”60 John Bellamy Foster,
Brett Clark, and Richard York similarly note how ecological science is maturing
into what they call a dialectical critical realist ecology, wherein the conflict between
organismic idealist and mechanistic materialist ecologies is resolved.61 Alluding to
a line from Engels, Foster offers simply that “Ecology is the proof of dialectics.”62
This is not to say that a smooth synthesis of Marx and ecology has to date been
accomplished, though as Harvey suggests the potential is great. But why, in any
case, should this matter for ecopsychology? For me, ecopsychology must integrate
the social realm into its theory and practice because otherwise the transition to an
ecological society is a process external to ecopsychology. While ecopsychology has
focused on integrating psyche and nature, ecosocialism has critically integrated
society and nature better than any other tradition I am aware of.63 To integrate
psyche, nature, and society, then, I am proposing that one promising avenue is to
integrate ecopsychology and ecosocialism. Taking this path does, of course, mean
getting past a certain queasiness about Marxism. But as I discuss below I think this
queasiness has more to do with a history of anticommunist propaganda and with
a failure to make certain distinctions—between what Marx actually said (not all of
which, to be sure, is worth listening to), what has often disastrously been done or
said in his name, and what has recently been made of Marxism by ecosocialists—
than it does with the content of Marx’s philosophy itself.
Now, what exactly does dialectics refer to? The term has a long history from
early Greek philosophy, through Hegel, and on to Marx and more contemporary
formulations. At the risk of oversimplification, and noting that the field of dia-
lectics is by no means a univocal one, I wish here to briefly introduce three main
features of dialectics as these have been taken up in the tradition of Marx.64 First

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 213

of all, the subject matter of dialectics is change and interaction. Reality is viewed as
a process, with transformations occurring as various contradictions and comple-
mentarities in the world play themselves out (for better or worse) or as different
systems or moments of reality interact over the course of natural and human his-
tory (which are brought together in dialectical thought).65 The dialectical view
also corresponds to a radical political attitude that, seeing change as being in the
nature of things, actively pursues those social changes that would resolve specific
contradictions or injustices present in the world—in contrast to the conserva-
tive political attitude embodied in “the various forms of non-dialectical thinking
[which] can always be identified as so many strategies for containing, repressing,
or naturalizing contradictions as such.”66 (Thus, for example, orthodox eco-
nomics contains a status quo politics because it theorizes the economy in terms
of a static equilibrium, thereby hiding the grave contradictions that generate the
crisis-prone dynamics within the capitalist system, and making it unable ever to
explain or anticipate such events as the Great Depression or Great Recession).67
Among other possibilities, these ideas—about the thoroughly processual and
political nature of our reality—give us a way to think about ecopsychology itself,
viewing the transformation in psychology that it stands for as a politically radical
creative emergence at a particular moment in history as psychology dialectically
returns to nature.
The second feature of dialectics is that it is based on a philosophy of internal
relations.68 Here is where the ecological character of dialectics is perhaps most
evident, as this philosophy perceives reality entirely in terms of interrelationships
and looks for interconnections where they are usually not seen. This is moreover
an aspect of dialectics that makes it difficult to grasp, for when things are viewed
as relations rather than as self-contained entities they can never be identical with
themselves, all phenomena being present or implied in one another in some
fashion (recall Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh and Gendlin’s philosophy
of experiencing, both of which have this dialectical quality).69 At the same time,
because opposites internally relate they are seen as having a certain identity (e.g.,
causes are effects—organisms, for example, are both causes and effects of their
environments).70 The radical implications of this philosophy are many, but one
important topic we may return to is that of the subject/object dualism. As dis-
cussed above, subject and object form a differentiated unity. But what socialists
stress is not so much developing subjectivity alone as changing the objective social
conditions in which our subjectivity lives, transforming ourselves by transforming
the world, understanding the world by changing it and thereby ourselves. I will
have more to say about this angle in discussions ahead, but if ecopsychology is
indeed committed to overcoming dualism then I suggest it must include thinking
of this sort, wherein the development of the object side of the subject-object
­interrelation or dialectic is also considered.

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 214 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

The final aspect of dialectics I wish to consider is expressed by the ­ecosocialist

Joel Kovel: “As a praxis, dialectics implies an ethic as well as a method. . . .
Dialectics is inherently emancipatory; it allows otherness its presence and wel-
comes difference even as it eschews relativism.”71 Harvey similarly notes that
“the central motif of dialectical praxis” is not deduction or induction but rather
“the exploration of potentialities for change,” the creation of greater unities, with
“ethical, moral, and political choices” built into its processes and power plays.72
Because dialectics chooses to attend, “within the manifold of life processes, to
forms of becoming, creativity, and contingency, as opposed to those of being,
stability, and predictability,”73 it is less focused on statistical relations within a
known world than on creating conditions for a world that could be or that is ready
to emerge. Ecopsychology’s commitment to the emancipation of natural other-
ness and to an ecological revolution, to the emergence of an ecological society,
obviously fits with such praxis. Indeed, an ecological society is a future society in
which dialectical thinking has become common sense.

Insisting on Interdisciplinarity and Counterdisciplinarity: Ecopsychology as Project.

As the final aspect of ecopsychology I wish to discuss in distinguishing it from
the mainstream, I characterize ecopsychology as inherently interdisciplinary74
and so not reducible to a single discipline such as psychology. Whereas con-
servation psychology may wish to collaborate or network with other scientific
disciplines, or even foster cross-fertilizations, I suggest that ecopsychology, as
a transformation of psychology, must range far more freely outside of disci-
plinary boundaries for both intellectual and political reasons, releasing itself
from a conventional psychological identity.75 To begin with, recall that in dis-
closing new ways of being-in-the-world, the neighboring traditions one might
cross-appropriate include other disciplines. We saw this in the case of Watkins
and Shulman’s liberation psychology. In its studying of the interior side of the
human-nature relationship, ecopsychology may similarly incorporate disciplines
or fields such as fine art, literary ecology, environmental history, environmental
education, human geography, ecological anthropology, philosophy, social
theory, and the various radical and scientific ecologies.76 This means engaging
with the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of these fields, which may
not always resemble those of mainstream psychology. It also involves dialecti-
cally allowing for creative interactions, metamorphoses, and shifting boundary
lines. Tim Ingold, for instance, argues that the intellectual justification for dis-
tinguishing anthropology from psychology falls once an ecological or “agent-
in-the-environment” approach is adopted.77 Ecopsychology in this sense is far
more of an intellectual adventure than would currently be permitted by normal
scientific psychology.
In addition to interdisciplinarity, ecopsychology implies counterdiscipli-
narity.78 By this I mean a protest against the disciplinary specialization that has

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 215

fragmented and insulated knowledge within the academy, preventing radical

interconnections from being made and thus a deeper understanding of our total
situation from being developed. As the dialectical biologists Richard Lewontin
and Richard Levins suggest: “Narrowness and pragmatism are characteristic of the
dominant ways of thought under capitalism, where the individualism of economic
man is a model for the autonomy and isolation of all phenomena.”79 If we hope
one day to inhabit an integrated lifeworld, where internal relations are prioritized
over external, and the alienation of science is overcome, then we must for political
reasons overcome the dissociation of the disciplines. While some have read me as
calling ecopsychology a project because it has yet to firm up into a discipline, my
perspective is actually that ecopsychology is inherently a project, the very opposite
of a discipline.
Having surveyed these seven characteristics of ecopsychology that stand out
for me, I need to clarify that I am not proposing them as the seven dimensions of
ecopsychology. There are others I could name, and other ecopsychologists would
of course identify different or additional ones. The exercise was purely one of
illustration. In particular, I wanted to show not only that ecopsychology implies
a radical reworking of psychology, but also that sound scholarly traditions are
available for this task (with good ways to evaluate the research it produces).80 My
constant impression is that ecopsychology is even more radical that I have been
able to say. I propose, in this spirit, that we reserve the term ecopsychology for the
kind of radical undertaking just sketched.

The Ecopsychology Journal and “Second Generation” Ecopsychology

Within the scholarly world, fields do not effectively exist unless they have a journal.
It was thus a good day when the Ecopsychology journal came into being in 2009.
The editor Thomas Joseph Doherty, being mindful of the “decade-long . . . ‘cold
war’ between ecopsychology and mainstream psychology and related fields like
environmental studies,”81 envisioned the journal as a forum for bridging these var-
ious camps and so ending the standoff between them. To get the bridge building
going, he distinguished between what he called first-generation and second-­
generation ecopsychology, making it the mission of the journal to lay the founda-
tions for the latter. According to Doherty, first-generation ecopsychology can be
characterized as: countercultural (offering an alternative to mainstream Western
culture); holistic (connecting the needs of person and planet); ecocentric (having
earth-based values and commitments to the tradition of deep ecology); experien-
tial and nature-based (stressing firsthand sensuous participation in nature); and
romantic in its worldview (“valuing psychological depth, passion, intuition, the
soul, and the stereotypically feminine [i.e., versus rational, scientific, competi-
tive, and stereotypic male attributes of the enlightenment and modernism]”).82

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 216 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

Doherty also noted the “explicitly therapeutic focus” of first-generation ecopsy-

chology and its offering of critiques of mainstream psychology while bringing
to light certain “perspectives and practices underrepresented in mainstream, aca-
demic settings in the US,” such as gestalt, depth, feminist, and transpersonal psy-
chology, wilderness-based therapy, and indigenous shamanic practices.
Doherty proposed second-generation ecopsychology as a way to address
its “outsider status,” revisioning ecopsychology so as to bring it “into alignment”
with “existing research and practice within psychology.”83 Such a psychology
“honors its countercultural origins without being limited by them, accepts that
one can work within the system while also challenging the status quo, and rec-
ognizes that tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive.”84
Doherty proposed three characteristics important for second-generation ecopsy-
chology. The first, self-reflection, is necessary to address potential blind spots
in the field. He suggests, in this respect, that first-generation ecopsychology’s
opposition to mainstream psychology wound up perpetuating a set of dualisms
(research/practice, empirical/intuitive, cognition/emotion) that “constrained
ecopsychology’s development and inhibited dialogue with potential collabo-
rators.” The second, pluralism, is necessary because there are manifold ways
ecopsychology may be understood. Doherty sees the journal in this regard as a
forum that is inclusive of a large number of perspectives while also maintaining
“the highest standards of scholarship.” The third characteristic, pragmatism,
focuses ecopsychology “on achievable ideals and useful, observable outcomes in
the present day.” This includes fostering a “creative commons” among the dif-
ferent schools or disciplines of psychology, various therapeutic approaches, and
other fields addressing the human-nature relationship. It also includes “open-
ness to empiricism,” acknowledging that empirical findings can lend support in
such areas as ecopsychology’s experiential practices and conceptions of self, and
that such findings have already helped engender the children and nature move-
ment that addresses what Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder.” Following
Doherty’s lead, a number of professional psychologists are now identifying as
ecopsychologists or at least participating under the ecopsychology heading,
taking up the mission of providing the field with scholarship recognizable to
psychologists.85
Doherty is of course addressing the same conflict between mainstream and
radical or alternative approaches I discussed under the previous two headings.
His attitude toward “first generation” ecopsychology, however, is different than
mine. While he and I share a concern over the development of ecopsychology, he
proposes a revisioning of it through a turn toward the psychological mainstream
whereas I propose a more complete realizing of it through radical and extra-
psychological traditions of scholarship. All of Doherty’s concerns about the first
wave of ecopsychology can in my view be met by carrying through on the ecolo-
gizing of psychology to a degree that has yet to be achieved. The risk of pursuing

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 217

a second generation ecopsychology, furthermore, is that it will renormalize

ecopsychology.86 In other words, rather than face the uncomfortable demand
I believe is implicit in ecopsychology to give birth to something quite unlike
conventional psychology, the field will to some significant degree return to the
familiar or normal style of doing psychology and thereby lose contact with the
original call of ecopsychology and grow deaf to the valid (if undeveloped) criti-
cisms of psychology that ecopsychologists have made. Doherty wishes to guard
against losing the first-generation spirit of ecopsychology, but I am not confident
the second-generation formulation has the strength to do this. In order to make
this point further, let us consider what a radically conceived ecopsychology would
say in regard to each of the three features of second-generation ecopsychology
introduced by Doherty.
On the topic of self-reflection, first, I believe the reflections I offered under
the previous heading demonstrate how a radicalized ecopsychology could address
not only Doherty’s concern about a reactionary or divisive tendency in some quar-
ters of ecopsychology but also larger political economic concerns. For ecopsy-
chology to reflect on these latter concerns, moreover, it needs to do so in the arena
of ecology, not just psychology. I think, in fact, that ecopsychology has been weak
here, remaining vague on the whole about its political ecological commitments
due in part to its overidentification with psychology. Consider, in this regard, the
suggestion by Foster, Clark, and York that the environmental movement’s focus
on technological fixes and market mechanisms is a strategy of denial because it
evades the central place of capitalist social relations in the ecological crisis and
“serves the vested interests of those who have the most to lose from a change in
economic relations.”87 A dialectical approach would also identify the illusion that
the ecological crisis is at base a problem of simple consumer behavior, given that
consumption internally relates with a system of production that is itself far more
consumptive of the earth than are households, that organizes society in a way
that itself generates specific consumption needs, and that molds consumeristic
behavior through aggressive marketing and other colonizing means as a way to
sell the commodities it must overproduce in order to keep accumulating capital.88
For me, the goal of radical ecology is exactly to name such forms of denial and
illusion, and I think it is important not to reproduce them within ecopsychology,
of all places.89 Doherty notes, in this respect, that the “second-generation perspec-
tive is influenced by developments in the environmental movement itself,” but
he makes this point by referring to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger,90
who subscribe to a green capitalist, technocratic approach, as opposed to the more
critical approaches offered within the radical ecology movement. While there is
much talk of psychology’s role in fostering sustainable behavior, what is gener-
ally meant by sustainability is to preserve the capitalist world economic system,
that is, to somehow deal with the ecological crisis while maintaining our current
form of society, without fundamentally disrupting existing economic and political

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 218 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

arrangements.91 This leaves no room for genuine praxis toward an ecological

society. I believe, then, that reflections of this nature would set a more politically
radical agenda for ecopsychology.
Pluralism, next, is probably the greatest strength and the central feature of
second-generation ecopsychology. This includes making room for multiple modes
of knowing, which means the journal is in principle opposed to the “methodologism”
that insists on a strict application of experimental-statistical or empirical-statistical
methodology to all research questions regardless of the subject matter.92 The spirit
of inclusion that Doherty has established also means that those who see ecopsy-
chology as a radical project now have a welcoming scholarly forum. For all this,
I think the problem with the pluralistic approach as practiced here is that the
meaning of ecopsychology, what is distinctive or unique about it, tends to get
washed out. It is one thing to invite multiple perspectives; it is another to discern
which of these are truer to the nature of ecopsychology. Which ones use an eco-
logical/dialectical ontology versus a dualistic or environmental one? Which ones
interpret the earth as ensouled, with its own subjectivity, versus viewing it prima-
rily as a psychological resource? Which ones are actively committed to the praxis of
building an ecological society versus the mainstream environmentalism aimed at
untenable or unreflective notions of sustainability?93 One need not be exclusionary
in answering these questions. I believe, for example, that the environmental psy-
chologists David Uzzell and Nora Räthzel aim at an ecological society when they
step out of the mainstream to argue in dialectical fashion for a “transformed envi-
ronmental psychology.” Such a psychology would analyze relations of production
and support personal empowerment, democracy, and conscious political action.
Uzzell and Räthzel also criticize conservation psychology for viewing nature as
separate from society rather than seeing how the human-nature relationship is
socially produced.94 My emphasis, then, is on differentiating various positions
in relation to the ecopsychological project regardless of their origin. Doherty’s
stress on inclusion versus mine on differentiation is perhaps most evident in his
query about whether conventional and radical versions of ecopsychology can
coexist.95 My own reply is that a mainstream ecopsychology could not in fact be
­ecopsychological unless the mainstream itself radically changed course.96
Pragmatism, finally, means aiming at real world outcomes. The common
criticism of pragmatism, however, is that its focus is too narrow or piecemeal and
that it eschews larger critical analysis. I would therefore propose instead the notion
of praxis, by which I mean a dialectic between theory and practice that preserves
the aim of real world change but that marries this with radical reflection. I think
here of the standpoint feminist theory of Sandra Harding, in which she introduces
the idea of “strong objectivity” as against the “weak objectivity” produced by con-
ventional science when it attempts to separate facts from values, the positive from
the normative. For Harding, stronger objectivity is won through stronger reflex-
ivity about the historical and material background, the hidden social prejudices,

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 219

within the research situation. As she writes: “The history of science shows that
research directed by maximally liberatory social interests and values tends to be
better equipped to identify partial claims and distorting assumptions” present
within science.97 Foster, Clark, and York argue in this respect that, ironically,
social science is on the whole hamstrung in its ability to be critical of society
because “both its analysis and what is deemed acceptable/unacceptable tends to
be filtered through the dominant institutions and structures. . . . Getting ahead
in the academy . . . all too often involves self-censorship, a narrow focus on the
relatively inconsequential, and leaving the big stuff—in terms of social change—
off the table.” In the specific matter of the ecological crisis, “the more pressing
the environmental problem has become and the more urgent the call for eco-
logical revolution has been articulated, the more quiescent social scientists seem
to have become on the topic, searching for a kind of remediation of the problem,
in which real change will not be required.”98 In this light, my hope for the journal
is that it may indeed support “real change” by encouraging scholars to resist the
academic politics and class interests that immobilize social scientists,99 and also
by holding out an image of the overall project of ecopsychology, including its
relationship with the radical ecology movement, that could lend the journal a
unifying political drive. In recognizing that the conversation about what counts
as ecopsychology has not been settled, and in creating a space with the journal to
carry out this conversation, I believe that Doherty is doing ecopsychology a great
service. Much will depend on how that conversation goes.

Ecotherapy: The Question of Praxis

Ecotherapy is ecopsychology’s success story. Mainstream psychologists such as

Reser, Koger, and Winter endorse it, noting the impressive and growing body of
evidence for the therapeutic effects of contact with the living world and the need
for clinicians to validate the distress that people experience over the ruination of
the earth.100 Universities are now starting to offer schooling in ecotherapy, such as
the Ecotherapy Certificate program at John F. Kennedy University and the Ecopsy-
chology in Counseling Certificate program at Lewis and Clark Graduate School
(which has an ultimate “mission of creating license-eligible and employable coun-
selors who are prepared to effectively engage the pressing social and environmental
issues of our time”).101 The Ecotherapy primer edited by Linda Buzzell and Craig
Chalquist remains popular, with Buzzell heading up the International Associa-
tion for Ecotherapy. Buzzell and Chalquist call ecotherapy “an umbrella term for
nature-based methods of physical and psychological healing” and “a new form of
psychotherapy” that “addresses the critical fact that people are intimately connected
with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature.”102 Among other
approaches, the primer covers nature-inclusive psychotherapy, animal-assisted

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 220 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

psychotherapy, ecological dreamwork, wilderness work, horticultural therapy,

therapy for traumatized nonhuman animals, the psychology of peak oil and climate
change, ecospirituality, shamanism, and community- and place-based perspectives.
The children and nature movement (detailed in Louv’s Last Child in the Woods) is
also associated with ecotherapy, drawing on research on children that demonstrates
the power of “green time” to relieve symptoms of ADHD, foster creativity, buffer
against stressful life events, build self-worth, and so on.103 In all cases, ecotherapy
relies on evoking the “mind-body-world web,” which, as Buzzell and Chalquist
note, “contains its own freely available healing potentials.”104
So, how would a radically conceived ecopsychology think about ecotherapy?
In a word: dialectically. Psychotherapy or clinical psychology is the main worldly
practice of psychology, so it makes sense that the practice of ecopsychology would
initially be framed as a kind of therapy that negates the anthropocentrism of our
culture and opens the door to a healing recollection of our earthen nature. That
ecotherapy is “astoundingly effective”105 is of course heartening (though for ecops-
ychologists not surprising), as is the growing interest in and variety of approaches
to it. And yet I think it is still important to critically reflect on the matter of eco-
therapy so that we may support the continued evolution or dialectical unfolding
of the practice of ecopsychology.
Any mode of thought and practice, including psychotherapy, corresponds
to and is constrained by the specific form of society in which it is enstructured. For
me, it is therefore important to imagine a different kind of society—an ecological
society—and then to create practices that are transitional and more appropriate to
it.106 I think some of ecotherapy fits this bill, but much of it does not, or at least
does so to a relatively minor degree. From this angle, the task is to sort through the
field of ecotherapy to see which aspects are worth preserving and carrying forward
and which need to be questioned due to the contradictions with ecopsychology
they still contain. This task of reflection is necessary, moreover, because eco-
therapy is often thought to be the same thing as ecopsychology. In their anthology
Identity and the Natural Environment, for example, psychologists Susan Clayton
and Susan Opotow write that ecopsychology “represents a therapeutic orientation
which holds that humans need to rediscover their ties to the natural world in order
to experience full mental health.”107 This definition risks making the research
and theory of ecopsychology mostly about “mental health” (e.g., the psycho-
logical benefits of wilderness experience) instead of the kind of transformational
exercise I discussed above. Although Buzzell and Chalquist define ­ecotherapy
as applied ecopsychology, the sense of what ecopsychology actually stands for
in the Ecotherapy primer is quite limited.108 Without a more comprehensive
picture of what in fact is being applied, the dialectic between theory and prac-
tice rather collapses. If ecopsychology is about such things as decolonizing and
reintegrating the lifeworld, institutionalizing new disclosures of our relationship
with the earth, building a culture of interdependence, and creating subjective

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 221

conditions for a postcapitalist ecological society, then how exactly is ecotherapy, as

the practice of ecopsychology, going about meeting these goals? Since first writing
this book I have come to think that the practical and critical tasks I identified in
chapter 1 need to be more tightly integrated, so as to generate radical praxes that
offer “therapy” that is as much cultural and social as personal.109 I do not mean to
suggest by this that social and cultural issues are entirely absent from the minds or
activities of practicing ecotherapists. Of note here, the philosophy statement for
the ecopsychology counseling program at Lewis and Clark includes the idea that
because the stance of ecopsychology “ultimately confronts institutionalized forms
of environmental degradation and injustice, and requires speaking truth to power,
the therapeutic focus of ecopsychology ultimately becomes a political one.”110
I nonetheless believe that further critical reflection by the field of ecopsychology
as a whole is needed so that we do not delude ourselves about the nature of our
practice and so that we can unite or gather around a good image of the political
challenges that our subject matter poses to us.
A straightforward question I ask in sorting through the field of ecotherapy
is: In what ways and to what extent does a given practice address the roots of the
ecological crisis? This is the radical question. There have been many efforts over
the years to make the therapist’s office a site of revolution but the world does not
seem to have noticed. Can ecotherapy be different? Will it encourage the building
of cultural and social forms that both integrate psyche and nature and counter
the ecodestructive dynamics of the current system? Perhaps it will. But I think
radical ecopsychological theory—much more than is available at present—is nec-
essary to answer these questions in a satisfactory way and to steer the practice
of ecopsychology in new directions. Consider, along these lines, David Kidner’s
article “Depression and the Natural World: Towards a Critical Ecology of Psycho-
logical Distress.” Calling for an ecologizing of critical psychology, Kidner links the
epidemic of depression sweeping through the industrialized world to the deforma-
tions of selfhood imposed by the current economic system and to a loss in our
relationship with the wider natural world that is not consciously felt because it
is ideologically denied by the system. In making his arguments, Kidner quotes
Martin Seligman: “[A]n individualism without commitment to the commons
produces depression and meaninglessness on a massive scale.”111 What ­Kidner’s
analysis of the ecological and ideological roots of depression invites is (among
other things) a public or collective process of the sort discussed by Watkins and
Shulman, an instance of what Ignacio Martín-Baró called de-ideologization, in
which, in this case, our capacity for experiencing resonance with the more-than-
human natural world is evoked, our implicitly felt losses are given symbolic expres-
sion, and the nature of the system is exposed. An example in this vein is the Altars
of Extinction project, described by the ecopsychologist Mary Gomes as “an artistic
and ritual memorial that provides opportunities to collectively contemplate and
grieve the extinction of plant, animal, and fungal species at human hands.”112

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 222 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

While only a single effort, I believe this project could act as a seed for a larger
ecopsychological art politics, a form of cultural therapy inviting awareness of and
recommitment to the commons. I wish to compare it, in any event, to some other
forms of ecotherapy that take a less critical attitude. George Burns’s “nature-guided
therapy” is a pragmatic approach to therapy that uses sensory outdoor experiences
to increase pleasure and foster a general sense of wellness, helping clients to “reach
their desired therapeutic goals in the quickest and most effective manner.”113 In
other words, sensory stimuli from the environment are among the therapist’s tools
in an otherwise conventional therapeutic practice. While there is much to appre-
ciate about Burns’s approach, I do not think it leads us to an ecological society or
to critical ecological consciousness (or, given its use of dualistic scientific language,
to an ecological understanding of reality). In short, I find minimal ecopsychology
in it, as I use the term, because it goes only a small distance toward the roots.
As another example, the British mental health charity Mind published a report
calling “for a new green agenda for mental health, following the growing evidence
in support of an accessible, cost-effective and natural addition to existing treat-
ment options—ecotherapy.”114 The projects covered in the report are universally
inspiring, including the use of “care farms” where people experiencing psycholog-
ical distress work periodically for a farmer who is then paid for providing a health
service. What is missing from the report, however, is any query along the lines
presented by Kidner about the political economic background or origins of peo-
ple’s distress now being treated at the care farm (why, for instance, is there a rising
epidemic of depression in advanced capitalist nations, while it is virtually absent
among modern-day hunter-gatherers?).115 Indeed, ecotherapy is presented as a
way of saving the health care system money by reducing prescription drug costs.
While the ecotherapeutic approaches presented by Burns and Mind are clearly an
improvement on office-bound and pharmacologically driven treatments, I believe
that ecopsychological critical theory asks us to go farther.
Consider, as a second example of how a critical perspective sheds light on
ecotherapy, the psychologist Bruce Alexander’s dislocation theory of addiction.
A leading researcher on the psychology of addiction, Alexander found that the
riddle of addiction is solved only by viewing it historically and anthropologically.
In brief, he demonstrates that wherever free-market capitalism goes, addiction
follows in its wake. Alexander’s explanation for this relation—­echoing Haber-
mas’s theory of the colonization of the lifeworld—is that capitalism and psycho-
social disintegration are synonymous. “‘Psychosocial integration’ is a profound
interdependence between individual and society that normally grows and
develops throughout each person’s lifespan. Psychosocial integration reconciles
people’s vital needs for social belonging with their equally vital needs for indi-
vidual autonomy and achievement.”116 It refers to an integrated lifeworld with
traditions that hold people in place. By contrast, psychosocial disintegration or

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 223

historical dislocation refers to the process of alienation built into the system of
capital: “[T]raditional sources of psychosocial integration in every type of society
came to be identified as ‘market distortions’ that had to be eliminated. [Thus,]
the ideal form of free-market society would inevitably create universal disloca-
tion.” Defining addiction broadly to include not only drugs and alcohol, but
also gambling, work, power seeking, religious or political zeal, Internet surfing,
video game playing, pornography viewing, “love,” food, shopping, and so on,
Alexander characterizes it by a devotion to narrow, distress-based lifestyles that
substitute for psychosocial integration. Thus: “Free-market society can no more
be addiction-free than it can be free of intense competition, income disparity,
environmental destruction, unequal access to life-saving medical care, or dis-
honest business practices.” Drawing on Alexander and other sources, Lorraine
Fish similarly defines addiction as a “cultural disorder brought about by mas-
sive societal upheaval and geographical dislocation, resulting in a culturally
dysfunctional relationship with self, community, and the natural world.”117
Given that addiction is best viewed as a social pathology, Alexander suggests
that addressing addiction means “reorganizing the practices of addiction profes-
sionals within a larger social project.” The question here is whether ecotherapy
practices for healing addiction, such as outdoor behavioral healthcare programs
for youth, are actually organizing themselves for such a necessary social project.
I think Chellis Glendinning’s account of heroin addiction and recovery in the
New Mexico village of Chimayó is instructive in thinking about this. Glendin-
ning describes a community-focused approach that uses indigenous land-based
traditions in successfully coming to grips with the severe state of dislocation,
caused by a brutal history of capitalism and colonialism, underlying Chimayó’s
horrific heroin problem. Highlighting the importance of addressing addiction
at the level of cultural ownership and community empowerment, Glendinning
notes that “healing is one and the same as the work of decolonization.”118
What I hope these few brief examples illustrate is the need to include
political education and processes in the practice of ecopsychology, given that the
social and cultural roots of ecological and psychological crisis run deep. I am
not proposing, however, that the practice of ecopsychology aim simply at moti-
vating people to engage in existing forms of political or environmental activism
(a strategy more characteristic of environmental and conservation psychology).
Ecopsychology is to my mind still a psychological politics, working on the level
of subjectivity, and so needs to develop novel forms of social intervention that are
themselves ecopsychological, incorporating the poetics, healing, earth celebration,
ritual, care for the human lifecycle, rites of passage, embodiment, ecospirituality,
and so on that it is known for. The challenge is to shape these interventions so
that they are deliberate efforts at decolonization, at psychosocial integration, at
building an ecological society.

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 224 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

Integral Ecology: Agreements and Disagreements

I turn now to the vexed issue of situating ecopsychology relative to Integral

Ecology and to the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber that acts as its template. Inte-
gral Ecology is a project to unite virtually all perspectives on the natural world,
including ecopsychology, by organizing them in terms of Wilber’s self-described
theory of everything. Wilber himself has launched some harsh criticisms of ecopsy-
chology, especially as found in the writings of Theodore Roszak, calling it regressive
and romantic and confused about the nature of interior development and tran-
scendence.119 The authors of Integral Ecology, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Michael
Zimmerman, while taking a softer tone, repeat these criticisms. I wish to offer a
reply and to comment further on the relationship between Integral Ecology and
ecopsychology, but am faced with certain difficulties. The Integral Ecology authors
explicitly chose not to include a critical appraisal of Integral Theory,120 so we must
go behind their backs to the voluminous writings of Wilber himself if we wish to
make one. It is difficult to comment on the work of Wilber, however, because in
presuming to speak about “everything” he covers an enormous amount of ground
and raises very complex issues that beg further treatment and scholarly evaluation.
His at times hyberbolic and sarcastic style can also make it challenging to sort out
and appreciate his positions. As a strategy to deal with these difficulties, as well as
with the limited space available in this chapter, I have chosen to offer comments
aimed primarily at marking out places where I believe theoretical and political
issues are at stake and further dialogue is warranted. My view in general is that there
is much both to agree and disagree with in Integral Theory and Ecology, and that
answering the strong positions of Integralists will force ecopsychologists to clarify
and (re)formulate their own positions. On the one hand, I believe that Integralism
breaks out of the prison of mainstream disciplinary scholarship in a way that is
often refreshing, well argued, and illuminating. In this sense, it is an ally to ecopsy­
chology. On the other hand, I believe that Esbjörn-Hargens and ­Zimmerman
maintain to a large degree specific Wilberian biases that prevent Integral Ecology
from being radical precisely in the recollective and critical respects I discussed
in the preface to this book. In this sense, Integral Ecology illustrates why it is
important to continue pursuing the idea of ecopsychology as a radical project.
The central image of Integral Theory is the “AQAL” diagram developed by
Wilber, a simplified version of which follows. This is Wilber’s map of everything. The
upper quadrants refer to the individual aspects of reality, the lower to the collective; the
left side refers to the interior dimensions, the right side to the exterior. The upper left
(UL) quadrant thus covers all reality of an interior and individual sort (the “I” domain
of subjective intentions); the lower left (LL) of an interior and collective sort (the “we”
domain of culture); the upper right (UR) of an exterior and individual sort (the “it”
domain of objective behavior); and the lower right (LR) of an exterior and collective
sort (the “its” domain of objective social reality). The arrows in the diagram indicate

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 225

From Integral Ecology, by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, PhD, and Michael Zimmerman, PhD,
©2009 by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman. Reprinted by arrangement with
Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.

increasing levels of development or evolution in each of the four quadrants. For humans
in the UL quadrant, for example, this covers a spectrum of consciousness from the most
infantile to the most spiritually attained, with the UR quadrant indicating the corre-
sponding rise in complexity of behavior and anatomy. In the lower quadrants, the arrows
refer to cultural and social evolution, human and otherwise. Nature appears in this dia-
gram in three senses. “NATURE” is depicted as the entire diagram, that is, all levels of
development in all quadrants of reality (All Quadrants, All Levels = AQAL); “Nature”
as the right side of the diagram, which is to say, the empirical, sensory world studied
by science; and “nature” as those relatively low levels of development located closest
to the center of the diagram, for instance, the sensory body as opposed to the rational
mind, or the biosphere as opposed to the noosphere (the sphere of mind, language,
technology, etc.). Despite that these four quadrants can be differentiated, the diagram
is meant to indicate that any phenomenon includes all four of them, with correspond-
ences or correlations across all the quadrants. Thus, there is no separating our con-
sciousness (UL) from our behavior (UR) and from the culture (LL) and society (LR) in
which we live.
There are many uses to which this diagram can be put, but I will highlight
two arenas in which I think ecopsychology and Integralism are fruitfully in accord
(even if disagreements can also be found in these places). First, it shows that the

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 226 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

scientific materialism of the modern age has ignored or eliminated the interior,
lefthand (L-H) side of the Kosmos, reducing reality to the exterior, righthand
(R-H) side (the cosmos). The first chapter in Integral Ecology is entitled “The
Return of Interiority,” which suggests how Integralism seeks to be a corrective to
the modern exteriority bias. This return involves legitimizing methods other than
R-H scientific ones,121 bringing subjectivity on its own terms into our analyses of
the world, including the level or depth of psychological development reflected in
various actions or worldviews. According to Wilber:

[T]he real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is
how to get people to internally transform from egocentric to sociocentric to world-
centric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimen-
sions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even
eagerly, embrace global solutions. . . . [A]bout these interior transformations, and
all the intricate psychological changes necessary in order to effect them, the Eco
camps have virtually nothing to say. . . . [T]heir understanding of interior dynamics
and development is incredibly anemic; thus they are contributing little to the real
changes that have to occur in order to “save Gaia.”122

Wilber criticizes the “Eco camp” for adopting R-H web-of-life or systems ­theoretical
approaches to nature on the assumption that this alone will transform conscious-
ness, rather than the difficult work of interior development. I agree with this criti-
cism to some extent, which is why in this book I introduced phenomenology,
hermeneutics, and other L-H approaches. However, I also aimed to demonstrate
that what defines ecopsychology is precisely the view that the ecological crisis has a
subjective or interior dimension and that psychospiritual work is a necessary con-
dition for building an ecological society. In ecopsychological circles, practices for
interior development are pervasive. It is Joanna Macy’s genius to see that we cannot
face the devastating realities of our times without the strengthening provided by
spiritual commitment. The transpersonal ecopsychologist John Davis even incor-
porates Wilber’s work.123 I think, then, that we can all get on the same page and
agree that the theme of interiority is crucial in these and many other respects,
including: recognizing the unavoidability of subjectivity in research and so making
the argument for interior development or soul education among researchers,124 as
well as for remaining humble about our inevitable blind spots; challenging the aca-
demic world’s typical discomfort with spirituality and putting back on the scholarly
table the notion that our essential work as human beings is to grow in spirit; and
returning to the world the depth or meaning that people hunger for (Wilber is a
“pan-interiorist,” seeing some manner of interiority or depth in all reality, while
Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman suggest that “any ecological system is a com-
plex eco-social system whose members not only exhibit behaviors but also possess
­interiors that comprise overlapping horizons of culture”).125

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 227

The second feature of Integralism on display in the AQAL diagram that

suits ecopsychology is its explicit focus on being comprehensive and integrative.126
This was my own intention in this book and I believe such an approach is implied
in the mission of ecopsychology, with its focus on nonduality and integration.
The diagram offers a useful visual, furthermore, of the omnipresence of cultural
and social moments in psychological phenomena, reminding us to think beyond
individual subjectivity and behavior and so to reach for disciplines and fields that
study or engage these collective regions. Introducing a sociological angle on psy-
chology, for example, Marx famously described the self as an “ensemble of social
relations.” By making a space for culture and society in psychology, as well as for
nature, Integralism in fact offers an environment much more conducive to eco-
radicalism than that of mainstream psychology. It can be used, for example, to
show that (as anthropologists tell us) behavior takes place within channels that
culture makes available. Attempting to foster sustainable behavior within a cul-
tural clearing that reveals the world in a manner incompatible with this is then
to ignore an important root. Finally, by showing that many perspectives are pos-
sible on any chosen topic, the AQAL diagram supports resistance to “method
hegemony,”127 inviting a plurality of methods instead.
Having sketched some areas of alliance or overlap between ecopsychology
and Integralism, the discussions that follow cover some areas of disagreement.
Although Integral Theory and Ecology do make helpful challenges and distinc-
tions in these places, I believe that Wilber’s valuable spiritual/interior corrective
becomes in the end also a misleading spiritual/interior prejudice. This prevents
the Integral approach from being able to embrace or recollect truly the material
earth or to integrate properly a materialist (LR) conception of history and society
(and thus to take a fully critical stance toward the system of capital, a stance
sorely missing among Integralists). While ecopsychology can gain in important
ways from an encounter with Integral Ecology, I thus suggest that the latter could
­likewise benefit from an encounter with radically conceived ecopsychology.

