Holding and Being Held: Group work and Eco-anxiety
This article reviews the limits of individual psychotherapy’s capacity to contain the distress brought into the consulting room from the effects of climate shocks. It focuses on the psychological work involved in group work to think the unthinkable and be with the emotional impact of ecological troubles. It explores the liminal thresholds of culture change and its unexpected openings to rethinking the place of humans on earth. It draws on examples from the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), which aims to support psychotherapists working with climate distress and its cultural expressions.
Ideas explored include: the end of progress; ecoanxiety; Winnicott’s notion of holding and Bion’s containing; Optimal Failure; Living Thought; sixth mass extinction; cultural threshold; Gaia’s intrusion.
Practices explored include: Negative Capability; Group Dialogue; Dream Matrix; Climate Aware group work.
Introduction
Climate psychology is concerned with understanding the non-rational dimensions of our collective paralysis in the face of a worsening climate crisis. If we humans simply responded to facts and evidence in rational ways then the gravity of our situation would have led to radical action. Although there are many individual actions and community attempts to repair damage, nations carry on with business as usual. This article seeks to understand the powerful role that the cultural unconscious plays in shaping the way we experience the world.
Learning how to think into the unthought penumbra of human awareness and bear discomfort, invites a different psychology – one that includes a planetary awareness. The fractured instability of our current environmental, social, economic and cultural world reflects the shift from the stable period of the Holocene to chaotic systems that have been named as the Anthropocene. Climate psychology is not simply a psychology to explain why climate science is not accepted but one which attends to the instability of cultural transition.
Many psychotherapists coming to CPA report the struggle with holding clients’/patients’ distress about the climate crisis. Most have at least one person in their practice, whose sessions are particularly demanding. They might even dread their arrival. This can also be the case with ecoanxiety. Some psychotherapists reported not having these issues presented at all and wondered what unconscious messages they were giving to avoid this difficult material. In this article I want to suggest that this is much less a personal issue with the capacity of the psychotherapist and more to do with the functional limits of individual psychotherapy itself.
Even where the psychotherapist treats the cell of their consulting room as part of a larger interconnected organism with semi-permeable walls to the external environment, there are constraining limits in one-to-one meetings. What participants in CPA groups such as Climate Cafes appreciate greatly, is being witnessed and affirmed by others in the group who share their distress. While psychotherapists can and do witness the distress of patients with great empathy and compassion, it is seldom a mutual or reciprocal process. The structural arrangement of most paid psychotherapy creates an unequal differentiation. The client’s dependency, recognised in transference or not, means they do not want to harm the psychotherapist, just as an infant may fear damaging the mother. The client may be as ambivalent as the psychotherapist to bring this climate distress into the consulting room. It is felt to be dangerous in its potential destructiveness. An unconscious collusive alliance can form to protect the therapeutic relationship from this danger.
It is not the failure of the practitioner to bear the emotions such as ecoanxiety, so much as the failure of the container to carry the waves of collective anxiety. Why the container fails needs re-thinking. It is not the individual or their family but the therapeutic frame itself that may be fractured. And this fracture may be apposite as the narrowness of the closed therapeutic frame limits its focus to ego-centric complaints excluding disturbance in the world. The weight of external troubles now press on the therapeutic container.
An emphasis on individual history in psychotherapy compounds the hyper-individualism of our Western culture. A client’s individual concern can exacerbate the sense of shame and guilt when they attempt to face the consequences of ecological destruction. Trying to make amends through recycling and not flying can add to a sense of futility. Acknowledging this political context, this article limits its focus to how a shift from individual psychotherapy to collaborative group work can provide a holding place for ecoanxiety.
Holding and Containing
The bewildering intensity of climate distress, including catastrophic fantasies of the end of our known world, is hard to stay with. Casement[i] talks of the patients need for holding or containing interchangeably in therapeutic recovery. These ideas of holding or containing stem from the work of Winnicott and Bion respectively. They offer complementary and different approaches to managing what feels like overwhelming distress. I give a brief summary below.
