Book Description

The Disseminated Self: Ecosystem Perspective and Metapsychology explores attitudes to climate change and ecological disaster from a psychoanalytic perspective. The author examines the concept of Self, how this can be broad enough to encompass our world as well as just our own bodies and why in some cases this still does not allow us to recognize and act on the threat to the self of climate disaster. Drawing on the work of Freud and Winnicott, and examining the place of destructiveness in psychoanalysis and in everyday life, this books offers a fresh perspective on the climate change debate. This book broadens psychoanalytic thinking in order to address both individual and societal issues facing the ecosystem disaster. It also develops a complementary psychoanalytic perspective in considering the psychotherapeutic process, with emphasis on the mobilizing and integrative effects of topic translations in mental functioning. Finally, it explores heuristic perspectives for multidisciplinary, comprehensive approaches to human phenomena. Translated into English for the first time, The Disseminated Self uniquely draws on the French psychoanalytic traditions, and will be of great interest to the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, as well as any with an interest in climate change and the relationship between Man and the environment.