The Charge of Eco-Romanticism: Recognizing Indigenous Peoples and Ecologizing

the Spectrum of Consciousness. In Wilber’s 1995 book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality,
he ­initiated a polemic against those “Eco-Romantics” or “retro-Romantics”
whose prescription for getting back to nature amounts in his view to irra-
tional regression, whether this be regression in time to a supposed Lost Para-
dise or psychological regression to a self-involved state in which nature becomes
“nature as it makes me feel” or “nature as narcissistic reflecting pond.”128 Wilber’s
antiromantic stance was then taken up by Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman in
their Integral Ecology. I believe this is a very important discussion for ecopsycholo-
gists because it pushes us to avoid the dangers identified by Wilber and to articu-
late theoretic positions that can meet the charge of Eco-Romanticism. Although
I did address the “you can’t go back” argument in this book,129 my thinking in

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 228 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

it was not always as free of romantic ideas as I would now like, and I am keen to
engage the topic further. I will consider the two aspects of Eco-Romanticism—
historical and ­psychological—in turn.
Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman define the historical form of Eco-
Romanticism by its “contemptuous attitude toward modernity, the depiction of
civilization as a fall from pristine and noble origins, and the failure to consider the
dark side of tribal and premodern sociocultural conditions.”130 Eco-­romantics,
they say, complain about the disasters of modernity while ignoring its dignity and
praise the dignity of premodernity while ignoring its disasters. The ­antiromantic
view is instead that we must look to the future, transcending there our current
problems, rather than deluding ourselves that there is something better behind
us. In chapter 2 I questioned this orientation, arguing for neither full speed
back nor full speed forward but rather for recollecting essential aspects of our
humanity that have been lost over the course of history while also appreciating
the virtues of modernity as we move beyond it.131 I furthermore highlighted in
chapter 6 a number of spiritual delusions that include not only (past-oriented)
romanticism but also certain (future-oriented) ideas about progress. In Wilber’s
own words, the thwarting of our vertical potentials for spiritual realization results
in their being projected into the dimension of time in “utterly futile schemes”
such as scientific progress or political utopianism seeking future salvation.132
I would now add to this discussion that a danger of antiromanticism is seeing in
Eco-Romanticism only delusion, rather than discerning the truth in it as well. As
David Kidner argues regarding such “frauds” as Grey Owl (né Archie Belaney) and
Chief ­Seattle’s speech: “Simply to dismiss Euro-American fantasies about native
cultures as ‘fraudulent’ . . . is to miss the significance of this phenomenon. The
underlying problem is that certain types of experience cannot easily find authentic
expression within industrial society, and are fundamentally incompatible with
current economic structures.”133 Following Kidner, we could say that within
Eco-­Romanticism can be found a longing for unavailable this-worldly relations
that native or indigenous cultures signify. The challenge is to give an account of
history that validates the truth in these yearnings while also keeping it free of spir-
itual delusion, making sense of our alienation while not fooling ourselves about
past harmony.134
Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman offer the slogan that “things are getting
worse, are getting better, and are perfect.”135 This is their way to acknowledge
the disaster of modernity while cautioning against forgetting its dignity (as well
as the spiritual or absolute perspective that “things are Always Already perfect”).
In a related way, Wilber does acknowledge that regression is necessary when there
has been a dissociation or repression, so that what has been split off or denied
can then be reintegrated at a higher level; his concern is only when the prescrip-
tion is for regression alone.136 He and the Integral Ecology authors would then
presumably agree that the modern epidemic of depression, to use this example,

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 229

will not be resolved without returning to forms of social organization marked

by a greater degree of psychosocial integration—not as a romantic mimicking of
some premodern form of life but rather as a creative incorporating of the holistic
qualities of earlier eras or other cultures into our own. I believe, however, that
more needs to be said than this. In Wilber’s view, all evolution or development, in
all quadrants of the Kosmos, is a process in which a new stage first differentiates
itself from or transcends a junior stage in an ascending or vertical motion and
then integrates or embraces that junior in a descending or horizontal motion.
(For example, in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development the preoperational
stage, in which children enter the world of symbols and concepts, both transcends
and includes the infantile sensory-motor stage in which cognition occurs purely
through the sensing-moving body.) As a way of accounting for history, however,
this seems too simple to me—even if Wilber does acknowledge all the patholo-
gies that issue forth whenever this process “goes wrong.”137 Consider the fact
that indigenous, communal societies have consistently resisted being part of the
civilized world,138 which suggests that the earliest stage of human history, which
Wilber calls the “forager” epoch,139 has precisely not been included or integrated
into later stages. Indeed, the Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond (who used
the term primitive nonpejoratively) wrote that that “the sickness of civilization
consists, I believe, in its failure to incorporate (and only then to move beyond the
limits of ) the primitive.”140 Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman call Diamond a
paradise lost romantic,141 but I do not think this is fair, for Diamond pointedly
said that it “is not a question of regaining lost paradises or savage nobility,” but
of realizing the significance of the longstanding contradiction between civilized
and primitive culture, the primitive being civilization’s negative other. This con-
flict has, moreover, been a political and economic one, not only a spiritual one,
the main motivation for the ethnocide, genocide, and displacement of peasant
and indigenous peoples being the exploitation of labor and natural resources.142
Diamond argued that we have come to a “dialectical moment” in which the prim-
itive-civilized contradiction must be resolved “in our society and in ourselves”
through a process of synthesis or transcendence to a higher level. Though there are
no doubt grounds for questioning certain aspects of Diamond’s project, I think
his position here is actually consistent with Integralism, as it provides a way to
appreciate the advances of civilization while also appreciating the holistic virtues
common among indigenous peoples that must be returned to and integrated.143
In sum, the global recognition of indigenous peoples underway today, of which
I think ecopsychology needs to be a part, is an act both psychological (recognizing
lost existential modalities or this-worldly potentials within ourselves) and political
(recognizing the historical violations against others, as well as the demand for
radical social change and decolonization).
The second form of Eco-Romanticism involves mistaking childhood
­oneness with nature and adult narcissistic immersion in nature for genuine

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 230 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

spiritual states. Magical and mythical mindsets, says Wilber, are not the same as
transpersonal or even rational ones.
Although he tends to lump together groups in a way that is not always
fair,144 Wilber’s remarks are worth heeding, and do point to the importance of
interior development and vertical analysis (assessing the level of psychological
development that a given position reflects). The danger of such antiromanticism,
however, is that its focus on the vertical dimension can lead to neglect or misrep-
resentation of the horizontal, the dimension of this-worldly embrace or descent
to earth that concerns ecopsychologists. The human psyche emerged from this
earthly world and remains tied to it.145 The delusion that we can break this
tie—that we can forget our kinship, our intimate relations, with plants, animals,
and soil, that we can dissociate ourselves from bodily and ecological rhythms,
imposing a mechanical order of time instead, that we can do all these life-denying
things without consequence to the integrity of both our minds and the rest of
earthly creation—this is the serious problem ecopsychology addresses. Ecopsy-
chology affirms our deep human love for the land and its creatures, our erotic
attraction for wild and sensuous things, our innate desire to know the stars and
planets, the birds and mammals. (The pull ecotherapists feel to abandon office-
bound therapy, with its devotion to the posture of sitting,146 to go outside and
dance with the wind, comes from this place.) Although Integralists are aware of
the ­interrelationship between the vertical and horizontal, I cannot find in their
writings where they give it much demonstration, where the kind of earthly inter-
relations I just discussed are explored. For example, in Wilber’s book Integral
Psychology—which contains a large number of charts of vertical development as
mapped by a variety of theorists—he writes: “Much of development—at least half
of it—involves various types of non-hierarchical, heterarchical [i.e., horizontal]
processes of competence articulation and application. These nonhierarchical
processes, of course, are not indicated on the charts, which focus on migratory
development; but their profound importance should not on that account be for-
gotten.”147 To provide a reminder, perhaps Wilber should rename his diagram
AQALAR—All Quadrants, All Levels, All Relations.148
In their discussion on psychological development and ecology, Esbjörn-
Hargens and Zimmerman likewise tend primarily to vertical matters, which
again makes it difficult to sense the dimension of horizontal differentiation and
depth, the profoundness of our fleshy interexistence with the earth (the term flesh
designating for Merleau-Ponty “an encompassing lateral investment”),149 or the
urgency to sing the land. On the one hand, they choose to discuss theorists such
as Stephen Kellert and Peter Kahn, Jr., whose research can be used to disprove the
Eco-Romantics (by showing that children are egocentric and anthropocentric)
and to chart such things as the development of values about nature and animals
(Kellert) and moral reasoning about the environment (Kahn, Jr.).150 On the other
hand, they knock theorists such as Paul Shepard for being romantic (applauding

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 231

him nonetheless for his use of developmental psychology). I think, though, that
Shepard’s lasting contribution will not be his primitivism, but rather his strong
antidote to otherworldliness and his evocation of the lateral dimension of earthly
relations while still offering a model of psychological and spiritual development.
Indeed, many of the ideas that Shepard pursued—including attachment to place
and play at being animals—have also been taken up by researchers such as Louise
Chawla and Gene Myers. Chawla is given no mention in Integral Ecology and
Myers is named but his findings are not. I think the omission of researchers of
this sort is important to note for two reasons. First of all, to integrate the vertical
and the horizontal is not just to show how a new level of vertical development
lends us a higher and different view of the world but to show how the vertical and
horizontal internally relate.151 When Chawla discusses the incorporation of the
natural world by children as a secure emotional base152 and Myers details the
emergence of the child self through fleshy interaction with other animals, they
are doing this. In both of their cases, second of all, they have had to challenge
anthropocentric/antiromantic prejudices in psychology that are employed in
denying human-nature continuity and the necessity for childhood experiences
of nature.153 Just as we need to beware the risks of Eco-Romanticism, then, it is
equally important to beware the risks of antiromanticism.
Integral Psychology is based on the idea that there are multiple, semi-inde-
pendent lines of vertical development (moral, cognitive, spiritual, etc.). In making a
move toward ecopsychology, Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman offer the thought
“that many currently established lines of development could, in principle, be trans-
lated to or situated within an ecological context.”154 I would tweak this, however,
to say not “many” but all lines of development. For do we not need to ecologize the
entire spectrum of consciousness in all its levels and dimensions? Is not anything less
still to leave some aspects of the human psyche floating in Searles’s “homogeneous
matrix of nothingness,” disarticulated or disembedded from our earth-home? Bill
Plotkin’s Wheel of Life model, presented in his book Nature and the Human Soul,
includes eight stages of interior development, from infancy to sagehood, from ego-
centrism to “cosmoscentrism,” in which the matrix of the natural world, revealed
differently at each stage, is indeed never absent. It is thus an attempt to weave the
vertical and horizontal together through the entire spectrum of ecological con-
sciousness: it is an example of ecopsychology.155 As an example, next, of ecolo-
gizing one particular line of development, consider educator David Sobel’s work on
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Sobel recognized that the middle child-
hood period when the child has an insatiable hunger for being outdoors corresponds
exactly to Piaget’s stage of concrete operations. What Sobel realized, then (in a way
that resonates with Shepard’s emphasis on nature in human cognition), is that the
life of the child calls at this time for intense interactions with the concrete earth that
literally inform the child’s mind.156 While I think Sobel’s work is very important,
when thinking about Piaget it is also necessary to be mindful of his antiromantic

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 232 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

biases. As Graham Harvey notes in his review of cultures with animistic world-
views: “According to Piaget, children are alleged to be animistic until they develop
more advanced, rational and correct understandings of the world around them. . . .
[To the contrary,] far from being a childish (if understandable) error, animism is
more developed—deliberately, thoughtfully and experientially—in elders than in
infants.”157 For Harvey, the term animism refers to an ethic of learning “how to
behave appropriately toward persons, not all of whom are human,” wherein one
becomes “increasingly animist” over a lifetime, carefully developing the skill and
cultural knowhow to increase the world’s personhood: to make persons of others,
revealing them as such, thereby making more of a person of oneself. In her study
of imaginal dialogues, Mary Watkins similarly observed Piaget’s prejudice against
imagination and animism. Her goal was to demonstrate “the development of the
imaginal other from an extension of the ego, a passive recipient of the imaginer’s
intention, to an autonomous and animate agency in its own right.” In other words,
she suggested the idea of a line of development in which the “imaginal other is
gradually released from our egocentrism to an autonomy from which he or she
creates us as much as we create him or her.”158 I have found no mention of an
imaginal/animism line of development in Integral Psychology or Ecology (though
Wilber does include shamanism). Animism is rather defined in Piagetian terms,
and associated with the earliest, tribal stage of human evolution. The danger here
is that the antiromantic perspective can be used to add to the cultural weight sub-
merging lines of development important to ecopsychology. There is a pervasive
fear in Western culture of getting furry and feathered, of losing human bounda-
ries;159 one wonders about the role of this fear in some antiromantic rhetoric. In
any event, I would caution once more against allowing antiromantic prejudices to
shut the mind we need to keep open in developing ecopsychology.

Keeping Earth in Mind: Disastrous Interiority. One of Wilber’s controversial state-

ments is that “it is not true that human minds (the noosphere) are part of nature
(or the biosphere), but rather the reverse.”160 In other words, the biosphere is
in—is interior to—the noosphere; we contain the biosphere in our being. Once
one realizes, though, that Wilber is making an interior realm (L-H) argument,
I think there is little to be concerned about, at least initially; his argument is actu-
ally consistent with ecopsychology. He agrees that in the exterior (R-H) realm
humans are inside and members of ecosystems; but in the interior domain we
have earth in mind.161 In Wilber’s terms, increasing psychospiritual develop-
ment means increasing interiority: the world is increasingly differentiated and
then embraced or included within us, that is, manifested in the clearing our
existence holds open.162 “[E]very within turns us out into more of the Kosmos
. . . the more the depths of the self are disclosed, the more the corresponding
depths of the Kosmos reveal themselves.”163 With each level of development come
new capacities for disclosing and relating to the world (thus, for example, when

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 233

an infant differentiates itself from its own body it then becomes able to be
aware of, relate to, and control that body). Recall Searles’s idea that the mark of
increasing maturity is the ability to relate to, and thus find within oneself, what is
most seemingly unlike oneself. Recalling, as well, the principle of ever-widening
spheres of meaning and participation (chapter 5), Wilber says that every step of
development is “a new going within to a deeper and wider beyond.”164 The rub,
however, is that all of this describes an optimal or ideal developmental process. If
as a culture we actually embraced and interiorized the earth in our development,
widening out our biospheric existence through ever-deepening earthly relations
within the context of an integrated lifeworld, then we would have no need for
ecopsychology. Wilber himself seems aware of this in his comments about the
disastrous modern Ego:

In seeking freedom—autonomy not bound by any sort of heteronomy [governance

by otherness—AF]—[the rational Ego] ended up cut off from spirit, cut off from
nature, cut off from its own body, cut off from its fellows. And the worse it felt, the
more it intensified its hyperagentic withdrawal and disenchantment: the unfreer it
became. Not within and beyond, but within and withdrawn.165

I would add, as well, that this cutting off process is, in Wilber’s terms, a four
quadrant affair, expressing not merely individual psychology but social and cul-
tural conditions shared in our historical period. My point is that under current
historical conditions the biosphere is in the noosphere in only the thinnest of
senses, the more-than-human world being disclosed in the shallowest of ways. I
discussed this topic in this book in terms of the deanimating of the world as
the psyche withdraws into the highly problematic interior of the modern self,
its own deanimated soul being a sign of absent, broken, frustrated, or unrealized
world-relations. (The need to reverse this process is why I repeatedly stressed our
worldly nature.) It is precisely to this condition of withdrawal that ecopsychology
is a response, being an effort to get the biosphere into the noosphere thickly, to
perceive the earth deeply.
Wilber holds that the more interiority an entity has, “the more networks
of communion it is involved in, and thus the greater its responsibilities in com-
munion,” the “greater the burden of inclusion.”166 Wilber’s comments notwith-
standing, neither he nor Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman appear to pursue this
theme nearly to the extent that Wilber’s own ideas about our burdens of inclusion
and communal responsibility demand. That Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness
model must be ecologized tells us that it is not on its own an ecopsychology.
Where is the embrace of the land? Where is the inclusion of plants and animals?
In Searles’s study on “the nonhuman environment”—in which he posited that dif-
ferentiating and entering into intimate relatedness with this environment is vital to
the human psyche—he found the strongest examples of cultures engaged in such

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 234 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

relatedness in the anthropological literature.167 Indeed, this literature provides

numerous accounts of cultures with practices that keep earth in mind through
maintaining relations with other-than-human reality. This raises the question of
the role of anthropology in ecopsychology. For Wilber, the purpose of anthro-
pology seems to be to track the rise of consciousness over the course of human
evolution.168 For the ecological anthropologist Tim Ingold, by contrast, it is to
help us become more alive by recovering our “original openness to the world.”169
I think it is this latter vision of anthropology that can assist us in addressing the
modern withdrawal from or closure to the world.
Ingold discusses cultures in which the experience is of being truly inside the
world in dense relational “meshworks” that animate it, as opposed to the alienated
sense of looking at the world from the outside that characterizes Western conscious-
ness. In doing so, he makes an important distinction between a “local ontology of
engagement” and a “global ontology of detachment.”170 It is in the local mode, in
short, that through open engagement with others of all kinds we may embrace and
interiorize the earth. Ingold is thus cautious about a one-­dimensional, global approach
to environmentalism, for “the global environment is not a lifeworld, it is a world apart
from life” (i.e., a world we continue to view from the outside). What he proposes
instead is, first, that the local perspective not be seen as “a more limited or narrowly
focused apprehension than the global,” but rather one that “rests on an altogether
different mode of apprehension.” Second, he asks us to recognize “the dialectical inter-
play between engagement and detachment, between human beings’ involvement in
the world and their separation from it.” However, because the mode of detachment is
so dominant in the West, Ingold argues for a “turn to local or indigenous cosmologies
of engagement for sources of insight into our current predicament.”
The reason I mention Ingold’s ideas is because they help illuminate what
is needed in order to integrate two motions described throughout Wilber’s work:
the ascent motion of increasing transcendence of or freedom from the world
and the descent motion of increasing embrace of or unity with the world (Wilber
calls the split between these two motions the “Great Dualism of all dualisms,”
­manifesting as pure otherworldly and pure this worldly spiritual perspectives).171
As I have been suggesting, modern Western culture has little idea of what an
embrace of the earth truly looks like, for it requires a lifeworldly style of open
engagement with other-than-human reality very foreign to it. Not surprisingly,
then, Wilber’s own narrative is still biased toward the upward current. His eye
is on the global not the local; on the ascent of consciousness to ­worldcentrism
(embracing all people) rather than its descent to ecocentrism (embracing
the earth). Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman’s notion of “planetcentrism”
(embracing all beings) is a possible integration here, as they conceive of it as a
combination of ecocentrism and worldcentrism.172 I am not convinced, though,
as discussed above, that their Integral Ecology properly grapples with what the
descent to earth demands of us. I think they, too, are largely ascent-oriented,

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 235

which leads to what I believe are certain misreadings, as in their criticism that
David Abram is making a “crime” out of alphabetic literacy in his account of
the historical withdrawal of psyche from the more-than-human surround. What
I think he is actually doing is highlighting the immense power of language (for
both dignity and disaster) and identifying the need to counterbalance the detach-
ment that literacy engenders with modes of local or place-based engagement that
reanimate the world and tie us back to the land—that keep earth in mind.173
To round this discussion out, finally, I would note that the political challenge of
dialectically linking global environmental actions with place-based and locally
strategized social and ecological struggles (thereby avoiding “globalocentrism”)174
is increasingly being identified. A radical ecopsychology in step with this trend
will not see the biosphere’s containment in the noosphere only as a simple fact of
human existence but also as a potential whose realization or relational enactment
currently requires that a political process be in place.

Negating Capitalism (not “Industrialism”): The Psyche-Society Dialectic. Capitalism

is the central organizing force in our society, yet critical analysis of the capitalist
system barely makes an appearance in Integral thought.175 Examining this omis-
sion helps us to see why it is important for ecopsychology not to do the same.
There are several angles I wish to consider in this examination, the first being
Wilber’s politics of “Conscious Capitalism.” This is based on the idea that by
employing Integral Theory businesses can get a “truly comprehensive map of the
marketplace”176 and use the system to promote the evolution of consciousness
and thereby the evolution of capitalism itself as a force for good. Conscious Capi-
talism is in a long line of other approaches that see noble potential in capitalism,
believing it can be spiritualized and greened. David Harvey, however, takes us
straight to the point: “an ethical, non-exploitative and socially just capitalism that
redounds to the benefit of all is impossible. It contradicts the very nature of what
capitalism is about.”177 Indeed, the issue at hand is the failure to understand the
nature of capitalism. The Conscious Capitalists write, for example, that capitalism
is “just a tool” that can be used for good or bad and that Conscious Capitalism is
“not allergic to profit,” making it a bottom line along with people and planet.178
In reality, though, profit is won at the expense of people and planet, through the
exploitation of nature as human labor power and material resources. Why do
Conscious Capitalists not see this? I think Wilber’s consciousness (UL) bias leads
to uncritical participation in the spiritual marketplace and to downplaying a soci-
omaterial (LR) reading of capitalism that would invite a more questioning view.179
Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, following Wilber’s lead, are similarly soft on
capitalism. In their discussion of climate change, for example, they entertain a
number of perspectives, but among them is not the view that greenhouse gases
accumulate in the atmosphere as capital accumulates on the earth (and unless
capital is accumulating it is not capitalism).180

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 236 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

Perhaps what Integralists most overlook is the fact that the capitalist system itself
develops, that it has its own historical dynamic based on increasingly violating natural
limits in order to maintain its perpetual expansion. Wilber, however, defines the cur-
rent level of social evolution not as capitalism but as industrialism,181 which avoids
the reality of this capitalist dynamic. Wilber is not alone in defining the social system
this way, as industrial production is common to both capitalist and socialist nations.
A closer investigation, however, reveals that the former Soviet Union and other such
socialist experiments are more accurately described as forms of state capitalism, never
having escaped involvement in or the logic of the world capitalist system.182 Thus,
when Wilber suggests that the next step in social evolution will involve limiting
industry,183 he is missing the fact that industrial society is essentially capitalist society
and that it tolerates no limitation. To limit and go beyond industrialism it is thus
necessary to go beyond capitalism—to some form of ecological socialism (or what-
ever we may call it), not to the informational society that Wilber anticipates next.184
In a related vein, Wilber gives much discussion to the dissociation of
art, morals, and science as identified by Habermas (who, recall, used the terms
­aesthetic-expressive, moral-practical, and cognitive-instrumental for these three value
spheres). The quadrants of Wilber’s AQAL diagram in fact match these categories,
which he calls the Big Three (art/self/consciousness = UL; morals/culture/values =
LL; and science/nature = UR and LR). Wilber argues that the ecological crisis will
not be resolved until a new society evolves that integrates the Big Three.185 What
he leaves out of his discussion, however, is Habermas’s theory of the colonization of
the lifeworld, which identifies the agent of their dissociation as the capitalist polit-
ical economic system—this system stabilizing itself through its crises by steadily
diminishing the aesthetic-expressive and moral-practical orders and by imposing
an instrumental-commodifying logic in their stead. For Wilber, the dissociation
of the Big Three is the result of an evolutionary differentiation that “went too far,”
traceable largely to the influence of the machine mentality of industrialization.186
But because the colonization of the lifeword was underway right at the transition
from feudalism Wilber’s explanation is not nearly sufficient, hiding as it does the
inherently disintegrative or dissociative nature of capitalism. If Wilber’s Integral
Psychology had included critical psychology (which faces the horizontal world of
material relations) then perhaps he would have seen that capitalism unavoidably
creates conditions that thwart interior development and that disintegrate or dis-
sociate consciousness—the very opposite of what he aims for. As the psychiatrist
Marlene Steinberg writes: “It is no exaggeration to say that just as hysteria was the
dominant psychiatric illness in Freud’s time, and depression reigned in the twen-
tieth century, dissociation is the illness of today.”187 For me, this suggests a specific
internal relationship between our social system (LR) and our consciousness (UL)
not identified by Integralists. It also suggests that if we are interested in the develop-
ment of consciousness and in the integration of art, morals, and science, then it is
to a postcapitalist ecological society that we must look.

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 237

The question is: What does the process of social change entail? What does it
look like? Wilber seems to have two (perhaps complementary) views. One is that
the “Left-Hand path, not merely the Right-Hand path, must take the lead.”188
The “coming transformation,” says Wilber,

is being built, as all past transformations have been, in the hearts and minds of
those individuals who themselves evolve to centauric planetary vision. For these
individuals create a “cognitive potential” in the forms of new worldviews (in this
case, centauric-planetary) that in turn feed back into the ongoing mainstream of
social institutions, until the previously “marginalized” worldview becomes anchored
in institutional forms which then catapult a collective consciousness to a new and
higher order. The revolution, as always, will come from within and be embedded
in the without.189

The process he charts in this case is thus from UL to LL to LR. Elsewhere, he

notes:

As is usually the case, the techno-economic base—the LR quadrant—takes the

lead first, fashioning the societies within which individuals develop. The tech-
nology ­usually spreads very rapidly, and then that technology slowly, over many
­generations, remakes the cultures arising within it. This happened with foraging,
with ­horticultural, with agrarian, with industrial, and now it is happening with
informational. / But within those techno-economic structures . . . there are still,
in the Left Hand, the horizontal tectonic plates and the vertical memes of develop-
ment—and that is where much of the action is and always will be.190

Notice that Wilber introduces the idea of a techno-economic base but equates this
with technology, so that it is not clear what the economy side of his term means.
This is a move he frequently makes, speaking in terms of the forces of production
rather than also the social relations of production, the combination of these two
making for the mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, etc.). This is again a
serious omission, as it leaves out of the picture the entire history of class conflict
and changes in social organization and power. (It furthermore gives an overly
simple view of social evolution, rather than a more complex one that includes
political dynamics.)191 The view of social change that emerges, then, is of either
allowing the new level of technology (e.g., digital-informational) to come in and
create the conditions for a new level of consciousness or else developing a new level
of consciousness at the individual level that transforms worldviews and makes its
way into society. Wilber also proposes an integral politics that integrates liberalism
with spirituality, combining exterior development with interior development.192
It is difficult to find critical social terms in his writings, though, and so to envi-
sion from them a more radical dialectic between social and psychological change.

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 238 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

Consider, for example, that Wilber’s Conscious Capitalism encourages

people to view “abundance as a default possibility of exchange rather than always
seeing scarcity and lack.”193 This gives the appearance that a scarcity mentality is
purely a matter of individual psychology (UL). It bears mentioning, then, that for
capitalism the creation of scarcity is a means for increasing the exchange value of
a commodity, the diminishment of common wealth—including such necessities
as water and food—paradoxically leading to the growth of private wealth (the so-
called Lauderdale Paradox).194 We may mention furthermore that although a sense
of lack is given in the human condition, this will be exacerbated under impover-
ished psychosocial conditions. In like fashion, we may go around all the quadrants
and find the presence of capital. For the UL quadrant, we may note Marx’s observa-
tion that our identity, needs, character, and so forth are socially conditioned, and
that in a capitalist society we become “personifications of capital”—competitive,
self-interested, acquisitive, and so forth. Our needs take forms that are met by
commodities; we suffer from addiction, narcissism, egocentrism, and so on. For the
UR quadrant, we may include consumptive and competitive behavior, the domina-
tion of (human) nature, alienated labor, instrumental behavior, and neurotoxins
in our bodies. For the LL quadrant of culture, Wilber uses psychological language
(magical, rational, etc.) to describe different worldviews. A specifically capitalist
culture is instead one dominated by a commodity-driven culture industry and by a
particular kind of moral vacuum, money becoming the standard of universal value.
The LR quadrant of society and nature, finally, includes a political system that
functions primarily to provide the conditions of production195 to corporations in a
society that is virtually synonymous with the capitalist economy (versus other soci-
eties that merely have economies). Nature in this quadrant is a specifically capitalist
nature, in the form of real estate, natural capital, and so on—a nature that performs
economic services.196 I think the advantage of this kind of go around the quadrants
is that it makes critical use of the AQAL(AR) diagram and gives us a different view
of where and how change needs to happen. From the perspective of ecopsychology,
we need to counter the presence of capital in all four quadrants as we develop spe-
cifically ecological selves, behavior/skills, cultural patterns, and social institutions,
in mutually supportive ways. I will consider this topic further in the next section.
As a final note to this discussion, it is curious that Wilber uses the jagged
rise of the stock market as an image for the “overall and unmistakable upward
trend of evolution,”197 for this market has not been doing well of late, and with
the end of cheap energy, exhaustion of material reality, and intensifying of contra-
dictions to the breaking point, the days of its rise may be numbered.198 I do not
mean to say that there can be no further progress in human affairs, but I do think
a different image is called for.
To conclude, I wish to say that there are many aspects of Integral Theory
and Ecology on which for reasons of space I could not comment, and many elab-
orations or clarifications I could not make. Given the difficulties in reviewing

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 239

Integral writings, I may also have erred in places. Despite these qualifications, I
hope to have demonstrated an attempt at what Integralists themselves promote:
finding the value and partial truth in another’s positions, while developing posi-
tions that have even greater inclusiveness and holistic capacity.

Challenges Ahead

From a radical perspective, ecopsychology is still very much a project under

construction. In this final section, I therefore discuss a number of broad chal-
lenges that I think are important to face if ecopsychology is to play the socially
transformative role that I have been claiming for it. Perhaps the biggest chal-
lenge is the grand instability of the present moment in history. The roads
ecopsychology takes will to some greater or lesser extent be dictated by how
world events unfold, by the priorities and possibilities that history offers to us.
The moment requires a talent for discerning the greatest opportunity or the
most vital need; a talent for dialectical imagination. Where is the puck going to
be? Can we position ourselves there? If the capitalist system is nearing its end
or at least drawing more critical attention, then what is the best place to focus
our efforts; what methods should we use? Conditions may be better now than
ever to build an ecological society, as the foundations and legitimacy for the
old one give way. How might ecopsychology help build the new? I do not think
there is only one answer to this last question, and I remain committed to the
idea that our radicalism, however bold or modest, must start from the situa-
tions in which we find ourselves. At the same time, I believe it is important for
ecopsychology to have a good sense of itself as an overall project in order to
ensure that our efforts are mindful of the deeper issues and can join or reso-
nate with one another in the historic work of social and psychological change.
Needless to say, the concluding thoughts I share here reflect my own particular
vantage and hopes.
As I imagine ecopsychology, it needs to think more like a social movement
than an academic discipline. It no doubt needs intellectuals in the academy,
which remains an important arena for conducting research and building theory
that might become, in Marx’s words, a material force. In an era of financial cut-
backs, though, it is hard to say what the prospects are for getting ecopsychology
farther into the university system, especially within psychology departments.
Whether working inside or outside the academy, a key challenge for ecopsychol-
ogists is to create not only scholarly works but also popular ones able to reach a
large audience. Rather than another anthology or primer, I think we need texts
that comprehensively and directly lay out the radical nature of ecopsychology
and so help to mobilize change with a view to the roots. A good example of a
writer who is able to make potentially radical arguments in a popular format

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 240 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

is the journalist Michael Pollan. Offering a sort of case for revitalizing the life-
world, Pollan has convincingly highlighted the ecological and human health
disasters that have resulted from industrial food production and food/nutrition
science and has argued for a recollection of the aesthetic and cultural dimensions
of food instead.199 Despite Pollan’s often astute observations about capitalism,
however, he refrains from linking these to a critique of the capitalist system as a
whole.200 The task, then, is to align with the Pollans of this world who are willing
to apply their rhetorical skills in popular ecopsychological writings that offer a
language of both critique and possibility in touch with the mood of the historical
moment.201
As I have been discussing throughout this chapter, I think the main
­challenge for ecopsychology is to integrate not only psyche and nature but also
society, in theory and in practice. To help visualize this task, I have plotted
several fields (though many others are possible) relevant to it on the triangular
figure below.

PSYCHE
En
vir
on
log y

me
ho eor

nta cops
y
syc Th

l/C ych
E
al P cial

on olo
itic So

ser
Cr hist

vat gy
dd

ion
Bu

Psy
ho c
log
y

SOCIETY Ecosocialism NATURE

Ecological Anthropology

The figure shows that none of these fields integrates all three terms, as
each is primarily involved in connecting two of them (e.g., both ecosocialism
and ­ecological anthropology link society and nature). With respect to building an
ecological society, each would benefit from inclusion of more of the third term at
the opposite corner of the triangle as it is found in the adjacent fields. Thus, ecoso-
cialism could use greater psychological depth, whether from a Buddhist theory of
society or from an ecopsychological understanding of nature. For ecopsychology,
meanwhile, the need is to integrate more of the social term, whether via ecosocialist
or Buddhist social theories, critical psychology, or ecological anthropology. The
power of this triple integration is that it steers us to places we might not otherwise
go. For example, ecosocialism identifies labor as the main site of the human-nature

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 241

relationship, the locus for a society’s metabolic exchange with the larger natural
world. This makes the development of concrete or nonalienated labor a potential
arena of ecopsychological practice. I think that by reflecting in like fashion on
how these three terms might go together we will see the practical steps we need to
take in building a new society, one that incorporates the ­important truths of all
the fields on the triangle.
In finding an image that shows the integration of psyche, nature, and
society, I like to use ecological anthropologist Philippe Descola’s notion of a
“society of nature,” which serves to overcome the dualism between society and
nature.202 Recall that when more-than-human beings are granted personhood,
agency, power, or interior depth of their own, then the natural world may be
regarded as a psychological and social field. Anthropologists such as Descola and
Ingold describe cultures in which this is a living reality and so in which people,
say, visit the forest to maintain relations with the beings there as one might with
a human friend. Psychosocial integration in this case includes integration with
the society of nature. As Ingold notes, however, such an observation “plays havoc
with the established Western dichotomies between animals and society, or nature
and humanity. The distinction between the human and the nonhuman no longer
marks the outer limits of the social world, as against that of nature, but rather
maps a domain within it whose boundary is both permeable and easily crossed.”203
Another anthropologist, Edvard Hviding, similarly writes: “Since the separation
of society from nature is so much a part of our own ontological constructs as
westerners and intellectuals, it may be difficult to grasp that the social and the sub-
jective may need to be extended [i.e., granted or recognized—AF] well into what
might initially be seen as the natural and the objective.”204 Adopting Descola’s
term, we may accordingly replace the triangle above with the following circle.

Society of Nature

Human
Society

This figure shows how human and more-than-human reality may be per-
ceived as a single field of subjective social relations. Notably, Descola remarks

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 242 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

that in societies of nature there is a clear correspondence between how humans

treat one another and how they treat other-than-human beings. For example, with
respect to the practice of yam cultivation in New Caledonian society:

[B]rutal treatment of the plant is excluded in favour of minute preparation of the

ground where each plant is to grow. Whereas Western cereals are collectively sub-
mitted to violent operations, tropical roots and tubers elicit an individualized and
“respectful friendship” which finds its parallel in Melanesian political conceptions:
the chief refrains from wielding ostentatious authority and strives to reflect in his
deeds the consensus of the community, established through personal discussions
with each of its members.205

Despite that Western society is not a society of nature in Descola’s sense, we may
nonetheless observe the same correspondence between our relationship with
nonhuman nature and our interhuman relationships. It is no coincidence, for
example, that the natural world is regarded as a stockpile of resources while the
employees of capitalist business are seen as a pool of “human resources.” One
way to think about psyche-nature-society, then, is in terms of a general style of
relating that cuts across the human/nature boundary and discloses both humans
and other-than-humans in a similar light. It follows, moreover, that if we are to
treat the larger natural world with more care then the quality of care must corre-
spondingly enter further into our human social and political relations. I think this
gives us an important clue about the nature of an ecological society.
I am not proposing that the anthropological studies of Descola and others
be used as an exact template for reforming modern Western culture. I am sug-
gesting, though, that the idea of a society of nature be realized in our own, more
familiar terms. We may still work with the notion that our human society is
embedded in a larger more-than-human social and psychological field, and that
our being-in-the-world is deepened and made more responsible as we enter into
open and caring relations with other forms of life. There are many possible ways
to understand this on ground close to home. For example, a study conducted in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, found that people with an attachment to specific urban
natural areas protested against proposed changes to them, and experienced grief
when changes did occur or were threatened. Such stories are all too common. In
remarking on this study, though, David Kidner offers that the “emotional rela-
tion to place, in a sense, was not merely an element of self, but reached beyond
self to become a stabilizing force within the ecosystem, suggesting a potentially
more integrated self-place system.”206 In other words, attachment theory can be
expanded to the scale of eco-social systems and human emotion can be seen as
an element in the ecological dynamics of a place. Consider, as well, Ariel Salleh’s
remark that “[e]cofeminists go beyond dualistic structures by recognizing that
ecology and society form a relational web where everything flows bio-energetically

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 243

in/out of everything else.”207 This too gives us a clue about the nature of an eco-
logical society.
I think the best guidance toward an ecological society—crucial for the inte-
gration of psyche, nature, and society—is found in ecosocialism. Not only do the
ecosocialists provide a clear-eyed analysis of the psychological, social, and eco-
logical destructiveness inherent to capitalism, they also offer helpful principles
for an alternative society in which mature, ecological selves could develop and
the integrity of the earth could be maintained. Moreover, in identifying how all
social movements are in one way or another struggling against capitalism, ecoso-
cialism presents itself as a way to invite unity and dialogue among diverse move-
ments, North and South. Salleh’s ecofeminism, for example, is socialist, though
she criticizes ecosocialists who maintain Marx’s bias of giving primacy to pro-
duction rather than reproduction.208 Unfortunately, ecosocialism is up against a
fierce anticommunism, especially in the United States, and a history of repressive
totalitarian states that have used Marx for ideological purposes, causing terrible
suffering. An initial challenge is thus to address the fear of socialism directly by
charting the history of the uses and misuses of Marxism and of its ongoing dia-
lectical development into the current ecological form, and also by showing the
attractiveness of many of its elements as we face the daunting task of reconfiguring
our social world to make it more psychosocially and ecologically integrative. The
current economic crisis, and the glaring failure of the orthodox establishment to
predict or understand it, has generated a resurgence of interest in Marx. This is
fitting, for “the main contours of world economy today can be practically read
off the theoretical lines found in Marx’s classic text,” Capital.209 As the American
dream fades, moreover, with its individualistic vision of fame and material wealth
having turned sour in the movement against the One Percenters, perhaps the
dread of all-things-Marx will also start to fade. For ecopsychology, I think the goal
needs to be to help this process along by finding the psychologically and ecologi-
cally valuable features of ecosocialism and to work these into our own terms, as
well as to lend ecosocialism itself a greater understanding of the vital role ecopsy-
chology could play—by fostering necessary subjective conditions—in attempting
this social transition. What follows is a brief sketch toward this goal, recognizing
that there is much more to say and think about.210

From the psychological angle, consider the following:

• Ecosocialism is a project for reconfiguring social relations and (re-)produc-

tion in order to meet genuine human needs, especially social needs, while
also meeting the need to maintain the integrity of ecosystems. I think, then,
that Roszak’s “the needs of the person are the needs of the planet”211 is a
cry for ecosocialism. Ecosocialist society is envisioned as one that serves
the needs of life rather than those of capital (which violates life to expand

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 244 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

economic value). The advantage of Marx is that he had a theory of needs

that appreciates how they are not all pre-given but also created over the
course of history as the relationship between humans and nature changes.
For example, the spread of capitalist production relations has atomized
“individuals into selfish globules of desire,”212 thereby thwarting commu-
nity needs and creating bottomless individual needs instead. Capitalism is
wholly quantitative in orientation, profit being created through ever-rising
amounts of production and consumption. Ecosocialism is accordingly a
“struggle for the qualitative side of things,” for a historical restructuring of
our needs toward qualitative satisfactions. “As alienation and exploitation
are overcome, therefore, we would not expect life to expand but to develop
ever more subtle, interrelated, mutually recognizing, beautiful, and spiritu-
ally fulfilled ways of being. We should not seek to become larger within
socialism but more realized.”213 To this end, ecopsychology may contribute
its crucial discourse on the needs that we have at every stage of life in rela-
tion to the more-than-human natural world and on how meeting these
needs reciprocally serves the needs of nonhuman others by establishing
them within a field of care.
• Ecosocialism aims to overcome the total alienation that rules under the
regime of capital. History is on its own rather conspiring—both in the
breakdown of the capitalist system under its own contradictions and in
the peaking of “everything,” especially cheap energy214—to force us to
­overcome certain historical alienations. (On peak oil, consider: “Without
oil there is no productivity, no markets, no profits, no petrodollars to help
fuel the world’s financial system, and no Pentagon. There is no capitalism
as we know it.”)215 There are movements afoot (e.g., Transition) to return
people to more cooperative ways of living and to new and forgotten skills
for reproducing the conditions of life through intimate knowledge of nat-
ural systems. Part of the vision of socialism has always been to overcome the
division of labor that creates alienation through specialization (even Adam
Smith criticized the division of labor, saying that “it leads to ‘mental mutila-
tion’ in workers as they become ignorant and insular”).216 Cheap fossil fuel
energy has supported this alienation and the abstracting of our lives from
the living land. But as Richard Heinberg notes, “Take away cheap energy
and it becomes more cost-effective to do a growing number of tasks locally
and with muscle power once again. As energy gets increasingly expensive,
a countertrend is therefore likely to emerge: generalization.”217 This is in
keeping with the goals of socialism, which envisions a world of whole people
enjoying nonalienated social relations, a world in which people realize their
creative powers and own rather than sell their labor power, so that they
are not alienated in their work, a world in which a fuller self can emerge
in free communion with others. I think that an ecosocialist framework is

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 245

important, in fact, to give the recent trends toward concrete labor and com-
munity greater coherence and further direction, for the current conversa-
tion about localism tends to shy away from the direct critique of capital
and the idea of community building on its own lacks a radical political
vision. With respect to ecopsychology, these recent trends are also notably
in keeping with the goal of overcoming alienation from nature. The oppor-
tunity, then, is to integrate the discourses on alienation from ­ecopsychology
and ecosocialism in order to create a stronger and deeper discourse than
either presents on its own.
• “It is impossible,” says the ecosocialist Michael Löwy, “to conceive of the
construction of a new society without the majority of people attaining a
high level of socialist and ecological consciousness as a result of their strug-
gles, their self-education and their social experience.”218 An ecological
society will indeed demand more not less of our humanity, more realization
of our potential versus the hollowing out and stunting of human life under
conditions of alienated commodity production and consumption. Marx
imagined communism as a social form that produced “fully developed
human beings.”219 What socialism has historically lacked, however, is an
appreciation of what is required in order to produce the subjective or inte-
rior conditions necessary to support the transition to a postcapitalist society.
There is here again a happy convergence with the historical moment, for we
are collectively called to mature or develop spiritually in order to meet the
current crisis. Adjusting to new ecological and social realities will take all
our creativity, compassion, wisdom, and generosity. A worldcentric identity
is indeed needed to cooperate in the ways now demanded of us, seeing the
needs of others as important as our own, while an ecocentric identity is
needed to care for creation, seeing the needs of the land as the same as our
own. In other words, we might say (keeping in mind the discussions above
about vertical and horizontal development): ecopsychology is needed. Spir-
itual discipline also counters the disastrous capitalist pedagogy—embodied
in the advertising industry and culture of consumption—of flight from pain
or discomfort, this preventing us from skillfully inquiring into our suffering
and so developing the insight, courage, equanimity, and other spiritual
strengths so needed in our times.220 If for reasons of ecological rationality
we must recover the commons and release our attachment to hyperindi-
vidualism and private property, then who among us can do so with grace?
I always think in this context of the work of Joanna Macy and Ken Jones,
both engaged Buddhists with ecological commitments who stress the direct
interrelationship between spiritual growth and social change. As an activist,
Jones calls for the building of a “radical culture of awakening” that would
bring spiritual insight to the work of social reconstruction. ­Ecopsychology
and ecosocialism would do well to join him.

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 246 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

• Due to the image of autocratic or bureaucratic rule, a common impression

is that socialism is undemocratic. In reality, it is a project for substantive
democracy in contrast to the plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) that
today gives the illusion of democracy or to the ideological democracy waved
about by political leaders.221 Socialism, a society made up of a “free asso-
ciation of producers,” “implies the fullest expression of democracy, with
a public sphere and public ownership that is genuinely collective and in
which each person makes a difference”222 (this being one area of increased
qualitative satisfaction). I think this can be extended in several directions.
First, if in order to become more caring in our relations with more-than-
human others we must correspondingly become more so in our human
social and political relations, then a rich democratic process is perhaps a
main place to practice. It also becomes the place for what Vandana Shiva
calls living democracy, which, for her, “enables democratic participation in
all matters of life and death—the food we eat or do not have access to; the
water we drink or are denied due to privatization or pollution; the air we
breathe or are poisoned by. Living democracies are based on the intrinsic
worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures; a just and equal sharing of the
earth’s vital resources; and sharing the decisions about the use of the earth’s
resources.”223 Finally, I think true or living democracy is also an arena for
making room for the life and natural wisdom in our lived experience. David
Levin has highlighted the potential for Eugene Gendlin’s experiential prac-
tices (chapter 3) to be used in developing new forms of intersubjectivity in
democratic processes, with our speaking being a practice of carrying life for-
ward rather than merely representing a position.224 In terms of allowing the
needs of the society of nature to be considered, we may also envision a kind
of democratic speech that comes from a thick, bodily felt knowing based on
longstanding open engagement with the more-than-human.225

From the ecological angle, now, consider the following two points.

• The materialist philosophy of socialism, while sometimes suspicious of

the spiritual side of life, does give vital attention to concrete social, eco-
nomic, and natural conditions, to the practical lives of real people in real
places. This means, first of all, that ecosocialist economic analysis incorpo-
rates scientific ecology and avoids the kind of “economics in Wonderland”
that plagues neoclassical theory and that failed to question the increasing
unreality and trading in “various pure-nothings” that led up to the current
economic crisis.226 This commitment to material reality also allows ecoso-
cialism to avoid the weakness of deep ecology and other schools of ecology
when they adopt purely cultural approaches that use a discourse of values
and ethics alone.227 This is an important message for ecopsychology, as it

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 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years 247

has close links with deep ecology and, as I discussed in chapter 1, is there-
fore prone to such culturalism (neglecting the internal relationship between
culture and society). Where a materialist philosophy is perhaps most helpful
to ecopsychology, however, is with respect to understanding the history of
the human-nature relationship. Whereas it is common to present this as
a history of ideas, an ecosocialist history links these ideas to actual mate-
rial conditions. To make this point, I wish to quote James O’Connor at
some length on the origin of dualistic ideas in the modern period: “It is
now possible to connect the revolution in the idea of nature with the revo-
lution in sociomaterial practices of capitalist everyday life. These dualistic
notions or separations or fragmentations were caused by, and helped to
cause, real material and social changes. . . . [Capitalism started with] the
breakup or enclosure of common lands and common property, the seizure
of the commons by the well-to-do, and New World slavery, hence the real
separation of nature or land and human beings. . . . The creation of a labor
market separated human beings from one another, increasingly atomizing
society. Then, in the capitalist factories, there occurred the separation of
mind labor from manual labor, and mind workers from manual workers,
and both from emotion or affect, which was now expected to be produced
by women in the domestic sphere.”228 I do not think this is the whole story
but I think it is an important part of it (and it connects with the ideas of
Carl Anthony, whom I discussed in chapter 1, on the history of alienation
from nature among people of color). I think such material analysis should
be included in any satisfactory history of the psyche-nature relationship.
• Although Marx was hardly an ecocentric thinker, his materialism did
attune him to ecological issues, most notably regarding the health of soil in
England: “In early societies, the produce of nature was often recycled back
to the land, fertilizing it. But the concentration of land ownership, which
involved the depopulation of rural areas, and the increasing division between
town and country, changed this process. Food and fiber were shipped from
the countryside to distant markets. In this, the nutrients of the soil were
transferred from the country to the city where they accumulated as waste
and contributed to the pollution of cities, rather than being returned to
the soil. This caused a rupture in the nutrient cycle.”229 Marx used the idea
of “social metabolism” for the “complex interchange of matter and energy
between human beings and nature,” with each mode of production having
its own characteristic form of metabolism that then defines a particular
society-nature relationship, as in the example just given about the rift in
the soil nutrient cycle. The site of this metabolism is labor, being defined
by Marx as the process “by which man, through his own actions, mediates,
regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”230 In
wage labor under capitalism, however, this metabolic relationship becomes

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 248 A Decade Later: Still Radical After all these Years

alien to laborers as they become alienated from nature, from the cycles of
matter and energy they are involved in. Now, the reason I am drawing atten-
tion to the topic of labor is because Marx demonstrated how pivotal it is
to the relationship between humans and nature—the psychology of which
is the subject of ecopsychology. It follows, furthermore, that overcoming
the alienation between capitalist society and the larger natural world will
require a different mode of production. As I mentioned above, this makes
the development of nonalienated labor—in which workers are connected
with their own bodily nature and creative powers, their society, the prod-
ucts of their labor, and the rhythms and cycles of the larger natural world
in which they are actively working—an arena that ecopsychology would
do well to pursue. (I think, as well, that Robert Greenway’s frequent plea
for the inclusion of “real” ecology in ecopsychology may find a positive
response here, for it is in such nature-connected labor that scientific ecology
takes on practical meaning.)

