Psychological insights on discussing societal disruption and collapse

As the impacts of climate change grow in number and severity, so climate distress is increasing around the world and becoming a major issue for psychologists, as both individuals and professionals. Increasing numbers of people assess that the damage that is forthcoming because of existing trajectories of atmospheric heating will lead to massive disruption and ultimate collapse of societies around the world. Some such people have been grouping together to share ideas on the implications for the rest of their lives. Many are using the concept and framework of “Deep Adaptation” to organise their sense making and actions. Their existence and ideas have led to strong criticisms from some commentators and scientists, who argue it is not correct or helpful to discuss collapse risk and readiness. This paper explores the reasons why publicly discussing anticipation of collapse has become helpful, and how criticisms of it are likely involving forms of ‘experiential avoidance’. The problematic objectification of people for ‘doomism’ is explained, as well as the antecedents of authoritarianism that may be emerging in the criticisms of Deep Adaptation. Therefore, a case is made for how psychotherapists and psychologists can help people, including scholars, understand how their aversion to the topic of collapse — and the emotions associated with it — could be preventing dialogue and wise action at this crucial time for humanity.

In person online

During the 2020 lockdown in response to COVID-19, students in the Master of Psychotherapy at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) were required to rapidly move their clinical work online. We surveyed these students about their experience of working clinically online. We used a mixed-methods approach and analysed qualitative data using grounded theory methods. Students found the move online difficult, with technological challenges, the loss of a professional clinical space, and having to establish and maintain the therapeutic alliance in the unfamiliar online setting. They showed a strong preference for in-person clinical work, along with scepticism about the efficacy of online therapy, though some acknowledged its convenience and others its currency and relevance. Most expressed a need for more specific training in online therapy. Students rated their technological skill level higher than their levels of interest in online communication. This suggests that preferences, rather than technical skill, influenced their hesitancy for working clinically online. While online therapy can impose increased strain on clinicians and directly impact their capacity to manage online clinical work, the literature finds strong and consistent evidence that online therapy has equivalent outcomes to in-person therapy. There is significant emphasis in the literature on the disjunct between the outcomes evidence and therapist expectations. This is modified somewhat by training and experience in online therapy. We recommend that research- active psychotherapists engage actively and collaboratively with the profession, through professional bodies, to encourage research-informed professional development and practice for clinicians; and that further research is conducted into effective strategies for training in online clinical delivery.

On knowing who you are and who you are from

Engaging with poetic inquiry as a way of being and knowing, the author uses autoethnography and poetry to explore identity and to lay open the ideas of self in relation to culture and biculturalism. In this paper the author explores her immediate Western cultural contextual understandings in relation to the ancestral, historical context that has shaped her, and how these might be revealed in the bicultural context of Aotearoa-New Zealand. The invitation to deepen these understandings begins with her encounters with te Ao Māori. The paper and the poems unfold how mātauranga Māori might foster an expanded horizon such that the author can no longer consider her Pākehā (non-indigenous) ‘self’ an isolated ‘I’, but rather as deeply embedded in the world. The kōrero tracks her shift to consider herself in relationship to her ancestors (whakapapa) and her place(s) in the world (tūrangawaewae) where she is most connected to those ancestors and the earth. Supporting and woven throughout the text is the spine of a poem. Written over the course of a decade the poem, Pepeha, continues to grow and evolve as the writer’s understandings change and develop.

Psychotherapy for end times

The broken connections between us and nature have left us feeling homeless in a world not only imperiled by multiple ecological crises and their political, economic, medical and social consequences, but also orphaned by the increasing turn to the allures of the digital world with its loss of place and embodied presence. In this context, this essay proposes that psychotherapy can be a place for homecoming in a fractured world. Exploring the key role of the grieving process in homecoming, I draw on my work in Jungian psychology, phenomenology, poetry and storytelling to show that our engaged, embodied presence with nature can re-mind us of the miracles in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and can open our hearts to the wonder, mystery, beauty and sacred dimensions of human life.

An 89 year old goes to hospital (with thanks to John Bowlby, 1969)

In this reflection on living, dying and ageing, the author explores her encounter with different aspects of herself and others, evoked by a recent visit to hospital.

The responsibility of communicating difficult truths about climate influenced societal disruption and collapse

This paper presents a review of psychology research that can help people begin to assess the different ways they can responsibly support each other to talk about their thoughts and feelings on their perceptions of societal disruption and collapse, at home and abroad, due to environmental and climate change. It includes a summary of a review of published studies in psychology on matters of anticipating difficult futures, including vulnerability, disruption, disaster, suffering and mortality. The claims by both specialists and non- specialists that collapse anticipation is necessarily harmful to mental health and social engagement is shown to be theoretically and empirically weak. Instead, the research suggests we engage each other on this upsetting topic to promote coping. It highlights the potential for that engagement to support people with processing difficult emotions and thus finding more pro-social and pro-environmental ways of responding to societal disturbances.

Thinking and not being able to think

In this paper I draw on valuable perspectives from a range of psychoanalysts in the British psychoanalytic tradition to understand a particular transference-countertransference dynamic, namely one in which the therapist is rendered unable to think. I explore what makes the capacity to think possible and what gets in the way of thinking.

Editorial

Each paper, despite considerable differences in approach and topic, invites the reader to explore how emotional honesty, no matter how painful, might allow in each of us greater creativity, as we face the losses, terrors and potentials that lie ahead and before us, clinically, and in our lives. We hope the combination of articles in this issue proves enriching for readers, particularly during these times of considerable disturbance and ongoing grief.

Editorial

Editorial

The Assembly of a Criminal Self

Beginning with the experience of working with men in prison and others who have considerable prison experience, all of whom have long criminal histories, and considering Aotearoa’s relatively high rate of imprisonment, particularly of indigenous people, this paper attempts to describe a theory of self as a performative assembly, rather than as a developmental achievement, which is the dominant view in psychotherapy. In doing so, a brief history of the self from the beginning of the 20th century is presented, illustrating how the self changes, not just in an individual subjectivity, but between eras in the history of Western society. This perspective is used to understand how a “criminal self” might develop as a product of incarceration and as a natural extension of the self in the neoliberal era, and why it might prove resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Rose, and Butler, among others, the concept of “intoxicating performativity” is introduced. The role of anger as an antidote to fragmentation is explored. Some thoughts are added about why indigenous people are overrepresented in prison compared to the population at large.