Winnicott[ii] thought of the psychic space between the mother and her infant as neither wholly psychological nor physical.
It is in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people–the transitional space–that intimate relationships and creativity occur.
He described this in-between space as the ‘holding environment’ which he saw developing with the maturation of the mother-infant couple. While initially the mother is highly adapted to and anticipates her infant’s needs, optimal failures occur which foster the infant’s autonomy. Extending this ‘holding environment’ to the space between the geological fault lines and the cultural ones, our present eco-psycho-social crisis could be seen as a necessary failure with possibilities for creative adaptation. This is a notion, I shall return to later.
Bion’s view is based on, but goes beyond, Klein’s idea of projective identification. The mother receives unpleasant or toxic projections from an infant, digests them so that they can be returned in a benign form. The infant internalises this experience of being contained and slowly develops their own capacity. Extending this to human-earth relationship, we can doubt if humans have, as yet, developed this wider capacity to digest the lived experience of climate-cultural rupture.
Ogden[iii] (2004) sees Bion’s approach as significantly different than that of Winnicott. He writes,
The ‘contained’, like the container, is not a static thing, but a living process that in health is continuously expanding and changing. The term refers to thoughts (in the broadest sense of the word) and feelings that are in the process of being derived from one’s lived emotional experience. While conscious and preconscious thoughts and feelings constitute aspects of the contained, Bion’s notion of the contained places primary emphasis on unconscious thoughts.
Bion’s container-contained is centrally concerned with the processing of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. I relate this to human culture being in a transitional process of digesting difficult part unconscious feelings which, if contained, could open new ways of perceiving humanity’s place in the world. It holds the possibility of finding emotionally significant meaning where previously the world situation seemed pointless.
Bion is primarily concerned with becoming aware of preconscious or unconscious feelings which previously could not be ‘thought’. Like the experiences of ecoanxiety described above, such unthought emotional experiences are hard to digest. In a cultural context, these anxieties are threatening to the stable beliefs and norms of western society, especially to its guiding myth of progress.
How can such collective dangers be sufficiently contained to be recognised in thought and not disavowed?
What if there is no hope of things getting better?
What if my children rather than inheriting the potential to lead a better life, will inherit a damaged planet?
The difficulty with bearing such feelings and being able to think about them is very real. Winnicott’s acceptance of the inevitability of failure along with Bion’s depiction of digesting what was previously unconscious are useful guides for how to be with these collective troubles.
Negative Capability & Groups
While writing this article I had a dream in which a fire had mysteriously started in a large pit which contained some dead oak branches. I was worried about a cat I could see asleep on one of the branches. I, as the dreaming ego, took it upon myself to attempt to alert the cat by throwing sticks close to it. The cat very nonchalantly returned my gaze, as if to say “what’s up with you?” I was at a loss as to what to do. On reflection I recognised that the key was not so much fire nature or cat nature, intriguing though that might be, but my being at a loss.
In terms of the climate crisis, the challenge is to acknowledge our inability to manage the consequences of ecological destruction. The value of sharing failures in a culture where performativity and goal setting are standard, is counter-cultural. Making the space to tolerate frustration and failure rather than moving on with the progress allows groups the possibility to stay-with what is.
This staying-with was described by Bion, following the poet Keats, as ‘negative capability’. The negating aspect was, as Bion[iv] pointed out, to refuse the temptation of the familiar that prematurely closes off what we don’t want to see or hear. Bion[v] also warned against ‘filling the empty space’ with preconceived solutions that obstructed new thoughts. Refusing preoccupations and expectations to get somewhere or make something happen, allows us to remain present with disturbing feelings. Being faced with an unknown situation is awkward and in tolerating this, we may be able to sense, if not immediately name, a previously unrecognised ‘reality’.