As Joel Kovel and others observe, there can be no exact blueprint for the transi-
tion to a postcapitalist ecological society; our transformational praxis can only be
prefigurative.231 A final challenge for ecopsychology is to consider how its own
activity might be prefigural or ground-preparing in this respect. I discussed above
the need to design our practice with a radical understanding of our historical
ecopsychological situation in mind. I wish to finish this chapter with one more
simple thought. We live in dark times, and in dark times there are always pos-
sibilities for renewal as the darkness calls out our humanity. In Iraq, a group of
Sunni and Shiite poets founded Freedom Space as a forum for supposed enemies
to come together to sing poems to one another. At one event, some of the poets
were killed by al Qaeda militants who believe that poetry is heresy. Despite the
risks, the Sunnis and Shiites persisted and at the next Freedom Space event sol-
diers from the local militia volunteered to guard the poets for free because the
organizers had no money. As one of the poets, Yanar, said, “We cannot give them
anything other than the spiritual feeling of the poetry. But they say they have
received a symbolic salary.” As for the participants who shared the magic of poetry
together, Yanar said: “People are desperate for this kind of positive connection.
What we see in every face, regardless of denomination, is absolute love and aspira-
tion for freedom.”232 The territory of ecopsychology is large; there are many places
to go and many ways to walk there. But perhaps it is something like the spirit of
Freedom Space that is most important. We may have to think of ecopsychology as
a psychology for dark times; we may have to put some portion of our lives aside as
a gift to others in bringing our world back to life.

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 NOTES

Preface

1. Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet, pp. 224–225.

Chapter 1

1. Editors comments, preceding Edith Cobb, “The Ecology of Imagination in

Childhood.”
2. Harold F. Searles, The Nonhuman Environment, p. xi.
3. In order to avoid awkwardness I will henceforth leave quoted male pronouns
uneditorialized. In order to maintain gender neutrality in my own writing I will either use
plural pronouns or use the phrases “she or he” and “her or him.”
4. Searles, The Nonhuman, p. 23. Although Searles is a significant figure in the his-
tory of ecopsychology, he made only one other relevant contribution of which I am aware,
the 1972 article “Unconscious Processes in relation to the Environmental Crisis.” (His
1961 article, “The Role of the Nonhuman Environment” is adapted from his book.)
5. Although Searles was speaking as a psychiatrist, I use “psychology” as an
umbrella term for all “psy” practice (psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychology, etc.).
6. Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, p. xvi.
7. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, p. 19.
8. Elan Shapiro, “Restoring Habitats, Communities, and Souls,” p. 225.
9. Carl Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” p. 85.
10. Roszak, The Voice, p. 302.
11. In addition to a personal unconscious composed of repressed mental contents,
Jung proposed that we share a “collective unconscious” composed of archetypal contents,
or patterns of experience, that have not derived from personal experience, but are rather
universal to humanity. See Carl Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” and
“Instinct and the Unconscious” in The Portable Jung. On defining archetypes, see James
Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. xix–xxi.
12. Roszak, The Voice, p. 304.
13. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pp. viii and 204.
14. See Morris Berman, “The Cybernetic Dream of the Twenty-First Century.”
249

Notes.indd 249 09/11/12 1:07 AM

 250 Notes

15. Aldo Leopold, quoted in Mary-Ellen Hynes, “Walking in a World of Wounds:

The Work of Donna Meadows,” p. 10.
16. Leslie Gray, “Shamanic Counseling and Ecopsychology,” p. 173. The only other
contribution of which I am aware by a Native American is Jeanette Armstrong’s moving
“Keepers of the Earth.”
17. James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psycho-
therapy—And the World’s Getting Worse, p. 51.
18. See Chellis Glendinning, “A Letter from Indian Country” and James Wright,
“A Cauldron-Born Quest: Speculations on European Vision Quest Rituals.”
19. Anthony Storr, “Man’s Relationship with Nature,” p. 21.
20. David Kidner, “Why Psychology Is Mute about the Environmental Crisis,”
pp. 365, 373.
21. Searles, The Nonhuman, p. 3.
22. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, pp. ix, 16, 108, 126, 124.
23. Tom Jay, quoted in Jim Cheney, “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as
Bioregional Narrative,” p. 122. Emphasis removed.
24. Modern philosophy, it is widely acknowledged, has floundered among the
various dichotomies issuing from the bifurcation of nature: spirit/matter, mind/body,
human/nature, subject/object, knower/known, male/female, reason/feeling, inner/
outer. As reality divided in two, so did philosophy, which split itself along the line
of those siding with or giving primacy to “inner” reality (rationalists, idealists, intel-
lectualists) and those taking the side of “outer” reality (empiricists, materialists, real-
ists). Modern philosophy, then, is a story of the various attempts to give a complete
account of reality from this divided—and so paradoxical—starting point, each effort
failing to discover a convincing way to link the two disparate orders of being. (See
Bernard Charles Flynn, “Descartes and the Ontology of Subjectivity.”) While from our
so-called postmodern vantage we can look back on modern philosophy and survey its
many shortcomings, the problem of dualism has by no means been solved. Much cur-
rent philosophy, for example, simply champions a “new spirit substance,. . . ­language
detached from both breath and body” (M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, p. x).
And for the most part the natural sciences continue to take a materialistic view of
reality; matter, after all, is what matters for such undertakings as biotechnology. In
the realm of art, finally, Aniela Jaffé writes that modern visual art taken as a whole is
itself symbolic of a “collective psychic rift.” As civilization removed “man further and
further from his instinctual foundation . . . a gulf opened between nature and mind,
between the unconscious and consciousness. These opposites characterize the psychic
situation that is seeking expression in modern art” (“Symbolism in the Visual Arts,”
p. 290). This rift has been played out, she says, through the two modern extremes of
“great abstraction” (spirit) and “great realism” (matter).
25. See J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man, Chapter Five.
26. James Hillman, “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World,” p. 74.
27. Carl Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, p. 6.

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 Notes 251

28. Sendivogius, quoted in Hillman, “Anima,” p. 71.

29. A polarity consists of a relationship between opposite poles wherein each is
implicated in, or complementary to, the other—as in “yin and yang,” or “up and down.”
The poles are inseparable from, and take their meaning from, each other, being differenti-
ated from within a single field of reality. Dichotomies, on the other hand, consist of a
­splitting or dividing of the field into antagonistic or separate realities.
30. Hillman, “Anima,” pp. 78–79. The painter Kadinsky similarly wrote that: “Not
only the things of poetry, the stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button
glittering out of the puddle in the street. . . . Everything has a secret soul” (quoted in Aniela
Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,” p. 292).
31. George Steiner, Heidegger, p. 69.
32. Hillman, Re-Visioning, p. 134. Emphasis mine.
33. Hillman, “Anima,” pp. 88–89.
34. Hillman, Re-Visioning p. 187.
35. My favorite introductions to phenomenology are in a series of articles by
Eugene Gendlin, “Existentialism and Experiential Therapy,” “Experiential Explication and
Truth,” and “Experiential Phenomenology;” and in a single article by David Levin, “Phe-
nomenology in America.” The second chapter of David Abrams The Spell of the Sensuous
is another relatively straightforward introduction. More comprehensive, and challenging,
studies include Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement; D. Stewart and A.
Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology; and Pierre Thevenaz, What Is Phenomenology? And
Other Essays.
36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 92.
37. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. xi. Or as he puts it otherwise: “Inside and
outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself ’
(p. 407). This, significantly, is to give psyche an ontological status, that is, is to conceive of
psyche in terms of our primary understanding of being rather than a secondary domain of
reality inside our heads—a move that also follows from an “existentializing” of psychology,
where human existence is understood as being-in-the-world. How we grasp reality always
depends on our mode or style of existing. It is not surprising, then, that in a note to himself
(for a book on which he was working at the time of his death), Merleau-Ponty wrote: “I
must show that what one might consider to be ‘psychology’. . . is in fact ontology” (The
Visible and the Invisible, p. 176). We might just as well say, conversely, that “ontology is
psychology.” In other words, once we externalize psyche or contest the mind/world split,
then reality becomes psychological through and through. Thus does Hillman boldly con-
clude that “the psychological perspective is supreme and prior because the psyche is prior
and must appear within every human undertaking. The psychological viewpoint does not
encroach upon other fields, for it is there to begin with, even if most disciplines invent
methods that pretend to keep it out. . . . psychology cannot be limited to being one field
among others since psyche itself permeates all fields and things of the world” (Revisioning,
p. 130).
38. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. xi. See, also, p. 406.

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39. David Abram, “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth,” p. 105. Hwa Yol
Jung had also made this connection in his 1972 article, “The Ecological Crisis: A Philo-
sophical Perspective, East and West.”
40. Merleau-Ponty writes, for example: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky I
am not [dualistically] set over against it as an acosmic subject . . ., I abandon myself to it
and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’ [i.e., as I lend my senses to it], I
am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my
consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue” (Phenomenology, p. 214). He also calls
perception “a coition, so to speak, of our body with things” (p. 320).
41. Abram, The Spell, p. 262.
42. James Hillman, “Aesthetics and Politics,” p. 39.
43. See, respectively, Sarah Conn, “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?” and
Elan Shapiro, “Restoring Habitats, Communities, and Souls.” Another way of looking
at this situation is to recognize that once the psyche is turned inside out, reality becomes
psychological through and through (see note 37 above). If we are in the psyche, if all of our
engagement with reality involves the soul in some way, then it is possible to consider any
number of practices “psychological,” let alone “ecopsychological.”
44. The distinction I am making here—between ecopsychology in support of
activism and ecopsychology as activism—can be a fine one. In her article “Personal Trans-
formation and Social Change: Conversations with Ecopsychologists in Action,” Mary
Gomes talks with two people (Renee Soule and Amy Fox) who are “extensively engaged in
both ecopsychology and environmental politics.” In my reading, the emphasis in the article
is on “bringing psychological sensitivity to the environmental movement” (p. 218), and
not on reframing this movement as a form of ecopsychological practice in itself. Soule, for
example, talks about how “ecopsychology can make an important contribution to activism”
(p. 226, my emphasis). By bringing attention to its psychospiritual dimension, ecopsy-
chologists may indeed play a role in changing the nature of activism. But the activism will
still be activism. That said, I do want to leave space in this account for those who undertake
ecological social action precisely as an effort at healing, or as an extension of their personal
practice. As the green-Buddhist activist Ken Jones writes: “the distinction between personal
Buddhist practice and social activism can be false; there is only one practice to be done”
(The Social Face of Buddhism, p. 19). Indeed, the wise among us have always taught that
everyday life is the primary theater of psychological and spiritual practice.
45. Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair,” p. 244. See, also,
Anita Burrows, “Crying for the Manatees.”
46. Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, pp. 2, 3.
47. Melissa Melamed, “Reclaiming the Power to Act,” p. 9.
48. Roszak, “Where Psyche,” p. 2.
49. This quotation is a composite from Theodore Roszak, “The Greening of Psy-
chology” (Gestalt Journal), p. 16 and The Voice of the Earth, p. 38
50. Macy, Despair, p. xiii.

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51. Theodore Roszak, “The Greening of Psychology” (The Ecopsychology News-

letter), p. 1.
52. Mitchell Thomashow, Ecological Identity, pp. 144, 151. Closely related to the
psychology of activism is the psychology within activism. For his report, The State of Envi-
ronmentalists, James Thornton interviewed approximately fifty U.S. environmentalists,
many of them high profile mainstream activists and deep ecology supporters. His goal was
to assess the emotional atmosphere in which they worked and to see how this atmosphere
affected their sense of where the environmental movement was headed. In short, he found
that the efforts of his subjects were dominated by hopelessness and anger. Many were
strongly attached to their anger, and despite the dangers of burnout were “worried that if
anger was not present, there could be no action” (p. 2). Thornton, a Buddhist, therefore
finished his report by promoting training in “wisdom practices,” such as meditation and
group experiential work, so that environmentalists may become less angry and develop a
more positive and clear-headed vision for their work.
53. Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, p.185.
54. Sarah Conn, “Protest and Thrive,” p. 11.
55. Macy, Despair, p. 69.
56. A more recent work by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life,
includes exercises from both “despair and empowerment” and “Council of All Being”
workshops.
57. Council of All Being (CAB) workshops are based on the idea that deep ecology
“remains a concept without power to transform our awareness and behavior unless we
allow ourselves to feel—which means feeling the pain within us over what is happening
to our world. . . . Often [this pain] arises as a deep sense of loss over what is slipping
away—ancient forests and clean rivers, birdsongs and breathable air” (Joanna Macy and Pat
Fleming, “Guidelines for a Council of All Beings Workshop,” in John Seed, et al., Thinking
Like a Mountain, p. 101).
58. Carl Anthony, “Ecopsychology and the Deconstruction of Whiteness,” pp. 264,
273.
59. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature.
60. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology, And Other Essays.
61. See Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology; Carolyn Merchant, ed., Ecology;
Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future; and Michael Zimmerman, ed., Environ-
mental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology.
62. See Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 70. For other overviews
of deep ecology, see Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Move-
ment. A Summary”; Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends; and Warwick Fox, Toward
a Transpersonal Ecology. Practically speaking, deep ecology is a movement for cultivating
“ecosophy” or “earth wisdom,” which involves deepening one’s sense of connection to earth
and learning to “harmonize with the will-of-the-land” (Devall, Simple, pp. 10–11).

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63. In a world viewed ecologically, things do not stand alone as self-contained,

wholly independent, or static entities. Ecology is a perspective, rather, that regards all rela-
tions as internal relations: all phenomena are seen as interdependent processes, partici-
pating in, structuring, or implying one another. My lungs, for instance, have no meaning
without air to breathe; they imply air. Things link up, tie together, point to one another,
form one whole.
64. Gary Snyder, Interviewed by Catherine Ingram, pp. 238–239.
65. Self-realization is the central norm in the particular ecophilosophy advanced by
the person who in 1973 first gave deep ecology its name, Arne Naess. By Self-realization he
means the broadening and deepening of the self to achieve as wide an identification with
the world as possible. Fox decided (with some controversy) that Naess’s philosophy is the
most tenable and distinctive among the various approaches to deep ecology; he therefore
used it as the basis for transpersonal ecology. See Arne Naess, “SelfRealization: An Eco-
logical Approach to Being in the World”; and Fox, Toward.
66. I consider George Bradford’s “Toward a Deep Social Ecology” to be a relatively
balanced critique of deep ecology. While Bradford is hard on the deep ecology movement
for its failure to see the social and historical roots of its ecological and philosophical ques-
tions, he nonetheless does regard the basic insights and sensibilities of deep ecology (e.g.,
its poetic, animistic vision, and its respect for kinship with the land) as a “fundamental pre-
condition for breaking out of the prison-house of urban-industrial civilization and creating
a family of free cultures in harmony with one another and the Earth” (p. 418).
67. See chapter ten, “Character and Culture,” in Devall and Sessions, Deep; and
p. 2 of Devall, Simple.
68. I am taking cues here from Carolyn Merchants brief summary of critiques of
deep ecology in Radical Ecology, pp. 102–105.
69. Quoted in Bradford, “Toward,” p. 419.
70. See Karren Warren, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism.”
71. Ariel Salleh, “The Ecofeminist/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal
Reason,” p. 214. Val Plumwood writes on this that the domination of women is an “illu-
minating model for many other kinds of domination, since the oppressed are often both
feminized and naturalized” (“Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression,”
p. 211).
72. Ariel Salleh, “Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminist/Deep
Ecology Debate,” p. 229.
73. Ecofeminist Jim Cheney and others claim that the psychology of deep ecology
is actually of an alienated masculine sort, in which relief is sought either through inflating
one’s ego to include the entire cosmos or through obliterating oneself through a holistic
merger with the natural world. According to Zimmerman, on the other hand, he, Naess,
and Snyder do not interpret Self-realization as a process of self-expansion but of self-emp-
tying, of realizing the illusory nature or emptiness of the ego self (see Contesting, p. 314).
74. There are two ecofeminist-based articles in the main ecopsychology text
(Roszak, et al., Ecopsychology), neither of which addresses the ecofeminism-deep ecology

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debate. Roszak, I should also note, does give some mention the ecofeminism-deep ecology
debate in his The Voice of the Earth. I have, of course, not been able to outline all the
features of this debate, seeking primarily to indicate only that there is a debate. Deep
ecology theorists have made numerous responses to their critics. See The Trumpeter 12:3
(1995); Warwick Fox, “The Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels”; and
Zimmerman, Contesting.
75. Social ecology’s main theorist is Murray Bookchin, although he is by no means
its authoritative voice. His main work is The Ecology of Freedom, while Remaking Society is a
more accessible introduction. While ecofeminism and social ecology share a focus on social
and historical issues, they have differing philosophies and agendas. On this see Val Plum-
wood, “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression.” On Ecosocialism, finally,
see James O’Connor’s “Socialism and Ecology” and Natural Causes, as well as Kovel’s forth-
coming The Enemy of Nature.
76. I should note that there are a number of ecopsychologists besides Anthony (e.g.,
Allen Kanner, Mary Gomes, Jeanine Canty) who advocate for more of a multicultural
perspective within ecopsychology. As far as I am aware, however, they have yet to publish
any statements on the matter. I should also mention René Soule, who coauthored an article
with Anthony (“A Multicultural Approach to Ecopsychology”).
77. Anthony, “Ecopsychology,” p. 264. “Environmental injustice. . . refers to the
fact that poor communities are disproportionately harmed by industrial toxic pollution and
that corporations and government—intentionally or unintentionally—build their worst
toxic sites and store their most hazardous chemicals in and around these low-income neigh-
borhoods. It also refers to the well-documented fact that local governments have excluded
minority communities from environmental planning and that toxic sites have destroyed
many traditional minority communities” (Ruth Rosen, “Who Gets Polluted?).
78. “. . . the kind of knowledge and insight that upsets institutions and threatens
to overturn sovereign regimes of truth” (Joe Kincheloe and Peter McLaren, “Rethinking
Critical Theory and Qualitative Research,” p. 138).
79. Joel Kovel, “The American Mental Health Industry,” p. 89.
80. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia, p. 125.
81. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. xvii.
82. Joel Kovel, “Therapy in Late Capitalism,” in The Radical Spirit, p. 121.
83. Kovel, “Therapy,” in The Radical, p. 119.
84. Dreyer Kruger, The Changing Reality of Modern Man, p. xiv. In addition to
those cited here, my main sources for these views include David Ingleby (ed.), Critical
Psychiatry; David Levin (ed.), Pathologies of the Modern Self; Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire;
Issac Prilelltensky, The Morals and Politics of Psychology; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of
Narcissism; and articles by Philip Cushman and Edward Sampson.
85. Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet, p. 52. See also Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale.
86. As Kovel says, “psyche refers not to an isolatable thing but to a historically
dynamic relation between a person and a social totality. . . . And if this is so, then the
consequences for psychology are drastic, for it finds itself without the confident location

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 256 Notes

of an object for its discourse” (“Mind and State in Ancient Greece,” in The Radical Spirit,
p. 224). Kovel also has an interest in ecological politics, which makes his combination of
social and psychological theory particularly helpful to ecopsychology. See, for example,
“The Marriage of Radical Ecologies,” p. 406.
87. See, for example, his “Things and Words.”
88. I am referring here to Fox’s Toward a Transpersonal Ecology. In his “The Deep
Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels,” he defends deep ecology against criticisms
made by ecofeminists and social ecologists, but his discussion there is not psychologically
focused.
89. See, for example, the contributions in the journal ReVision (20.4, 1998), which
are dedicated to the theme of “Ecopsychology and Social Transformation.” In her “A Psy-
chological Impact Report for the Environmental Movement,” for instance, Melissa Nelson
writes of how our “polluted thinking” creates a form of consciousness “that manifests in
destructive beliefs and behaviours such as anthropocentrism, racism, sexism, nationalism,
classism, greed, and aggressiveness” (p. 38).
90. Allen Kanner and Mary Gomes, “The All-Consuming Self,” p. 83.
91. In his Regarding Nature, Andrew McLaughlin makes this same point in relation
to the ecology movement in general.
92. Roszak, “Where Psyche,” p. 15. Roszak is suggesting that if we could say with
the “full weight of professional psychological authority” that humans are emotionally
bonded to the earth, then this might “achieve the same legal and policy-making force that
now attaches to physical hazards like toxic waste.”
93. Sarah Conn, “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?,” p. 162.
94. See, for example, Irene Harvey, “Schizophrenia and Metaphysics: Analyzing the
DSM-III.”
95. Joel Kovel, “A Critique of DSM-III,” p. 135.
96. Conn does not view “the need to consume” as an individual issue, for example,
but as “as a serious signal of our culture’s disconnection from the Earth.” She would there-
fore revise the DSM to include this larger context. My point, by contrast, is to suggest
that ecopsychology keep its distance from establishment psychology altogether; that it stay
radical, rather than reformist.
97. A point I first made in my, “Toward a More Radical Ecopsychology.”
98. Roszak, The Voice, p. 55. Roszak refers, moreover, mostly to the “antipsychiatry”
movement of the sixties and seventies, in which psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing contended
that the so-called mentally ill were expressing a sensible response to social conditions that
were themselves mad. I have in mind, rather, the more sociologically and philosophically
informed works of the critics listed above, that is, Kovel et al.
99. Charles Taylor, quoted in Raymond Rogers, Nature and the Crisis of Modernity,
p. 166.
100. Stan Rowe, Home Place, p. 5.
101. Konrad Stettbacher, Making Sense of Suffering, p. 42.

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 Notes 257

102. The well-known ecologists Anne and Paul Ehrlich, for example, have written
a book called Healing the Planet, in which there are headings about pollution, the ozone
layer, and so on—but none about healing humans. The danger that industrial society poses
to human physical health have, of course, always been a focus of modern environmentalism.
The environmental justice movement, which emerged in the mid-1980s, does include
humans within its definition of “the environment,” but focuses mostly on social rather than
psychological issues (see Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of
Environment and Social Justice”).
103. Joel Kovel, “Rejoinder to Kenneth J. Gergen,” p. 407. Kovel asks, as I do: “if we
are completely malleable [i.e., without a nature], then what can be postulated as the source
of the drive toward freedom and the resistance to oppression?” (“On the Notion of Human
Nature,” p. 371).
104. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?,” pp. 89–90.
105. Gordon Wheeler, Gestalt Reconsidered, p. 34.
106. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. x.
107. John Welwood, “Meditation and the Unconscious: A New Perspective,” p. 8.
108. See Eugene Gendlin, “A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism.”
Gendlin uses the Women’s Movement as an example of how everyday experience can imply
social change, that is, how women’s experience of social reality contests that reality because
it oppresses them as women (pp. 296–297). Just so, in an ecodestructive society our eve-
ryday experience implies social change toward a more ecological one.

Chapter Two

1. John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 15.

2. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, p. 182.
3. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, pp. 2–3.
4. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, p. 213.
5. Robert Socolow, quoted in Borgmann, Technology, pp. 185–186. Emphasis
mine.
6. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?,” pp. 83–84.
7. Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien, p. 3. See, also, Neil Evernden, ed., The
­Paradox of Environmentalism.
8. Livingston, The Fallacy, p. 50.
9. I borrow this phrase from Raymond Rogers, Nature and the Crisis of Modernity,
p. 150.
10. Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, commenting on Gramsci, in Marilyn
Cooper, “Environmental Rhetoric in the Age of Hegemonic Politics,” p. 241.
11. Borgmann also lists the primacy of method and individualism as defining features
of the modern era, the main authors of these two features being Descartes and Locke,

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respectively. Ecopsychology, as should be evident by the end of this chapter, stands opposed
to these two as well.
12. In his chapter on “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” anthropologist Clif-
ford Geertz writes: “As a frame for thought, and a species of it, common sense is as total-
izing as any other: no religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy
more general.” As a cultural system, however, rather than some immediately given native
wisdom: “It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated,
even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next” (Local Knowledge,
pp. 76, 84).
13. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, “Introduction: Entering the Field of
Qualitative Research,” p. 4.
14. A phrase I prefer over “abnormal,” even if the latter makes for smoother English.
15. Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet, pp. 44, 197.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 24.
17. Martin Packer and Richard Addison, “Introduction,” to Entering the Circle,
p. 13. I am using the term “objectivism” here in a broad sense, as the position which insists
that there must be some ahistorical, definitive framework that can serve as a foundation for
all knowledge claims (see Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism).
18. See David Canter and Kenneth Craig, “Environmental Psychology”; Daniel
Stokols and Irwin Altman, eds., Handbook of Environmental Psychology; and Russell Veitch
and Daniel Arkkelin, Environmental Psychology.
19. Although David Seamon has made a call for a more phenomenological orien-
tation to environmental psychology (“The Phenomenological Contribution to Environ-
mental Psychology”), he did so precisely because the latter is so objectivistic in outlook.
20. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature, pp. 1, 196.
21. David Kidner, “Why Psychology Is Mute About the Environmental Crisis,”
pp. 368, 370.
22. Kaplans, The Experience, pp. ix, 198.
23. I do not mean to demonize mainstream environmentalism. The radical critique
does not make the concerns and efforts of the mainstream irrelevant, but rather points to
the ways in which this mainstream, by itself, still supports the status quo.
24. Russell Veitch and Daniel Arkkelin, Environmental Psychology, p. 425.
25. Paul Stern, “Psychological Dimensions of Global Environmental Change,”
p. 295.
26. Ecopsychologists, of course, are not the only ones involved in such criticism,
for the positivist conception of an “objective” nature (one unaffected by historical or social
prejudice, human meaning or value, ideological distortion, and so on) is increasingly in
disrepute. As historian Elizabeth Bird states: “Every aspect of scientific theory and practice
expresses socio-political interests, cultural themes and metaphors, personal interactions,
and professional negotiations for the power to name the world” (“The Social Construc-
tion of Nature,” p. 256). For more specific treatments of this topic, see Donna Haraways
Primate Visions, in which, taking primatology as her vehicle, she examines how “themes of

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race, sexuality, gender, nation, family, and class have been written into the body of nature
in western life sciences since the eighteenth century”; or Donald Worster’s The Economy of
Nature, in which he traces the history of social metaphors embedded in the shifting theories
of scientific ecology. In addition, a significant number of natural scientists (e.g., feminist
scientists) have themselves put traditional natural science into question. See, for example,
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science.
27. Arthur Kleinman, Rethinking Psychiatry, p. 1.
28. As discussed at length in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology. A valuable,
Heideggerian treatment of this topic is also given by Medard Boss in his Existential Founda-
tions of Medicine and Psychology.
29. In a recent article (“The Myth of the Organicity of Mental Disorders”), Victor
D. Sanua argues that after a hundred years of research into the brains, biochemistry, and
genes of schizophrenics, no case can be made for an organic basis to schizophrenic suf-
fering. Psychiatry leaves in its wake one discarded theory after another, each announced
in its day with the claim that the “cause” of schizophrenia had finally been found. He
asks: “Why do biopsychiatrists continue to attribute mental disorders to organic factors,
while ignoring completely social factors which offer a more parsimonious explanation for
the development of mental disorders?” (p. 61). As Judith Herman writes, “many or even
most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse” (Trauma and Recovery, p. 122).
Arthur Kleinman similarly comments that the genetic theory of schizophrenia “is now
in complete disarray. Inheritance has not been proven. . . . There is still, after more than
30 years of intense biological investigation, no clear-cut understanding of the biology of
schizophrenia. . . . This does not deter psychiatrists and those who write the advertisements
for drug companies from asserting without any hesitation that schizophrenia is a biologi-
cally based disorder. This belief is the central tenet of professional orthodoxy” (Rethinking
Psychiatry, p. 188, n. 1 for chapt. 3). While schizophrenia will always be a possibility within
the vulnerable terms of the human condition, less “developed” countries reportedly have
relatively low rates of it, with some small preliterate societies being almost entirely free of
it. On the other hand, rates are globally highest in North America and some European
societies (Kleinman, Rethinking, pp. 34–35). It has therefore been suggested that not only
biology, but political economy plays an important role among the conditions that con-
tribute to schizophrenia. The condition of the Western economy and “the development of
capitalist modes of wage-labor in non-Western societies appear to lead to greater numbers
of individuals manifesting schizophrenia and fewer of them improving” (Richard Warner
quoted in Kleinman, Rethinking, p. 36).
30. The outspoken psychiatrist Peter Breggin calls schizophrenia not a disease but
a psychospiritual crisis. Repeating a point made familiar by the antipsychiatry tradition,
he argues that schizophrenic speech appears to have no meaning only when it is taken
literally rather than metaphorically or poetically. He refers to one schizophrenic patient,
Brugo, who was shown on the television program 60Minutes speaking about such things
as being Adam and Eve’s kin, being a Homo-erectus man, and about not yet being extinct.
While the intention of the program was to demonstrate the nonsensibility of schizophrenic

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communication, Breggin heard Brugo symbolically discoursing about his “desperate need
for personal value and dignity, his identification with religion and humanity, and perhaps
his awareness of primitive [sic] impulses stirring inside himself, as well as his fear of personal
extinction” (Breggin, Toxic, p. 23).
There is a large body of literature arguing for the meaningfulness of schizophrenic expe-
rience, and protesting the medical model. James Glass, for example, writes that schizo-
phrenics’ delusional systems—obsessed as they are by themes of power, domination,
enslavement, violence, and transformation—mirror the mentality of political programs
and leaders that themselves paranoically divide the world into powerful and weak, seek
to dominate others, and so on. “By being in the world,” says Glass, “the schizophrenic
conveys messages about social power; yet in its haste to banish the mad, society blunts their
implicit criticisms and its symbolic meaning” (“Schizophrenia and Rationality,” p. 431).
David Levin, furthermore, says that in the speech of schizophrenia “there is always a painful
truth about us, about family, society, world, which needs to be recognized.” In particular,
Levin suggests that the voice of schizophrenia is the most extreme manifestation of the pain
inherent in modern dualism, wherein the inner self is isolated from the external world, cut
off, lonely, empty, fearful of engulfment, and so on (“Clinical Stories: A Modern Self in
the Fury of Being”). See also Peter Breggin and Mark Stern, eds., Psychosocial Approaches to
Deeply Disturbed Persons.
31. Joel Kovel, “The American Mental Health Industry,” p. 86. Eugene Gendlin’s
remarks are also relevant here: “I think that all our efforts to define schizophrenia—to clas-
sify it as a disease entity—will fail. Schizophrenia is something that isn’t. Interaction isn’t.
Being alive toward other people isn’t. Certainly there must be all sorts of chemical imbal-
ances and organismic reactions as a result of this. If we can find chemical means to alleviate
these, the individual may be more able to become reconnected. I doubt, however, that there
can be a chemical or any other kind of cure without interaction. I think the not being, the
cutoffness of interaction constitutes what we call schizophrenia” (“Schizophrenia: Problems
and Methods of Psychotherapy,” pp. 183–184).
32. See Sanua, “The Myth,” p. 59.
33. The latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Sta-
tistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes “psychosocial and environmental
problems” among its diagnostic axes. These problems nonetheless still have a minor pres-
ence in the manual, and their inclusion in no way makes the DSM a work of social com-
mentary. Nor does the mention of these problems do much to change the predominantly
medical ethos within the mental health setting.
34. Despite my concerns about biopsychiatry, I am not an outright opponent of
psychobiological research, some of which has shed very helpful light on the physiological
aspects of trauma (see, for example, Bessel van der Kolk, et al., Traumatic Stress). Nor do I
think that it is always a bad idea to use psychiatric medication, especially for persons who
have been traumatized and who are unable to “regulate” their overwhelming emotional
reactions in other than self-destructive ways, or persons who have no other good options
for reducing their suffering to the point where they can actually engage in a healing process

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or manage their lives. What I do object to is the reduction of human suffering to a purely
medical condition and human nature to biomechanics. It goes without saying that there
would be less need for medication if the experience of trauma were not so common and
if we had more humane and understanding environments in which to see our emotional
and spiritual crises through. Kovel cites a case—Soteria House—where a “drug-free, non-
medical treatment environment worked better for acute psychosis and was far cheaper
to boot.” Yet, it “was perceived as a threat to the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance-
government power structure, and was eliminated” (“Schizophrenic Being and Techno-
cratic Society,” pp. 345–347). See Loren Mosher, “Soteria: a Therapeutic Community for
Psychotic Persons.”
35. I am taking some of my cues here from Joel Kovel, “On the Notion of Human
Nature: A Contribution Toward a Philosophical Anthropology” and “Things and Words.”
36. As discussed in his writings on Freud in The Conflict of Interpretations and in
Freud and Philosophy. The quote is from Kovel, “Things,” p. 23.
37. Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in Mical Goldfarb, “Making the Unknown Known,”
p. 180.
38. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” p. 86.
39. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 360, 373. John Dewey
quoted on p. 379. On this point, see also John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, chapter
eight.
40. Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics, p. 215.
41. J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man, pp. 95, 96. Italics mine.
“Natural understanding” is a phrase used to denote everyday, pretheoretical understanding.
42. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, p. 122.
43. George Sessions, “Paul Shepard: Ecological Elder,” p. 86.
44. Van den Berg, The Changing, p. 234.
45. Richard Nelson, “Searching for the Lost Arrow,” p. 203.
46. Hans-Georg Gadamer, quoted in Bernstein, Beyond, p. 148.
47. It is this point, once again, that differentiates ecopsychology from environ-
mental psychology.
48. By contrast Hans Peter Duerr suggests that normal scientists “mount the defence
against what is strange” (Dreamtime, p. 126).
49. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human
­Sciences,” p. 83.
50. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” in
Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 5.
51. As related by Bernstein, Beyond, pp. 128–129.
52. Borgmann, Crossing, p. 51.
53. Rorty, Philosophy, p. 300. Rorty is here drawing on the views of Donald
Davidson.
54. Kovel, “On the Notion,” pp. 378–380. See also “Freud’s Ontology—Agency
and Desire.”

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55. Gadamer ultimately avoids this charge, for he claims that language always refers
back to lived experience, of which language is the articulation. The criticism here, however,
is that his view of experience has little body. On this, see Jerald Wallulis, “Carrying For-
ward: Gadamer and Gendlin on History, Language, and the Body.”
56. Eugene Gendlin, “Human Nature and Concepts,” p. 5. I added the word
“human” to indicate the possibility of nonhuman language and culture.
57. Eugene Gendlin, “A Philosophical Critique of Narcissism,” p. 293.
58. David Abram, “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth,” p. 112.
59. Hermeneutics and phenomenology have a close relationship. While herme-
neutics may not always be associated with phenomenology, Heidegger claimed in Being and
Time that phenomenology is necessarily hermeneutical, working as it does to interpret or
uncover phenomena. This “hermeneutic phenomenology” is distinguished from Edmund
Husserl’s “transcendental” phenomenology, the latter of which is conceived as an attempt
to describe the pure structures of transcendental consciousness. While Merleau-Ponty held
that his own work sprang most directly from the later Husserl, his writings are nonetheless
best located in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology. Even Husserl’s work can in
retrospect be read as a hermeneutical undertaking.
60. My discussion here is drawing on Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World,
pp.  16–23, and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 191. Dreyfus notes that there is
no reason to believe that there are any theories, principles, or rules behind the “pervasive
responses, discriminations, motor skills, and so forth” that make up our cultural practices.
“Indeed, if one tried to state the rules for distance-standing, one would require further
rules, such as standing closer if there is a noise in the background, or further away if the
person has the flu, and the application of these rules would require further rules, and so on,
always leading us back to further, everyday, taken-for-granted practices.”
61. Such biases are in fact necessary for any inquiry to proceed, for they provide the
initial organization or orientation for any kind of sense-making whatsoever. As Gadamer
wrote: “Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions
whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us”
(“The Universality,” in Philosophical, p. 9). He was, accordingly, critical of the Enlighten-
ment “prejudice against prejudices.”
62. Palmer, Hermeneutics, p. 25.
63. Gadamer has been criticized for his notion of a “fusion of horizons” because it does
not adequately account for the problematic aspects of dialogue or communication. Critics such
as Jürgen Habermas rightly say that in describing fusion as a simple process in which preexisting
traditions are mutually enriched, Gadamer does not sufficiently consider how communication
is ideologically distorted and disrupted or how traditions can oppress people and limit their view
of reality. For us, dialogue does not take place in some ideal community of equal participants but
in a world riven with class interests and exploitative relations. While I believe there is merit in
these criticisms, I also believe that the notion of a “fusion of horizons” does describe the everyday
process by which meaning is transmitted and our biases are revealed. In other words, I think it
is fair to use the term for the phenomenon it truly does describe, even if a critical hermeneutics

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 Notes 263

must go beyond the model of a simple fusing of horizons (i.e., dialogue under ideal circum-
stances) to also engage in the critique of ideology.
64. David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds., Being Changed.
65. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, p. 141.
66. This point is made repeatedly in a recent issue of Man and World, 30 (1997),
which is dedicated entirely to the topic of hermeneutics and natural science. Human/
social scientists are increasingly adopting explicitly interpretive or qualitative approaches,
although academic psychologists in particular have been slow to make the move. On the
reluctance of the psychological mainstream to incorporate a hermeneutic perspective, see
Kenneth Gergen, “Emerging Challenges for Theory and Psychology;” Stanley Messer et
al., Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory; and Martin Packer and Richard Addison, eds.,
Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology.
67. This is not to say, however, that there are not many scientists aware of herme-
neutical issues.
68. Gadamer, “The Problem,” p. 133.
69. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 96.
70. Baleen, quoted in Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, pp. 58–59.
71. Allen D. Kanner, “The Voice of the Earth: A Review,” p. 170.
72. Robert Greenway, “The Wilderness Effect and Ecopsychology,” p. 123. See also
“Psychoecology as a Search for Language.”
73. Christine Downing, “Poetically Dwells Man on this Earth,” pp. 316–317.
Emphases mine.
74. Peter Mathiessen, The Nine-Headed Dragon River, pp. ix–x. Charles Bergman,
furthermore, echoes a common sentiment when he says: “increasingly we are coming to
know nature through what is no longer available to us” (“The Curious Peach,” p. 282).
75. Richard Nelson, The Island Within, p. 280.
76. Rogers, Nature, p. 152. Indeed, Rogers argues that a sense of loss is “the cen-
tral battleground over which this divisiveness [between the radicals and the mainstream]
struggles.”
77. Erazim Kohák writes that “discourse seeks to communicate by evoking an expe-
rience shared” (The Embers and the Stars, 64). As I noted at the start of this chapter, how-
ever, the possibilities for communication become slim when one’s experience is not shared
by others (at least not on the surface). By focusing on what I presume is a common experi-
ence—loss—I am thus hoping indeed to evoke an “experience shared.”
78. In his book Radical Hermeneutics, John Caputo does a good job of laying out
what is at issue here. Caputo adopts Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction between two basic
orientations toward life: “recollection” and “repetition.” Recollection is backward looking;
it tries to regain something lost or forgotten, seeks to recover from a fall. Repetition,
meanwhile, is forward looking; it is based on the idea that we come to know ourselves—
repeatedly come back to ourselves—only by courageously pushing ahead through our dif-
ficulties, not by trying to recover some former innocence. The knock against recollection
is that it “begins at the end instead of at the beginning, with the loss instead of the task”

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(p.14). As Caputo describes it: “The love of repetition is happy, an earnest and exhilarating
struggle, while the love of recollection is a nostalgic melancholy longing for a lost paradise,
a dreamy wistfulness” (p. 15). I think, however, that this contrast is unfairly put. Repetition
appears in such a positive light only because recollection is cast so negatively. This is the
kind of binary strategy that Caputo is himself so adamant that we deconstruct (recollection
is repetition’s negated “other”). I would instead adopt an orientation that incorporates both
motions, and that sees either motion on its own as problematic. A recollection that only
looks backward, that spends all its time dwelling on losses and fantasizing about an idyllic
past, is indeed an avoidance of present society, as well as a recipe for perpetual discontent.
A repetition that lacks a recollective moment, however, is no less of a problem. For it misses
utterly the genuine experience of loss; becomes insensitive to the deep “pain for home” (the
etymological meaning of “nostalgia”) that many people do in fact feel. At a time when our
society is so obviously estranged from its “earth-home” (oikos), when such great numbers
of people have been dislocated, when so much is disappearing, and when “soul loss” is such
a common complaint, I just see no merit in dismissing all talk of loss as weak-willed or
deluded chatter. I would ask the reader, then, not to confuse my use of the term recollection
with Caputo’s. For one thing, I am not trying to recall a golden era but rather our own
human nature and our grounding in the more-than-human earth. I focus on both loss and
task. I frame ecopsychology as a response to history, not a running away from it. Repeti-
tion, says Caputo, “is a living response which speaks against, protests, disavows the weight
of tradition which has become leaden and lifeless” (p. 91). So would I describe the critical
work of ecopsychology. It is in fact precisely through a process of recollection that I see
ecopsychology helping us to find the strength and creativity to move forward. (Despite my
disagreements with Caputo, there is much in his book that I would support, including his
proposal for “an ethics of otherness, an ethics aimed at giving what is other as big a break
as possible” (p. 260).)
As for the charge that to concentrate on our modern losses is to neglect or be
ungrateful for what has in fact been gained, I will simply say that this is not necessarily the
case. As should be apparent in this book, I am very much in support of the modern ideal
of authenticity, as well as the modern goal of universal freedom and solidarity. In short, I
seek to counter modernity only in its negative aspects; I want to get beyond modernity, not
to duplicate precisely some premodern state of affairs. If I focus on the experience of loss it
is only because I feel there is much important work to be done by doing so.
79. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 196.
80. On the relationship between theory and practice within an experiential frame-
work, see Eugene Gendlin, “The Role of Knowledge in Practice.”
81. The work of philosopher Eugene Gendlin has been crucial to me in validating
such an approach.
82. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, p. 55. Emphasis removed.
83. Paul Campbell, “Poetic-Rhetorical, Philosophical, and Scientific Discourse,” p. 2.
84. Aristotle himself dedicated an entire book of his Rhetoric to the topic of indi-
vidual and group psychology.

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 Notes 265

85. Hillman, Revisioning, pp. xvi, 213. The mind, says Hillman, has a poetic basis;
it seeks meaning, not facts. Hence, to become less literal is to become more psychological—
a point lost on those scientific psychologists who seek literal, objective accounts of psycho-
logical life.
86. It is worth noting, in this vein, that the traditional goal of rhetoric is to advance
a persuasive case for how to deal with a collectively held problem that defies easy, single-­
discipline solution. “Rhetoric exists. . . because a world of certainty is not the world of
human affairs. It exists because the world of human affairs is a world where there must
be an alternative to certain [apodeictic] knowledge on the one hand and pure chance
and whimsy on the other. The alternative is informed opinion.” Rhetoric guides decision
making, “where no method is inherent in the total subject-matter of decision” (Donald
Bryant, “Rhetoric: Its Function and Its Scope,” p. 39).
87. Borgmann, Technology, p. 240.
88. I am borrowing here from Charles Taylor, who, in the same spirit as Borgmann,
has written that: “As our public traditions of family, ecology, even polis are undermined or
swept away, we need new languages of personal resonance to make crucial human goods
alive for us again” (Sources of the Self, p. 513).
89. Owen Barfield, “The Meaning of the Word ‘Literal,’” p. 57. Emphasis mine.
90. Barfield, Poetic, p. 63. Emphasis removed.
91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Barfield, Poetic, p. 179. Heidegger likewise
wrote: “Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather
the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which
there hardly resounds a call any longer” (quoted in Charles Taylor, “Heidegger, Language,
Ecology,” p. 269, n. 32). Or as Paul Ricoeur says: “Every metaphor is a poem in miniature”
(quoted in Véronique Fóti, “Alterity and the Dynamics of Metaphor,” p. 307).
92. There is therefore no sharp line between literal and figurative speech, but only
different degrees of metaphorical “twist” that may still be felt in a word or phrase. The point
of this paragraph—that the metaphoric-poetic mode is primary—has been well established
by many others. In addition to the works by Burke, Barfield, Romanyshyn, and Campbell
cited in this section, see Eugene Gendlin’s numerous writings on metaphor and experi-
ence; Merleau-Ponty’s writings on speech/language in Phenomenology of Perception (as well
as Jerry Gill’s study, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor); Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought;
and, for psychological perspectives, James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology; Ronald Valle
and Rolf von Eckartsberg, ed.’s The Metaphors of Consciousness; and David Leary, ed.’s Met-
aphors in the History of Psychology.
93. Edmund Burke, quoted in Campbell, “Poetic-Rhetorical,” p. 3.
94. Paul Campbell, Rhetoric-Ritual, p. 21. The word rhetoric traces back to a pre-
historic Indo-European base, wer-, which means “speak, say,” and which also gives us word
and verb.
95. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 92, emphasis removed.
The modern scientific and philosophical dream, by contrast, was to discover the literal
foundations of reality without having to resort to using figurative, rhetorical language in

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 266 Notes

order to persuade one’s audience toward the truth. Thus, in 1667 Thomas Sprat wrote of
the Royal Society of London that it had “endeavored to separate the knowledge of Nature
from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, [and] the delightful deceit of Fables”
(David Leary, “Psyche’s Muse,” p. 8).
96. Campbell, “Poetic-Rhetorical,” p. 5.
97. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflec-
tion,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 24. See also “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,”
in which Gadamer notes that there is a “deep inner convergence with rhetoric and
hermeneutics.”
98. Borgmann, Technology, p. 178.
99. “World” refers here to the everyday context or interrelational whole in which
we gather the meaning of things according to our practical, concernful involvement with
them. To the extent that natural scientists attempt to rub out any such involvement, their
methods “deworld” nature—disclose it in only its thinnest, decontextualized, meaning-
shrunken dimensions. On this, see Dreyfus, Being, chapter eleven.
100. Aristotle made a distinction between epi-deictic and apo-deictic discourses, both
of which seek to demonstrate something, the latter by means of scientific proof, the former
by means of displaying or showing forth some phenomenon. I believe that Borgmann
uses the simple term deictic in place of Aristotle’s epideictic. Relating these two forms of
discourse in his own way, Gadamer wrote that the “hermeneutical experience . . . is the
matrix out of which arises the questions that it then directs to science” (“On the Scope,” in
Philosophical, p. 40).
101. As Medard Boss argues in Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, for
example, all medical interventions should in principle take their bearings from the existence
of the person, from the meaning of a medical condition within the world of the patient. Even
to fix a broken leg, for example, is more than just treating bone matter. For the meaning of
the break is that one can no longer play with one’s friends, go to work, walk to the store, go
on a canoe trip. The break is essentially an injury to one’s existence, which shrinks as a conse-
quence. Hence, the real significance of medical treatment is that it restores one’s freedom to
engage the world, returns one to one’s former life. Why else fix the bone? A broken bone may,
however, further symbolize to a person that she or he is “breakable,” a loser, a victim, or some
other disturbing existential meaning, in which case applying plaster to the bone will of itself
not be an adequately human response. All the more so is the sufficiency of purely medical
treatment a question in the case of psychic suffering, as I discussed above.
102. Kohák, The Embers, p. xii.
103. Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, p. 146.
104. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 107. I do not wish to give the
impression that statistics have no place in ecopsychological (or any other) inquiry, but do
offer Gadamer’s caution that “what is established by statistics seems to be a language of
facts, but which questions these facts answer and which facts would begin to speak if other
questions were asked are hermeneutical questions. Only a hermeneutical inquiry would
legitimate the meaning of these facts” (“The Universality,” in Philosophical, p. 11).

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105. Borgmann, Crossing, p. 5.

106. Borgmann, Technology, p. 179. Borgmann mentions, in particular, the poetic
prose of Henry Thoreau and Herman Melville.
107. Norman O. Brown, quoted in Hillman, Revisioning, p. 149.
108. On this, see Barfield, Poetic.
109. Calvin Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth, p. ix.
110. Gary Snyder, The Old Ways, p. 13. Also on p. 51 of A Place in Space. See also
Borgmann, Technology, p. 26.
111. Borgmann, Technology, p. 26.
112. In Borgmann’s words: “Something is going on that needs to be illuminated
and understood. Yet. . . it will not be captured in the modes of explanation that are proper
to the sciences and to the great focal powers of the past, i.e., through apodeictic or [epi-]
deictic explanations. But there is a third possibility of explaining, one where we try to com-
prehend the character of reality by discovering its predominant pattern. A pattern is more
concrete and specific than a [scientific] law and yet more general and abstract than a unique
focal thing. To illuminate reality by disclosing its pattern is a quasi-deictic explanation. Let
us call it paradeictic or paradigmatic explanation” (Technology, p. 73).
113. A point also made by Dreyfus about phenomenological inquiry in his
Being-in-the-World.
114. Borgmann, Technology, p. 179.

Chapter Three

1. With a nod to Neil Evernden, who used this phrase as the title for the third
chapter of his The Natural Alien.
2. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, p. 119.
3. John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 100. A conclusion
shared, incidentally, by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 268.
4. Evernden, The Natural, p. 33.
5. Livingston, The Fallacy, p. 115.
6. R. D.Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 12.
7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 346.
8. David Levin, “Psychopathology in the Epoch of Nihilism,” p. 33.
9. As a popular movement in mid-twentieth-century Europe, existentialism
became associated (especially under the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre) with the idea that
existence precedes essence, that is, that our nature is purely what we choose it to be through
our free actions. I oppose that idea, so do not want my use of the term existentialism to
be limited to it. I am using the term more broadly, to indicate an emphasis both on the
primacy of experience and on a confrontation with the ultimate concerns in life (death,
freedom, meaning, suffering, the human place in nature, etc.). In this sense, Buddhism,
for example, is a kind of existentialism. My specific goal is to develop a kind of “ecological
existentialism,” wherein the ultimate concerns of life are worked out in the context of our

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membership within the community of all life. As a Buddhist-ecologist, Gary Snyder seems
to me an example of someone practicing this kind of existentialism.
10. Eugene Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, p. 15.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 166.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin made a similar existentialist point: “Contemporary man feels
sure of himself, feels well off and clear-headed, [only] where he is essentially and funda-
mentally not present. . . . The course from a premise to a conclusion is traversed flawlessly
and irreproachably, for [he himself does] not exist on that course. . . . But he feels unsure
of himself, feels destitute and deficient in understanding, where he has to do with himself ’
(Toward a Philosophy of the Act, pp. 20–21). Middle sentence is out of original order.
13. Gendlin, Experiencing, pp. 15–16.
14. See David Levin, “Psychopathology in the Epoch of Nihilism,” p. 29.
15. Theodore Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” p. 15.
16. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, pp. 94–95. Emphasis mine. Roszak
also comments: “If any part of an animist sensibility is to be reclaimed, the project will have
to integrate with modern science. Nothing else will qualify as an honest intellectual effort.”
My discussions in part one, especially concerning Hillman’s and Abram’s work, should suf-
fice to indicate my utter disagreement with Roszak on this point.
17. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, p. 3. “Reason” here refers to instru-
mental reason—not to be confused with critical, practical, spiritual, or other kinds of
reason. Even Issac Newton cautioned that “Reasoning without experience is very slippery”
(quoted in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 284).
18. Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, p. xii.
19. Hence, even Shepard’s statement is misleading, for scientific data may of itself
only assist, and not guide, a redirection of society. On the folly in presuming that it may,
see Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature. On the dangers of defending nature by
speaking in ecological abstractions (e.g., complexity, diversity, integrity, etc.), rather than
by offering testimonials and appeals based on lived experience, see Albert Borgmann, Tech-
nology and the Character of Contemporary Life, pp. 186–187.
20. Laing, The Politics, p. 51.
21. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 115.
22. The discussion under this heading and the next draws particularly heavily on
the work of Eugene Gendlin. Indeed, I use many of his phrases throughout. I wish, then,
to indicate here my colossal indebtedness to Gendlin.
23. Eugene Gendlin, “A Theory of Personality Change,” p. 129.
24. Martin Heidegger, quoted in David Levin, The Listening Self, p. 219.
25. Gendlin, Experiencing, p. 162.
26. In the early 1930s, Heidegger believed that Nazism was a necessary violence for
halting the decline into nihilism and for reversing the devastation of the Earth wrought
by modernity. The danger of using Heidegger’s thought is that it includes hierarchical and
authoritarian views that can still conceivably be used to justify fascist causes. My position
on the Heidegger question is essentially that of Thomas Sheehan’s: “If Heidegger himself

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 Notes 269

felt free, even for awhile, to put not just his person but also the major categories of his
philosophical thought at the service of Nazi foreign and domestic policy, then one would
do well to ask whether those categories are really as free of economic, social, and political
interests as most Heideggerians contend. The point is not to condemn a man for his past
but to learn something about oneself in the present, not to dismiss Heidegger’s philo-
sophical work out of hand but likewise not to join the Perpetual Adoration Societies that
currently thrive among the Heideggerian faithful in Europe and America. The task, for
those who care to take something from Heidegger, is to learn how to read him critically,
both his life and his works, not to swallow his philosophy whole but to sift it for what is still
of value and what is not.” (“Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times,” p. 92). Although
I am still in the process of learning to read Heidegger critically, I believe that the elements
of his thought I have drawn on bear no necessary connection to fascism. The task of saving
what is profound and essentially human in Heidegger’s thought, while rejecting what is
dangerous and inhuman, is one that I plan to take up more fully in future works.
27. See Gendlin, Experiencing, p. 125, n. 17 and p. 134.
28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 403.
29. As recounted in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, pp. 197–198. See also Jerry
Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, pp. 29, 121.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 215.
31. Neil Bolton, “The Lived World: Imagination and the Development of Experi-
ence,” p. 9.
32. John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer, p. 162.
33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Concept of Nature I,” p. 70.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 131.
35. Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 57.
36. See David Noble, The Religion of Technology.
37. The “corpse is the body abandoned and invented for the space of explanation”
(Robert Romanyshyn, “The Human Body as Historical Matter and Cultural Symptom,”
p. 165).
38. Romanyshyn, “The Human,” p. 173.
39. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 106. Emphasis
mine.
40. Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West, p. 168.
41. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” p. 194.
42. On violent practices designed to break children of unwanted natural tendencies
see Alice Miller, For Your Own Good.
43. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp. 73–74.
44. “The core of our being. . . is formed by the obscure id, which has no direct rela-
tions with the external world” (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 108).
45. See Eugene Gendlin, “A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism:
The Significance of the Awareness Movement.”
46. Eugene Gendlin, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, p. 304. Emphasis mine.

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47. This exercise is the briefest of introductions to focusing. Gendlin has presented
focusing in a variety of forms: popularly in Focusing; psychotherapeutically in “A Theory
of Personality Change” and Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy; and philosophically in Experi-
encing and the Creation of Meaning.
48. Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, p. 76. Emphasis removed.
49. Gendlin, Focusing, p. 76. Emphasis mine.
50. Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones, p. 330.
51. See Gendlin, “A Philosophical Critique.”
52. Eugene Gendlin, “The Wider Role of Bodily Sense in Thought and Language,”
p. 194.
53. I am using this term in the strong sense (as discussed by Richard Bernstein in
Beyond Objectivism and Relativism), that is, in reference to the position that because all
truths are relative to a particular (social, cultural, theoretical, geographical, personal, . . .)
context, there are no grounds for judging one view better than another. I agree that truths
are relative, but argue in this paragraph that the life process gives us our ground.
54. See Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse, p. 46.
55. Martin Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, p. 101.
56. “The dead end of postmodernism,” says Gendlin, “arises when one discounts
the role of experience because it is never pure, never without conceptual forms and distinc-
tions already implicit in it, and then discount those because they are never purely logical,
but always involve experience” (“How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How
It Can,” p. 6).
57. Eugene Gendlin, “Neurosis and Human Nature in the Experiential Method of
Thought and Therapy,” p. 140.
58. Eugene Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” p. 292.
59. This is perhaps the central point of Gendlin’s whole philosophy of language.
60. Livingston, The Fallacy, p. 59.
61. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 184.
62. Eugene Gendlin, “Reply to Wallulis,” in David Levin, ed., Language Beyond
Postmodernism, p. 287. I have modified this sentence to clarify its meaning.
63. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, p. 25.
64. This is an argument made by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, where he
suggests, for example, that any effort to “prove” the existence of the “external world” “pre-
supposes a subject which is proximally worldless or unsure of its world, and which must,
at bottom, first assure itself of a world” (p. 250). See also Eugene Gendlin, “Befindlichkeit:
Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology.”
65. Frederick Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 332.
66. The words mind and mean both mean intend, sharing as they do the common
Indo-European base, “men.” Given that meaning and intentionality are both bodily based,
then so is the mind. Simply put: “psychological events are body events” (Eugene Gendlin,
“A Small, Still Voice,” p. 59).
67. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 271.

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68. Medard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, p. 33.

69. Boss, Psychoanalysis, p. 33, emphasis mine.
70. Perls et al., Gestalt, p. 229.
71. The prehistoric base “per-” denotes trial, test, peril.
72. Frederick Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, p. 42.
73. Paul Shepard, The Others, p. 13.
74. Gordon Wheeler and Daniel Jones, “Finding Our Sons: A Male-Male Gestalt,”
p. 75.
75. Fritz Perls, The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy, pp. 33–34.
76. Gary Snyder, “Fear of Bears” (Afterword to Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders,
The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature), p. 209.
77. Shepard notes that meat means mate (from the Old German gemate)—“one
with whom food is shared.” Similarly, in the Sanskrit madati means “rejoice.” Shepard sug-
gests therefore that “meat” most originally signifies “celebrated sharing.”
78. Despite that I am here using the concept of “need,” my intention is not to intro-
duce a biologically reductive position. My intention, rather, is to maintain an existentialist
or experiential perspective while yet locating existence within the life process (as Gendlin
does in his A Process Model). I believe that any misunderstanding this strategy produces will
be worked out in chapters four and five.
79. See James Kepner, Body Process.
80. Wheeler and Jones, “Finding,” p. 78.
81. Perls et al., Gestalt, pp. 340, 342.
82. See Frederick Perls, Ego, Hunger and Aggression and Laura Perls, Living at the
Boundary.
83. Contacting thus has two poles, involving both confluence, in which we flow
together with the other, and resistance, in which we maintain our difference from the other
(Gordon Wheeler, Gestalt Reconsidered, p. 110). Or in James Kepner’s words, it is “dis-
solving to some extent our sense of boundedness, and then return [ing] to a more bounded
sense of self ” (Body, p. 195).
84. “What makes life ‘meaningful’ to the acting organism is . . . [s]imply that which
secures and guarantees the forward momentum of its action” (Ernest Becker, Angel in
Armor, p. 7). See also Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 428.
85. Perls, Gestalt, p. 3.
86. This follows from his view that for the “well-adjusted” person “the self is pri-
marily a reflexive awareness of the process of experiencing. It is not a perceived object, but
something confidently felt in process. It is not a structure to be defended, but a rich and
changing awareness of internal experiencing” (quoted in Gendlin, “A Theory,” p. 110).
87. Eugene Gendlin, “The Role of Knowledge in Practice,” p. 276.
88. Gadamer, Truth, p. 356. Emphasis mine.
89. That is, despite that Gadamer recognizes experience as a dialectical process, he
only conceives of it as one of formal negation, without a natural, organizing moment: our
expectations can only come from the forms we have already acquired. For anything new

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to happen, it must therefore be a painful contradiction of some earlier form, rather than a
satisfying lending of good form to a genuine bodily need. Gadamer’s philosophy of experi-
ence thus does contain a pessimistic element, even as he openly denies it.
90. As Joel Kovel notes: “Neurosis is living proof of the tension between the human
subject and the objective social order; it only comes into existence so far as these are incon-
gruent” (“Therapy in Late Capitalism,” in The Radical Spirit, p. 123).
91. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 164.
92. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud speculated that all of civilized society
might be neurotic. In 1955 Erich Fromm coined the phrase “the pathology of normalcy,”
arguing, indeed, that “the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental
pathology does not make these people sane” (The Sane Society, p. 23). Abraham Maslow
later spoke of “the psychopathology of the average.”
93. To be clear, I use the term problem broadly: to include any tension between
body and world that calls for some action and resolution, not just those technically or
formally defined ones.
94. The theory of creative adjustment, as developed by Paul Goodman, is presented
in part two of Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy.
95. Konrad Stettbacher, Making Sense of Suffering, p. 33.
96. On understanding social oppression as nature domination, Kovel writes that
“the major forms of social domination, of class, of race and of gender, are each mediated
through the domination of nature-as-body. In class domination, the oppressed body of the
slave/serf/worker is repressed and converted into a machine for the aggrandizement of the
master; in racial domination, sensuousness is lost by the master, who splits off bad [shame-
bound] parts of the self and invests them in the body of the oppressed; while in patriarchy,
female parts of the self are degraded, repressed and conquered in the body of the woman”
(“The Marriage,” pp. 412–413).
97. Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 260.
98. As discussed in the context of Gestalt therapy by Kepner, Body, p. 98.
99. Laing, The Politics, p. 64.
100. Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, pp. 264–265.
101. Stettbacher, Making Sense, p. 15.
102. Stettbacher, Making Sense, p. 26.
103. Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 375.
104. On this see Gendlin, “A Theory,” p. 142.
105. Carl Rogers, “Ellen West—And Loneliness,” p. 165.
106. Miller, For Your Own, p. 85.
107. Carl Rogers, “A Therapist’s View of the Good Life,” p. 195.
108. This is not to say that introjection is not an aspect of contact making. In learning
a new field of study, for example, we must take in much material and only gradually come
to develop our own views in relation to it. What is contrary to the organism is to never
bodily evaluate that which has been swallowed. See Gordon Wheeler, Gestalt Reconsidered.
109. Perls et al. Gestalt Therapy, p. 190.

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110. Quoted in Rogers, “Ellen West,” p. 173.

111. See Perls et al. Gestalt Therapy, p. 265.
112. Bakhtin, Toward, p. 51. In Perls’s words: “fantasy is diminished reality and
thinking diminished acting” (The Gestalt, p. 53). John Dewey’s comments are also sig-
nificant: “Philosophical dualism is but a formulated recognition of an impassé in life; an
impotence in interaction.” Hence the various “forms of subjectivism register an acceptance
of whatever obstacles at the time prevent the active participation of the self in the ongoing
course of events” (Experience and Nature, pp. 241–242). In other words, the social context
that gives rise to dualistic thought is one that frustrates worldly engagement or organismi-
cally satisfying interaction.
113. Jeannette Armstrong, “Keepers of the Earth,” p. 319.
114. Gendlin, Focusing-Oriented, p. 246.
115. Hence, “all psychiatric diagnoses are basically only sociological statements”
(Boss, Psychoanalysis, p. 56).
116. J. H. van den Berg, A Different Existence, chapter three.
117. See chapter three, “Disconnection,” in Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
118. In the discussion that follows I am drawing heavily on Robert Lee’s, “Shame and
the Gestalt Model,” and Gordon Wheeler’s, “Self and Shame: A New Paradigm.”
119. See Lee, “Shame.”
120. Shame and guilt are both emotions arising from negative (self-)evaluation, but
have different contexts or felt meanings. In guilt we feel that we have done something bad,
have broken a moral code, whereas in shame we feel that we are bad, not enough, and so
forth. Intense guilt can, however, lead to shame, for the doing of wrong deeds does imply
that it is of our nature to be bad. To not act on or make reparations for our guilty acts,
moreover, does generate feelings of inadequacy, which will then lead us into a “shame-guilt
bind.” (See chapter fifteen, “Shame,” in Gary Yontef, Awareness Dialogue and Process: Essays
on Gestalt Therapy.) Note, also, that the polar opposite of shame is pride, whereas the oppo-
site of guilt is innocence.
121. Freud, for instance, denied to our nature any positive social impulses. In his
dualistic model of human nature, relationships are purely instrumental: I depend on others
only to the extent that they serve as objects for the discharging of my sexual and aggressive
drives.
122. Wheeler, “Self and Shame,” p. 48.
123. Wheeler, “Self,” p. 49.
124. Gordon Wheeler and Daniel Jones, “Finding Our Sons,” p. 84. I am drawing
on this article throughout this paragraph.
125. Iris Fodor, “A Woman and Her Body: The Cycles of Pride and Shame,” pp. 235,
265.
126. Becker, Angel, pp. 150–151.
127. Boss, Psychoanalysis, p. 144. Emphasis mine.
128. See Perls et al. Gestalt Therapy, pp. 430–432. Gendlin thus says that “neurosis
involves sensing more meanings than are livable” (“Neurosis and Human Nature,” p. 148).

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129. Gendlin, “A Theory,” p. 137.

130. Wheeler and Jones, “Finding,” pp 75, 80. Emphasis mine.
131. Robert Romanyshyn, “Unconsciousness: Reflection and the Primacy of Percep-
tion,” p. 159. See also J. H. van den Berg, “What Is Psychotherapy,” pp. 347–348.
132. My friends were following the theory of Re-evaluation Counseling, which holds
that healing occurs through giving respectful attention to people as they complete old emo-
tional experiences. See Phyllis Bronstein, “Re-Evaluation Counselling: A Self-Help Model
for Recovery from Emotional Distress.”
133. See Phyllis Bronstein, “Promoting Healthy Emotional Development in
Children.”
134. See Eugene Gendlin, “A Phenomenology of Emotions: Anger.”
135. John Welwood, “Meditation and the Unconscious: A New Perspective,” p. 4.
136. Paul Goodman suggests that Freud was unable to connect his patients’ spon-
taneous mental contents with either their bodies or their environments because he passed
over the body in favor of a purely verbal therapy. Needing to account for the apparent
autonomy of these contents, however, he was then forced to confusedly posit the uncon-
scious as an independent realm of its own (Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 440).
137. See, especially, Gendlin, “A Theory.”
138. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 381. As he remarked, what he became aware
of in a moment of insight “was not, from the start, a thing hidden in my unconscious. . .
but the impulse carrying me towards someone” (emphasis mine).
139. Deborah Rinzler, “Human Disconnection and the Murder of the Earth,”
p. 102.
140. The word attenuation is used by Daniel Boorstin to describe the “thinning out
or flattening of experience” that has come with the modern homogenizing of everyday life
(see chapter ten of Democracy and Its Discontents). The phrase “the extinction of experience”
is used by insect ecologist Robert Michael Pyle to describe the loss of personal contact
with wildlife which follows on the extirpation of local habitats (as discussed in Gary Paul
Nabhan and Sara St. Antoine, “The Loss of Floral and Faunal Story: The Extinction of
Experience”). The “waning of affect” is a phrase used by Fredric Jameson in his discussion
of the depthlessness of postmodern culture (“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism,” pp. 61–62).
141. The symptoms of this personality include “contactlessness, isolation, fear of
falling, impotence, inferiority, verbalizing, and affectlessness” (Perls et al., Gestalt, p. 317).
142. Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, pp. 12–13.
143. Gendlin, Focusing, p. 114.
144. Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, p. 24. Even the least pessimistic of wit-
nesses, such as the Buddhist Jack Kornfield, speak of how “a deep loneliness and inner
poverty” contribute to our society’s “pervasive sorrow” (A Path With Heart, p. 24).
145. Says Glendinning: “Just about everybody I know who is serious about personal
healing, social change, and ecological rebalancing is in recovery: recovery from personal
addiction, childhood abuse, childhood deprivation, the nuclear family, sexism, racism,

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urban alienation, trickle-down economics, combat service in the trenches of the gender
wars, the threat of extinction, linear thinking, the mind/body split, technological progress,
and the mechanical worldview” (My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western
­Civilization, p. ix).
146. Perls et al. Gestalt, p. 333.
147. Joel Kovel, “Things and Words,” p. 49. Hence, “the unconscious must be pri-
marily grasped as the indwelling, subjective record” of the “uneasy” relationship between
human society and nature. Next quotation, p. 48.
148. See Joel Kovel, “Mind and State in Ancient Greece,” in The Radical Spirit,
p. 220.
149. See Kovel, History. This is not to ignore the existence of a considerable body
of psychoanalytic social criticism. For an anthology dedicated to juxtaposing socialist with
psychoanalytic theories and practices, for example, see Barry Richards, ed., Capitalism and
Infancy.
150. Toronto Star, June 21, 1995, p. C2.
151. Kovel, “The Marriage,” p. 411. As Kovel notes elsewhere, “capitalism is not so
much a species of economy as it is a kind of society which deifies the economic in order to
produce capital” (“On the Ontology of Capital,” p. 2).
152. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 138. “. . ., to put these [material,
social, spiritual] sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals,
and to sell them to us at the highest profit.”
153. How much this is the case is suggested in Roger Gottlieb’s discussion of
the nuclear family: “The male-dominated nuclear family is a highly mobile unit for an
economy which needs to shift its labor force to changing areas of investment. The nuclear
family also tends to create people who think of themselves primarily as individuals rather
than as members of communities or classes. This self-understanding makes political organ-
izing and mass radical movements extremely difficult. Having women do the household
and emotional labor necessary to ‘reproduce’ male laborers and raise new ones cheapens the
reproduction of workers—and thus the cost of labor for capitalists. Women’s inferior social
status also allows capitalists to pay them less and treat them worse than men. Addition-
ally, the atomized nuclear family is necessarily a high-consumption family, providing an
ever-growing market for consumer goods. Finally, the power that men enjoy over women
makes up in a psychic sense for the powerlessness they experience on the job. After a day
of demanding and at times degrading paid labor, a man may exercise power at home while
he is catered to by his wife. At the same time, the authoritarian, nonegalitarian relation-
ships within the home perfectly prepare children for a public world defined by hierarchy,
competition, and unequal power” (Marxism, pp. 137–138).
154. Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire, p. 113.
155. Some factories are now openly “managed by stress.” That is, the pace of produc-
tion is continually speeded up “to find out where the weaknesses and soft spots are, so that
new designs and procedures can be implemented to increase the pace and performance.”
The consequence is reportedly a historically high level of mental and physical pathology

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among workers (including chronic fatigue) as they are progressively transformed into high
velocity machinery (chapter twelve of Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work). As David Noble
also writes: “In the wake of five decades of information revolution, people are now working
longer hours, under worsening conditions, with greater anxiety and stress, less skills, less
security, less power, less benefits, and less pay. Information technology has clearly been
developed and used during these years to deskill, discipline, and displace human labour in
a global speed-up of unprecedented proportions” (Progress Without People, p. xi).
156. Raymond Rogers, The Oceans are Emptying, p. 9.
157. Raymond Rogers, Nature and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 1.
158. Rogers, Nature, p. 160. Because the ecological crisis predates capitalism the
latter cannot entirely be blamed for the former. To the extent that the system of capital
defines our society, however, it is the current antagonist. On this, see Joel Kovel’s forth-
coming The Enemy of Nature.
159. Rogers, Nature, p. 12. Winona LaDuke offers an indigenous person’s perspec-
tive on this topic in her “From Resistance to Regeneration.”
160. Vandana Shiva, “The Impoverishment of the Environment: Women and Chil-
dren Last,” in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, p. 75.
161. Horkheimer, The Eclipse, p. 94. Emphasis mine.
162. For discussions of the work of other critical theorists on this topic see Henry
Blanke, “Domination and Utopia: Marcuse’s Discourse on Nature, Psyche, and Culture”
and Robyn Eckersley, “The Failed Promise of Critical Theory.”
163. As William Leiss clarifies, the “notion of a common domination of the human
race over external nature is nonsensical” (The Domination of Nature, p. 122). Rather, the
artificial separation of human society and the natural world masks the way in which ruling
groups dominate other social groups, who are put to work in exploiting nonhuman nature.
The domination of nature, as a “species project,” has thus historically arisen as an ideology
for concealing social contradiction.
164. Kovel, History, p. 205.
165. Kovel, The Age, p. 125. Middle sentence is from p. 172. Kovel is currently pre-
paring a manuscript entitled The Enemy of Nature.
166. Tom Athanasiou, The Ecology of Rich and Poor, p. 171. See, also, James
O’Connor, “Socialism and Ecology.” These points are basic aspects of Marx’s theories of
exploitation and capitalist development.
167. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and Joel Kovel, “Narcissism
and the Family,” in The Radical Spirit.
168. “For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success
in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal
relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time
provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem” (Lasch,
The Culture, p. 91).
169. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?,” pp. 114–115. Emphasis mine.
170. Livingston, The Fallacy, p. 116.

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171. William Leiss, The Limits of Satisfaction, p. 3.

172. See Athanasiou, Divided, p. 14.
173. Leiss, The Domination, p. 151.
174. David Levin, “Psychopathology in the Epoch of Nihilism,” p. 26. In his
Nihilism Incorporated, Arran Gare similarly identifies the dominant theme of the modern
age with an inherently nihilistic mechanistic materialism. He traces the ecological crisis
and other modern problems to this meaning-denying world-orientation, albeit in different
terms than my own.
175. Jules Henry, quoted in David Levin, “Clinical Stories: A Modern Self in the
Fury of Being,” p. 512.
176. Evernden, The Natural, p. 124, emphasis mine.
177. Evernden, The Natural, p. 126.
178. Romand Coles, “Ecotones and Environmental Ethics: Adorno and Lopez,”
p. 244.
179. Laing, The Politics, p. 24.
180. Horkheimer, The Eclipse, p. 100.
181. Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, p. 140. See also Keith Thomas’s Man and
the Natural World, in which he chronicles early modern English attitudes toward animals.
“Men attributed to animals the natural impulses they most feared in themselves—ferocity,
gluttony, sexuality—even though it was men, not beasts, who made war on their own
species, ate more than was good for them and were sexually active all the year round”
(pp. 40–41).
182. Rinzler, “Human,” p. 106.
183. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” p. 127.
184. Even if it is one of “immeasurable need,” “nameless sorrow,” “growing and
spreading peacelessness,” and “mounting confusion” (“What Are Poets For?,” In Poetry,
Language, Thought, p. 93).
185. Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 144.
186. This is a recurrent theme in Alice Miller’s work.
187. See Ynestra King, “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.”
188. Ynestra King, “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Cul-
ture Dualism,” p. 117. Emphasis mine.

Chapter Four

1. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 130.

2. Anthony Barton, “Humanistic Contributions to the Field of Psychotherapy:
Appreciating the Human and Liberating the Therapist,” p. 215. Emphasis removed.
3. While human specialness is a defining concern of humanism generally, the
extent to which specific humanistic psychologists posit a human/nature divide varies.
Existential psychologists (who are most often placed in the humanistic camp) such as

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Rollo May are probably the most committed to such a division, saying that humans,
“cast on this barren crust of earth aeons ago,” have to willfully make their own meaning
in an intrinsically meaningless and indifferent world. However, one of my favorite
humanistic authors, Eugene Gendlin, has a strong interest in what ethology can teach
us about the continuity between human and nonhuman nature, and emphasizes our
kinship with plants. There is much in Gestalt therapy, furthermore, that opens toward
the natural world, and Fritz Perls speculated that awareness is a property of the entire
universe (making him a quasi-animist). My comments, then, are aimed at humanism as
its main authors have presented it over the years and also at the fact that, quite simply,
humanistic psychology could by no means as yet be called an ecopsychology. For over-
views of humanistic psychology, see Frederick Wertz, ed., The Humanistic Movement:
Recovering the Person in Psychology; and Joseph Royce and Leendert Mos, Humanistic
Psychology: Concepts and Criticisms. I should also say that although I am throughout
this book blending hermeneutic and humanistic psychological sources, there are notable
differences in their general outlooks, as Louis Sass has discussed in his “Humanism,
Hermeneutics, and the Concept of the Human Subject.” Granted Sass’s distinction,
humanistic psychology and hermeneutics are both “humanistic” in the sense of being
human-centred, which is the general point I am after. I might thus have more broadly
called this chapter “From Humanism to Naturalism.”
4. Amedeo Giorgi, “Whither Humanistic Psychology?,” pp. 312, 318.
5. Erich Fromm, quoted in David Kidner, “Why Psychology Is Mute About the
Ecological Crisis,” p. 366.
6. Noteworthy here is William Cahalan’s effort to ecologize his Gestalt therapy
practice (see “Ecological Groundedness in Gestalt Therapy”); as well as the efforts of those
with articles in a special issue of the The Gestalt Journal on ecopsychology (18.1, 1995). See
also The Humanistic Psychologist’s special issue on ecopsychology (26.1–3, 1998).
7. See, most notably, David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism.
8. Roy DeCarvalho, Founders of Humanistic Psychology, p. 82.
9. David Levin, commenting on the failures of humanism, in “Clinical Stories: A
Modern Self in the Fury of Being,” p. 487.
10. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 110.
11. Graham Parkes, “Human/Nature in Nietzsche and Taoism,” p. 356.
12. On these general themes, see Joel Kovel, “On the Notion of Human Nature: A
Contribution Toward a Philosophical Anthropology.”
13. Plural realism is Hubert Dreyfus’s term for the stance of Heidegger’s later
thinking. I am, however, additionally qualifying the term along my own lines. Says Dreyfus:
“For a plural realist there is no point of view from which one can ask and answer the meta-
physical question concerning the one true nature of ultimate reality. . . . for Heidegger
different understandings of being reveal different sorts of entities, and since no one way
of revealing is exclusively true, accepting one does not commit us to rejecting the others”
(Being-in-the-World, pp. 262–263). In Being and Time, the early Heidegger had already said
that “an entity can show itself from itself in many ways, depending in each case on the kind

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 Notes 279

of access we have to it” (p. 51). He also did not dispute that what is represented by modern
natural science “is indeed nature itself,” but was adamant that this “objective” nature is
“only one way in which nature exhibits itself ” (“Science and Reflection,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 174).
14. Simone Weil, quoted in Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism, p. 315.
15. This is not the place to discuss the relative ecological merits of Buddhism. On
these topics, see Ian Harris, “How Environmentalist is Buddhism?” and “Buddhist Envi-
ronmental Ethics and Detraditionalization: The Case of EcoBuddhism;” Alan Badiner,
Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology; Martine Batchelor and Kerry
Brown, Buddhism and Ecology; and D. T. Suzuki, “Nature in Zen Buddhism.”
16. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space, p. 187.
17. These three categories correspond to those discussed by Raymond Williams in
his Keywords.
18. See Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers.
19. This is my own version of James Wright’s suggestion that while it is impor-
tant for Euroamericans to draw on Euroamerican traditions, the work of eco-spiritual
renewal must still rely to some extent on indigenous knowledges. In his own wilder-
ness quest work, Wright has chosen to perform a “literary archeology” of European
mythology in order to retrieve the skeletons of rites that he feels are hidden in the
old myths. He admits, nonetheless, that without “direct experience of some of [the]
North American ways, . . . the work of reanimating the old European forms would be
virtually impossible” (The Bones of Metamorphosis, p. 19). Caught between using ritual
forms native to North America or reimagined forms indigenous to old Europe, Wright
counsels that “we must do some of each”—while insisting that as an archetypal pattern,
found across cultures, “the core vision quest experience does not belong to any one
people.” I assume that it is clear to the reader that I claim no authoritative knowledge
of indigenous ways—that I am using such general notions as can roughly be grasped
not as a guide to those ways, but primarily as a means to come back to and show up
my own theme of loss and longing. I am aware, moreover, that disharmonious relations
with the natural world, warfare, starvation, and questionable gender arrangements are
not unheard of amongst primal peoples. These things do not of themselves, however,
erase the general relevance of indigenous teachings for undertaking the recollective task
at hand.
20. John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 101.
21. Richard Nelson, The Island Within, pp. 245, 249.
22. Robert Avens, “Heidegger and Archetypal Psychology,” p. 185.
23. Martin Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” p. 368.
24. I developed the idea of a kinship continuum from Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty,”
p. 378; as well as from Joel Kovel, “Human Nature, Freedom, and Spirit,” in The Radical
Spirit, pp. 300–301; and the writings of Paul Shepard.
25. Douglas Kirsner, The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Laing, p. 68.
In Sartre’s novel, Nausea, even the protagonist’s own hand is a source of disgust.

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26. In truth, Sartre’s world is conceivable, but never quite achievable, as a person
with no common ground with others could never make contact with them. Similarly, nir-
vana is a temporary state only, so could never be regarded as a day-to-day form of life.
27. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 8.
28. A point I take from M. C. Dillon, “Erotic Desire,” p. 158.
29. Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, p. 152.
30. Joel Kovel, “On the Notion of Human Nature,” p. 375.
31. Contacting, recall, occurs across a boundary zone of “me and not-me.” We
are never identical with that which we contact, no matter how much we may be identi-
fied with it. Even when in such “nondual” states of awareness as meditation or absorp-
tion in a task, we are still in contact with the world. As the Zen author D. T. Suzuki
writes: “The mountains do not vanish; they stand before me” (“Nature and Zen Bud-
dhism,” p. 241).
32. The idea of some “optimal distance” is present, in one form or another, in all
experiential practices of which I am familiar. T. J. Scheff discusses the relation between “aes-
thetic distance” and “optimal distance” in his Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama. The
notion of finding the “right distance” from a felt sense is a central feature of the practice of
focusing. The Buddhist idea of a “middle path” also suggests an optimal balance between
the extremes of sensual indulgence and asceticism, or a zone of experiencing in which one
can face one’s suffering while not being overwhelmed by it. Merleau-Ponty, finally, writes
that: “For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance
from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes most of
itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or
deficiency” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 302).
33. Joel Kovel, “The Marriage of Radical Ecologies, p. 411.
34. Paul Shepard, The Others, p. 5. Emphasis mine.
35. Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, pp. 20, 33, 76.
36. Kane, The Wisdom, p. 105.
37. Barry Lopez, “Renegotiating the Contracts,” p. 14.
38. Calvin Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth, p. 19.
39. For a poetic and touching consideration of this, see chapter eleven of Ursula
LeGuin, Buffalo Gals; And Other Animal Presences. See also Colin Turnbull, The Human
Cycle, pp. 51–52, 183–184.
40. Gordon Wheeler, “Self and Shame: A New Paradigm for Psychotherapy,” p. 49.
41. “For us, being is discontinuous—and yet this discontinuity is experienced as
loss, and life is spent trying to overcome it. It comes naturally to us, then, to sense nonbeing
along with being, and to try to rejoin the two, that is, to be spiritually. For nonbeing [the
gap] is the space between the discontinuities.” (Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, p. 81).
42. Kovel, History, p. 83.
43. Egoic “being is self-experience in which the rationalistic, all knowing ‘I’ crowds
out every other self-phenomenon. In the egoic topology of the self, ontological space is
occluded by the I-centre” (Kovel, “Human,” p. 299). My presentation here on the Ego and

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the void is of necessity a great simplification of a complex topic. The three articles by David
Loy in the bibliography offers some further discussion.
44. David Loy, “Avoiding the Void: The Lack of Self in Psychotherapy and Bud-
dhism,” p. 172.
45. Bertram Karon and Leighton Whitaker, “Psychotherapy and the Fear of Under-
standing Schizophrenia,” pp. 39–40.
46. This is a variation on Gary Yontef ’s “twin dangers” (Awareness, Dialogue, and
Process, p. 463). See, also, Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, pp. 143–147.
47. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 93. For a discussion of this dynamic
in the lives of physically and emotionally abusive men, see Donald Dutton, The Abusive
Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships.
48. See William Bridges, Transitions.
49. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, pp. 105, 106.
50. Kovel, “Human Nature,” in The Radical, p. 300.
51. Passages taken from Snyder, The Practice, p. 19, and from Gary Snyder quoted
in Paul Shepard, “A Post-Historic Primitivism,” p. 82.
52. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 8. Emphasis removed.
53. See M. C. Dillon, “Toward a Phenomenology of Love and Sexuality: An Inquiry
into the Limits of the Humans Situation as They Condition Loving.”
54. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 14.
55. Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, Sacred Paw, pp. xix, 57.
56. John Livingston, Rogue Primate, p. 104.
57. “The gap between nature and ourselves is healed by attempting to sway as
humans within the rhythms of nature, swinging to and fro with the coming-to-be and
passing-away inherent in all life” (Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse, p. 197).
58. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 169.
59. Kane, The Wisdom, p. 40.
60. Jacob Boehme, quoted in Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 130.
61. On this see Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and other Essays; and Robert Romanyshysn, “The Despotic Eye: An
Illustration of Metabletic Phenomenology and Its Implications.”
62. Owen Barfield, Saving The Appearances, p. 95.
63. Cf. Heidegger’s comments: “Color shines and wants only to shine. When we
analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only
when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to pen-
etrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruc-
tion. . . . The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved
as that which is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and
constantly keeps itself closed up” (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, p. 47).
64. Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, p. 4.
65. S. N. Tandon, “Dharma—Its Definition and Universal Application,” p. 11.