The capacity to inhibit a rush to solutions pressured by performance anxiety is a negative capability. Being present to not-knowing makes space for the emergent. The discipline needed to inhibit or relinquish habitual patterns is often misunderstood. It is not inaction but a receptive attentiveness. If we stop and breathe in order to notice what is happening, space finds us. What is no longer necessary begins to fall away. In developing the discipline of not-doing what we have habitually done, we create the space for new possibilities.
Groups which hold this receptive space for emergent possibilities operate in ways to enhance negative capability. I summarise two examples below.
Group Dialogue originally formulated by theoretical physicist David Bohm[vi] is described by him as,
a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behaviour, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise. As a microcosm of the large culture, Dialogue allows a wide spectrum of possible relationships to be revealed. It can disclose the impact of society on the individual and the individual’s impact on society.
Like with the practice of negative capability, no explicit rules are followed. It is rather a creative participation between peers in an unfolding process that slows down the process of thought in order to observe it while it is actually occurring. The exploration takes place during listening to oneself as well as to others. This bi-directional listening reveals the reciprocal relation between inner and outer, individual and social environment.
Social Dreaming, invented by Gordon Lawrence[vii] is a method of social enquiry through a process of accessing the unthought known. It creates new meaning through making connections between dreams and our social context. This comes about because the dream is in a matrix owned by all present and dreams no longer belong solely to the dreamer. Gosling, Patman and Manley[viii] write,
The social dreaming matrix (SDM) is understood as being a shared liminal space in which we each, as members of the organisation, dreamers and participants in the SDM, have access to perspectives that are possible only from this liminal position. We conceive of dreams and in some cases associations to those dreams dreamt and/or associated to by participants in the SDM – as expressive of experiences in the waking world, many of which are common but not necessarily conscious.
The authors’ dream space is a form of border-lands. Their liminal is an in-between reality where boundaries no longer hold. Liminal spaces are part of unstable phenomena that pervade our current crisis as humans cross into the Anthropocene. These spaces facilitate border crossings between psyche, culture and external nature that can arouse an ecological awareness of our interdependence with other beings.
Climate Aware Groups
The impasse on collective action to change the destructive direction of most non-indigenous cultures has reached a critical point. The catastrophe is not ahead of us in some diffuse future time zone. It is present. Many climate scientists now point out that the time projected to transit to net zero emissions is longer than the activation of known climate tipping points, such as the melting of Arctic sea ice. Although many previous generations have faced catastrophic fantasies of the end of the world, the mounting evidence of the sixth mass extinction brings the reality home. According to the writer Roy Scranton[ix], with the prospect of runaway climate change, we are already living a doomed existence. Humans as a species face the prospect of dying out.
How to convey the experience of recognising humans as a vulnerable species – one threatened with extinction through its own deranged ecocide?
This is an existential dilemma unlike the loss and grief for individuals, communities or nations. The sixth mass extinction could well include the our species. It is not humans as bystanders. We are literally ‘all in it together’ whatever our privilege. Climate aware groups explore how to bear the terrifying and often disowned fears of extinction. The dawning reality of the massive destructive effect of our technical triumph is a cultural threshold. It can both trigger helplessness and also catalyse a shift towards facing the pain of a world severely damaged by our way of life.
Climate aware workshops make space for facing our human complicity with the damage to earth. In one such workshop[x], I invited participants to remember a time when they had felt unable to think of any solution to an immanent crisis – a time with no future. We dropped into the presence of the unspeakable. . . the dread . . . the void.
Strangely the sharing of these horrors touched into poignant connectedness. We were present to a falling apart together not expressible in words. A spontaneous group sculpt emerged which allowed a melding of the grief and pain bringing a transformational sense of being held.
What is at stake in perceiving a different reality? We need release from our underlying assumptions about what it means to be human and our place on this planet. An example is how anthropologist Kohn[xi] writes, in ways close to Bion’s, on thought being alive. He says,
This chapter develops the claim that all living beings, and not just humans, think, and explore another closely related claim, that all thoughts are alive. It is about “the living thought.” What does it mean to think? What does it mean to be alive? Why are these two questions related, and how does our approach to them, especially when seen in terms of the challenges of relating to other kinds of beings, change our understanding of relationality and “the human”?