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66. Lawrence Hatab, Myth and Philosophy, p. 35. This is not to equate the outlooks
of Buddhists, western phenomenologists, and various mythological peoples, all of whom
will of course have their own specific understandings of things, even as they share an expe-
riential approach.
67. Shepard, The Others, p. 326. James Hillman similarly remarks that: “Multiple
personality is humanity in its natural condition. In other cultures these multiple person-
alities have names, locations, energies, functions, voices, angel and animal forms” (Arche-
typal Psychology: A Brief Account, p. 51. See also Revisioning Psychology, p. 203). Indeed, in
indigenous societies, and up until about the seventeenth century in our own culture, “the
otherness of the self has been axiomatic” (Michael Holquist in the Introduction to M. M.
Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, p. xxvi).
68. On some such varieties of private otherness, see Roger Levin, “Multiple Person-
ality, Transpersonal Guides, and Malevolent Possessions: Discriminating Kinds of Alterity
in a Psychotherapy Case by Means of Bodily Felt Sensing.”
69. Eugene Gendlin, “The Client s Client: The Edge of Awareness,” p. 81. The felt
sense is thus the source of all our inwardly arising symbols, the place where we discover the
aims or intentions, the needs or claims, of the soul itself (the soul being the personification
of the unconscious). In what could serve as a description of the felt sense, Hillman alludes
to soul as “an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence” below our normal con-
sciousness (Revisioning, p. xvi).
70. James Hillman calls this the “personal/impersonal paradox of the soul” (Revi-
sioning, p. 105; see also pp. 31, 46–51). I would also call it the identity/dis-identity paradox.
71. Hillman, “The Animal,” p. 320.
72. The best descriptions of this process are contained in the work of Ann Weiser
Cornell, including The Focusing Student’s Manual and The Power of Focusing. Gendlin, fur-
thermore, emphasizes the importance of thanking whatever comes to us in focusing, loving
and appreciating our dreams; in short, of developing a respectful personal relationship with
all “inner” contents. See also Hillman, Re-Visioning, pp. 31, 139.
73. James Hillman devotes the first chapter of Re-Visioning to this point.
74. See Hillman, Revisioning and Robert Sardello, Love and the Soul.
75. Shagbark Hickory, “Environmental Etiquette/Environmental Practice: Amer-
ican Indian Challenges to Mainstream Environmental Ethics,” p. 121. As Nelson also
notes: “weather is the most fully personified element in the Koyukon physical world. The
interchange between people and these conscious entities is fairly elaborate and intense”
(Make Prayers, p. 40).
76. Martin Heidegger, “The Fieldpath,” p. 456.
77. There is, in fact, a great deal of literature on such communication. See, for
example, Stephen Foster and Meredith Little, The Roaring of the Sacred River; Stephanie
Kaza, The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees; and the last two chapters of John Liv-
ingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation.
78. I can, for example, generally distinguish among the kind of experiences I have in
downtown Toronto; on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park; and in those even-less-humanized

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places where there are no trails, designated campsites, or line-ups at portages. This does not
mean, however, than I do not have wild encounters in downtown Toronto, nor that I am
always optimally attuned or open to the big outdoors when I am in them.
79. John Livingston, Rogue Primate, p. 104.
80. Even the most cursory glance at the Buddhist doctrine of karma is enough to
realize that to comprehend it in any depth requires much practice and insight.
81. Richard Nelson, Interview. “Life-Ways of the Hunter,” p. 84. Sean Kane simi-
larly writes: “In dealing with nature or any of her people, the one thing you can be really
sure of is that beings are intelligent and therefore easily insulted, and that acts have con-
sequences. For life in a playground of intelligent roving energies, that is perhaps the best
advice. What goes around comes around” (The Wisdom, p. 240).
82. Tandon, “Dharma,” p. 12. These ideas are discussed well in a Taoist context by
Roger Ames, “Taoism and the Nature of Nature.”
83. Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, p. 125. Emphasis mine.
84. James Hillman, “The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” pp. 314,
325–326.
85. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 101.
Heidegger quotes Nietzsche: “How can anything dead ‘be’”? See also Foltz, Inhabiting,
pp. 132–134, from which I am taking most of this discussion. As Foltz observes, Zoe is
itself from the Greek root ‘Za-,’ which means a strengthening or intensification.
86. Tandon, “Dharma,” p. 10.
87. As John Caputo notes, everything in a “hermeneutic interpretation. . . comes
down to its ability to provoke in us the ultimate hermeneutic response: ‘That is what we
are looking for. That puts into words what we have all along understood about ourselves’”
(Radical Hermeneutics, p. 81).
88. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question
Concerning Technology, And Other Essays, p. 10.
89. Kane, The Wisdom, p. 234.
90. Hillman, “The Animal,” p. 324. Hillman’s comments are inspired by the biolo-
gist Adolf Portmann.
91. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, p. 180. Bernard Berenson similarly wrote that
what he perceived in art was the appearance of living motion, even in works of stone (as
discussed in Edith Cobb, “The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood,” p. 131).
92. Martin Heidegger, quoted in Eugene Gendlin, “Dwelling,” p. 139. As this line
suggests, Heidegger regarded written poetry or “poesy” as only one of many possible modes
of poetizing or bringing forth.
93. James Hillman, “Aesthetics and Politics,” p. 76.
94. Richard Avens, “Heidegger and Archetypal Psychology,” p. 199. Emphasis mine.
95. See Eugene Gendlin, “Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors” and
“Dwelling.”
96. Whatever sense we make, it is always from a bodily feeling, is always phys-ical.
Thus, says Avens, physis “as logos (physio-logy) is also the soul (psycho-logy)” (“Heidegger,”

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p. 198). Vincent Vycinas observes, in this respect, that: “Logos, as cut off from physis and
standing by itself or for itself, becomes the perverted logos, logic. Physis, on the other hand,
when thought of separately from logos, becomes perverted physis, matter” (Earth and Gods,
p. 196). David Abram makes a similar point when he notes that when reflective reason fails
to acknowledge or loses conscious awareness of its “rootedness in . . . bodily, participatory
modes of experience” it becomes “dysfunctional” (The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 303). On the
original unity of physis and logos, see Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp.
115–196.
97. Paul Klee, quoted in Mica Goldfarb, “Making the Unknown Known: Art as the
Speech of the Body,” p. 188. J. Macmurray likewise wrote: “The artist is not abnormal, but
simply the normal human individual. Not of course the average human being, after educa-
tion and the constraints of social and physical necessity have succeeded in suppressing and
stunting his natural capacity” (Quoted in Neil Bolton, “The Live World: Imagination and
the Development of Experience,” p. 14).
98. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Norman Brown, Life Against Death, p. 67.
99. Frederick Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, pp. 235, 321, 323. The psychoanalyst D.
W. Winnicott claimed that creativity “belongs to being alive.” Hence, the person who lives
creatively feels that “life is worth living.” An uncreative and conformist mode of existence,
by contrast, “is a sick basis for life” (Playing and Reality, pp. 65, 67).
100. See Carl Bigwood, Earth Muse for lengthy discussions of this theme.
101. George Steiner, Heidegger, p. 132.
102. Martin Heidegger, “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . .,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, p. 216.
103. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought,
p. 149. We can tell when our dwelling has become unpoetic exactly “because it is in essence
poetic” (Heidegger, “. . . Poetically,” in Poetry, p. 228).
104. Martin, In the Spirit, pp. 10, 15. Otherwise put, indigenous societies judge
“ecstatic communication with the earth to be humanity’s greatest prerogative and calling”
(p. 133).
105. See Shagbark Hickory, “Environmental,” pp. 114–115; and Jeanette Arm-
strong, “Keepers of the Earth.”
106. Bigwood, Earth, p. 206. John Livingston has suggested that the best word he
can find to describe bird song is “celebratory” (“The Dilemma of the Deep Ecologist,”
p. 68). I do not doubt, then, that others creatures also revel in creation. I would suggest,
though, that it is the special business of humans to create cosmologies.
107. The story is told by the Haudenosaunee statesman Leon Shenandoah, quoted
in Chellis Glendinning, My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization,
pp. 211–212. As Joseph Bruchac observes, in Native American traditions “Animals are rec-
ognized not only as spiritual beings but, in some ways, as being wiser than humans. A bear
never forgets that it is a bear, yet human beings often forget what a human must do. . . .
This potential for confusion was true for Native people long before the coming of Euro-
peans (though Europeans have raised the art of spiritual confusion to a new level!) That

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is why the traditional teachings remain so important. They remind human beings how to
take care” (“Understanding the Great Mystery,” p. 101).
108. See Kovel, “On the Notion.” For an example of weak denial, see chapter two of
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
109. See Eugene Gendlin, “Neurosis and Human Nature in the Experiential Method
of Thought and Therapy.”
110. Eugene Gendlin, “Human Nature and Concepts,” p. 4.
111. For arguments by a phenomenologist who claims that it “cannot seriously be
doubted today that there is a given biological nature,” a “transhistorical order not reducible
to social conditioning,” see David Levin, The Listening Self and “Visions of Narcissism.”
Eugene Gendlin also argues that the “dreadful error” of many modern thinkers has been
“to think of humans as mere creations of culture, created out of nothingness, disclosed in
the midst of an abyss” (“Reply to Hatab,” in David Levin, ed., Language Beyond Postmod-
ernism, p. 247). “From Descartes to Heidegger. . . there are only cultural humans: there is
no human” (“The Small Steps of the Therapy Process,” p. 209). More, he says that because
the “conviction that there is no human nature” leads to a nonrecognition of our shared
humanity it also leads to bloodshed based on the notion that one group of people’s culture
is superior to another’s (see “Reply to Hatab”).
112. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 254. Emphasis mine. I do not want to make
Merleau-Ponty say what he did not intend. While he clearly felt that we are born already
organizing our experience according to an ancient dialogue between body and world, he
did not go as far as I do in positing a transhistorical human nature.
113. Frederick Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 440.
114. Eugene Gendlin, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, p. 281.
115. Eugene Gendlin, “A Phenomenology of Emotions: Anger,” p. 373. Emphasis
mine.
116. Eugene Gendlin, “A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism: The
Significance of the Awareness Movement,” p. 264.
117. See Gion Condrau and Medard Boss, “Existential Analysis”; Medard Boss, Exis-
tential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology; and Christine Downing, “Poetically Dwells
Man on This Earth,” p. 315.
118. Joel Kovel, “Things and Words,” p. 53.
119. See Kovel, “Things.” As Kovel offers: “Secure and coherent intimate human
relations . . . have been established as a transhistorical human need—that is, a necessary
condition for the development of real human power, as against infantile impotence” (“Nar-
cissism and the Family”). See, also, Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child.
120. The quote continues: “An analogous argument would be that because some
societies do not define fruit and leafy vegetables as edible they are not required in the
diet. Unless one could show that scurvy, rickets, and other diseases of poor nutrition were
absent, the argument about cultural variation in diet would not be credible. Because of
this lapse, the cultural-specific position of the arbitrariness of emotional expression should
probably not be given much weight” (Thomas Scheff, “Toward Integration in the Social

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Psychology of Emotions,” p. 339). Noteworthy, also, is the claim of Harvey Jackins that
in counseling people from every corner of the world, he has discovered that they all appear
to have been wounded in the same general ways and to have the same need to express the
same repressed emotions (which seem to be of a cross-cultural nature). Jackins is the Inter-
national Reference Person for a form of peer-counseling practiced in over eighty countries.
(See Harvey Jackins, How “Re-evaluation Counseling” Began, p. 14; and The List.) Mary
Hendricks similarly writes that the process of focusing “seems to get at a variable more
fundamental than cultural differences” (“Focusing Oriented/Experiential Psychotherapy”).
Finally, Shepard offers that most anthropologists have been “hell-bent on the study of cul-
tural differences,” while evincing little interest at all in “species characteristics” (The Only
World We’ve Got, p. xii).
121. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. Of course, the need for meaning cuts
across all the rest, which only goes to show that there are our needs can be articulated in
various ways.
122. I emphasize some developmental needs in the following passage from Judith
Herman: “In [a] climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable
developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caregivers who are
either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must develop a way to develop a
sense of basic trust and safety with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must
develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring, or cruel. She must
develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environment in which her body is at the
disposal of others’ needs, as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without
solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that
she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately she
must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships
are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.
. . . Though she perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a
way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can
bear” (Trauma, p. 101).
123. The same can be said, inversely, for the process of affirming the common joys we
experience, such as the universal delight at a baby’s smile.
124. See Judy Steed, Our Little Secret.
125. Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, p. 134.
126. See Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept.
127. Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala, pp. 9 and 10. I have taken liberties with the
ordering of the quotations.
128. Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart, p. 50.
129. It may be objected that humanistic psychology and Buddhism have differing
views of our basic goodness. Whereas numerous humanists suggest that we are simply
born good, Buddhists suggest that we are reborn carrying patterns of bad karma from
previous lifetimes. Despite this difference, what is common to humanism and Buddhists
is the belief that we free ourselves from suffering and make better contact with our basic

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nature primarily through our own efforts. Although humanists generally trace our suf-
fering to hurtful experiences, they do not advocate victimhood, but rather the taking of
responsibility for our wounds, for becoming more accountable for our behaviors, and for
developing the awareness to personally grow. Buddhists similarly advocate that we take
responsibility for all our past karmas, for our reactions in the present, and for the work of
becoming more enlightened or attained. In other words, for both Buddhism and humanism
our basic goodness is something that can be relied on, that is assumed as an ultimate truth,
and yet which is not realized without our taking responsibility for this realization.
130. The idea of innate human goodness has not gone uncriticized (see, for example,
F. C. Thorne, “Critique of Recent Developments in Personality Counselling Therapy”).
Critics say, for example, that the presence of so much antisocial or oppressive behavior in
the world makes the idea of innate goodness untenable; or they say that humanists set up
a false duality between a good human nature and a bad human society, the latter of which
is regarded as the sole source of our trouble. Because it is not the purpose of this book to
defend humanistic psychology or Buddhism against its critics, I do not intend to pursue
these debates at any length. I would like to assert, however, that pointing to our bad karma
does not by itself refute the idea of basic goodness. Indeed, Buddhists emphasize precisely
that the world is full of greed, hatred, and delusion, while still maintaining that we and
the world are basically good—a goodness that can be gradually realized or understood
with practice. While wholeness and goodness define our original condition, we live in
forgetfulness or ignorance of this fact. How this might have become so is the topic for
numerous cultural narratives, as I discussed above. Regardless of how we might under-
stand this “fall” into ignorance and violence, what seems most significant to me is that the
process of awakening to our essential nature or unity, of spontaneously reclaiming it in
the course of healing and growing, is well-documented and widely experienced by all sorts
of practitioners, including humanists and Buddhists. Goodness and badness in this case
are not dualistically opposed but are related via our condition of ignorance, forgetfulness,
woundedness, and so on.
131. Gary Snyder writes: “There is nothing in human nature. . . which intrinsically
requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated
personalities. . . . One can prove it for himself by taking a good look at his own nature
through meditation. . . . To make ‘human nature’ suspect is also to make Nature—the
wilderness—the enemy” (Earth Household, pp. 91, 115).
132. Richard Nelson. “Life-Ways of the Hunter,” p. 96.
133. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia, p. 31; Kovel, “Human Nature,” in The Radical,
p. 303.
134. Jeanette Armstrong, interviewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio program, “From Naked Ape to Superspecies.”
135. See Peter Mathiessen, “Native Earth” and Joseph Bruchac, “Understanding the
Great Mystery.”
136. Heidegger, An Introduction, pp. 125, 134.
137. John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer, p. 120.

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138. Joel Kovel, “The Marxist View of Man and Psychoanalysis,” in The Radical
Spirit, p. 169.
139. Nelson, “Life-Ways,” p. 92.
140. Nelson, Make Prayers, pp. 138, 225.
141. Martin, In the Spirit, p. 8.
142. Matthiessen, “Native,” p. 22. Mathiessen continues: “Nature itself is ‘the Great
Mystery,’ the ‘religion before religion’. . . Respect for nature is respect for oneself,. . . since
man and nature, though not the same thing, are not different.” Joseph Epes Brown writes:
“Throughout virtually all indigenous American Indian traditions, a pervasive theme has
been that all forms and forces of all orders of the immediately experienced natural environ-
ment may communicate to human beings the totality of that which is to be known of the
sacred mysteries of creation, and thus of the sacred essence of beings and being” (The Spir-
itual Legacy of the American Indian, p. 26). See also Barre Toelken, “Seeing with a Native’s
Eye: How Many Sheep Will It Hold?,” p. 14.
143. Stan Rowe, Home Place, p. 75.
144. Mathiessen, “Native,” p. 7.
145. “For the Navajo . . . almost everything is related to health . . . one needs not
only medicine, the Navajo would say, but one needs to reestablish his relationship with the
rhythm of nature. It is the ritual as well as the medicine which gets one back ‘in shape’”
(Toelken, “Seeing,” pp. 14–15).
146. Abram, The Spell, p. 22.
147. These four are Re-evaluation Counseling, Vipassana meditation, Gestalt
therapy, and focusing.
148. Vipassana simply means “insight” or “wisdom.” Vipassana meditation is based
on the original discourses of the Buddha, being associated with the earliest, or Theravaden,
stream of Buddhism. For a discussion of how crucial the condition of one’s posture is for
the experience of sitting meditation, see Will Johnson, The Posture of Mediation.
149. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, p. 108. My
emphasis.
150. In The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees, for example, Stephanie Kaza
describes how she draws on her Zen Buddhist training to listen to trees. It was encouraged,
furthermore, in my own training for an extended wilderness quest (on which topic, see
Stephen Foster and Meredith Little, The Roaring of the Sacred River).
151. A topic extensively treated by Kovel in History.
152. Kovel, “On the Notion,” p. 389. “Desire wants fusion with the ground of its being
and the undoing of the distinction between humanity and nature” (Kovel, History, p. 144).
153. Charles Bergman, ‘“The Curious Peach:’ Nature and the Language of Desire,”
p. 282.
154. Kovel, History, pp. 124, 159.
155. Kovel, The Age, pp. 72, 83. “There is no intrinsic need . . . for desire to be problem-
atic unless the society in which it emerges is self-estranged and estranged from nature” (p. 72).
156. Kornfield, A Path, p. 88.

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157. Perls et al., Gestalt, p. 408.

158. David Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being, p. 2. See also his “Eros and Psyche:
A Reading of Merleau-Ponty.”
159. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 20.
160. As the Jungian Erich Neumann observed, Eros is the “archetype of relatedness.”
161. Terry Tempest Williams, Interview. “Terry Tempest Williams,” pp. 310, 312;
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” p. 209. Emphasis mine. “When
I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that
creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in
our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (p. 210).
162. Brown, Life, pp. 33–34.
163. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 41.
164. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. xvii.
165. Gaston Bachelard, quoted in Shepard, The Others, p. 291.
166. Percy Shelley, quoted in Livingston, Rogue, p. 196. Understood in this way,
human nature takes on a dual aspect. In his study of Freud, for example, Paul Ricoeur con-
cluded that human existence is a combination of desire and effort (“Existence and Herme-
neutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 21). I take “effort” to be the realm of our free
will, agency, or volition, which we are charged by nature to use in its service, whether we
take up this responsibility or not. Kovel likewise suggests that the two main categories of
human nature are desire, the transhistorical aspect of our nature, and praxis, which is the
freely chosen, organized, purposeful activity by which a society transforms the conditions
of its existence and so makes history (Kovel, The Age, pp. 52, 236).
167. David Levin, “Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing,” p. 132.
168. This is borne out as well in the etymology of anxiety and angst, which come
from the Indo-Germanic root “angh,” meaning “to constrict.”
169. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 68.

Chapter Five

1. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?,” p. 113. Emphasis mine.

2. Paul Goodman, New Reformation, p. 207.
3. Gary Snyder, Earth Household, p. 127.
4. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, p. 8. Perhaps clarifying this matter a
little further, the social theorist Ted Benton refers to any approach that reduces social reality
solely to natural scientific explanation (e.g., sociobiology, neo-Malthusianism) as “over-
naturalistic.” (Ted Benton, “Biology and Social Theory in the Environmental Debate,”
pp. 39–40).
5. Christopher Lasch, quoted in David Noble, Progress Without People, p. 128.
6. See William Leiss, The Domination of Nature, pp. 178–187; Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature; and Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness.

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7. Donald Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainability,” pp. 140–142. This

makes the point further that the concerns of ecopsychology cannot be articulated by nat-
ural scientific discourse alone.
8. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, pp. 14–15.
9. Hatred of limits is a symptom of grandiosity or narcissism. Because narcissists
have such little self-esteem, they feel driven to win the esteem of others by becoming larger-
than-life, denying their bodily limits, becoming kings of the world. That our society’s ecocidal
relationship to nature betrays a narcissistic pattern is obviously a topic for further ecopsycho-
logical inquiry. As Allen Kanner notes, there is a “narcissistic thread” that runs through “the
many historical, political, and economic trends” that contribute to the global environmental
crisis (“Mount Rushmore Syndrome: When Narcissism Rules the Earth,” p. 102).
10. Frederick Perls, Ego, Hunger and Aggression. The ego in this view is not a sub-
stance but a process, coming into existence as required by our life situations. Note that for
Freud the Id (nature) is mastered by and put in service of the Ego, that is, Freud’s view is
the reverse of Perls’s.
11. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 74. Emphasis mine.
12. Ellen Chen, The Tao Te Ching, p. 3.
13. Bhikku Nanamaoli, The Life of the Buddha, p. 37. I have changed dhamma to
dharma.
14. Peter Mathiessen, “Native Earth,” p. 12.
15. Four Worlds International Institute for Human And Community Develop-
ment, The Sacred Tree, p. 47. Emphasis mine.
16. Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, p. 240. Emphasis mine.
17. On this humility, Perls writes: “The organism knows all. We know very little”
(Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, p. 23); while, echoing a common Native American belief, a Koyukon
Indian comments that “Each animal knows way more than you do” (Make Prayers, p. 225).
18. I disagree with the view that whatever grief I experience in relation to the paving
of the earth merely reflects my own personal neurosis. In her lovely article “Crying for the
Manatees: Youth and Our Endangered World,” Anita Barrows discusses how children can
be hurt in ways that result in their being particularly attuned to the violence done to wild-
life. While it would be possible to fix a psychodiagnostic label on many of these children,
this is not good grounds for dismissing their perceptions.
19. Raymond Williams, Keywords, p. 87. Cultura itself traces to colere, whose mean-
ings included “inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship.”
20. See Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse, pp. 207–223.
21. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 89. The quotation continues:
“a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
22. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, p. 29. See also p. 286.
23. See Deborah Kleese, “Toward an Ecological Epistemology for Psychology”; Paul
Shepard, “Wilderness Is Where My Genome Lives,” in Traces of an Omnivore; and Marjorie
Grene, “The Paradoxes of Historicity.”

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24. Lionel Trilling, quoted in Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, p. 38.
Noting that an authentic culture takes nature as its “guide in the task of cultivation,”
Kohák remarks: “If, in the course of the last three centuries, we have become increasingly
marauders on the face of the earth rather than dwellers therein, it is not because we have
become more distinctively human, more distinctively cultured, but rather because we have
become less so” (The Embers, p. 91).
25. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 43.
26. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 7.
27. Grene, “The Paradoxes,” p. 28.
28. Grene, “The Paradoxes,” p. 29. Note that I am here addressing the problem of
finding a discourse that lies “between the human and the natural,” for (as Grene observes)
human science is said to correspond to the historical, natural science to the nonhistorical.
History (humans) and nonhistory (nature) thus share no common ground.
29. Paul Shepard, quoted in David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 181. Emphasis
mine. See, also, “A Post-Historic Primitivism,” pp. 40–47; and Nature, pp. 54–58, 144.
30. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, p. 206.
31. For all his talk of earth and sky, Heidegger was thus ultimately unable “to place
man within an organized nature.” “Only if we can place ourselves . . . within nature,” says
Grene, “only then can we save the concept of historicity from the self-destruction to which
it seems so readily susceptible” (“The Paradoxes,” p. 29).
32. Hermes is a complex character—guide of souls, inventor, trickster, bringer of
both luck and misfortune, thief, source of wild versus domestic order, god of fertility.
Walter Otto called the world of Hermes a “basic image of living reality,” a complete form
of existence, where one journeys after the full sweep of human experience while keeping a
good-humored spiritual detachment about it all. See Karl Kerényi, Hermes: Guide of Souls
and Kane, The Wisdom.
33. Kerényi notes the connection between hermeneutics and Hermes: “Hermes is
hermeneus (‘interpreter’), a linguistic mediator, and this not merely on verbal grounds. By
nature he is the begetter and bringer of something light-like, a clarifier, God of ex-position
and inter-pretation . . . which seeks and in his spirit . . . is led forward to the deepest mys-
tery” (Hermes, p. 88). Despite that Hermes figures in my thinking, I am reluctant to wholly
embrace him as a symbol for my psychology, for two reasons. The first is that I wish to work
in broad principles, rather than in the details of Hermes’s world. The second is that I am
mindful of the fact that within indigenous traditions the messengers of the divine are not in
human but animal form. The bear, for example, “has for thousands of years been the master
of souls, bodies, and minds in transition,” guarding the underworld and bringing “to the
people a message of good ecology and good relations between them and the sacred powers
that govern the world” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw, pp. xv, xviii, 72).
Likewise, in “the Haida mythworld, the messengers are the loon and pie-billed grebe, birds
of good omen” (Kane, The Wisdom, p. 110). What I am going for in this section, then, is
simply a view of human existence that is inspired by hermeneutic thought, and in which
messages or gifts are welcomed from all sorts of others.

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34. Claudio Naranjo, The Techniques of Gestalt Therapy, p. 5; Medard Boss, Existen-
tial Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, p. 282.
35. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 100. Geertz is also drawing on
Susan Langer.
36. Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations,
p. 17; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” p. 87.
37. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” in
Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 15.
38. Shepard, Nature, p. 14.
39. Medard Boss, Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions, p. 37.
40. This is the particular terrain of an area of psychoanalysis known as “object rela-
tions.” See, for example, Margaret Mahler et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human
Infant; D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment and
Playing and Reality; and Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, Object Relations in Psycho-
analytic Theory. This principle comes out clearly, as well, in Erik Erikson’s work on psycho-
social development, in which he assumes that “the human personality in principle develops
according to steps predetermined in the growing person’s readiness to be driven toward, to
be aware of, and to interact with, a widening social radius” (Childhood and Society, p. 270).
Finally, the principle of ever-widening spheres also comes out of the field of “attachment
theory,” first formulated by the psychiatrist John Bowlby. See, for example, Bowlby’s A
Secure Base; Mary Ainsworth, Patterns of Attachment; and Michel B. Sperling and William
H. Berman, Attachment in Adults.
41. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 62.
42. Nancy Chodorow, “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Per-
spective,” p. 11. Emphasis removed. I am partly drawing on Chodorow in the rest of this
paragraph as well.
43. Winnicott thus speaks of the seeming paradox that there can be a “separation
that is not a separation but a form of union” (Playing, p. 98)—in other words: kinship.
44. Frederick Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 270.
45. Harold Searles, The Nonhuman Environment, p. 30.
46. For Chodorow, it is especially important to see this in boys, who in the absence
of parenting by men must establish their male identity by splitting away and overasserting
their difference from women (mother).
47. Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, p. 70.
48. Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, p. 85. “Splitting . . . is the basic property of domi-
nation, whether of class, sex, race or, more generally, of nature itself. . . . Differentiation . . .
represents what we [ideally] strive for: it is the outcome of human nature in the direction
of ecological interrelatedness and the essential unity of all beings” (Joel Kovel, “Human
Nature, Freedom and Spirit,” in The Radical Spirit, p. 292).
49. Colin Turnbull, The Human Cycle, p. 36. Emphasis mine. The detailed discus-
sions in Turnbull’s entire book admirably bring out much of what I am attempting to say
in this section.

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 Notes 293

50. I should note that humans are not the only species to experience anxiety before
the void or to go through a developmental process of attachment and separation, both of
which are highly noticeable among primates generally. As Hans Jonas suggests, the various
forms of life are more or less precarious depending on how mediated their relationship is
to the world, how much of a gap they sense. “Imaging and speaking man,” however, has
achieved the most extreme degree of such mediacy (The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 183–187).
51. Shepard, Coming, p. 45.
52. Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature, p. 223. For the hunter-gatherer,
“there is no contradiction, no conflict of purpose, between the expression of individuality
and his generalized commitment to others. Since the world of others is enfolded within his
own person, these are one and the same” (p. 240).
53. D. W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” in The Maturational Processes
and the Facilitating Environment.
54. I am adapting here from Kovel, History, p. 181.
55. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, p. 170. Emphasis mine.
56. Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire, p. 74. My discussion here on desire is in general
inspired by Kovel.
57. In actuality, we typically experience life as a relative mix of goodness and bad-
ness, which leads to a complexly compartmentalized inner life.
58. Kovel, The Age, p. 255. The notion of “sociation” comes from Kovel.
59. See Kovel’s excellent discussion in History, pp. 81–82.
60. As Kovel writes: “The more alienated a society or person, the more horrific the
Otherness” (History).
61. Turnbull, The Human, p. 30. Hence: “With the Mbuti we see the concept of
the family as a constantly expanding universe, beginning with the nuclear family and ulti-
mately embracing the whole forest, the entire extent of their experience at any moment”
(p. 59).
62. Nelson, Make Prayers, pp. 14, 226, 238. Reports such as Nelson’s and Turnbull’s
are ubiquitous. Musicologist Marina Roseman, for example, observes that the Temiar, a
rain-forest people of the Malay peninsula, do not alienate “flowers, trees, or cicadas as
inherently different and distant,” but “stress an essential similarity.” They “receive inspira-
tion and constant regeneration from interaction with the essences of mountains, rivers,
fruits, and creatures of the tropical rain forest. . . . The jungle is a social place” (quoted in
Shepard, Coming, p. 42).
63. Richard Nelson, The Island Within, p. 276.
64. Richard Nelson, “Life-Ways of the Hunter,” p. 88.
65. This idea forms part of the nucleus of Ray Rogers’s thesis in Nature and the
Crisis of Modernity.
66. Old Torlino, quoted in Abram, The Spell, p. 70.
67. Turnbull, The Human, p. 149.
68. Conrad Aiken, quoted in Edith Cobb, “The Ecology of Imagination in
­Childhood,” p. 129.

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69. The middle chapters of Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous—namely, “The Flesh
of Language,” “Animism and the Alphabet,” and “In the Landscape of Language”—are all
dedicated to this topic. I will be making reference to others besides Abram in due course,
especially Merleau-Ponty, but see also Kohák, “The Gift of the Word” in The Embers,
pp. 47–66.
70. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p 187.
71. Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 215.
72. Abram, The Spell, p. 82. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s remark that “language has us. . .
it is not we who have language. . . . it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak
of being” (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 194). By “being,” Merleau-Ponty here means the
world in its nonthematic, inexplicit, or horizonal character.
73. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 98–99.
74. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 155. In making this point, Merleau-Ponty is bor-
rowing from Valéry.
75. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A
Prospectus of His Work,” in The Primacy of Perception, p. 7.
76. Abram, The Spell, p. 83.
77. In addition to Abram’s work, my other main source, Dillon’s Merleau-Ponty’s
Ontology, offers much discussion that helps elaborate this principle beyond what I am able
to do here.
78. Abram, The Spell, p. 84. Emphasis mine. See also Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s,
p. 218.
79. Abram, The Spell, pp. 80, 84.
80. “Alone of all expressive processes, speech is able to settle into a sediment and
constitute an acquisition for use in human relations” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology,
p. 190). Words thus also have a transparent quality, going right to the things they disclose
while keeping themselves nonfigural, just as we see with our eyes while having no thematic
awareness of them (unless something gets in them, we develop cataracts, or whatever).
81. This unique disclosive ability of words is suggested, says Abram, in the Old
English word “spell,” which came to mean not only correctly arranging the letters of the
name for some entity but in so doing to also “effect a magic” or cast a “spell” over that
entity, that is, to summon it forth in some way (The Spell, pp. 89, 133).
82. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and
Feeling,” pp. 150–151.
83. See Christopher Norris, Deconstruction, and Robert Mugerauer, Interpreting
Environments.
84. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity,” p. xxiii. As Dillon suggests, by
contrast: “sedimented language, the store of knowledge wrested from the perceived world,
does not screen us from the world; rather it provides the means of articulating the world
and adding to that store” (Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 201).
85. Eugene Gendlin, “Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors.” Derrida’s strategy
is to show that language is metaphorical and so that it can never re-present some original

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 Notes 295

or objective reality, as the modern tradition has sought to do; he wants to show that there
is no such reality, but rather constant slippage. Gendlin argues, however, that in knocking
the representational model, Derrida is at the same time holding onto it, that is, he retains a
dated theory of metaphor. He thus does not go far enough in his criticism, or pose any alter-
natives. That is, Derrida misses the creative, originating power of language-use, wherein
we sense more than our existing concepts and distinctions; “misses the texture of life and
usage” that word-use opens up; misses, finally, the way that metaphors call forth bodily felt
meanings, bring experiential effects, as part of an ongoing life process, rather than simply
mis-represent some original reality that is nowhere to be found.
86. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 187.
87. Walter Ong has criticized Derrida and other “textualists” precisely on this point.
Ong says that textualist regard the text as a closed system because they view it in historical
isolation, instead of tracing it to its verbal source in primary orality. See Orality and Literacy,
pp. 168–169. In other words, they take the text as primary when it is in fact secondary.
88. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, pp. 429–430. “The only pre-existent Logos is
the world itself ’ (p. xx). I think it is odd that Barfield should have to argue that “if language
is ‘meaningful,’ then nature herself must also be meaningful.” How could it be otherwise?
As Barfield notes: “The denial of any . . . inner being to the processes of nature leads inevi-
tably to the denial of it to man himself ’ (“The Rediscovery of Meaning,” pp. 12, 15).
89. Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 201. Note that although
this statement may serve as a response to Derrida, it was written a number of years before
Derrida’s major works appeared, by which time Merleau-Ponty had already died. See also
M. C. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity.”
90. See Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical,” p. 142.
91. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s comment: “There really is inspiration and expiration of
Being” (“Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, p. 167). See, also, Abram’s chapter
on “The Forgetting and Remembering of Air,” in The Spell.
92. I do not doubt the critical value of Derrida’s efforts to disrupt received habits
of thought. As Joel Kovel comments, however, whatever liberation Derrida promises is
largely undone by his flight into the cage of text. “There is nothing to be said within lan-
guage—yet nothing but language: surely one of the bleakest perspectives ever advanced on
the human condition.” (History, p. 281, n. 48). On intellectual retreatism, see also Dillon,
“Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity,” pp. xxii–xxiii.
93. “More than any other single invention,” writes Ong, “writing has transformed
human consciousness” (Orality and Literacy, p. 78). Ong is careful to note, however, that
the shift from orality to literacy is not the only historical force that has brought about
changes in “psyche and culture.” “Developments in food production, in trade, in political
organization, in religious institutions, in technological skills, in educational practices, in
means of transportation, in family organization, and in other areas of human life all play
their own distinctive roles. But most of these developments, and indeed very likely every
one of them, have themselves been affected, often at great depth, by the shift from orality
to literacy and beyond, as many of them have in turn affected this shift” (p. 175).

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94. As Abram observes, the letters of our alphabet can in fact still be traced to earlier
pictorial signs. In the early Semitic aleph-beth, for example, the first letter, Aleph, is also the
ancient Hebrew word for ox. This letter is (from our perspective) an upside-down version
of our own letter A, with two ox horns pointing upward (The Spell, p. 101).
95. Abram, The Spell, p. 254. Emphasis removed.
96. Abram, The Spell, p. 273.
97. Personal communication, November 2000.
98. See M. C, Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 256, n. 61.
99. See Kurt Danzinger, “Generative Metaphor and the History of Psychological
Discourse,” pp. 348–352. On psychology’s general adoption of the modern world’s eco-
nomic-technological character, David Leary comments that throughout the field one finds
a “cult of efficiency,” a preoccupation with productivity, a language dense with techno-
logical analogues (calling our senses, for example, “signal detection devices”), and many
other features of an engineering vision (“Psyche’s Muse,” pp. 51–52, n. 53). Currently, the
clearest example in psychology of using machine metaphors is cognitive psychology’s adop-
tion of the computer as an image to describe the human mind.
100. Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, p. 231. Roughly
speaking, totemism is the practice in which a society perceives itself homologously to cer-
tain totemic beings who act as symbols for organizing the whole community.
101. Leary, “Psyche’s Muse.”
102. Marcel Detienne, quoted in Calvin Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth, p. 2.
103. Martin, In the Spirit, pp. 94, 107. Martin did not actually use the phrase “less-
than-human,” but rather “we are not now true humans.” I used “less-than-human,” how-
ever, because it indicates what becomes of us when we cleave ourselves off from what is
“more-than-human.”
104. Jeannette Armstrong, “Keepers of the Land,” p. 323. As Armstrong also notes:
“The Okanagan word for ‘our place on the land’ and ‘our language’ is the same.”
105. Kane, The Wisdom, pp. 14, 79, 166. Like Abram, Kane offers that our own
language has become domesticated, “no longer wild in the sense of resonating with the cries
of forest animals” (p. 235).
106. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 235. See also p. 195.
107. See Eugene Gendlin, “Dwelling.” Gendlin also notes: “If words were only dis-
cursive forms [i.e., lacking in an experiential dimension], then they could not say some-
thing new, nor something that does not follow from their established patterns. Then what
words newly say has to be considered only a contradiction or a rupture” (“How Philosophy
Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can,” p. 36).
108. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, pp. 135, 137.
109. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 267. Merleau-Ponty noted to himself that his
philosophy “must be presented without any compromise with humanism, nor naturalism
[natural science], nor finally with theology” (p. 274). In other words, he was convinced
that philosophy could not proceed so long as it retained the traditional cleavages among
humans, nature, and God. Jerry Gill, in fact, calls Merleau-Ponty’s outlook a “naturalistic

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 Notes 297

theism,” indicating the latter’s belief that God is not above the world but is the world, in the
sense of a nonthematic logos (Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of
the flesh was presented in a limited number of places, primarily The Visible and the Invisible
(specifically, chapter four, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” and among his “Working
Notes”); and the article “Eye and Mind.” For a brief explication see M. C. Dillon, “Mer-
leau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis.”
110. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 139. Thus flesh denotes the commingling or
intertwining of subjective and objective reality, for example, I experience my body’s inten-
tionality, I aim at the world with my hands and feet, yet only because I can see these parts
of my body as objects am I able coordinate my subjective actions.
111. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 153.
112. Merleau-Ponty himself said that language “is founded on the phenomenon of
the mirror . . . or the echo, . . . on the magical action of like upon like” (quoted in Dillon,
Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 206).
113. “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world
is flesh?” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, p. 138; see also p. 248). Ecological thinking places
phenomena in con-text, within the larger text-ure, fabric, or weave, of life. The ultimate
“text,” then, is the flesh of the world.
114. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty also noted to himself to: “Do a psychoanalysis of nature:
it is the flesh, the mother” (The Visible, p. 267).
115. Gill, Merleau-Ponty, p. 60. Recall my discussion of the contact boundary in
chapter three. In the terms used here, we would say that our flesh faces both inward and
outward at this boundary.
116. Quoted in David Strong, Crazy Mountains, p. 155.
117. Thus did Heidegger say that “perceiving is responding (resonating)” (quoted in
Avens, “Heidegger,” p. 197). Experiential psychotherapists understand this well, for they
are always sensing into their own bodies in order to sense what might correspondingly be
going on for their clients.
118. Owen Barfield, “The Meaning of the Word ‘Literal,’” p. 56. As the Roman phi-
losopher Plotinus put it: “All knowing comes by likeness” (quoted in Hillman, Revisioning,
p. 99).
119. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, p. 164. Emphasis
mine. “We understand the thing as we understand a new kind of behaviour, not, that is,
through any kind of intellectual operation of subsumption, but by taking up on our own
account the mode of existence which the observable signs adumbrate before us” (Phenom-
enology, p. 319; emphasis mine).
120. Shepard, “Wilderness,” in Traces, p. 221.
121. Paul Shepard, “The Ark of the Mind,” p. 59.
122. Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals, p. 191. As many have commented, we experi-
ence the world as a unified whole only because of the way that things resemble or imply one
another, and so hang together in our perception of them (see, for example, Isaiah Berlen’s
comments in David Leary, “Psyche’s Muse,” p. 29, n. 12). Trees are like flowers, flowers

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are like us, and we are like stones and stars (and this sentence is like a Gary Snyder poem,
in No Nature, p. 287). Everything overlaps, mirrors, bleeds into, stretches away from, or
“metaphors,” everything else.
123. Boss, Existential, p. 76. Recall that self and world form a single unit, both being
disclosed within the same clearing of being or horizon of understanding. Thus for scientists
to experience the world as a dead place, they must actually deaden themselves—must adopt
a mood or mode of attunement that is “calm, cool, and collected.” In studying vision,
Descartes, for example, chose to take “the eye of a newly dead man” (quoted in Robert
Romanyshyn, “The Despotic Eye: An Illustration of Metabletic Phenomenology and Its
Implications,” p. 93; see also van den Berg, Things, pp. 20–21).
124. Indeed, according to a philosophy of flesh no such independence of mental
functions is even possible, for all aspects or regions of existence continuously play into or
mirror one another. What we perceive, for example, cannot be cleanly separated from how
we are moving our bodies, what emotions or desires we are feeling, what we are thinking,
or what kind of language we have acquired. All of these are intertwined aspects of a single
bodily existing.
125. Please note how this discussion ties into much of what I talked about in chapter
two concerning the impossibility of achieving an unbiased knowledge of reality. On the
necessary of projection for the making of contact see also Abram, The Spell, pp. 58, 275–
276, n. 3; and Gordon Wheeler, Gestalt Reconsidered. Quite simply, if others are so dif-
ferent from ourselves that we can’t imagine what it is like to be them or what they are
experiencing, then we can’t make any contact. This is also why psychotherapists are often
people who have been much wounded themselves, for this helps them to see, understand,
and make contact with other people’s wounds. On the imaginative component within
all experience, see Neil Bolton, “The Lived World: Imagination and the Development of
Experience.”
126. Stephen Levine, Poiesis, pp. 33, 41.
127. In the usual understanding of projection, by contrast, the idea that we misper-
ceive the wolves can only mean that there exists some correct or objective, perhaps scientifi-
cally determined, perception of wolves.
128. Barry Lopez, “Renegotiating the Contracts.” Parabola 8.2 (1983), p. 16.
129. Personal communication, August, 2000; and “Revitalizing Natural History,” p.
87.
130. George Santayana, quoted in Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 82.
Emphasis mine. In concluding the controversial anthology, Uncommon Ground, William
Cronon writes: “Nature is a mirror onto which we project our own ideas and values; but is
also a material reality that sets limits . . . on the possibilities of human ingenuity and story-
telling. . . . The nonhuman world is real and autonomous, a place worthy of our respect and
care, but the paradox of our human lives is that we can never know that world at first hand.
Instead, we see it through the lens of our own conceptions and simulations, which never
map onto the real world in a perfect one-to-one correspondence” (p. 458). While I am in
support of recognizing both the otherness of the natural world and the role of projection in

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our understanding of it, I believe that Cronon’s conception of projection is dualistic, for it
makes “the real world” inaccessible. As a plural realist I suggest, rather, that we do contact
reality, even if we can do this in better or worse ways. Reality, in short, is not some objec-
tive, material realm we distortedly perceive through our various lenses, but the meanings
we gather in our fleshy commerce with others.
131. Robert Romanyshyn, “Unconsciousness: Reflection and the Primacy of Percep-
tion,” p. 158.
132. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, pp. 303, 320.
133. Gion Condrau and Medard Boss, “Existential Analysis,” p. 503.
134. Medard Boss, Existential, p. 261. See also Medard Boss, The Analysis of Dreams.
135. André de Koning, “Reflections on the Heart,” p. 142.
136. James Hillman, “The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” p. 321.
137. James Hillman, “Animal Presence,” pp. 126–127. Elsewhere, Hillman has
pleaded that we not view dream animals as mere symbols of our instincts or dangerous
subjective forces inside us, but in “motifs of learning from the animal, amazed by its beauty,
touched by its pain, reconciliation with it, being borne, helped, saved by the animal” (“The
Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” p. 329). In The Dream and the Underworld,
he also notes that dream animals do not merely represent instincts because “they are not
images of animals, but images as animals” (p. 150). Medard Boss makes similar remarks in
The Analysis of Dreams (e.g., pp. 105–107), even if his theoretical framework differs in other
respects from Hillmans.
138. Erving and Miriam Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated, pp. 266–268. As Gen-
dlin, Jungians, and other also emphasize, it is important to establish a reciprocal relation
with dreams, to treat them lovingly and respectfully, to welcome them, pay attention to
them, thank them. In this way, the dreams themselves come to offer more to the dreamer.
139. I thus agree with the distinction made by Gary Snyder: “Animals come into
myth or dream not as projections, but as a way to speak to the human mind. In one sense,
you can say that’s a projection, but the fact is we couldn’t have animals in our dreams if
there weren’t real animals. There is some kind of information that is exchanged there”
(“Hanging Out with Raven,” p. 140).
140. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity,” p. xxiii. Emphasis mine. We are
“separated from ourselves” in that we exist only in our interactions with others; and that in
order to contact the other we must reach across a distance, finding ourselves both here in
our bodies and over there, absorbed in another who correspondingly mirrors or informs us
of who we are or what we can be. Thus it is only in being separated from myself that I may
come back to myself changed—the other creates the distance I need in order to see myself.
141. Shepard, The Others, p. 281.
142. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space, p. 187.
143. “Many features of the bear—especially the many races of the brown bear—place
it in correspondence to humanity. Its size, appearance, mobility, dexterity, omnivorousness,
reproduction, annual cycle, length of life, social behavior, and intelligence have an eerie
relation to our own. These characteristics are the source of enduring speculative analogy

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and psychological tension. . . . The bear is the only familiar omnivore whose size approxi-
mates our own. . . . It has an expressive face, binocular vision, vocal and gestural responses,
sitting and bipedal stances, almost no tail, and fine dexterity. . . . And yet the bear is vividly
other—huge, furry, long-muzzled, long clawed, quadrupedal—in these things nothing like
a man” (Shepard, “The Ark,” p. 58).
144. Shepard and Sanders, The Sacred, p. 59. Gary Snyder also includes a version of
this story in The Practice of the Wild.
145. Paul Shepard, “The Unreturning Arrow,” p. 211. Emphasis removed. Although
I have not pursued it here, this idea suggests an affinity between the notions of flesh and
that of the life force. Anita Barrows has, in this vein, called for a type of developmental
psychology that would emphasize “the wordless stratum of the child’s being, which is . . . a
life-force made manifest, a porous, permeable, sensitive essence intertwined with all other
such essences, affecting and affected by them with its every breath” (“The Ecopsychology
of Child Development,” p. 110).
146. Shepard, The Sacred, p. 72. By “species” I mean to suggest more than just the
plant and animal world.
147. Shepard, Thinking, p. 72. See, also, “Phyto-resonance of the True Self,” in Traces
of an Omnivore.
148. Harold Searles, quoted in Shepard, Nature, p. 14.
149. For a “wheel” teaching which combines Native American and old European
sources, and which is intended as a contribution to the ecopsychology literature, see Steven
Foster, with Meredith Little, The Four Shields.
150. Joseph Epes Brown, “The Bison and the Moth: Lakota Correspondences,”
p. 13.
151. Paul Shepard, “Nature and Madness,” p. 39.
152. Shepard, Nature, p. 128.
153. Paul Shepard, “On Animal Friends,” p. 279.
154. Shepard, Coming Home, p. 5.
155. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, pp. 184–185. The following sentence also bor-
rows from Merleau-Ponty.
156. See Searles’s remarks from chapter one. Anita Barrows recently noted that “from
the earliest moments of life the infant has an awareness not only of human touch, but of the
touch of the breeze on her skin, variations in light and color, temperature, texture, sound.
No one who has spent time watching an infant could fail to notice this; yet the theorists on
whose work our current understanding (and therapies) have been based fail to account for
its importance—indeed, even for its presence” (“The Ecopsychology,” p. 103).
157. Gene Myers, Children and Animals, p. 143. This is the same point made above
by Searles. Shepard also writes: “We do not graduate from animality but . . . into and
through it” (Thinking, p. 3).
158. Cobb, “The Ecology,” p. 131.
159. Wang Jiazhu, quoted in “The Three Gorges: The Case for Development,”
p. 51.

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 Notes 301

160. A point made by Wolfgang Sachs: “Through the trick of a biological metaphor,
a simple economic activity turns into a natural and evolutionary process, as though hidden
qualities would be progressively developed to their final state. The metaphor thus says that
the real destiny of natural goods is to be found in their economic utilization” (quoted in
Livingston, Rogue, p. 61).
161. One of Shepard’s central arguments, in fact, is that Western history has the
character of a “continuing dedevelopment” (my emphasis). He speculates, that is, that “the
history of Western man has been a progressive peeling back of the psyche,” with “mutila-
tions of personal maturity” being “the vehicle of cultural progress and environmental deci-
mation” (Nature, p. 16). It is not insignificant, then, when Maria Mies reports of male sex
tourists found in Thailand who “demand that the . . . [prostitute] bath and feed them like
a baby, and oil and powder their buttocks” (Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism,
p. 136).
162. In his The Human Cycle, Colin Turnbull contrasts his own experiences through
the various stages of the life cycle to those of the different peoples he has studied around
the world as an anthropologist. It was a very moving read for me, and certainly comple-
ments well the discussion here. Needless to say, virtually all of Paul Shepard’s writings may
be sought out for further treatment of the present topic.
163. In his article “The Child’s Relations with Others” (in The Primacy of Perception),
Merleau-Ponty argued, however, that our usual Cartesian view of persons—as self-con-
tained, solitary, rational, and externally related individuals—makes this kind of infantile
experiencing a logical impossibility. Descartes began with the experience of dualistically
split, isolated, intellectual adults, whereas infants exist in an original being-together with
the world and only gradually come to differentiate and enter into relations with others. As
Paul Nonnekes puts it, the infant is involved in “a pulsation of growth that is neither an
inside nor an outside, but an intertwining” (“The Intertwining Wildness of Flesh-Child
Becoming,” p. 20). For a good discussion of how developmental theorists often start not
with the child but with the rational adult word, which is then used as a yardstick against
which “the child is judged to be more or less competent,” see Chris Jenks, “Introduction:
Constituting the Child.” Jenks says that much developmental “theory moves to envelop the
child within its own projections,” such that the child is “abandoned in theory,” or “reim-
ported as an afterthought.” See, also, David Levin, The Listening Self (pp. 150–166) for a
general discussion of mirroring and infancy.
164. The rise and fall of the speech of parents, for example, has been observed to
correspond to rises and falls in the trunk movements and gesturings of their infants. At
times the boundaries between caregiver and infant may become indefinite, where there
exists only an “interpresenced participation in the flesh” (Nonnekes, “The Intertwining,”
p. 22), a blurring of identities in a nondual and synergistic feeling space. See Zachariah
Boukydis, “A Theory of Empathic Relations Between Parents and Infants: Insight from a
Client-Centred/Experiential Perspective.”
165. As discussed, for instance, in Levin, The Listening, p. 152.
166. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s, p. 167.

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 302 Notes

167. Erik Erikson, quoted in Cobb, The Ecology, p. 57.

168. Morris Berman, borrowing from educator John Holt, in Coming to Our Senses,
p. 42.
169. Eugene Gendlin, “The Primacy of the Body, Not the Primacy of Perception,”
p. 350.
170. Gill, Merleau-Ponty, p. 97.
171. Perls et al, Gestalt, p. 270. See, also, Mary Ainsworth, “Attachment as Related
to Mother-Infant Interaction” for a discussion of the “pre-adapted . . . system of maternal
behaviour.”
172. Shepard, Nature, pp. 7, 9.
173. Winnicott, The Maturational, p. 87.
174. Barrows mentions that some ecofeminists do this as a deliberate ritual (“The
Ecopsychology,” p. 104).
175. Harold Searles, quoted in Levin, Listening, p. 155. Searles remarks are based
on “daily-life observations of infants and young children, and from psychoanalytic and
psychotherapeutic work with neurotic and psychotic adults.”
176. Liedloff, The Continuum, p. 34.
177. See Boukydis, “A Theory.”
178. Ainsworth, “Attachment,” p. 44.
179. As Boyd Eaton et al., note: “More or less constant carrying of the infant in a
sling or pouch at the mother’s side or back is characteristic of hunters and gatherers in
widely separated geographic regions” (The Paleolithic Prescription, p. 207). See, also, Turn-
bull, The Human (especially p. 76), and Liedloff, The Continuum.
180. See, for example, Ainsworth, “Attachment” and Winnicott, The Maturational.
Jean Liedloff ’s The Continuum is a powerful testimony to the wrong-headedness of much
conventional Western belief about child raising. On the emotional mistreatment of chil-
dren in western society, see also Phyllis Bronstein, “Promoting Healthy Emotional Devel-
opment in Children.”
181. Liedloff, The Continuum, p. 71. This follows because a basic infantile need is to
know that we have a right to be. As Winnicott puts it, when well-mirrored the baby can in
effect say: “When I look I am seen, so I exist” (Playing, p. 114).
182. See, for example James Masterson, The Search for the Real Self and chapter
fourteen of Gary Yontef, Awareness, Dialogue and Process. The existence today of parent-
infant psychotherapy suggests, as well, how much trouble our society gets into in raising its
infants.
183. See, for example, chapter six of Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery and
chapter two of John Briere, Therapy for Adults Molested as Children.
184. See Donald Dutton, The Abusive Personality.
185. Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood.
186. Cobb, “The Ecology,” pp. 123–124.
187. Shepard, Nature, p. 11. See, also, the chapter “Kids’ Stuff ” in Livingston, Rogue,
pp. 119–136.

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 Notes 303

188. Paul Shepard, “Place in American Culture,” p. 32. Emphasis mine. Shepard
believed that: “every child under ten has three ecological needs: architecturally complex
play space shared with companions; a cumulative and increasingly diverse experience of
non-human forms, animate and inanimate, whose taxonomic names and generic relations
he must learn; and occasional and progressively more strenuous exertions into the wild
world where he may, in a limited way, confront the nonhuman” (The Tender, p. 267).
189. Perls et al, Gestalt, p. 270.
190. Myers, Children, pp. 15, 64. Emphasis mine.
191. Shepard, Thinking, p. 59.
192. Myers, Children, p. 5.
193. Myers, Children, p. 16.
194. Myers, Children, pp. 41–42. This again shows a split between the symbolic and
experiential in our society.
195. Myers, Children, p. 170. Myers suggests, in fact, that the child who is “provided
with a human social environment but deprived of nonhuman others,” will be unable to
develop “her or his full humanity.”
196. Jenks writes that for Piaget play “is merely diverting fun or fantasy, it deflects
the child from his true logical purpose within the system of rationality; the criteria of
play need not equate with the rigorous factual demands of reality” (“Introduction,” p.
22). Compare these remarks to those of a Gestaltist, Laura Perls: “A small child, before
becoming socialized, lives on the [contact] boundary: looks at everything, touches every-
thing, gets into everything. He discovers the world, expands his awareness and means of
coping at his own pace: playfully serious or seriously playing, he makes an ongoing creative
adjustment to his own potential” (“Comments on the New Directions,” p. 223; emphasis
mine). On the significance of play in childhood, see also David Levin, The Body’s Recollec-
tion of Being, p. 238–240.
197. Eaton et al., The Paleolithic, pp. 211–212. I have spliced some words into this
quote from elsewhere on the same page.
198. As is thoroughly discussed in Turnbull, The Human; and Shepard, Coming,
p. 59.
199. Martin, In the Spirit, p. 9.
200. Myers, Children, p. 141.
201. Shepard, The Others, p. 282.
202. Shepard, Thinking, p. 121.
203. Myers, Children, p. 10. Emphasis mine. Adding another dimension to this,
Shepard notes: “Fantasies of animals wearing clothes and building houses, what may seem
a too-close similarity between them and [children], creates an excess of common ground,
stored for late adolescence when disjunction almost swamps the ego” (The Others, p. 88).
204. Shepard, The Others, p. 83. Myers mentions a child (Billy) who after a turtle
was introduced to his classroom imagines that he is himself in the water and that a shark
is nearby. Playing the turtle, he pulls his arms in tight to his sides, and only when the
coast is clear extends them back out. “For Billy, the turtle symbolizes not only safety and

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 304 Notes

coherence but the whole affective experience of surviving an imagined life-threatening situ-
ation. Notably, Billy’s symbolization took the embodied form first of a tightly closed-off
protective posture and them of an expansive, mobile, and agentic one—conveying quali-
ties that would be hard to represent verbally” (Children, p. 57). Qualities such as agency
(animals have their own purposes, confirming the child’s own); coherence (animals are not
contradictory or ambiguous, as are adults; they do not lie, they are whole); affectivity (all
animals convey feelings in their voices, motions, and manner); and continuity (the child
experiences the continuity of her or his own self through the maintenance of her relations
with animal others) are thereby made available to the child in her or his interaction with
animals.
205. Shepard, “The Ark,” p. 55.
206. Myers, Children, p. 171.
207. Stephen Trimble in Nabhan and Trimble, The Geography, pp. 170–171.
208. Turnbull, The Human, p. 81. “The consequences of our folly are to be seen all
around us in the violence, neurosis, and loneliness of our youth, our adults, and our aged,
some of whom never even approach the fullness and richness of life that could have been
theirs had their adolescence been handled with more wisdom, understanding, and gentle
respect.”
209. Peter Breggin writes: “Adolescence, with its struggle to form identity in the
face of unleashed passions, easily gets called ‘mental illness.’ Whether adolescents become
mentally ill often depends mostly on the love, patience, and tolerance of the adults who
surround them” (Toxic Psychiatry, p. 33). Whereas critics like Breggin trace the onset of
schizophrenia and other “mental illnesses” among adolescents to the acute psychospiritual
and social demands of this stage of life, the biopsychiatric establishment generally does not
make such a link, sticking to its biochemical and genetic explanations. See, also, Medard
Boss, Existential, pp. 235–236.
210. Turnbull, The Human, p. 122.
211. Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, p. 258. Emphasis mine. Adolescence,
says Erikson, is a time for, “the mutual confirmation of individual and community, in
the sense that society recognizes the young individual as a bearer of fresh energy and that
the individual so confirmed recognizes society as a living process which inspires loyalty
as it receives it, maintains allegiance as it attracts it, honors confidence as it demands it”
(p. 241).
212. Erik Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, p. 95.
213. Carleton Coon, The Hunting Peoples, p. 392.
214. Erikson, Identity and the Life, p. 97.
215. Says Erikson: the adolescent “would rather act shamelessly in the eyes of his
elders, out of free choice, than be forced into activities which would be shameful in his own
eyes or in those of his peers” (Identity: Youth, p. 130).
216. Erikson, Identity: Youth, p. 254.
217. “Sexual and spiritual awareness as modes of experience are just as valid as phys-
ical and intellectual awareness; and like those other modes of apprehension they can be

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 Notes 305

turned in any direction, inward or outward, restricted to the individual self or encour-
aged to expand and encompass the infinitely greater social self ’ (Turnbull, The Human,
pp. 122–123).
218. M. C. Dillon, “Toward a Phenomenology of Love and Sexuality: An Inquiry
into the Limits of the Humans Situation as They Condition Loving,” p. 344.
219. Turnbull, The Human, p. 82.
220. Eaton et al., The Paleolithic, p. 215. “For the growing child among the !Kung,
as opposed to among ourselves,” for example, “sex becomes less taboo, less frightening, and
less unknown” (p. 221). Mbuti children also spend much time in imitation of “how the
wide diversity of territorial, kinship, age, and sex roles are played” (Turnbull, The Human,
p. 45).
221. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth,
pp. 1, 39.
222. Among tribal societies males and females generally undergo different forms of
initiation. Both involve a period of severance or isolation from the community and a cer-
emonial return. The female rites, however, tend to center on initiation into the sacrality of
womanhood, or of the female mode of being, and generally follow the first menstruation.
Male rites are generally more elaborate, involving various trials or ordeals, and focusing
on mythology, cosmology, and the like. Among those who are today reviving initiatory
practices in our own society, the female/male distinction is often maintained, although rites
such as vision quests are being offered to both males and females, without distinction. For
a broad treatment, see Louise Mahdi et al., ed., Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine
and Feminine Initiation.
223. See Toni Nelson, “Violence Against Women.”
224. See David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making. Gilmore is careful to point out
that these violent rituals do have a social function. If, for example, a society requires for
its continuance that men take great risks in hunting and warfare, then it makes a sort of
sense to convert boys into “fearless” men through painful initiation tests. Be that as it
may, the need in our own society to question traditional ideals of masculinity—a need
first brought home by the women’s movement—puts any violent form of male initia-
tion into question. Rituals and socialization processes that shame males into disowning
essential aspects of their humanity—including their vulnerable emotions and relational
needs—are not only violent to men, but contribute to the creation of men who are then
violent with women.
225. Geertz, The Interpretation, p. 125.
226. Shepard, Nature, p. 66.
227. Eliade, Rites, p. 130.
228. Thus when initiatory rites declined in the middle ages they were replaced by
literature containing initiatory motifs, as in the heroic tales of Arthur or Percival. Fairy
tales were later to dramatically express initiatory scenarios that “answers a deep need in the
human being.” In our own time, finally, best sellers continue to be full of mythological
figures.

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 306 Notes

229. In addition to Eliade’s work, see: Mahdi et al., ed., Betwixt; the works of Stephen
Foster and Meredith Little; Joseph Epes Brown, ed., The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of
the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process; Arnold van Gennep,
The Rites of Passage; and James Wright, The Bones of Metamorphosis. The classic account of
attaining a vision for one’s people is told in John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks.
230. Shepard, Nature, p. 10.
231. Shepard, Coming, p. 44.
232. Thus for Shepard, “the frame-work of nature as metaphorical foundation for
cosmic-at-homeness is as native to the human organism in its adolescent years as any nutri-
tive element in the diet” (Nature, p. 71).
233. Shepard, “Place,” p. 90.
234. Shepard, The Others, p. 89.
235. Erikson, Childhood, p. 269.
236. Michael Meade, Men and the Waters of Life, p. 19.
237. Mahdi et al., ed., Betwixt, p. xi. In introducing Arnold van Gennep’s The
Rites of Passage, Solon Kimball writes that the “situation in psychology is a very curious
one. Except in psychoanalysis, there is no indication of knowledge of or interest in rites
of passage, or in events of this type, in the individual’s life. . . . The critical problems
of becoming male or female, of relations within the family, and of passing into old age
are directly related to the devices which the society offers the individual to help him
achieve the new adjustment. Somehow we seem to have forgotten this. . . . It seems . . .
likely that one dimension of mental illness may arise because an increasing number of
individuals are forced to accomplish their transitions alone and with private symbols”
(pp. xiv, xviii).
238. Meade, “Foreword,” to Eliade, Rites, p. xx.
239. Meade, “Foreword,” p. xxi.
240. Shepard, Coming, p. 46.
241. Leidloff, The Continuum, p. 149.
242. Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 107.

Chapter Six

1. Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, p. 137.

2. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 16.
3. David Noble, Progress Without People, p. 128.
4. As Jeanette Armstrong remarks: “A serious life principle is being happy at what
we do; that is, fulfilled at what we do, internally whole at what we do, doing something
because we love to participate in it and feeling that we need to do it or our lives are empty
shells” (Interviewed by Derrick Jensen, p. 282).
5. Brown, Life, p. 8.
6. David Strong, Crazy Mountains, p. 80.

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 Notes 307

7. Fredric Jameson notes, in this regard, that the capitalist mode of production
has engendered three stages of revolution in technology: steam-driven motors; electric and
combustion motors; and electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses. These revolutions
correspond to three “fundamental movements in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical
expansion over the previous stage”: market capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and multina-
tional capitalism (“Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” p. 78). See,
also, Andrew Freenberg’s “The Critical Theory of Technology,” in which he argues that
capitalism is in itself a technical system; that technology has an essentially social character.
8. I draw heavily on Noble in what follows, both because he provides a compre-
hensive narrative and because he uses some recent scholarship which revises the usual view
of Luddites as irrational opponents of technology.
9. Noble, Progress, p. 139.
10. Francis Bacon, quoted in William Leiss, The Limits of Satisfaction, p. 37.
11. Noble, Progress, p. 12. Noble is himself drawing here on Geoffrey Bernstein.
12. Noble, Progress, p. 142. See, also, Nobles The Religion of Technology.
13. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 24.
14. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” p. 194.
15. Freud, Civilization, p. 33. Next quote, p, 24.
16. Freud, “The Future,” p. 185. Civilization “presupposes precisely the non-satis-
faction . . . of powerful instincts” (Freud, Civilization, p. 44).
17. Freud, “The Future,” p. 194.
18. Freud, Civilization, pp. 30, 81.
19. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 94 and 162. See also Herbert Mar-
cuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, chapter two. On the use of the notion of the revolt of
nature by the early critical theorists in general, see Robyn Eckersley, “The Failed Promise
of Critical Theory”; and Henry Blanke, “Domination and Utopia: Marcuse’s Discourse on
Nature, Psyche, and Culture.”
20. Although Horkheimer was originally referring only to the revolt of human
nature, William Leiss writes: “If it is the case that the natural environment cannot tol-
erate the present level of irrational technological applications without suffering breakdowns
in the mechanisms that govern its cycles of self-renewal, then we would be justified in
speaking of a revolt of external nature which accompanies the rebellion of human nature”
(The Domination of Nature, p. 164).
21. Paul Shepard, The Others, p. 265.
22. Leiss, The Domination, p. 194.
23. Horkheimer, The Eclipse, p. 94.
24. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, p. 44.
25. Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, p. 275.
26. See Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale; and Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet, p. 242.
As an example of the power of public relations, Athanasiou notes: “When a scandal-ridden
company called Nuclear Engineering, Inc. changes its name to U.S. Ecology, wins the
contract to build a hotly contested radioactive waste dump, and distributes slick brochures

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explaining the dump’s displacement of a threatened desert tortoise as ‘A New Home for
Endangered Friends,’ it is obviously the logic of appearances that sets the terms” of our age
(p. 232).
27. Joel Kovel, “The Justifiers,” p. 1.
28. This term comes from the theoretical work of the Re-evaluation Counselling
Communities. See their booklet “What’s Wrong with the ‘Mental Health’ System: And
What Can Be Done About It.”
29. Brown, Life, p. 15. See Freud, Civilization, p. 80.
30. Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire, p. 174. A “line of self-alienation must be drawn,
above which is ‘normal capitalist restlessness’ and below which is neurosis and frank psy-
chosis. The mental-health professionals have been stationed to patrol this boundary no less
than their brethren police exist to hold the line against objective criminality” (p. 122).
31. Hence, the repression of the revolt of nature is enforced by our fear of social
censure, of being unloved, of facing the void. Our existential insecurity, in other words,
keeps us from questioning our own violation.
32. See Phyllis Bronstein, “Promoting Healthy Emotional Development in Chil-
dren.” As Bronstein notes, some psychologists even support this rule, claiming that mature
people have learned to inhibit their strong emotions. My next sentence draws from the
work of N. Henley, cited by Bronstein.
33. It is not uncommon even for psychotherapists to be afraid of emotional
catharsis. In this case, they are unable to discern those instances when a catharsis is in
fact a movement toward healing (see “What’s Wrong”). In The Stormy Search for the Self,
Christina and Stan Grof discuss how a great deal of spiritual experience is also diagnosed as
“mental illness.”
34. Rogers, Solving, p. 86.
35. As Peter Breggin observes: “After passionate people get psychiatrically labeled,
they become especially vulnerable to defeat and disaster. Psychiatrists commonly force
treatment on them, then claim that they must be ‘mentally ill,’ because they resent and
resist being diagnosed and treated” (Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 33–34).
36. Noble, Progress, p. 21.
37. Joel Kovel does not mince his words on this point: “a colossal burden of neu-
rotic misery in the population . . . continually and palpably betrays the capitalist ideology,
which maintains that commodity civilization promotes human happiness” (“Therapy in
Late Capitalism,” in The Radical Spirit, p. 136).
38. Jules Henry, quoted in David Levin, “Clinical Stories: A Modern Self in the
Fury of Being,” p. 480.
39. See Rogers, Solving, p. 20.
40. This has much in common, for example, with earlier leftist strategies for raising
class consciousness. In his Marxist days, for instance, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich
argued that to awaken this consciousness “we must begin with the assumption that no
social order that requires the frustration of instinct can lead to human happiness. There-
fore, a fundamental dissatisfaction will always be present, at least in latent form. Radical

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politics must kindle this latent dissatisfaction into revolutionary class consciousness. . . .
Only people fully in touch with their own needs and interests can be counted on to resist
both capitalist exploitation and communist domination” (the words are Roger Gottlieb’s,
in Marxism, pp. 126–127). Whether the kind of strategy I and others propose has an
advantages over Reich’s, or any greater likelihood of success, remains to be seen.
41. Jameson, “Postmodernism,” p. 77.
42. Jameson writes: “distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular)
has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. . . . the prodigious
new expansion of multilateral capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-
capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archi-
median footholds for critical effectivity. . . . we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that
not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla war-
fare, but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash, are all somehow
secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be
considered a part, since they can achieve no distance form it” (“Postmodernism,” p. 87).
On the difficulties of being caught, as a member of our society, within the very meanings
we oppose, see also Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” p. 72.
43. Robert Bourassa, quoted in Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse, p. 224.
44. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 50.
45. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 14.
46. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, p. 165. “Eventually, all plants might’
become unnecessary,’ replaced by artificial leaves that would ‘waste’ none of the sunlight
they receive on luxuries such as roots but instead use ‘all the energy they trap to make things
for us to use.’.”
47. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, p. 38.
48. Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse, pp. 149, 170. Emphasis mine.
49. Hence, “nature takes orders from man and works under his authority” (quoted
in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 171).
50. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 100.
51. See George Steiner, Heidegger, p. 132.
52. Martin Heidegger, quoted in Bruce Foltz, “On Heidegger and the Interpreta-
tion of the Ecological Crisis,” p. 334.
53. Noble, Progress, p. 4.
54. The commodity is what the device provides, what function it serves, what it is
there for, or what gets consumed. Thus television sets provide news and entertainment, cars
provide transportation, and so on.
55. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, p. 192.
56. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, p. 137.
57. This is an example used by Borgmann, but which I am presenting in my
own way.

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58. Borgmann, Technology, p. 77.

59. Borgmann, Technology, p. 77.
60. Borgmann does make room in his scheme for issues of social justice, saying that
the pattern of technology acts to maintain inequalities. He does not, however, give them
much detailed treatment. For myself, I would like to have included more class, gender, and
race analysis in this chapter, but did not feel adequate to the task. As I mentioned in chapter
one, the working out of a more thorough critical perspective remains a future project for
me.
61. I believe that Borgmann’s linking of a philosophy of technology to the com-
modification of reality is a very important move, as it opens the door for the kind of
economic thinking largely absent in Heidegger, and to a great extent missing even in Borg-
mann himself. Although my exercise here is a limited one, I hope in what follows to dem-
onstrate some of the potential the device paradigm offers in this respect.
62. Kovel “Therapy,” in The Radical, p. 135.
63. Medard Boss, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, p. 209. Borg-
mann adds: “When commodities have reached the final stage of reduction and refine-
ment, leisure outwardly will no longer be distinguished from sleep or unconsciousness”
(Technology, p. 131). On this general point, see also Sigmund Kvaløy, “Ecophilosophy and
Ecopolitics: Thinking and Acting in Response to the Threats of Ecocatastrophe.”
64. Noble mentions a deskilled machinist who summarizes his job as follows: “I
sweep up robot doo-doo.”
65. A point made well by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America. See also
Strong, Crazy, p. 166.
66. See Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, p. 125; and Richard Nelson,
Interview, “Life-Ways of the Hunter,” p. 82.
67. Robert Romanyshyn, “The Human Body as Historical Matter and Cultural
Symptom,” p. 174.
68. William Leiss suggests that this aspect gives a “more precise image” of com-
modity fetishism as it appears in an advanced capitalist setting (The Limits, p. 87). This
entire paragraph draws heavily on Leiss’s work.
69. Leiss, The Limits, p. 22. See, also, Jerry Mander’s discussion of the EPCOT
Center at Disneyworld, where the “‘natural environment’ has been perfected and packaged
to eliminate any of nature’s troubling variables” (In the Absence of the Sacred, p. 155).
70. Leiss, “The Imperialism.” p. 33.
71. Leiss, The Limits, p. 18.
72. Leiss, “The Imperialism.” p. 33. For a discussion of some South American
indigenous societies in which, in the absence of a high-intensity market setting, needs
are met more simply, simultaneously, or densely, see Liedloff, The Continuum, especially
chapter one.
73. Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self, p. 30.
74. Borgmann, Technology, p. 52.

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75. I don’t know of anybody who argues for an outright elimination of market
exchanges.
76. Borgmann, Technology, p. 51. See, also, Strong, Crazy, p. 94.
77. Alan Durning, “Are We Happy Yet?,” p. 69.
78. Kovel, The Age, p. 82. Kovel also notes how in a capitalist society the “child
loses her/his functionality in the household and becomes a pure consumer. . . . With this
the child-mind in everyone becomes celebrated, as indeed it should be by the managers of
society, who are clever enough to sense in the infantile mental organization a possible way
out of the crisis instigated by the glut of commodities” (pp. 121–122).
79. Kovel, The Age, pp. 58–59.
80. Leiss, “The Imperialism.” p. 31.
81. Leiss, “The Imperialism.” p. 32.
82. As David Loy remarks, our economic system “feeds on and is fed by a sense of
lack” (“Trying to Become Real: A Buddhist Critique of Some Secular Heresies,” p. 419.
Kovel also observes: “For the purposes of advanced capital . . . it is increasingly imperative
that the commodity lead not to satiety but to restless reconsumption” (The Age, p. 82).
83. Joel Kovel, “On the Ontology of Capital,” from The Enemy of Nature, p. 4 of
my version. As Kovel adds: “Ego and capital grow together.”
84. Loy, “Trying,” p. 408. This is, of course, something the media themselves under-
stand very well. The quest for media fame was personified by the actor Nicole Kidman in
the movie To Die For.
85. This is certainly not to rule out the possibility of love, per se. It is rather to
identify a form of obsessive and fantasy-based love, originating in eleventh-century Europe,
which is “effectively a religious experience, in which the deity worshipped is the beloved.
Hence, to lose one’s love is to lose one’s life; is to lose the entire world” (Morris Berman,
Coming to Our Senses, p. 207).
86. Loy, “Trying,” p. 420.
87. Diamond, In Search, p. 40.
88. Loy, “Trying,” p. 421.
89. This view is exhaustively presented in Jules Henry’s classic Culture Against Man.
90. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 147.
Sigmund Kvaløy similarly speaks of the “Disney Land effect,” in reference to cultural diver-
sions that bear not at all on the central or pressing issues of life (“Ecophilosophy and Eco-
politics: Thinking and Acting in Response to the Threats of Ecocatastrophe,” p. 19).
91. Kovel, The Age, p. 184.
92. Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic, p. 167.
93. Borgmann, Technology, pp. 52, 130.
94. Borgmann, Technology, p. 55.
95. Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, p. 113. Liedloff traces our deprivation
most forcefully to a relative poverty of physically close, “in-arms” contact in infancy.
96. Borgmann, Technology, p. 142.

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97. Using 1990 data, Jerry Mander says that “the main activity of life for Ameri-
cans, aside from work or sleep, has become watching television” (In the Absence, p. 76). A
research project conducted in 1985 found that: “Eighty percent of leisure is passive con-
sumption; being passive, it is essentially solitary. Television comprises sixty percent of it”
(Borgmann, Crossing, p. 44). I don’t know how accurate these numbers are for today, but
the statistics don’t ultimately matter for the points I am making. See, also Mander’s Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
98. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
p. 79. Indeed, despite the great amount of time spent in front of the television, it appar-
ently brings little satisfaction to its viewers. In reference to a study performed on leisure,
Borgmann notes: “It appears that people enjoy least what they indulge in most. Generally
they find activities without personal interaction unsatisfying. And television in particular
is thought to have little intrinsic benefit. . . . Commodious privacy [such as TV watching]
remains both strong and unloved” (Crossing, p. 45). See, also, David Strong’s discussion in
Crazy, pp. 87–91.
99. Berry, The Unsettling, p. 130.
100. Thus does the “protective capsule . . . becomes a household of the living dead”
(Berry, The Unsettling, p. 119).
101. Martin Lewis, quoted in Raymond Rogers, Nature and the Crisis of Modernity,
p. 145, 151, 156. Emphasis in first quote mine.
102. Richard Nelson writes, in this respect, that the main source of satisfaction
among Koyukon Indians lies in their “providing a livelihood from nature.” The pleasure
of living close to wild nature is, in fact, “probably the most pervasive theme in their exist-
ence.” A decoupled human being, then, would not even have the possibility of saying, as
did old Chief Henry: “I have had a good life. I have camped many times beneath spruce
trees, roasting grouse over my campfire. So there is no reason to pray that I might live on
much longer” (Make Prayers to the Raven, p. 46).
103. Paul Shepard, “On Animal Friends,” p. 294.
104. An argument made by John Livingston in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation
(pp. 92–94); and Sigmund Kavaløy, in “Ecophilosophy and Ecopolitics: Thinking and
Acting in Response to the Threats of Ecocatastrophe.”
105. On this Mary Midgley writes: “The impression of desertion or abandonment
which Existentialists have is due, I am sure, not to the removal of God, but to [the] con-
temptuous dismissal of almost the whole biosphere—plants, animals, and children. Life
shrinks to a few urban rooms; no wonder it becomes absurd” (Beast and Man, p. 18).
106. E. O. Wilson, Biophilia, p. 118.
107. As discussed in Gary Paul Nabhan and Sara St. Antoine, “The Loss of Floral
and Faunal Story: The Extinction of Experience.” “Any conditions which reduce such inti-
mate experience, Pyle claims, creates a cycle of disaffection, apathy, and irresponsibility
toward natural habitats” (p. 239).
108. Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals, p. 251–252. Following Shepard, I suggest that
it is cause for grave concern when a survey reports that 50 percent of “high school students

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 Notes 313

polled said that they would prefer to be taught by a machine, and gave as their reason that
they wished to be left alone” (cited in Morris Berman, “The Cybernetic Dream of the
Twenty-First Century,” p. 35). Human social relations, it seems, are becoming too much of
a burden. It doesn’t help either when the author of a book called How to Teach Your Child
to Be Gifted, Charles Ling, claims that “Computers are smarter than humans and they are
the best tutors at home. . . . If kids can start working on them, they can soon form those
thinking patterns like a computer” (quoted in Nicholas Keung, “Can you actually make
your child smarter?,” p. BE3).
109. Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, p. 107.
110. William Irwin Thompson. Interview, “Mind Jazz,” p. 14.
111. Shepard, Nature, p. 129.
112. John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 94.
113. This is the phrase used by Jason Lanier, the very person who coined the term
“virtual reality” (quoted in Noble, The Religion, p. 158).
114. See the discussion in Mander, In the Absence, pp. 150–152.
115. Borgmann, “Artificial,” pp. 195–197.
116. Witness a remark made by Thompson: “I don’t feel threatened by technology
because I know being a city kid, most of my mystical experiences in my life have come
from things like watching Fantasia, when I was five, listening to Tchaikovsky on the radio
when I was seven” (“Mind,” p. 13). If all that matters is having mystical experiences for
ourselves (by which it is not clear what Thompson means), then what of our relationships
and responsibilities to others, including wild, nonhuman others?
117. Frederick Perls et al., Gestalt Therapy, p. 231. Emphasis mine.
118. Plural realism, recall, opposes any wholesale relativizing of reality. If I were to
adopt a purely relativistic position, the argument I am making here would fall apart.
119. It was in this vein that Harold Searles wrote that a “fruitful effect of the mature
human being’s sense of relatedness with his nonhuman environment . . . is the enhance-
ment, the sharpening, the deepening, the strengthening, of the individual’s experiencing his
own existence, and the existence of the world around him, as being real’ (The Nonhuman
Environment, p. 135.) Stanley Diamond also writes that the primitive’s direct “engage-
ment with nature and natural physiological functions” engenders a “sense of reality [that]
is heightened to the point where it sometimes seems to ‘Blaze’” (In Search of the Primitive,
p. 170). The weakest reality or poorest contact, conversely, is what we have in mind when
we speak of being in a derealized condition, wherein we feel cut off from a world whose
immediate presence is only vaguely felt. I think of the example of a person who is driving
at high speed toward a wall, but who experiences the situation flatly or unemotionally. She
or he sees the oncoming wall, but does not sense the immediacy of the danger.
120. Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future, p. 371.
121. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” p. 73.
122. Borgmann, Technology, p. 208.
123. See “Part Three, The Reform of Technology,” in Borgmann, Technology; as well
as the growing literature on radical/alternative technology.

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124. Noble, Progress, pp. 72, 112. This is a theme given much concrete detail by
Noble.
125. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 54.
126. A point repeatedly made by Shepard.
127. Rodman, “The Liberation,” p. 113.
128. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, p. 6. For the sake of readability I have
deleted Campbell’s alphabetized “enumeration” of these four cosmic realms, while leaving
out the usual ellipses.
129. Loy, “Trying,” p. 419. Economic/technological progress is not, however, the
only myth we could name. I discuss below, for example, a myth that Richard Slotkin has
called “regeneration through violence.”
130. Robert Bringhurst, “Myths Create a World of Meaning,” p. C1.
131. According to Heidegger, it is only the great, epoch-making thinkers and poets
who are capable of revealing those new cultural understandings that change the course of
history. Gendlin has criticized this view by saying that Heidegger did not understand how
every person’s experiencing implicitly exceeds or speaks back to her or his culture. Heidegger
was thus unable to “further examine the role of individual humans in the coming of new
history” (“Thinking Beyond Patterns,” p. 32). As I discuss below, then, this is a process in
which I believe that all people can be actively engaged. On the possibility of singing new
myths, see the Epilogue to Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers.
132. William Irwin Thompson, quoted in Coates, “Future,” p. 75.
133. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia, p. 64. Jacoby uses his own flood image: “Today
the process of reification is a storm tide; and the human subject is locked in the basement.
The frantic search for authenticity, experience, emotions, is the pounding on the ceiling as
the water rises” (p. 18).
134. Robyn Eckersley, “The Failed Promise of Critical theory,” p. 71. Today, Noble
likewise laments the fortunes of “an ever-weaker labour movement” (Progress, p. 47).
135. James Masterson, The Search for the Real Self, p. vii.
136. Although “focal practice” is Borgmann’s term, I should note that I am not fol-
lowing him in all respects; I am concentrating on the “focusing” effect of such practice.
137. Gary Snyder, “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” in Earth Household, p. 91.
138. Borgmann, Technology, p. 245.
139. I am taking cues here from Borgmann, Technology, p. 214.
140. Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, p. 173.
141. Richard Nelson. “Exploring the Near at Hand,” p. 41.
142. I have moved out of Toronto since writing these words, but decided to leave
them in the present tense.
143. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 92. Thus any genuine wildlife conservation
practice will protect natural entities not just in their biodiversity (or whatever), but in their
being.
144. Personal communication. The quote in the previous sentence is from David
Abram, “To Speak as a (Human) Animal: A Reply to Ted Toadvine.”

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145. Ursula LeGuin, Buffalo Gals; And Other Animal Presences, p. 12. “Coming into
Animal Presence” is a poem by Denise Levertov (p. 13).
146. See, for example, Cisco Lassiter, “Relocation and Illness: The Plight of the
Navajo.”
147. This is the title of a recent book by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown,
which updates Macy s earlier work, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. I chose
it for the heading here because it fits my own theme, as well as to acknowledge the kind of
work that Macy and others are doing.
148. Dorothy Dinnerstein, “Survival on Earth: The Meaning of Feminism,” p. 198.
149. Lasch, The Minimal, p. 16.
150. Jacoby, Social, p. 101.
151. Jacoby, Social, p. 116. “Society ineluctably coerces everyone to attend to the
remaining fragments of self and subjectivity” (p. 15).
152. Issac Prilleltensky, The Morals and Politics of Psychology, p. 82.
153. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, p. 29.
154. Lasch, The Culture, p. 64.
155. Another factor here is that within the pattern of technology we become less and
less engaged in general. Political engagement dwindles, in particular, as the governmental
and corporate machinery takes over. See Borgmann, Technology, pp. 107–109.
156. This point has been made by people ranging from one of the earliest revision-
ists of Marx’s ideas, Rosa Luxemburg; through the critical theorists; and on to one of my
own favorite authors, Joel Kovel (see the last chapter of The Age of Desire). The same idea
underlies critical education, all sorts of consciousness-raising, and so on. The Buddhist Ken
Jones puts the matter very strongly: “Buddhism implies that unless there is some significant
personal and individual change in the way we feel and think about ourselves and about
others we shall try to go on evolving societies which express and reinforce the futile struggle
of each of us to escape from our root fear into varieties of acquisitiveness and aggressive
belongingness identity” (The Social Face of Buddhism, p. 123).
157. I thus disagree with Murray Bookchin when he remarks that “nearly all ecolog-
ical problems are social problems” (Remaking Society, p. 24). For I believe he is committing
the reductive fallacy of “sociologism,” in which psyche is not abstracted from society, but
society from psyche.
158. Roger Gottlieb, Marxism, p. 78. “The task of the genuine revolutionary is there-
fore to help generate capacities for self-organization and self-expression on the part of the
mass of people in society, to foster many independent self-acting, self-conscious centers of
power and awareness” (103). The discussion which follows also draws on Gottlieb.
159. Paul Goodman, Nature Heals, p. xxii. By a “natural society” I believe Goodman
meant one that attends to human nature and experience. Goodman considered himself
a “sociotherapist,” that is, he applied the principles of Gestalt therapy on a social level so
as “to remedy institutions that hinder experience from occurring.” Much of Goodman’s
work in education, for example, argued against curricula that did not meet student ‘“need,
desire, curiosity, or [imagination].’ All else was parroting and conditioning, either promptly

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forgotten after the examination, or worse, introjected as part of self-control and conforming
to authority.” Insofar as students were interested and excited and growing, the curriculum
was a good one. Thus Goodman did not believe in manifestos or received truths, but in the
ability of people to create their own solutions through experimenting with their social situ-
ations and following their own experience as to what felt most satisfying or life-enhancing.
He felt, moreover, that there must be some artistry to solving social problems, for our social
life is grounded in the same human nature as is all art. Quotations are from Paul Stoehr, in
his “Paul Goodman and the Political Dimensions of Gestalt Therapy.”
160. I might have call this the “growth threshold,” but given the hurt state of our
society I think “healing threshold” is more appropriate. All healing, moreover, is itself a
process of growth.
161. Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism, p. 200.
162. Eugene Gendlin, Experiential Psychotherapy, p. 308. Emphasis removed.
163. I have not taken the space here to elaborate Gendlin’s entire political position,
which is essentially based on introducing focusing skills widely enough to create a society
of people capable of making the kinds of microchanges in their immediate contexts that
will add up to structural change on the larger scale. I refer the reader to Focusing, “The Poli-
tics of Giving Therapy Away,” “A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism,”
“Process Ethics and the Political Question,” and “Experiential Psychotherapy.” Gendlin
is aware that “individual development does not usually change the social structure.” He
therefore suggests that “We need a whole new branch of social science to study the more
rare conditions under which social change moves from the articulation of experience to
structural change” (“How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can,”
p. 35).
164. Joanna Macy in the preface to Katrina Shields, In the Tiger’s Mouth, p. xi. James
Hillman likewise speaks of “a psychological activism” that works from aesthetic responses.
“The motivation must come from below the superego, from the id of desire” (“Aesthetics
and Politics,” pp. 38, 76).
165. See Thomas Scheff, “Reevaluation Counseling: Social Implications”; Virginia
Coover et al., Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, part four; Cherie Brown and George
Mazza, “Anti-Racism, Healing, and Community Activism;” and Janet Foner, “Surviving
the ‘Mental Health’ System with Co-Counseling.”
166. Philip Lichtenberg, “Shame and the Making of a Social System,” p. 284. In The
Mermaid and the Menotaur, Dorothy Dinnerstein speaks of the “rigid forms of symbiosis,
of fixed psychological complementarity, which have so far dominated the relationships
between men and women.” Men and women are both complicit, in other words, in main-
taining mutually oppressive sexual arrangements.
167. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,’ pp. 126–127.
168. Anne Bell, “Critical Environmental Education/Ecological Critical Education,” p. 5.
169. Constance Russell et al., “Navigating the Waters of Canadian Environmental
Education,” p. 6.
170. Mike Weilbacher, cited in Bell, “Critical,” p. 6.