If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings – means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance — emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these.
Radical thinker and anthropologist Gregory Bateson[xii] pointed out that thought is not limited to the human person but enmeshed within an entire organism-environment system. Kohn is taking this a step further to suggest that thoughts are essential to life itself. Meaning is intrinsic to sentient life and not a specialism or achievement of our species. Such a radical perspective on the place of humans within our planet, makes us participative inhabitants rather than dissociated tourists.
The conjecture of this article is that Western culture is transiting a threshold that requires relinquishing the known to step through a symbolic doorway to an emergent as yet unknown reality. Workshop experience of imagining together supports participants in a passage through a door to find new ways of feeling into the future. These doorways lead though the breaks and ruptures in our cultural garments to reveal new stories for being with our changing world.
As author and Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy[xiii] writes,
Whatever happens, this can be a moment of unparalleled awakening. We have a sense of what it means for an individual to wake up. For the collective to awaken, we cannot even imagine what it will be like. The evolutionary pressure on us now, which can feel so ghastly, pushes us toward this awakening. Life-forms have gone through periods when it must have seemed totally hopeless. For example, when oxygen was a poison, who could have imagined that life would develop the breathing apparatus to use it?”
Tales of the Unexpected: thinking the unthinkable
As Joanna Macy says, we can’t imagine in the sense of anticipate, what a cultural transformation would be like. There needs to be a rupture that opens a door we did not know was there. We did not want it to be there because it marks a seemingly catastrophic break with the expected. These terrifying but intensely potent experiences bring radically fresh perspectives for thinking the unthinkable and bearing the unbearable.
At the same time social defences and cultural complexes that maintain public norms and beliefs, operate to disallow these possibilities. These complexes function to inhibit deviation from the known including any potential intrusion. Such a planetary intrusion has been named by Stengers, philosopher of science and collaborator with Nobel awarded chemist Ilya Prigogine, as Gaia. In the world that predatory capitalism has made for us, Gaia names the power that upsets and destabilises this world.
Isabelle Stengers[xiv] writes,
The intrusion of this type of transcendence, which I am calling Gaia, makes a major unknown, which is here to stay, exist at the heart of our lives. This is perhaps what is most difficult to conceptualize: no future can be foreseen in which she will give back to us the liberty of ignoring her. It is not a matter of a “bad moment that will pass,” followed by any kind of happy ending – in the shoddy sense of a “problem solved.” We are no longer authorized to forget her. We will have to go on answering for what we are undertaking in the face of an implacable being who is deaf to our justifications.
To grasp the reality of this intrusion, a destabilisation of the planet in earthquakes, wildfires, floods and hurricanes alongside cultural unravelling, is to recognise that there can be no continuation with denial. This awakening out of a stupor (into a nightmare) is exactly what Gaia’s intrusion is doing. It is painful with often tragic consequences but our human avoidance is what really brings the tragedy.
Calamities, such as the war in Ukraine, the wild fires in California and Australia, the tsunamis in Indonesia, happen increasingly often. Perhaps most pertinent was the pandemic. Despite warnings of impending disease spread, governments seemed blindly in denial. After the initial shock in the UK, a strange collective ritual gripped many streets. The Clap for Carers ritual that began in March 2020 continued for weeks creating widespread feelings of solidarity. It was an outflow of spontaneous and orchestrated gratitude to the brave but ill-equipped medical staff and key workers. How did this happen? What psychoanalyst and author, Sally Weintrobe[xv] has termed ‘The Culture of Uncare’ should have prevented it.
The function of the cultural defence of uncare is to insulate Westerners from experiencing too much anxiety and moral disquiet. It provides justifications for an inherently damaging way of living. These justifications screen out awareness of troublesome feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame. Otherwise, how would we live knowing that we are implicated with our culture’s exploitative destruction of the planet’s ecology?
During the pandemic, the anxiety could easily have led to widespread panic and hostility but this heart-warming celebration of local heroes opened up a public space to show care and concern. Winnicott[xvi] termed a ‘Capacity for Concern’ as when a child becomes aware of their potential to hurt and seeks to mend the damage. He says, “Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels and accepts responsibility.” Extending this to the pandemic, it marks the transformation of guilt we may have felt about self-protection into a sense of responsibility for others.
I emphasise this as an example of how social ‘catastrophes’ can evoke unexpected eruptions of human care and empathy which break through defences. Gaia’s intrusion is deeply destabilising and it might awaken sufficient human concern for mending the damage to our home planet.
Ending Thoughts: what it means to be human
What it means to be human changes with different civilisations and cultures. If there are human descendants left in our planet’s future, how might they look back at our present Western culture? A political response might frame us as violent liars and exploiters who left a legacy of concrete and plastic remains. A more psychological perspective would emphasise us as illusionists and deceivers who created socially networked bubbles offering false hope or even a constructed False World. This world is the neoliberal market of infinite growth on a finite planet. With increasingly fewer peoples and lands to exploit, this must collapse.
This article has framed our present climate crisis as an existential dilemma which threatens the core of Western privilege and our species survival. The challenge is to recognise that we Western humans are at an end of a cycle, a nadir of Gaian intrusion. The pivotal turning point is in acknowledging the failure to manage – a sinking feeling of unravelling. This failure opens a previously unrecognised door – a threshold of fear and excitement. In this article I have explored how passage through this cultural threshold involves facing into the discomfort of not knowing what to do . . .not knowing being vulnerable feeling hopeless.
In many myths and fairy stories, the humility of the lost, vulnerable protagonist is what evokes surprising and powerful support from elemental allies – or previously unconscious aspects of the psyche. Other beings in nature come to the rescue when humans relinquish their superior separateness. The previously unseen door suddenly appears, evoking imaginal inspiration. And this happens at just the moment of apparent hopelessness.
I have attempted to reveal a little of the work in groups that supports staying with cultural troubles and opening unseen doors. The beauty of group meetings is that they can make space for unexpected living thoughts. By being present in ways that challenge participants’ norms, new experience and fresh learning become possible. Because of their inherent permeability, groups can be attuned to collective thresholds and when this liminal experience is contained, operate as cells of cultural transformation.
References
[i] Casement, P. (1985) On Learning from the Patient. London: Routledge
[ii] Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Int J of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89–97
[iii] Ogden, T (2004) On holding and containing, being and dreaming Int J Psychoanalysis:85:.1349-64
[iv] Bion, W.R. (1978, 9) Four Discussions with W.R. Bion. Strath Tay, Perthshire: Clunie Press
[v] Bion, W.R. (1991,578) A Memoir of the Future. London: Karnac Books.
[vi] Bohm, D, Factor, D Garrett, P. (1991) http://www.david-bohm.net/dialogue/dialogue_proposal.html
[vii] Lawrence, G. (2005) Introduction to Social Dreaming. London: Karnac
[viii] Social Dreaming as liminal psychic space (2105) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289470156_
[ix] Scranton, R. (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights Pub
[xi] Kohn, E. (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. London: UCLA press
[xii] Bateson, G (1973) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Granada
[xiii] Joanna Macy Letters 2005
[xiv] http://modesofexistence.org/isabelle-stengers-the-intrusion-of-gaia/
[xv] Weintrobe, S. (2021) Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. London: Bloomsbury
[xvi] Winnicott, D.W.(1984,72) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Routledge
Chris Robertson has been a psychotherapist since 1978. He is the ex-CPA Chair and co-founder of Re-Vision psychotherapy training. He is co-author Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death (2022) and contributed the chapter Culture Crisis: a loss of Soul in Depth Psychology and Climate Change (2020) www.culture-crisis.net