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171. Russell et al., “Navigating,” p. 6.

172. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 68.
173. Stephen Foster and Meredith Little, Wilderness Vision Questing and the Four
Shields of Human Nature, p. 18.
174. In his book Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell writes: “A mythological canon
is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by which the energies of aspiration are
evoked and gathered toward a focus. . . . For those in whom a local mythology still works,
there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe.
For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work—or, if working, produce
deviant effects—there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social
nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the [intellect] will take to be for
‘meaning’” (p. 5). Creating new mythologies from one’s own experience, versus making sense
of one’s experience through existing mythologies, is the work of “creative mythologizing.”
175. In Buddhist thought, “pain” refers to unpleasant bodily sensations associated
with gross physical and mental states, whereas “suffering” is a broader term which refers
to our general insecurity or unease in an impermanent, insubstantial world, and which is
better rendered as “unsatisfactoriness.” In this section, however, the distinction between the
two terms is not so important, so I use them synonymously. The word suffer itself derives
from suf, as in “sub-,” and fer, as in “bear”: our suffering is what we “bear under.” The Latin
and Greek origins of the word pain both mean “penalty.”
176. Freud, Civilization, p. 22.
177. Agamemnon, 1. 177, quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Psychoanalysis and Contempo-
rary Culture,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 159.
178. Coates, “Future,” p. 75. Coates is commenting on the work of William Irwin
Thompson.
179. Venerable Myokyo-ni, a Western teacher of Zen Buddhism, quoted in Ken
Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism, p. 366.
180. Donald Goodwin, quoted in Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, p. 219.
181. Slotkin, “Dreams.”
182. Luc Sante, quoted in Loy, “Avoiding,” p. 152.
183. Freud was committed to an irremediably dualistic universe in which opposing forces
battle it out. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he proposed the existence of a destructive death
instinct (Thanatos), which is the first and most conservative instinct of all, namely, to return to
the inanimate and pain-free state that preceded the very emergence of life on earth. Thus Life
(Eros) is always having to struggle against the basic pull toward Death. In brief, I suggest that the
most basic “instinct” is not simply toward death, but toward growth and the completion of life,
at the natural end of which is death. Aggression, as I discussed in chapter three, is not a separate
instinct from that of life, but is itself an intrinsic aspect of it. As I am suggesting here, we turn
our aggression against our own living, we self-destruct, only when the pain of life itself becomes
unbearable. To be clear: all creative and appetitive living does of course involve destruction,
in the sense of destructuring our food by chewing on it, taking apart and selectively assimi-
lating another person’s ideas, or transforming the world in general. This is to be distinguished,

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however, from annihilation, which is “is a defensive response to pain, bodily invasion or danger.”
Annihilation is a “cold” response because it does not satisfy a “hot” appetite, but simply aims to
eliminate pain and danger (Perls et al., Gestalt, p. 341). Freud put forward his “fateful question”
in the last paragraph of Civilization and Its Discontents. See, also, Paul Goodman’s “Critique of
Freud’s Thanatos,” in Perls et al., Gestalt, pp. 349–352.
184. James Kepner, Healing Tasks, p. 101.
185. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 104.
186. See, also, Joanna Macy, “Buddhist Resources for Moving Through Nuclear
Death” and World as Lover, World as Self.
187. Jones, The Social, p. 123.
188. Ram Dass, “Compassion: The Delicate Balance,” p. 235.
189. Buddhist practice teaches one how to identify less with one’s painful Ego
dramas, and to concentrate instead on being of service, which is much more satisfying.
It also teaches that all feelings pass. Even the biggest experiences of grief or rage just flow
right through us if we let them be—a crucial ability to possess in a time such as ours, with
its great losses and frustrations. Buddhism teaches, finally, how to stay equanimous in the
face of all experience, how to maintain that spontaneous, caring, selfless, and optimally
distanced attitude that is called for by nature (dharma).
190. Michael Higgins, speaking on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio
programme “This Morning,” August 8, 1999. Higgins thus feels that Sartre’s “hell is other
people” is an entirely wrong sentiment.
191. Joel Kovel, “Schizophrenic Being and Technocratic Society,” p. 346. I have
reversed the sequence of the text around the ellipses.
192. Kovel, “On the Ontology,” p. 5. Stated still otherwise, the “movement of
capitalist society is toward dedifferentiation,” which is marked by, among other things,
“an increasing number of desociated characters of one kind or another” (Kovel, The Age,
pp. 248–249. Second emphasis mine).
193. See, for example, Ken Norwood and Kathleen Smith, Rebuilding Community in
America.
194. According to J. H. van den Berg, medical records indicate that there “has
been an increased sensitivity to pain since the beginning of the nineteenth century,” and
attributes this to our increasing loss of contact with others (Divided Existence and Complex
Society, pp. 215–228).
195. James Hillman, “The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” p. 326. Hillman
himself gives credit for this insight to Paul Kugler.
196. Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, Sacred Paw, p. xii.

Chapter 7

1. Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, and Allen Kanner, eds., Ecopsychology.

2. In the Afterword to the second edition of his The Voice of the Earth, Theodore
Roszak acknowledged that ecopsychology had not developed as he had hoped. His vision

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 Notes 319

of ecopsychology as a dialogue between mainstream psychologists and environmentalists

had not materialized, he said, because these two parties were generally not interested in one
another. In this chapter I similarly undertake a review of how ecopsychology has developed
but I use a different vision of ecopsychology and draw different conclusions.
3. Most obviously and recently in “What Is Ecopsychology? A Radical View,” but
see also “Ecopsychology as Radical Praxis” and “To Praise Again: Phenomenology and the
Project of Ecopsychology.”
4. See Andy Fisher, “Ecopsychology as Radical Praxis.” As David Harvey puts it
simply: “All critical examinations of the relation to nature [such as ecopsychology—AF]
are simultaneously critical examinations of society” (“The Nature of Environment: The
Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” p.39).
5. James O’Connor, Natural Causes, p. 197.
6. I am thinking here particularly of Neil Evernden’s “The Environmentalists’
Dilemma.” This paradox is also expressed in the impasse experienced by the critical theo-
rists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, when they could not see a way to connect
their radical vision of a liberated society with an actual historical praxis. They engaged
instead in a “negative dialectics” focused on simply keeping the vision alive even if it
could not be realized in their times. See Robyn Eckersley, “The Failed promise of Critical
Theory.”
7. The view that progressive social changes occur successfully only when they are
continuous with or develop from out of the reality of current historical conditions is widely
shared, being held by both the conservative Edmund Burke and the radical Karl Marx. On
this principle, see See Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism (p. 26), Bertell Ollman,
The Dance of the Dialectic (p. 20), and Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything.
8. Ecological and psychological illiteracy can thus be seen as two aspects of nature
illiteracy, this being the general issue that ecopsychology addresses.
9. I have in mind here the distinction Marx made between the method he used for
analyzing capitalism and the method he then used to present his findings. Ecopsychology
scholars may need to engage technical radical literature in order to gain adequate analyses
but then tailor their method of presentation to suit the audience of the day.
10. Tim Kasser and Allen Kanner, “Where Is the Psychology of Consumer Cul-
ture?” “To the extent that young psychologists are discouraged, censored, and even pun-
ished when they explore controversial issues related to capitalism and consumption, a
disservice is done both to the field and to the people whose lives psychology is meant to
improve” (p. 5).
11. By choosing these four developments I do not mean to suggest that there have
been none others of note. These are just the ones that have occupied my own attention.
12. Thomas Joseph Doherty, “Editorial: A Peer Reviewed Journal for
Ecopsychology.”
13. There are, furthermore, a number of schools of psychology that use the idea of
ecology. These include various versions of “ecological psychology,” especially those asso-
ciated with Robert Barker and Herbert Wright, James Gibson, and numerous authors

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 320 Notes

published in the journal Ecological Psychology. These “ecological” approaches are not, how-
ever, defined especially by an interest in the broad psychology of the human-nature rela-
tionships or in addressing the environmental/ecological crisis. They frequently ignore the
natural world altogether. The psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, for example, developed
an “ecological systems theory” which places child development in a series of nested systems
which extend out to the child’s sociocultural context but in which a natural system is not
clearly identified. This is not to say that any of these “ecological” approaches are irrelevant
for ecopsychology. The psychologist Louise Chawla, for example, drew on Gibson’s eco-
logical psychology in her article on how children learn to love the natural world (“Learning
to Love the Natural World Enough to Protect It”). But for the purposes of this chapter I am
focusing on the immediate exercise of differentiating ecopsychology from environmental
and conservation psychology.
14. See, for example, the “Promoting Environmentalism” special issue of Journal of
Social Issues and Susan M. Koger and Deborah Du Nann Winter’s The Psychology of Envi-
ronmental Problems, 3rd ed. Research articles in this vein have titles such as “Moderating
Effects of Social Value Orientation on Determinants of Proenvironmental Behavior Inten-
tion” (Tommy Gärling et al.) or “The Application of Persuasion Theory to the Develop-
ment of Effective Proenvironmental Public Service Announcements” (Renee Bator and
Robert Cialdini).
15. Robert B. Bechtel and Arza Churchman, eds., Handbook of Environmental Psy-
chology. The chapter authors are Robert Sommer, Daniel Stokols and Maria Montero, and
Robert B. Bechtel, respectively. Notably, this section does not have a chapter entitled “On
to an Ecological Society!” For another introductory text, see Robert Gifford’s Environ-
mental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 4th ed.
16. Carol D. Saunders, “The Emerging Field of Conservation Psychology,” p. 138.
17. Susan Clayton and Gene Myers, Conservation Psychology, p. 11.
18. Joseph P. Reser, “Wither Environmental Psychology? The Transpersonal Ecops-
ychology Crossroads,” p. 252.
19. Joseph Reser, “Thinking Through ‘Conservation Psychology,’” pp. 170–171.
20. Joseph Reser, “Joseph Reser: The Ecopsychology Interview,” p. 61.
21. In a related vein, the environmental psychologist Robert Gifford notes that the
emerging discipline of sustainability science has made little room for psychology because
the latter is not considered a hard enough science. Indeed, during a discussion about a large
interdisciplinary grant proposal related to climate change he observed a leading natural sci-
entist state that it “should not include any input from ‘fluff,’ by which he apparently meant
the social sciences” (Robert Gifford, “Psychology’s Essential Role in Alleviating the Impacts
of Climate Change,” p. 273). If scientific psychology is considered fluff, then we can only
assume that ecopsychology would be regarded as “ultra–fluff.”
22. Reser, “Joseph Reser,” pp. 61–62.
23. Koger and Winter believe that “ecopsychology will continue to flourish”
because: “it speaks to deeply felt experiences that people have in relationship to the natural
word;” it “offers therapeutic insights into wilderness experiences;” it “makes an important

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 Notes 321

contribution to clinical psychology by expanding the practice of psychotherapy to places

outside offices and hospitals into gardens and wilderness settings, and ecotherapy is gar-
nering increased professional attention;” and its claims are gradually being endorsed by
mainstream psychologists, as they are increasingly supported by evidence regarding the
therapeutic effects of “contact with nature” (Susan Koger and Deborah Winter, The Psy-
chology of Environmental Problems, 3rd ed., pp. 308–309).
24. Koger and Winter, The Psychology, p. 305. In other words, this “division
between ecopsychologists and other psychologists working on environmental problems is
another version of the scientist-practitioner split that often fuels debates in psychology.”
Other quotations in this paragraph are from p. 306.
25. See, for example, p. 45.
26. See Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.
27. “[A]uthors are always alive and potent in any intellectual work, no matter how
stringent their attempt to be objective. Knowledge is always shaped by values, assumptions,
cognitive styles, and the peculiar and arbitrary conjunction of sociological factors over
which one has no control but from which a sense of meaning is derived” (The Psychology of
Environmental Problems, p. xix).
28. In her phenomenological study of adult memories of childhood nature expe-
riences, for example, Louise Chawla found that conventional empiricist conceptualiza-
tions of memory—in mechanistic, placeless, and sensationalist terms—are inadequate to
account for the personal significance of childhood memories and places. She therefore
adopted a method that uses poetry, both to hear how memory is given in poetry and how
memory may be more truthfully understood. See her In the First Country of Places.
29. For a depth psychological perspective on this topic, see Robert Romanyshyn,
The Wounded Researcher.
30. Thomas Teo, “Philosophical Concerns in Critical Psychology,” p. 45.
31. Lewis Mumford referred to the “disqualified universe” as the objective world
depicted by science that has been stripped of all qualities (see Ken Wilber’s discussion in
A Brief History of Everything, p. 194.) As Neil Evernden suggested in The Natural Alien,
disqualifying the universe destroys its meaning, which then makes its material destruc-
tion inevitable. Noteworthy here, as well, is Almut Beringer’s commentary on Carol Saun-
ders’s introduction to conservation psychology (see above). Beringer questions Saunders’s
“implicit bias toward quantitative paradigms and methods” and suggests that she unfairly
overlooks ecopsychology (“A Conservation Psychology with Heart”).
32. As discussed in this book, I believe that for ecopsychology to get a handle on
its subject matter its discourse must be hermeneutic-rhetorical and critical. In saying this,
though, I am simply including ecopsychology among numerous other fields that likewise
reject a purely natural scientific model, both within psychology and without. In his The
Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, for example, Richard Bernstein argues that “An
adequate social and political theory must be empirical, interpretative, and critical” (p. 235).
Given the hermeneutical and critical deficits within psychology, as well as the radical
reinterpretations of the human-nature relationship that define ecopsychology, I stress the

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 322 Notes

importance of foregrounding the interpretive and critical elements, but I am happy to use
empirical findings when appropriate, especially if they are hermeneutically-sensitized (see
my “What Is Ecopsychology? A Radical View”).
33. In fairness to Koger and Winter, their book does risk going outside the lines of
typical mainstream psychology, especially their second chapter on “The Nature of Western
Thought” (which, interestingly, was cut from the second edition of their book but returned
to the third because of reader protest). In insisting on the inclusion of ecopsychology in
their survey of approaches to “environmental problems,” they are in a weak sense acknowl-
edging the challenge that ecopsychology poses to psychology. In the end, I would place
their book in a gray zone between a pure mainstream approach and an ecologically radical
one. Despite my concerns, there is no doubt the book makes a significant contribution to
bringing ecopsychology to mainstream attention.
34. Robert Greenway, “Robert Greenway: The Ecopsychology Interview,” p. 51.
Greenway advocates the inclusion of more “real” ecology in ecopsychology, though he also
qualified this: “as long as ecology mean[s] almost a Buddhist kind of systems study, which
for some ecologists it does.” While I do believe there is an important place for scientific
ecology in ecopsychology, my own preferred meaning for ecology is the radical ecology
movement (which incorporates scientific ecology in various ways), this sense of the term
being true in my mind to ecopsychology’s origins.
35. On the idea of “crossing,” see Eugene Gendlin, “Crossing and Dipping.”
36. See, for example, Paul Sears’s 1964 article “Ecology—A Subversive Subject” and
Paul Shepard’s 1969 piece “Ecology and Man—A Viewpoint.” I give this topic lengthier
treatment in my “What Is Ecopsychology? A Radical View.”
37. John Clark, “Introduction” to “Political Ecology,” p. 343.
38. “. . .as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles” (Theodore
Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, p.19).
39. Romanyshyn is not the first to suggest the significance of dream experience
for scholarly inquiry. In ecopsycholgoical circles, see, for example, Craig Chalquist, Ter-
rapsychology, in which he describes imaginal methods for reengaging the soul of place. For
a philosophical perspective, see Jan Zwicky, “Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpreta-
tion,” in which she argues that an inclusion of the logos of dreaming into philosophy, as
against the current cultural marginalization of dream process, would lead philosophy to an
expanded conception of itself as a discipline and to greater integrity of thought.
40. Goethean science, for instance, may also be worth pursuing by ecopsychology.
Roughly two hundred years ago, Goethe introduced a way of science that involves not
the use of instruments but prolonged emphatic encounter with natural phenomena. This
“delicate empiricism,” as he called it, requires extended practice in developing one’s powers
of perception and understanding so that one may see more deeply and clearly into the
world through direct experience (David Seamon, “Goethe, Nature, and Phenomenology”).
Precisely because it overcomes the subject/object duality—the researcher being immersed
in the phenomena of nature and the latter awakening the former’s powers of recognition—
such science requires that the practitioner attain a “post-rational” level of psychological

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 Notes 323

development, that is, one that transcends the modes of reason employed in mainstream sci-
entific consciousness (Esbjörn-Hargens, Sean, and Michael Zimmerman, Integral Ecology,
p. 250). Indeed, according to Frederick Amrine, for Goethe the “ultimate goal of science
should be the transformation of the scientist” (quoted in Ecotherapy News Fall 2011, p. 4).
41. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p. xii.
42. One example of a method of theory-production that does work skillfully with
experience, from “something that you know very thickly from years of experience,” is
Eugene Gendlin’s “Thinking at the Edge” practice. See his “Introduction to ‘Thinking the
Edge.’”
43. See, for example, Mary Watkins’s “From Individualism to the Interdependent
Self ” and her “Creating Restorative Ecotherapeutic Practices.”
44. I am drawing my terms here from Albert Bormann’s Crossing the Postmodern
Divide.
45. On this, see Philip Cushman, “Why the Self is Empty: Toward an Histori-
cally Situated Psychology,” Edward Sampson, “The Debate on Individualism: Indigenous
Psychologies of the Individual and Their Role in Personal and Societal Functioning,” and
David Kidner, Nature and Psyche, pp. 48–51. In environmental psychologist Robert Gif-
ford’s article “Psychology’s Essential Role in Alleviating the impacts of Climate Change,”
he repeatedly states that the individual is both the unit of analysis in psychology and the
target for behavioral change.
46. On this, see, for example, David Kidner’s Nature and Psyche.
47. Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation, p. 13.
Other quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 1, 15, 26, 270, 271, 221.
48. See also Stanley Diamond’s discussion on individualism in In Search of the Prim-
itive, pp. 159–168.
49. Charles Spinosa, Fernado Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds,
p. 168.
50. Adrian Ivakhiv’s book Claiming Sacred Ground is a good example, in this
respect, of scholarship aimed at making sense of New Age earthen spirituality.
51. Nor should we assume that mainstream approaches are themselves free from
irrationality, even if this is less visible under conventional conditions.
52. See, for example, Kidner, Nature, p. 56.
53. I can unfortunately provide here only the barest outline of Habermas’s theory of
the colonization of the lifeworld by the system. The critical psychologist Todd Sloan’s Dam-
aged Life contains a good presentation of this theory, which I am relying on throughout this
discussion.
54. Kidner, Nature, p. 130.
55. Needless to say, it is hard to imagine a human society burdened with these
pathologies entering into balanced relations with the more-than-human.
56. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins speak, in this regard, of the “dual nature
of science. On the one hand it is the generic development of human knowledge over the
millenia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist

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knowledge industry. The result is a peculiarly uneven development, with increasing sophis-
tication at the level of the laboratory and research project, along with a growing irration-
ality of the scientific enterprise as a whole” (Biology Under the Influence, p. 9).
57. Consider, for example, Thomas Fleischner’s comments on the historical devel-
opment of natural history: “What had made natural history vibrant was the integration of
science, art, and philosophy—a unified approach to understanding and expressing Nature’s
ways. Literary natural history lost scientific grounding, while scientific natural history
drifted away from an honest acknowledgment of its subject’s impact on human emotion.
As literary naturalists became more flowery, the scientific natural historians seemingly sped
to distance themselves from anything resembling literary grace, and instead emphasized
more dry and analytical descriptions of natural processes (“Revitalizing Natural History,”
p. 86).
58. Thus, not only would we be able to speak, as does Romanyshyn, of a “poetics
of research, as opposed to an empirics of research” (The Wounded Researcher, p. 342), we
would also be able to make a place for other forms of empiricism, such as the “delicate
empiricism” of Goethean science (see note 40 above). It is noteworthy in this respect that
Goethe’s science was often dismissed in its day as mere “subjective artistic descriptions”
(Seamon, “Goethe,” p. 1). In an integrated lifeworld there would likely also be more room
for phenomenology (of which Goethean science is an instance), which since Husserl has
been characterized as a radical empiricism both because it works strictly from lived experi-
ence and because it refuses to posit a duality between person and world.
59. On this, see David Abram’s comments in “D. Abram Interviewed by Derrick
Jensen.”
60. Harvey, “The Nature,” pp. 37, 34.
61. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift, p. 340.
62. John Bellamy Foster, “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology,” p.76.
63. This is because socialism understands our capitalist society better than any
other tradition and because Marx’s materialist conception of history and his notion of
the “metabolic” relationship between human society and the rest of nature, especially as
these have been taken up by ecological socialists, offer a unique critical perspective on the
society/nature relationship.
64. For more complete treatments, see Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic;
Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, eds., Dialectics for the New Century; and Richard Levins
and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist.
65. William Blake’s “Without Contraries is no progression” expresses this principle.
66. Fredric Jameson, “Persistencies of the Dialectic: Three Sites,” p. 120.
67. See Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism.
68. See, especially, Ollman, Dance.
69. On the dialectical nature of Gendlin’s philosophy, see David Levin, “Phenom-
enology in America.”
70. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical.
71. Joel Kovel, “Dialectic as Praxis,” p. 238. Emphasis added.

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 Notes 325

72. Harvey, “The Nature,” p. 37. Emphasis added.

73. Kovel, “Dialectic,” p. 238.
74. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman distinguish between disciplinarity, multi-
disciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and a postdisciplinarity that transcends all of these
(Integral, p. 47). The term interdisciplinarity suits my dialectical approach to this discus-
sion, though I am not sure it exactly corresponds to Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman’s
sense.
75. In trying to recover and advance an original sense of psychology, Romanyshyn
speaks of a psychology that is “less a formal discipline and more a style or a disposition, a
way of being present in and to the world in a psychological way. . .a qualifier to ways of
living, loving, and working with soul in mind” (The Wounded, p. 25).
76. Robert Greenway’s view is again relevant here: “So I think ‘ecopsychology’; I’d
love to drop the term. I’d love to work on the human-nature relationship without being
bound by the biases of this or that psychology” (“Robert Greenway,” p. 51).
77. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 171.
78. I borrow this term from Henry Giroux, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James,
Sosnoski’s “The Need for Cultural Studies.” These authors cite Paul Piccone’s remarks:
“What modern society produces is an army of alienated, privatized, and uncultured experts
who are knowledgeable only within very narrowly defined areas. This technical intelli-
gentsia, rather than intellectuals in the traditional sense of thinkers concerned with the
totality, is growing by leaps and bounds to run the increasingly complex bureaucratic and
industrial apparatus. Its rationality, however, is only instrumental in character, and thus
suitable mainly to perform partial tasks rather than tackling substantial questions of social
organization and political direction.”
79. Lewontin and Levins, Biology, p. 21.
80. Watkins and Shulman, for example, speak of contextual, interpersonal, interpre-
tive, catalytic, and epistemic and transformative psychopolitical forms of validity (Towards,
pp. 295–298).
81. Thomas Joseph Doherty, speaking in Joseph Reser, “Joseph Reser: The Ecopsy-
chology Interview,” p. 60.
82. Thomas Joseph Doherty, “Editorial: A Peer Reviewed Journal for Ecopsy-
chology,” p. 2.
83. Thomas Doherty in Doherty et al., “Roundtable: Environmentally Focused
Psychologies,” p. 84.
84. Doherty, “Editorial: A Peer Reviewed,” p. 3. Remaining quotations in this para-
graph are from p. 4.
85. See, for example, Peter H. Kahn Jr., and Patricia Hasbach, eds., Ecopsychology:
Science, Totems, and the Technological Species.
86. On the psychological defense of renormalization, see Watkins and Shulman,
Towards, p. 138.
87. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological, p. 430. This criticism also applies to
other well-known environmental figures such as Al Gore and Amory Lovins.

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88. See chapter 16 in Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological. These authors further-
more speak of “the common fallacy that by not consuming but rather saving income one
can somehow protect the environment. Yet in a properly functioning capitalist economy
savings are redirected into investment or new capital formation designed to expand the
scale of the entire economy. And it is such expansion that is the chief enemy of the environ-
ment” (p. 382). See, also, David Uzzell and Nora Räthzel, “Transforming Environmental
Psychology” and O’Connor, Natural, p. 206.
89. It is for this reason, again, that I think ecopsychology must stress ecology as
much as psychology—so that these two broad fields may inform and alter each other and
together metamorphose into a new field and political movement.
90. Doherty, “Editorial: A Peer Reviewed,” p. 3.
91. The Bruntland report, in which the idea of sustainable development was intro-
duced, is quite clear on this point: “In the past we have been concerned about the impact
of economic growth on the environment; we are now forced to concern ourselves with
the impact of ecological stress on our economic prospects” (cited in Neil Evernden, The
Natural Alien, p. 152). A truly ecological approach, by contrast, would embrace the prin-
ciple that: “Ecological arguments are never socially neutral any more than socio-political
arguments are ecologically neutral” (Harvey, “The Nature,” p. 25). See, also, David Uzzell
and Nora Räthzel, “Transforming Environmental Psychology.”
92. Teo, “Philosophical,” p. 44.
93. George Monbiot displays an admirable honesty when he declares that no one in
the environmental movement “has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of
this mess” (“None of Our Fixes Can Hope to Save Us,” p. 20).
94. David Uzzell and Nora Räthzel, “Transforming Environmental Psychology.”
95. See our conversation on this in Andy Fisher, “Andy Fisher: The Ecopsychology
Interview,” pp. 172–173.
96. Recall from the preface that my using of the term radical ecopsychology was
a strategy to invite recognition of ecopsychology’s inherent radicalness, not to propose
a particular radical version of ecopsychology. For clarity’s sake, I now prefer the phrase
ecopsychology radically conceived. I do realize that not everyone agrees with my views about
ecopsychology, and I do not presume to speak for the field as a whole. In this sense, the
term radical ecopsychology perhaps still holds this tension.
97. Cited in Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological, p. 305. I am relying on Foster
et al. in my discussion of Harding’s theory.
98. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological, pp. 20, 22, 19.
99. Not a “victim of society” but “Free should the scholar be—free and brave”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”).
100. Reser, “Joseph Reser,” p. 62; Koger and Winter, The Psychology, pp. 308–309.
101. http://graduate.lclark.edu/departments/counseling_psychology/ecopsy-
chology/, November 25, 2011.
102. Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist, “Psyche and Nature in a Circle of Healing,”
p. 18.

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 Notes 327

103. In addition to Louv’s Last Child, see research summaries in Clayton and Myers’s
Conservation and Koger and Winter’s The Psychology.
104. Buzzell and Chalquist, “Psyche,” p. 20.
105. John Scull, “Tailoring Nature Therapy to the Client,” p. 148. Scull uses the
“nature connecting” approach developed by Michael Cohen (see Cohen’s Reconnecting with
Nature).
106. See my “Ecopsychology as Radical Praxis.”
107. Clayton, Susan, and Susan Opotow, “Introduction: Identity and the Natural
Environment,” p. 7.
108. In their Introduction, Buzzell and Chalquist define ecopsychology as “the study
of the psychological processes that tie us to the world or separate us from it” (“Psyche,”
p. 17), but do not discuss it much beyond that. Some authors in the Ecotherapy primer also
provide brief discussions of ecopsychology. These discussions do not, however, add up to the
comprehensive characterization of ecopsychology that I think is needed in order to consider
the topic of ecopsychological praxis. It seems to me, furthermore, that many of the authors
in the Ecotherapy primer (e.g., Bill McKibben) are not actually applying a particular idea of
ecopsychology but are rather simply presenting a viewpoint or practice they have developed.
109. Mary Watkins is inspirational here, having consistently urged psychologists to
dis-identify from aspects of their training and practice out of synch with the suffering and
collective needs of this historical moment: “At some junctures, we will need to learn new
skills appropriate to our evolving understanding of what ails us. We may find ourselves
outside of the role definitions to which we are accustomed as we honestly respond to the
suffering that we witness” (“Creating Restorative Ecotherapeutic Practices,” p. 235).
110. http://graduate.lclark.edu/departments/counseling_psychology/ecopsy-
chology/philosophy/, November 25, 2011.
111. Martin Seligman, cited in David Kidner, “Depression and the Natural World,”
p. 133.
112. Mary Gomes, “Altars of Extinction,” p. 248.
113. George Burns, Nature-Guided Therapy, p. xv. See, also, Burns’s chapter in the
Ecotherapy primer.
114. Mind, Ecotherapy: The Green Agenda for Mental Health, p. 1.
115. Stephen Illardi, The Depression Cure.
116. Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction, p. 58. Other quotations in this
paragraph are from pp. 61, 64, 4.
117. Lorraine Fish, Nature, Culture, and Abnormal Appetites, p. 130.
118. Chellis Glendinning, Chivas, p. 216.
119. See, most notably, Wilber’s lengthy footnote in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, starting
on p. 696.
120. Such an appraisal “is legitimate, but we leave it to others to undertake” (Esb-
jörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral Ecology, p. 552).
121. Despite all the problems with postmodernism, Wilber sees it as a positive “return”
of “investigation of the Left-Hand dimensions, including multicultural interpretation and

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deep hermeneutics, introspection and interior disclosures, the existence of intersubjective

discursive formations and cognitive paradigms, chains of signification and depth of commu-
nication, the demand for qualitative distinctions and the search for worth and meaning. . . .”
In short, “all postmodern currents have one thing in common: mere empiricism is dead”
(Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, pp. 429, 430).
122. Wilber, Sex, p. 541.
123. John Davis, “The Transpersonal Dimension of Ecopsychology: Nature, Non-
duality, and Spiritual Practice.” Although considered a leading light of transpersonal psy-
chology, Wilber has distanced himself from the field.
124. As Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman note, different modes of research require
different levels of psychological development. “For example, to accurately perform empiri-
cism you need the formal operations [a stage of cognitive development—AF] associated
with a rational worldview. To perform hermeneutics (authentically take the role of ‘other’)
you need at least worldcentric perspective-taking capacity. Likewise to engage in systems
theory you must have the post-formal capacities associated with systematic operations”
(Integral, p. 66).
125. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 173.
126. As Wilber says: “the word integral means comprehensive, inclusive, non-
marginalizing, embracing. Integral approaches to any field attempt to be exactly that: to
include as many perspectives, styles, and methodologies as possible within a coherent view
of the topic” (cited in Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 5).
127. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 7.
128. Wilber, Sex, p. 488.
129. See, especially, endnote 78 for chapter 2 on pp. 263–264, and my discussion on p. 175.
130. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 291.
131. See p. 209, note 78.
132. Wilber, Sex, p. 539.
133. David Kidner, “Fraud, Fantasy, and Fiction in Environmental Writing,” p. 402.
“Just as the ‘weeds’ and ‘vermin’ that we have tried to eliminate may belatedly be recognized
as forms of diversity necessary for the regeneration of the wild world, so censored modes of
experience, together with the devalued forms of communication through which they can
be expressed, may conserve aspects of reality that one day may become actual” (p. 410).
134. This challenge raises the question of how to best understand historical changes in
the relationship between psyche and nature. If there was no preexisting state of pure harmony
then what exactly is the meaning of alienation? Must recollection be a recollecting forward, as
in the remembrance of our Buddha nature? Despite that I think that Wilber’s theory of his-
tory is too simple (as I discuss below), I do think his views will be helpful in answering these
questions. He refers, for example, to Schelling’s introduction in the nineteenth century of the
concept of alienation, by which he “meant that Spirit ‘loses’ itself in manifestation, and evolu-
tion or development is the overcoming of this self-estrangement, an overcoming of alienation
by the return of Spirit to Spirit” (p. 517). In a discussion of Socrates, he also notes: “Recollec-
tion (or remembrance of Source) is. . .the path of Return, the path of Ascent” (Sex, p. 339).

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I think the working out of a dialectic of history that integrates Wilber’s and other’s spiritual
conceptions with the material-political conceptions of Marxists and others is an important
exercise for ecopsychology. The fact that a realistic history of the psyche-nature relationship
can only be pursued in this manner again indicates the inherent radicalness of ecopsychology.
135. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 307.
136. Wilber, Sex, pp. 111, 691.
137. Wilber views history in terms of a “dialectic of progress”: “As consciousness evolves
and unfolds, each new stage solves or defuses certain problems of the previous stage, but then
adds new and recalcitrant—and sometimes more complex and more difficult—problems of
its own. Precisely because evolution in all domains (human and otherwise) operates by a
process of differentiation and integration, then each new and more complex level necessarily
faces problems not present in its predecessors. Dogs get cancer; atoms don’t. . . .So evolution
inherently means that new potentials and new wonders are introduced with each stage, but
they are invariably accompanied by new horrors, new fears, new problems, new disasters”
(Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, p. 66). I would say that Wilber’s view of history itself needs to
be transcended and included in a more complex one. Jameson argues in this respect that the
dialectic, insofar as this refers to “problems of causality and historical narrative and explana-
tion[,]. . .wishes ceaselessly to interrogate and undermine [existing] narrative and historical
ideologies, by allowing us to see and grasp historical change in a new and more complex way”
(“Persistencies,” pp. 120, 127). It is noteworthy, as well, that while Wilber borrowed the term
“dialectic of progress” from Habermas, Habermas has himself “quietly dropped” most of his
theory of social evolution (James Gordon Finlayson, Habermas, p. 73).
138. K.P. Moseley, “In Defense of the Primitive.”
139. According to Wilber the “central idea” of the foraging epoch of human evolu-
tion is that “Spirit is interwoven with earthbody. Foraging cultures the world over sing this
profound truth. The very earth is our blood and bones and marrow, and we are all sons and
daughters of that earth—in which, and through which, Spirit freely flows” (Wilber, A Brief,
p. 490). To say the least, it is hard to see how this idea has been integrated into subsequent
stages, certainly within Western civilization.
140. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, p. 129. Other quotations in this
paragraph are from pp. 174–175, 174, xvi.
141. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 230.
142. Richard Lee, “Demystifying Primitive Communism.”
143. I cannot explore here in any depth the debate about what these virtues might be
exactly, but do note the following remarks by the anthropologist Hugh Brody: “Egalitari-
anism, respect for the elderly, loving regard for children, diligent respect for the land, plants
and animals on which they depend—these are the ‘virtues,’ too often missing in the ‘devel-
oped’ world, that cause visitors to hunter-gatherer societies to experience deep admiration.
To describe these things, and seek to understand them, is not romanticism but the most
relevant kind of realism” (The Other Side of Eden, p. 147). While Esbjörn-Hargens and
Zimmerman caution against ignoring the dark side of “ancient tribal cultures and other
premodern cultures” such as destructive superstitions, tribal warfare, and human sacrifice,

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they do seem to acknowledge positive features such as “close intersubjective relationships,

common cultural purpose, inspiring rituals, an enchanted cosmos, and easy access to wild
or semi-wild nature” (Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 294). They offer a
set of guidelines for avoiding romanticizing indigenous and premodern peoples, which,
although valuable in some respects, I think misses the argument I make in this paragraph.
I would add, as well, that in In Search of the Primitive Diamond’s goal was to identify a set
of what Wilber would call “orienting generalizations” about “primitive” cultures. How suc-
cessful he was in this I cannot say, but I do think his intention needs to be acknowledged.
Finally, Wilber himself writes: “it is small wonder that, in these ecologically disastrous
times, many moderns are attempting to resurrect the natural wisdom of tribal awareness
more attuned with the biosphere. / I am in complete sympathy with that approach; I am
not in sympathy with the attempt to turn the clock back and elevate this structure to a
privileged status of integrative power that it simply did not possess” (Sex, p. 172).
144. For example, although Wilber includes Goddess spirituality among his list of
Eco-Romantic orientations, saying that it sees Spirit as entirely immanent in the world
rather than as also transcending it, this does not match the findings of Catherine L. Alba-
nese. She argues that although the Goddess is “of the earth, immanent in all that exists,”
She “is as transcendental as Emersonian idealism has been. . . .Pushed one way, she celebrates
the reality, the concreteness of matter. . . .Pushed another way, though, she tells us that
matter is only a form of spirit, that it can be shifted and changed by spirit” (cited in Michael
Zimmerman, “Ken Wilber’s Critique of Ecological Spirituality,” p. 26).
145. With each newborn child this emergence is repeated. Rather than seeing this
fact as a “nightmare,” though, as Wilber does (A Brief History, p. 495), I think it highlights
the importance—stressed so well by Shepard—of making the nurturance of the human life
cycle, the love-filled tending to human and nonhuman life, an ultimate concern around
which we organize our society. This differs from Wilber’s stress on adult spiritual practice.
146. Susan Scott, Healing with Nature, p. 65.
147. Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology, pp. 31–32. If horizontal development is not
indicated on the charts, then the question of course is where exactly it is indicated. Wilber
does say that each level of development involves its own needs and relational exchanges
with the kind of “food” that corresponds to that level (physical, emotional, mental, soul),
but such statements are offered with little elaboration (p. 118). It is also noteworthy that in
acknowledging the history of “pathological hierarchy,” Wilber writes that “we are allowed,
even enjoined, to give normal femininity and normal heterarchy an exaggerated emphasis
and a greater value, simply because we are trying to balance the scales” (Sex, p. 32).
148. This also helps remember that there is nothing in Integral Psychology along the
lines of the “All My Relations” worldview common among Native Americans or, say, the
Mohawk Thanksgiving Address (I mention these not to claim any great acquaintance with
them on my part, but to acknowledge their existence). Adding “All Relations” to AQAL
would, moreover, be a reminder of the need to overcome the alienation among human
social relations (which I suggest is of a piece with our alienation from other-than-human
social relations).

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149. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 217.

150. Just to be clear, my intention here is not to cast doubt on the research of Kellert
and Kahn, Jr., but rather to illustrate the vertical bias of Integralists.
151. That is, how vertical development is generated through the development of
interrelationship with the world (horizontal development) and, conversely, how new
relationships with the world are made possible by vertical development (recall the “ever-­
widening spheres of meaning and participation” principle I discussed in chapter five).
152. Louise Chawla, “Childhood Place Attachments.”
153. Regarding Chawla, see In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry, and Child-
hood Memory and “Spots of Time: Manifold Ways of Being in Nature in Childhood;”
regarding Myers, see pp. 140, 144–145 of this book. See, also, Kidner’s remarks in
“Depression.”
154. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 225. I would note, though, that
the examples that they give of this do not bring out especially the internal relationship
between psyche and nature.
155. This is not to say that Plotkin follows exactly Wilber’s spectrum of conscious-
ness model; only that he has his own version. There are many ways that Integralists would
likely take issue with Plotkin, and these are worth discussing. I think his effort nonetheless
makes a useful contribution. Strictly speaking, also, Plotkin’s earliest stage does not have an
egocentric identity because he believes that at birth there is no ego.
156. David Sobel, Children’s Special Places.
157. Graham Harvey, Animism, p. 169. Other quotes in this paragraph are from pp.
xi, 18. On the idea that animism is merely projection, Harvey notes: “While animism has
been wrongly defined as the projection of human likeness on to beings and objects which
are not human, it would be foolish to deny that some of what passes for animism might be
projection. Or rather it seems unlikely that animists never slip into anthropomorphism or
anthropopathism. Just as monotheists might be credulous (rather than properly faithful)
and academics cynical (rather than properly skeptical), animist may sometimes project
human emotion, passion, and reason where it does not occur” (p. 170).
158. Mary Watkins, Invisible Guests, pp. 88–90. “Far from revealing themselves as a
primitive form of thought, these dialogues reveal the complexity of thought as it struggles
between different perspectives, refusing to be simplified and narrowed to a single stand-
point” (p. 178).
159. On this, see chapter 9, “Becoming-animal and Horror,” in Joseph Dodds’s Psy-
choanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos, and chapter 8, “Frogs,” in Calvin Martin’s
The  Way of the Human Being.
160. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything, p. 98.
161. This is exactly what deep ecologists say, as in the “evolutionary remembering”
exercise in which participants are invited to recall the entire sequence of evolution they
hold within themselves that led to the emergence of human beings (see John Seed and Pat
Fleming, “Evolutionary Remembering”). See, also, Wilber, Sex, p. 109.
162. See Wilber, Sex, p. 96.

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163. Wilber, Sex, p. 265.

164. Wilber, Sex, p. 298.
165. Wilber, Sex, p. 480. Emphasis added.
166. Wilber, A Brief History, pp. 545, 495. “So transcendence is a form of increasing
love. I move beyond myself to encompass, to love, something else. That’s the real nature of
transcendence, it’s increasing embrace” (Ken Wilber in Michael Zimmerman, “A Conversa-
tion between Ken Wilber and Michael Zimmerman,” p. 4).
167. Harold Searles, The Nonhuman Environment, pp. 284–385.
168. See chapter 2, “In a Modern Light: Integral Anthropology and the Evolution of
Cultures,” in Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit.
169. Tim Ingold, Being Alive, p. 68.
170. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 216. Other quotes in this
paragraph, pp. 210, 216, 216, 217.
171. Wilber, Sex, pp. 330, 355. “How can you unite a path of radical freedom and
detachment heading in the direction of the ascending One, versus a path dedicated to
union and communion with the diverse Many? How to heal this deepest of dualisms that
had cruelly carved the landscape of Western culture for two thousand years?” (p. 510).
Wilber’s solution seems to be some sort of Idealism (see A Brief History, p. 466).
172. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman, Integral, p. 105. I think a good expression
of this is provided by Gary Snyder: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is
limited only by the size of one’s heart. We speak of watershed consciousness, and the great
water-cycle of the planet makes it all one watershed. We are all natives to this earth. / Yet
one has to start where one is and become nature-literate to the scale of the immediate home
place. With home-based knowledge, it is then within our power to get a glimpse of the whole
planet as home. As a rule, though, local knowledge (combined with an understanding of the
dynamics of systems) remains the most useful, and the most delicious (Back on Fire, p. 98).
173. For Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman’s criticisms of Abram, see Integral,
pp. 560–561. They write: “In some important respects, to claim that the artifact of the
written alphabet served to remove us from nature is analogous to claiming that an anthill
separates ants from nature. Imbedded in this thinking is the very dualism that the holistic
approaches are trying to overcome. Language is in fact a development within Nature.” I
do not think this is fair to Abram at all. Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman focus on the
dignity of language, on its being a “brilliant expression of our depth” (true enough), but
they do not acknowledge a disastrous side, the pathologies it can create. Wilber character-
izes both neurosis and the ecological crisis as a repression of the biosphere by the noosphere
(A Brief History, p. 253). It follows that language, as part of the noosphere, has the power
to dissociate consciousness from the biosphere and to be involved in the latter’s repression.
Saying this is not to be dualistic; it is to be Integral. The linguistic idealism dominating
the philosophical world is where the dualism in this arena truly lies; Esbjörn-Hargens and
Zimmerman do not comment on this.
174. Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern
Strategies of Localization,” p. 139.

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175. Wilber’s Sex proposed a holonic ecology but did not address the profoundly
anti-ecological nature of capitalist society. (“Holon” is a term Wilber borrows from Arthur
Koestler. The basic unit of reality, holons are wholes made up of parts that are themselves
parts of larger wholes. For Wilber, the Kosmos is holons all the way up and down.) In
Integral Ecology, Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman likewise make little critical comment
on capitalism; use language that bypasses the very notion of society (e.g., referring to the
quadrants of the AQAL diagram as: self [UL], culture [LL], and nature [UR and LR],
with society buried under nature); make little mention of critical or Marxist methods; and
in their list of recommended books (“The Integral Ecology Bookshelf ”) do not include
any works of critical social theory, the closest being Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and
L. Hunter Lovins’s book, Natural Capitalism.
176. Wilber, A Theory, p. 94.
177. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, p. 239.
178. Bert Parlee and Ken Wilber, “Like it or Not, You’re a Capitalist. But Are You a
Conscious One?”
179. Wilber argues for the dignity of capitalism, noting how it has transcended
the cruelties of feudalism, but does not go nearly far enough in thinking about the
essential cruelties of capitalism. Marxists do not deny the advances that capitalism
made over feudalism, but they nonetheless argue for the need to advance beyond
capitalism to socialism. Regarding the dignity of capitalism, David Harvey writes
that “the positive side to the capitalist revolution was that it dispossessed arbitrary
feudal institutions (such as the monarchy and the Church) and their powers, liber-
ated creative energies, opened up new spaces and knitted the world closer together
through exchange relations, opened up society to strong currents of technological and
organisational change, overcame a world based on superstition and ignorance and
replaced it with an enlightened science with the potential to liberate all of humanity
from material want and need. . . .It was for socialism and communism to build upon
the progressive aspects of capitalist development. These progressive aspects included
movements for land reform, the rise of democratic forms of government (always sul-
lied by the role of money power), freedom of information (always contingent but
nevertheless vital) and. . .of expression, and the creation of rights civil and legal” (The
Enigma of Capital, p. 249).
For Wilber’s views on Marxism, see Sex, pp. 199–201. Although he agrees with the
need for “equitable material-economic distribution in the physiosphere,” Wilber believes the
flaw of Marxism was that it “reduced the noosphere to the physiosphere [i.e., to the material
plane], such an egregious reduction that it took evolution less than a mere century to begin to
erase that mistake in earnest.” For Wilber, in other words, Marxism is a mistake safely behind
us. While I agree with him that Marxist revolutions have typically been marked by irrational
mythologizing due to the reduction that he notes, what his view most overlooks is the fact
that Marxism provides the best understanding of the capitalist system available, and that this
understanding is coming to bear more than ever in our own times. As I discuss below, it also
does not recognize that actually-existing socialist states have never freed themselves from the

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capitalist world system and are better characterized as forms of state capitalism: the failure of
Marxism has in practice largely been the failure of capitalism.
180. See Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological and Joel Kovel, A Really Inconvenient
Truth.
181. See the detailed version of the AQAL diagram in Wilber, Sex, as well as p. 427.
182. Regarding the former Soviet Union, Harman writes: “In undertaking the task of
accumulation, the bureaucracy substituted itself for a capitalist class that no longer existed.
But the methods it used were essentially those of capitalist industrialization elsewhere in
the world. ‘Collectivization’—in reality the state takeover of the land—increased the pro-
portion of agricultural output available for industrial accumulation while driving a very
high proportion of the peasantry from the land, just as enclosures had for England’s early
capitalists” (Zombie, p. 158; see also p. 118 and elsewhere in this illuminating book).
183. Wilber, A Brief, p. 103.
184. Using Wilber’s own terms, we could say that he aims to translate capitalism by
changing its surface structure rather to transform it by changing its deep structure (Wilber,
Sex, p. 68).
185. Wilber, A Brief History, pp. 420, 512.
186. Wilber, Sex, p. 427.
187. Marlene Steinberg, The Stranger in the Mirror, p. xvii.
188. Wilber, Sex, p. 148.
189. Wilber, Sex, p. 202. Centaur is Wilber’s term for a level of development in
which mind and body are integrated.
190. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything, pp. 130–131.
191. Eleanor Burke Leacock and Christine Ward Gailey, “Primitive Communism
and Its Transformations,” p. 100.
192. See Wilber, The Eye, p. xvii and A Theory, pp. 83–89.
193. Parlee and Wilber, “Like it or Not.”
194. Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological, p. 55.
195. Marx identified three categories of conditions of production: “natural condi-
tions” (land), “personal conditions” (labor power) and “communal general conditions”
(physical and social infrastructure, human-made space, etc.). As O’Connor notes, the
conditions of production may be reframed as the conditions of life, and various social
movements can then be seen a struggles united against capital in preserving, defending,
and enhancing the “conditions of life and life itself ” (Natural, pp. 144–145, 316). Ecopsy-
chology would clearly fit into this scheme.
196. I have drawn for this exercise on Harvey, “The Nature” and O’Connor, Natural
Causes.
197. Wilber, A Brief History, p. 391.
198. “There may be no effective long-term capitalist solutions (apart from reversion
to fictitious capital manipulations) to the crisis of capitalism. At some point quantitative
changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take seriously the idea that we may be
at exactly such an inflexion point in the history of capitalism. Questioning the future of

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capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of cur-
rent debate” (Harvey, The Enigma, p. 217).
199. See, especially, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
200. During a public forum in which Pollan interviewed Jack Sinclair, the executive
vice president of grocery merchandise for Walmart, “he described an epiphany he had in
Garden City, Kansas, while writing about the feedlot and slaughter businesses there. He
visited a local Walmart late one night and noticed a kind of cheap meat, tenderized by
injected saline solution and other artificial preservatives, that he’d never seen in his own
area. ‘And there were the people I’d seen working at the slaughterhouse—this was the meat
they could afford to buy. So I saw this whole non-virtuous cycle of low wages and low
prices.’” Here is an example of how Pollan can put his finger right on the exploitative and
competitive logic of capitalist social relationships but then not take the next step and bring
the entire capitalist system into critical view.
201. The idea of these two languages comes from Giroux, et al., “The Need.”
202. Philippe Descola, “Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society.” “[B]etween a
structuralist nature that is good to think and a Marxist nature that is good to exploit there
is perhaps room for a nature that is merely good to socialize” (p. 112).
203. Ingold, The Perception, p. 76.
204. Edvard Hviding, “Nature, Culture, Magic, Science,” p. 179.
205. Findings of G. A. Haudricourt, reported by Descola in “Societies,” p. 112.
206. Kidner, “Fraud,” p. 394. The study was by Robert Ryan.
207. Ariel Salleh and Meira Hansen, “On Production and Reproduction, Identity
and Non-Identity in Ecofeminist Theory.”
208. Ariel Salleh, “Global Alternatives and the Meta-Industrial Class.”
209. “. . .the same thing can’t be said of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which
has great symbolic worth but little practical value for neoliberalism” (O’Connor, Natural,
p. 1).
210. Ecosocialist texts can be difficult to approach, as they use the complex and
sometimes obscure language of Marxists. Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature remains for
me the best introduction, though for the uninitiated it is not always easy to follow. Foster,
Clark, and York’s The Ecological Rift is more accessible, but weaker on the actual nature of
the ecosocialist transition (and very repetitive in places). James O’Connor’s Natural Causes
is another important work, O’Connor being one of the main developers of ecosocialism.
Finally, Harvey’s “The Nature of Environment” is a brief but rewarding journey through
this territory. See also Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right for a useful debunking of many
misconceptions about Marx.
211. Roszak, The Voice, p. 321.
212. O’Connor, Natural, p. 328.
213. Kovel, The Enemy, pp. 215, 228. The Conscious Capitalist commitment to
spiritual development within a wholly quantitative economic and social system is thus
contradictory.
214. Heinberg, The End.

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215. O’Connor, Natural, p. 215.

216. Heinberg, The End, p. 182.
217. Heinberg, The End, p. 184.
218. Michael Löwy, “Contribution to the Debate on Climate Change,” p. 3.
219. Cited in Bertell Ollman, Social and Sexual Revolution, p. 57.
220. The Buddha taught that suffering is inherent in life, but that we have two gen-
eral choices as humans in how we handle it. The first way, taught endlessly by the system
of capital, is to try to evade it: through sensory escape (e.g. consumerism), striving to be
someone (e.g., narcissism, fame/celebrity), or through destruction/nonbeing (e.g., addic-
tion, violence, suicide). This evasion strategy, needless to say, only heightens our suffering.
The second general way is to willfully and skillfully face and inquire into the suffering in
order to progressively negate and transcend our Egos and thereby open our hearts and grow
in wisdom, compassion, equanimity, and skillful means. That the first way describes so
much of the texture of contemporary life, and the second so little, indicates the profound
psychological illiteracy at play in our world, as well as the crucialness and radicalness of
developing such interior literacy in our times.
221. Kovel, The Enemy, p. 200, Magdoff and Foster, What Every Environmentalist,
p. 100.
222. Kovel, The Enemy, p. 218.
223. Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy, p. 10.
224. See David Levin, “Gendlin’s Use of Language,” and “Democracy in America.”
225. Gary Snyder envisioned something like this many years ago. See Turtle Island,
pp. 106–110.
226. An “economist in Wonderland” was the ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s term for Julian
Simon. The phrase “no-nothings” is Wendell Berry’s, What Matters?, p. 19.
227. O’Connor, Natural, p. 46, Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological, p. 261.
228. O’Connor, Natural, p. 23.
229. Foster, Clark, and York’s The Ecological, p. 77. As a result of the rift in the
nutrient cycle, a trade was begun in guano from South America, which then led to a war
financed by British capital, and other disastrous consequences of this shifting of ecological
crises or rifts about the planet.
230. Marx, cited in Foster, Clark, and York’s The Ecological, p. 348.
231. Kovel, The Enemy. Marx himself refused to provide a blueprint for socialism,
as this would have amounted to an exercise in speculative thought divorced from material
reality and historical struggle. See Eagleton, Why Marx.
232. Kim Rosen, Saved by a Poem, pp. 36–37.

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 INDEX

A Bateson, Gregory, 5
Abram, David, 10–12, 38, 42, 112, 122, Bear, 100, 113, 137, 138, 188–189, 192,
127–128, 130–131, 179, 235, 284n.96, 299n.143, 317n.175
2941n.81, 296n.94, 332n.173 Becker, Ernest, 80, 271n.84
Adolescence, 147–153; initiation rites, Bell, Anne, 186
150–153, 186–187; sexuality and, 149–150; Benton, Ted, 289n.4
symbolic level of perception in, 151–152 Berenson, Bernard, 283n.91
Adorno, Theodor, 170, 177, 319n.6 Bergman, Charles, 114, 263n.74
Adulthood, 153 Beringer, Almut, 321n.31
Advertising Industry, 21–22, 156, 170 Bernstein, Richard, 270n.53, 321n.32
Aeschylus, 188 Berry, Wendell, 46, 84, 91, 120, 171
Aggression, 69, 317–318n.183 Bigwood, Carol, 163, 281n.57
Aiken, Conrad, 126 Bird, Elizabeth, 258n.26
Ainsworth, Mary, 143 Black Elk, 94
Alexander, Bruce, 222–223 Body: beyond the control of modernity, 46;
Alien, Alienation, 21, 24, 37, 39–40, 52, divorce from, 58–59, 73; jammed-up life
76–78, 95, 114, 127, 159, 171, 199, 211, in, 80, 136–137; and language, 62–64; is
223, 228, 234, 241, 244–245, 247–248, meaning seeking, 63, 69, 144; prejudices
293nn. 60, 62, 308n.30, 325n.78, against, 58–59; reclamation of, 59–65;
328n.134. See also Loss orders experience, 38, 60, 62, 107–108;
Anima Mundi. See Soul of the world unity of, and world, 64, 69. See also Inten-
Animism, 5, 10, 102, 104, 112, 179, 233–234 tion, bodily
Anthony, Carl, 16, 19–20, 247 Bookchin, Murray, 201n.75, 261n.157
Aristotle, 43, 156, 266n.100 Borderline personality disorder, 143
Arkkelin, Daniel, 33 Borgmann, Albert, 29, 37, 42–47, 160, 161,
Armstrong, Jeannette, 78, 110, 132, 306n.4 162, 174, 178; device paradigm, 163–165,
Athanasiou, Tom, xv, 31, 307–308n.26 170–171, 257n.11, 267n.112
Attachment theory, 143, 242, 292n.40 Boss, Medard, 65, 69, 80, 108, 134, 136, 137,
Avens, Robert, 105 165, 266n.101
Bourassa, Robert, 162
Bradford, George, 254n.66
Breggin, Peter, 20, 159, 259–260n.30,
B 304n.209
Bachelard, Gaston, 115 Bringhurst, Robert, 176
Bacon, Francis, 156, 163 Brody, Hugh, 329n.143
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 44, 78, 268n.12 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 320n.13
Baleen, Eskimo shaman, 40 Brown, Joseph Epes, 139, 288n.142
Barfield, Owen, 29, 44, 105, 295n.88 Brown, Norman O., 115, 155
Barrows, Anita, 290n.18, 300n.145 Bruchac, Joseph, 284–285n.107
Barthes, Roland, 129 Bryant, Donald, 265n.86

377

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 378 Index

Buddha, Buddhism, 56, 71, 93, 97, 101, 109, to human life cycle, 185–187; supportive of
113, 119, 155, 156, 191, 267–268n.9, beleaguered self, 14–16, 182–185
286–287n.129, 287n.130, 336n.220 Cosmological urge, 122, 142, 164–165,
Burke, Kenneth, 44 306n.232
Burns, George, 222 Creative adjustment, 72, 148–149, 173, 176;
Buzzell, Linda, 201, 219–220, 327n.108 and destruction of experience, 74, 88
Cronon, William, 298–299n.130
Culture, 107, 119–120, 147, 148, 169–171, 172,
290n.19, 291n.24; culture industry, 170
C Cushman, Philip, 20
Campbell, Joseph, 175–176, 317n.174
Campbell, Paul, 43
Canty, Jeanine, 255n.76
Capitalism: confronting, is difficult/avoided, D
200, 212, 219, 235–238, 243, 319n.10, Davis, John, 226
334–335n.198; conscious capitalism, 235, Death (anxiety/denial), 99, 124, 152, 153, 169,
238, 335n.213; historical development of, 258n.102, 317–318n.183
210, 236; hostile to (human) nature/life, Decolonization. See Colonization
xix, 84–87, 157, 159–160, 161, 162, 198, Deep ecology, 17–20, 110, 246–247, 331n.161
222–223; industrialism and, 236–237; Denzin, Norman, 31
fosters and exploits suffering, 165–170; and Derrida, Jacques, 127, 129–130, 294–295n.85,
technology, 156, 306n.4, 310n.61 295n.87, 295n.92
Caputo, John, 263–264n.78, 283n.87 Descartes, René, 56, 59, 121, 244n.123,
Cartesianism. See Descartes, René 301n.163
Center for Psychology and Social Descola, Philippe, 241–242
Change, 15 Desensitization, 73
Cézanne, 58 Detienne, Marcel, 132
Chalquist, Craig, 201, 219–220, 322n.39, Development, economic versus biological,
327n.108 140–141
Chawla, Louise, 231, 320n.13, 321n.28 Dewey, John, 26, 36, 273n.112
Chen, Ellen, 119 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Cheney, Jim, 254n.73 Disorders, criticism of, 22, 260n.33
Childhood, 144–147 Dialectics, 212–214
Clark, Brett, 212, 217, 219 Diamond, Stanley, 36, 51, 125, 229, 330n.143
Clayton, Susan, 202, 220 Differentiation, 123, 133, 139, 292n.48
Coates, Gary, 189 Dillon, M.C., 127, 128–129, 130, 294n.84
Cobb, Edith, 140, 144 Dilthey, William, 53
Coles, Romand, 87 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 180
Colonization, 210–212, 223, 229 Discourse: inadequacies of modern ­normal,
Commodity fetishism, 84, 166–167 29–31, 32–33, 290n.7; creating an
Concern, ultimate, 45–47, 86 ­ecological, xiv, 30–31, 35, 40–42, 263n.77;
Condrau, Gion, 136 deictic, 43–44, 45–47; hermeneutical,
Conn, Sarah, 15, 22, 256n.96 36–42; mixed, of Freud, 35; rhetorical,
Consciousness, ecological, 18, 22 43–47, 265nn. 86, 94
Conservation Psychology, 200–201, 201–205, Distance: optimal, 73, 96, 102, 226n.32;
211, 214, 218 humans as creatures of, 94–96, 123, 162,
Contact, 65–70, 125, 133, 135, 138, 271n.83, 309n.42
280n.31; fear of, 66–67, 75 Doherty, Thomas Joseph, 201, 215–219
Council of All Beings, 16, 253n.57 Downing, Christine, 40
Counterpractice, 161, 174–188; brings life into Dreams, 82, 96, 136, 137–138, 152, 299n.
focus, 177–180; as engagement with reality, 137–139
178; life-oriented politics, 180; responsible Dreyfus, Hubert, 209, 262n.60, 278–279n.13

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 Index 379

Dualism, problem of, xiv, 9–10, 24, 30–31, 32, Erikson, Erik, 8, 142, 148–149, 152,
35, 54, 56, 58, 64–65, 69, 78, 79, 81–82, 292n.40
94, 120, 127, 134, 136, 141, 173, 183, 198, Esbjörn-Hargens, Sean, 201, 224–239,
205, 206, 213, 250n.24, 251n.29, 260n.30, 328n.124, 329–330n.143, 332n.173,
273n.112, 291n.28. See also Splitting. 333n.175
Duerr, Hans Peter, 92 Evernden, Neil, 30, 51–53, 87, 321n.31
Ever-widening spheres, principle of, 122–126,
136, 141, 171, 174, 187, 233. See also
Experience, world-directedness of
E Existentialism, 53, 97, 212n.101, 213n.9,
Eating, 67, 142, 166 312n.105
Eaton, Boyd, 145, 150 Experience: bodily ground of, 38, 58–65;
Ecofeminism, 17, 19, 88–89 cycle of, 67–70; consumption as mode of,
Ecopsychology: anthropology and, 234, 240; 167; deprivation of 171–174; destruction
conservative tendencies within, 22–23; of, 73–74, 83, 176–177, 180–181; figure/
critical sense of, xiii–xiv, 16–17, 161; ground structure of, 58; gestalt as basic
definitions of, 3–4, 6, 7, 13, 23–24, 25, unit of, 67; interaction between feelings
33, 112, 180, 187, 198, 199, 205, 233, and symbols, 56–58, 75; marginalizing/
319n.8; experientially conceived, xvii, 26, forgetting of, 54, 129–130; primacy of,
42, 54–55, 174; as a hermeneutical form 53–55; returning to, 51–55, 183; source
of inquiry, 37–38; journal, 201, 215–219; for ecopsychological theory, 41–42, 161,
and language, 127, 131; naturalisti- 207–208; thicker than exiting forms, 64;
cally conceived, 24–25, 46, 91–92, 93, world-directedness of 69, 80
117–120, 147, 172; as a psychologically/
experientially base ecological politics, xv,
xvii, 13, 26–27, 174–188; as a radical
project, xiv; second-generation versus F
first, 201, 215–217; need for social and Fantasy, maximized in hostile environments,
political analysis within, 17, 21–23, 24, 77–78. See also Imagination
83, 110, 114, 147, 161, 217–219; and Fernandez, James, 146
spirituality, 98; therapeutic-recollective Fish, Lorraine, 223
sense of, xiii–xiv, 13, 52, 94, 110, 118, Fleischner, Tom, 135–136, 324n.57
131, 263–264n.78; as a transformation Flesh, 66, 230; definition, 132–134.
of psychology, 204–215 See also One flesh, principle of
Ecopsychology Institute, 22 Flores, Fernando, 209
Ecosocialism, 19, 198, 199, 200, 240–241, Focusing, 60–62, 64, 82, 102,
243–248 182–185
Ecotherapy, 201 Food. See Eating
Ego, 71–72, 97–98, 100, 114, 119, 123, 124, Foster, John Bellamy, 199, 212, 217,
152, 168–169, 280–281n.43, 290n.10 219
Ehrlich, Anne and Paul, 257n.102 Foster, Stephen, 186–187
Eliade, Mircea, 150–151, 152 Foucault, Michel, 30, 63
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 44 Fox, Amy, 252n.44
Environmental education, 185–186 Fox, Warwick, 18, 19, 21,
Environmental justice, 19–20, 201n.77, 254n.65
257n.102 Frankl, Viktor, 108
Environmental movement: mainstream Freedom, 69, 115–116, 166
(reform) versus radical, 17, 41, 217–218, Freud, Sigmund, 20, 35, 40–41, 54, 59, 83,
258n.23, 263n.76; psychology of, 15, 105, 114, 115, 156, 157–158, 159, 187,
253n.52 188, 190, 273n.121, 274n.136, 289n.166,
Environmental psychology, 32–33, 200–201, 317–318n.183
201–205 Fromm, Erich, 91, 99

Index.indd 379 09/11/12 1:45 AM

 380 Index

G 283–284n.96, 291n.31, 297n.117,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 37, 38, 39, 45, 53, 71, 314n.131; and politics, 57, 268–269n.26
122, 262n.55, 262nn. 61, 63, 266n.104, Heinberg, Richard, 199, 244
271–272n.89 Hendricks, Mary, 286n.120
Geertz, Clifford, 1, 121, 190, 258n.12 Henry, Jules, 87, 161
Gendlin, Eugene, 38, 53, 54, 55–56, 58, Heraclitus, 100
60–61, 64, 70, 75, 80, 101–102, 108, Herman, Judith, 20, 259n.29, 286n.122
129–130, 142, 183, 213, 246, 257n.108, Hermeneutics, 36–42, 45, 74, 92–93, 104–106,
260n.31, 268n.22, 270n.56, 278n.3, 120–122, 135, 204, 206, 262n.59,
282n.72, 285n.111, 294–295n.85, 283n.87; hermeneutic circle, 39, 42, 120;
314n.131, 316n.163, 323n.42 hermeneutic deficit in psychology, 204,
Gifford, Robert, 320n.21 263n.66, 321n.32; hermeneutically sensi-
Gilmore, David, 305n.224 tized empiricism, 211, 266nn. 100, 104;
Glass, James, 260n.30 Hermes, 121, 291nn. 32, 33
Glendinning, Chellis, 83, 223, 274–275n.145 Higgens, Michael, 191
God, 119, 296–297n.109 Hillman, James, 5, 10, 12, 43, 104, 105, 119,
Goethean science, 322–323n.40, 324n.58 137, 251n.37, 265n.85, 282nn. 67, 69,
Goldstein, Kurt, 25 299n.137, 316n.164
Gomes, Mary, 22, 221, 252n.44, 255n.76 Historicism, History, 108, 120–121, 174,
Goodman, Paul, 83, 105–106, 117, 142, 182, 291nn. 28, 31, 301n.161
274n.136, 315–316n.159 Hölderlin, 106, 128
Goodness, basic, 109–110, 143, 286–287nn. Holquist, Michael 282n.67
129–130 Horkheimer, Max, 54, 84–85, 98, 158, 159,
Goodwin, Donald, 189 170, 177, 319n.6
Gottlieb, Roger, 181 Humanistic psychology, 91–92, 110, 181,
Gramsci, Antonio, 30 277–278n.3, 286n.129, 287n.130
Gray, Leslie, 5 Human-nature relationship: attenuation of, in
Greenwashing, 159 modern world, xiv; centrality of, in human
Greenway, Robert, 40, 41, 204–205, 248, existence, 88–89, 116, 117, 121; effect of
322n.34, 325n.76 literacy on, 130–131; meaning of “human”
Grene, Marjorie, 120–121, 291n.31 in 96, 119
Griffin, Susan, 63 Husserl, Edmund, 10, 262n.59
Grof, Christina and Stan, 254n.33 Hviding, Edvard, 241

H I
Habermas, Jürgen, 210–211, 236, 262n.63, Id, 59, 77
329n.137 Imagination, 134–136; versus fantasy, 135–136.
Happiness, 155–156, 160, 161, 189, 306n.4 See also Reality
Haraway, Donna, 258–259n.26 Indigenous peoples, relationship to ecopsy-
Harding, Sandra, 218 chology, 5, 94, 105, 125–126, 132, 139,
Harman, Chris, 334n.182 143, 151, 169, 228–229, 234, 279n.19,
Harvey, David, 212, 214, 235, 319n.4, 284n.104
326n.91, 333n.179 Individual, Individualism, 7, 9, 14, 18, 19,
Harvey, Graham, 232, 331n.157 21, 32, 33, 34, 53, 78–79, 124, 160,
Healing threshold, 182, 190 176, 180–183, 200, 208–209, 215, 221,
Heidegger, Martin, 11, 57, 88, 102, 105–106, 237, 238, 243, 244, 257n.11, 275n.153,
119, 121, 128, 162–164, 262n.59, 301n.163, 323n.45, 323n.48
265n.91, 270n.64, 278–279n.13, 281n.63, Infancy, 141–143

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 Index 381

Ingleby, David, 20 272n.96, 280n.41, 280–281n.43,

Ingold, Tim, 124, 209, 214, 234, 241 285n.119, 289n.166, 292n.48, 295n.92,
Integral Ecology, 201, 224–239 308n.37
Intention, bodily, 65, 69, 71, 80–81, 115, 127, Koyukon people, 96, 111, 119, 125–126,
136–137, 270n.66, 297n.110; shame- 290n.17, 312n.102
linking of, 79 Kruger, Dreyer, 21
Introjection, 76

L
J Labor, an arena for ecopsychology, 240–241,
Jackins, Harvey, 286n.120 247–248
Jacoby, Russell, 20, 177, 181 LaDuke, Winona, 180
Jaffé, Aniela, 196 Laing, R.D., 74, 87–88, 256n.98
Jameson, Fredric, 161–162, 309n.42, 329n.137 Lame Deer, John (Fire), 58, 111
Jay, Tom, 9 Language: derives from and “sings” the (natural)
Jenks, Chris, 301n.163, 303n.196 world, 44, 126–132; as a kind of flesh, 133;
Jonas, Hans, 64, 293n.50 and the life process, 62–64, 66, 129–130;
Jones, Ken, 182, 190, 245, 252n.44, 315n.156 and oral peoples, 130–131; against post-
Jung, Carl, 4, 10, 40–41, 102, 114 modern view of, 63–64, 127, 129–131;
returning, to the natural world, 131–132,
235
Lasch, Christopher, 20, 118, 180, 181
K Lauderdale paradox, 238
Kahn, Jr., Peter, 230 Leary, David, 131, 296n.99
Kane, Sean, 96, 100, 105, 132, 283n.81 Leblow, Victor, 167
Kanner, Allen, 22, 40, 200, 255n.76, 290n.9 LeGuin, Ursula, 179
Kaplan, Rachel and Stephen, 32, 33 Leiss, William, 158, 168, 276n.163, 307n.20;
Karma, 103, 112 on commodity fetishism, 166
Kasser, Tim, 200 Levin, David, 38, 53, 87, 114, 115, 246,
Kaza, Stephanie, 288n.150 260n.30, 285n.111
Kellert, Stephen, 230 Levine, Stephen, 135
Kepner, James, 190, 271n.83 Lewis, Martin, 171
Kerényi, Karl, 291n.33 Lewontin, Richard, 215, 323–324n.56
Kidner, David, 7, 32, 210–211, 221, 228, 242 Levins, Richard, 215, 323–324n.56
Kierkegaard, Søren, 115, 263n.78 Leopold, Aldo, 4–5, 16
Kimball, Solon, 306n.237 Liedloff, Jean, 142, 143, 155, 170
King, Ynestra, 89 Life process, 51–52, 81; all meaning grounded
Kinship, 95, 96, 99, 111, 121, 123, 138–139, in, 63; non-relativity of, 62; and human
147, 186, 292n.43, 303n.203; as a psychology, 70–72, 75, 76, 80–82, 83, 153;
­continuum, 95 social antagonism toward, xvii, 71–72, 84,
Kleinman, Arthur, 259n.29 88; an ultimate concern, 86
Koger, Susan, 203–204, 219, 320–321n.23, Lifton, Robert J., 14
321n.27, 322n.33 Limits, 24–25, 92, 118–119, 120, 122, 124,
Kohák, Erazim, 43, 45, 118, 120, 263n.77, 153, 163, 168, 290n.9
291n.24 Lincoln, Yvonna, 31
Kornfield, Jack, 109, 114, 274n.144 Little, Meredith, 186–187
Kovel, Joel, 20, 21, 22, 25, 34, 38, 83, 85, Livingston, John, 29, 30, 522–53, 64, 86, 94,
96, 97, 98, 114, 125, 159, 165, 167, 170, 100, 103, 173, 284n.106
191, 214, 248, 255–256n.86, 257n.103, Lopez, Barry, 88, 96, 101, 135

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 382 Index

Lorde, Audre, xv, 88, 115, 185 Myers, Gene, 140, 144–145, 146, 147, 202,
Loss, a defining experience for ecopsychology, 231
14, 20, 36–37, 41–42, 47, 49, 83, 114, 119, Myokyo-ni, Venerable, 189
126, 136–137, 172, 187, 191, 192, 280n.41 Myth, Mythology, 96, 101, 132, 151, 175–176,
Louv, Richard, 216, 220 187; Christian, 156–157; creative,
Love, 99; romantic, 169 317n.174; of progress, 175–176; of regen-
Löwy, Michael, 245 eration through violence, 189
Loy, David, 97, 168, 176
Luddism, 157, 160

N
Nabhan, Gary Paul, 144
M Naess, Arne, 17, 254n.65, 254n.73
Macmurray, J., 284n.97 Narcissism, relation to ecological crisis, 85–86,
Macy, Joanna, 14–16, 42, 46, 183, 190, 226, 88, 119, 124, 290n.9
245 Naturalism, 24–25, 118
Magdoff, Fred, 199 Naturalistic psychology. See Ecopsychology,
Mahler, Margaret, 123 naturalistically conceived
Martin, Calvin, 46, 106, 111, 131–132, 146 Nature: as birth, 99–101; claims/demands of,
Martín-Baró, Ignacio, 221 24–25, 26; as desire, 113–115, 125; calls for
Marx, Karl, Marxism, 20, 83, 84, 156, a respectful attitude, 113; as dharma, 101,
161, 212, 243, 244, 247–248, 319n.9, 103–104; domination of, 25, 30, 84–85,
333–334n.179, 334n.195, 336n.231 87–89, 98, 123; in economic theory, 168; as
Masterson, James, 177 Eros, 114–115, 125; as essential quality or
Mathiessen, Peter, 41, 112, 119, 288n.142 order, 103–110; human, 34–35, 60, 94–116
May, Rollo, 278n.3 passim, 125, 155, 158, 168, 284–285n.107,
Mbuti people, 123–125 285n.111, 287n.131, 289n.166; humans as
McKibben, Bill, 162 servants of, 119, 161, 163, 187–188, 193; as
McLaughlin, Andrew, 256n.91 matter of interpretation, 93–94, 168,
Meade, Michael, 152 172–173; as life force or sacred power,
Meaning, 35, 45, 92, 108, 121, 139, 165, 169; 110–116; mysteriousness of, 100–101;
grounded in life not just language, 38, 60, ­natural scientific disclosure of, 31–34, 45, 92,
62–64, 69, 127, 129–130, 132, 271n.84; as 163, 203–204, 211, 218–219, 258–259n.26,
felt or experienced, 56–58; invisibility of, 58 266nn. 99, 100, 104, 278–279n.13,
Meditation, 112–113, 177–178, 288n.148 298n.123, 323–324n.56; as the natural
Melamed, Elissa, 14 world, 94–103; as otherness, 95, 101–103;
“Mental health” oppression, 159–160 as phusis or physis, 99, 124, 163, 283–284n.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 11–12, 31, 38, 58, 64, 96; poetry of, 105, 284nn. 97, 99, 103;
78, 82, 107, 127, 128–130, 132, 133–134, as ­resource 162–163; as a radical concept,
138, 213, 230, 251n.37, 252n.40, 262n.59, 25, 93; revolt of, 158–160, 188, 307n.20;
294nn. 72, 80, 296n.109, 297nn. 112–114, second, 110, 175; as a social place, 122,
301n.163 125–126, 132, 138, 146, 147, 303n.195;
Metaphor, 44, 265n.92 and spirit, 96–99; ­transhistorical, 107–109,
Midgely, Mary, 120, 312n.105 140, 173, 174, 175, 285nn. 111, 119
Mies, Maria, 301n.161 Naturism, 73
Miller, Alice, 76 Navajo people, 288n.145
Mind (charity), 222 Needs, discovery of, 107–109, 144, 150–151,
Monbiot, George, 326n.93 310n.72
Muir, John, 18 Nelson, Richard, 37, 41, 94, 96, 111, 282n.75,
Mumford, Lewis, 321n.31 312n.102

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 Index 383

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 153 Pollan, Michael, 240, 335n.200

Nihilism, 87–88, 92, 108 Polster, Irving and Miriam, 137
Noble, David, 156, 160, 276n.155 Pragmatism, 215, 218–219, 222
Nonnekes, Paul, 301n.163 Prilelltensky, Isaac, 20, 181
Nordhaus, Ted, 2217 Progress, technological and economic, 155–161;
Normalcy, pathology of, 72, 272n.92 irrationality of, 155–156, 157, 158–160,
Nostalgia, charge of, 42, 140, 175, 169, 175; as modern myth, 175–176; not
263–264n.78 natural but political, 175
Projection. See Imagination
Psyche-society dialectic, 21–22, 83, 180–185,
235–238
O Psychiatry/Psychology, criticisms of mainstream,
Objectivism, 32, 93, 102, 258n.17; xii–xiv, 20–23, 30–31, 32, 34, 46, 140,
route out of, 36 144–145, 159–160, 259–261nn. 29–34,
Object relations, 292n.40 263n.66
O’Connor, James, 198, 247, 334n.195, Pueblo people, 147
335n.210 Pyle, Robert Michael, 172
O’Keeffe, Georgia, 36
Old Torlino, 126
One flesh, principle of, 132–139, 141, 172, 187
Ong, Aihwa, 160 R
Ong, Walter, 130–131, 295n.87, 295n.93 Radical, Radical Ecology, xiv, 17–23, 25–27,
Opotow, Susan, 220 41, 197–198, 199, 205, 210–211, 212, 213,
Oppression, psychological dynamics of, 216–219, 221, 224
184–185 Ram Dass, 191
Räthzel, Nora, 218
Realism, plural, 93, 278–279n.13,
298–299n.130
P Reality: economization of, 84–87, 170,
Pain for the world, 14–15 275n.153; fantasy as a diminishment of,
Parkes, Graham, 92 77–78, 135–136, 273n.112; given in con-
Perls, Fritz, 67, 69, 76, 77, 78, 278n.3, 290n.17 tact with the wide world, 66, 123, 173–174,
Perls, Laura, 303n.196 299n.130; phenomenological ontology, 101;
Personification, indigenous to the psyche, 102 is psychological through and through, 9–12,
Phenomenology: defined, 10–11, 262n.59, 251n.37, 252n.43; technologizing of, 156;
324n.58; philosophical source of ecopsy- virtual, 173
chology, ix–xi; phenomenological ontology, Reason, 51, 54, 268n.17
101 Reevaluation Counseling, 182–185, 190,
Piaget, Jean, 145, 231–232, 303n.196 220n.132, 285–286n.120
Piccone, Paul, 325n.78 Reich, Wilhelm, 308–309n.40
Place, 144, 179–180 Relativism, 63, 93, 270n.53
Plato, 59 Reser, Joseph, 202–203, 219
Play, 115, 142, 144, 145–147 Rhetoric, 43–44; and hermeneutics, 45;
Plotkin, Bill, 231, 331n.155 of advertising, 170
Plumwood, Val, 200n.71 Ricoeur, Paul, 35, 122, 235n.166
Poetizing, Poetry, 44, 46–47, 105–106, 129, Rifkin, Jeremy, 275–276n.155
132, 265n.91, 324n.58 Rightness, 62
Politics, experiential. See Ecopsychology, as Rilke, Rainer Maria, 134
a psychologically/experientially based Rinzler, Deborah, 82, 88
­ecological politics Rites, wilderness, 150–153, 186–187

Index.indd 383 09/11/12 1:45 AM

 384 Index

Rodman, John, 25, 30, 86, 117, 175 Shiva, Vandana, 84, 246
Rogers, Carl, 70, 76 Shulman, Helene, 208–209, 221
Rogers, Ray, 41, 49, 84, 160, 171 Singing the world, principle of, 126–132, 141,
Romanticism, eco-, 227–232. See also 149, 187
Nostalgia, charge of Sloan, Todd, 323n.53
Romanyshyn, Robert, 59, 136, 206–207, Slotkin, Richard, 189
324n.58 Smith, Adam, 244
Rorty, Richard, 36, 37–38 Snell, Bruno, 134
Roseman, Marina, 293n.62 Snyder, Gary, 17, 46, 93, 99, 116, 117, 120,
Roszak, Theodore, 4, 15, 22, 54, 136, 224, 243, 138, 186, 254n.73, 267–268n.9, 287n.131,
256n.98, 268n.16, 318–319n.2 299n.139, 332n.172
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 37 Sobel, David, 231
Rowe, Stan, 24, 111 Social ecology, 19
Russell, Constance, 185–186 Sociation, 125, 151, 191, 318n.192
Society of nature, 241–243, 335n.202.
See also Nature, as a social place
Socolow, Robert, 29
S Soul of the world, 10, 206
Sachs, Wolfgang, 301n.160 Soule, Renée, 252n.44, 255n.76
Salleh, Ariel, 19, 242, 243 Spinosa, Charles, 209
Sanders, Barry, 138 Spirituality, 97–99, 114, 124–125, 126,
Santayana, George, 136 149–153, 168–169, 190–191
Sanua, Victor, 259n.29 Splitting, 9, 123, 125, 139, 145, 292n.48
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 95, 99, 267n.9, 280n.26 Steiner, George, 10
Sass, Louis, 224 Stettbacher, Konrad, 24, 88
Saunders, Carol, 202 Storr, Anthony, 7
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 128 Suffering, 70–82, 188–192; bearing, as a
Scheff, Thomas, 108, 285n.120 central ecopsychological principle, 189;
Schizophrenia, 34, 97, 259–260nn. 29–31 capitalist exploitation of, 160, 165–169,
School of lost Borders, 186 245, 336n.220; conflict with organismic
Science. See Nature, natural scientific disclosure of self, 76–78; domination of nature as
Seamon, David, 258n.19 (backward) solution for, 156–157, 158,
Searles, Harold F., 3, 7–8, 16, 123, 139, 143, 160, 188, 192; fearful narrowing of experi-
231, 233 ence, 74–76; Freudian view of, 157–158;
Seligman, Martin, 221 given in the human situation, 71; as a life
Sendivogius, 10 compass, 115, 155, 189; generated in social
Sessions, George, 17, 37 antagonism toward life, 71, 72–73; points
Shame, 78–80, 85, 97, 99, 124, 126, 150, us to our nature, 108–109; involves the
160, 168, 169, 185, 191, 273n.120; in the whole social field, 78–79, 112, 126; and the
­creation of gender, 79–80, 305n.224 pattern of technology, 162–165; veiled by
Shavano Institute, 15 ideology, 161
Sheehan, Thomas, 268–269n.26 Superego, 77, 79, 159
Shellenberger, Michael, 217 Suzuki, D.T., 280n.31
Shelley, Percy, 115 Symbol, 56–58
Shenandoah, Leon, 284n.107
Shepard, Paul, 3, 4, 54, 67, 96, 109, 118–119,
121, 134, 138, 163, 172, 173, 178, 192,
230–231, 271n.77, 286n.120; theory of T
normative psychogenesis, 8–9, 139–140, Taoism, 119
141, 142, 145, 146, 151, 301n.161, Taylor, Charles, 24, 174, 265n.88
303n.188 Techne, 106, 120, 163

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 Index 385

Technology, modern, 106, 118; and ­capitalism, W

156, 253n.7, 310n.61; as a ­destructive Warner, Richard, 259n.29
mode of revealing, 163; history of, Watkins, Mary, 208–209, 221, 232, 327n.109
156–157; pattern of, 161–165; and Watts, Alan, 59
­politics, 315n.155; technosalvationism, Weil, Simone, 93
157, 160, 192 Welwood, John, 26
Television, 170–171 West, Ellen, 77
Temiar people, 293n.62 Wheeler, Gordon, 25, 67, 79
Teo, Thomas, 204 Wilber, Ken, 201, 224–239, 327–328n.121,
Thomashow, Mitchell, 15 328n.126, 328–329n.134, 329nn. 137,
Thompson, William Irwin, 172, 176, 313n.116 139, 330nn. 143, 145, 147, 332n.173,
Thornton, James, 253n.52 333nn. 175, 179, 334n.184
Transpersonal ecology. See Fox, Warwick Williams, Terry Tempest, 115
Transpersonal psychology, 18 Wilson, E. O., 172
Trauma, xiii, 52, 73, 76, 98, 108, 143, 182, Winnicott, D. W., 115, 124, 142, 284n.99,
189, 190, 260–261n.34, 286n.122 292n.43, 302n.181
Trimble, Stephen, 144 Winter, Deborah, 203–204, 219, 320–321n.23,
Turnbull, Colin, 123, 126, 147–148, 150 321n.27, 322n.33
Worldliness of human existence, 10–12, 64–65,
68–69, 78, 80, 122, 134–135, 136–137,
142, 164–165, 171, 172, 173–174,
U 232–235, 273n.112. See also Eve-widening
Unconscious: ecological, 4, 136–137; repressed, spheres, principle of
80–82, 83, 136 Worster, Donald, 118
Uzzell, David, 218 Wright, James, 279n.19

V Y
Van den Berg, J. H., 36, 37, 78 York, Richard, 212, 217, 219
Veitch, Russell, 33
Violence, xiv, 25, 55, 81, 84–85, 88, 92–93,
150, 163, 168, 172; domestic, 143,
251–305n.224; strategy of, 189–190 Z
Vision questing, 13 Zimmerman, Michael, 201, 224–239, 254n.73,
Void, the, 97–98, 121, 124, 189, 293n.50, 328n.124, 329–330n.143, 332n.173,
308n.31; and the twin terrors, 98, 125 333n.175
Vycinas, Vincent, 284n.96 Zwicky, Jan, 322n.39

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Index.indd 386 09/11/12 1:45 AM
PSYCHOLOGY / ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Personal in its style yet radical in its vision, Radical Ecopsychology, Second
Edition offers an original introduction to ecopsychology—an emerging field
that ties the human mind to the natural world. In order for ecopsychology
to be a force for social change, Andy Fisher insists it must become a more
comprehensive and critical undertaking. Drawing masterfully from humanistic
psychology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, radical ecology, nature writing, and
critical theory, he develops a compelling account of how the human psyche
still belongs to nature. This daring and innovative book proposes a psychology
that will serve all life, providing a solid base not only for ecopsychological
practice, but also for a critical theory of modern society. In this second edition,
Fisher includes a new preface, a new section looking back at the development
of the field since the book’s initial publication a decade ago, and a look at the
challenges that lie ahead.

Praise for the First Edition

“…a provocative look at the philosophical concepts (and conceits) that underlie
what truly is a radical new form of social thought.” — Utne

Andy Fisher is a psychotherapist in private practice.

A volume in the SUNY series in Radical Social and Political Theory

Roger S. Gottlieb, editor

State University of
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu