http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/roszak.htm
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore echo-psychology. With me for the first of a three part series is Dr. Theodore Roszak, a professor of history at California State University at Hayward, a leading social critic and an author of numerous books including The Making of a Counterculture, Where the Wasteland Ends, Person, Planet, and most recently, The Voice of the Earth. Welcome Ted.
TR: Good to be here Jeff.
JM: It's a pleasure to be with you. In your book The Voice of the Earth, you outline what hopefully will become an entirely new discipline which you call eco-psychology. I think the best way to introduce our viewers to this subject is to talk about what psychology has been up until now. And I think maybe the best place to start would be with Freud himself who was the founder of psychotherapy.
TR: That's where I decided to start the examination of the psychiatric mainstream. It provides a good baseline. As Freud, whatever else has to be questioned and revised his work as most of the important questions. And even though I disagree with many answers he came up with, I thought the questions where well worth addressing. And so I used Freud and his influence on later figures, positive or negative, as a starting point for a re-examination and a revisioning of the psychiatric tradition in the modern Western world.
JM: Well, one of the issues that Freud did address was the environment itself in some very limited sense wasn't it?
TR: Freud asked a question that was a pregnant question, an important one: What is the relationship of the human psyche to nature in general and to the universe at large? The question you would think every psychiatrist would want to address at some point. It's the big question-- how does the psyche connect with anything outside of the psyche in nature. Freud thought of himself as a scientist examining a scientific material called the human psyche, even though others in psychology think that he indulged in a lot of abstractions about the id and the ego and the super ego and so on. Freud himself thought he was a good solid materialistic scientist studying quite objectively a material called the psyche. When he asked the question "How does the psyche connects with nature at large," he came up with a very negative assessment. That is, he was convinced the human mind, the psyche, and life in general was a freakish development in the universe. And that decision on Freud's part haunts the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy down to the present day. And it has led to the assumption that you can treat the psyche in isolation from the natural environment because there's no significant, meaningful, human connection. Freud went so far as to regard the human mind as freakish, as purely accidental and perhaps not natural in the sense that it would someday give a return to the unconscious state, to the inert state. Now the problem with that is that it has left us with a severely under-dimensioned psychology, a psychology in which the human mind does not connect with the natural environment. And it is therefore treated wholly within a social context, a family context, perhaps a very personal context but without any outreach to the world beyond -- the non-human world -- that surrounds us out of which we evolved.
JM: And I suppose the larger significance of this is that it's not just Freud. But he was in fact representing what was a mainstream opinion at the time he wrote at the end of the last century, one that was widely shared and is still influential in our culture.
TR: Well, I concluded that Freud's influence in this respect has been absolutely decisive. Jung, his great disciple tried to find his way around this position Freud had adopted and tried to find a more religious, a more spiritual interpretation of the psyche, which is one of the reasons Freud and Jung fell out with one another. Most other followers of Freud and the schools that followed the post-Freudians simply assumed that Freud was correct about the connection between the psyche and the natural environment. The result of this has been is that if you look at psychiatric literature as a whole, there's almost no mention in it of the non-human world, as if it just doesn't matter. Indeed you find extreme examples of this in a development following World War 2-- existential therapy for example-- it is simply assumed that human beings exist in the condition of alienation from nature. Indeed that's the key problem that you have to address yourself too: Our profound alienation as human being in an alien universe. Well, I decided to go back beyond Freud and then to place his work within a larger framework of spiritual healing, psychotherapy in the most general sense of the term because if you look beyond the modern, Western schools of psychiatry, you find that in traditional societies among primary people, the people we once used to call primitives, that it is understood that sanity and madness have to be defined always in relationship to the natural habitat; and that indeed to a very large extent, madness is understood to be an imbalance between the individual and the natural environment or between an entire tribe or a people and its natural environment. That's a much larger conception of what sanity and madness are. And so my feeling is that the indigenous cultures have a lot to offer our understanding of sanity and madness in this one significant respect-- that there has to be a balance between the psyche and the natural world around us. That I think has profound ecological implications.
JM: Well, one of the controversial issues of modern psychiatry and psychology is the whole issue of the social system itself: What happens when the social system is mad or insane?
TR: Yes, Freud also addressed himself to this issue asking the question, how do we define madness? If we decide, if we suspect that an entire culture may be embedded in what he called "collusive madness" or "communal neurosis." Where does the therapist then look for a baseline to define sanity and madness? Freud raised this issue, but he never came up with a successful answer to it. Later schools like radical therapists have. They have called into question the existing social definition of madness and sanity in ways that have profound social implications. Perhaps an entire society is mad, in which case you don't simply want to adjust people back into another condition of madness. The way in which I take this issue up is to suggest that there is a madness involved in urban industrial society that has to do with our lack of balance and integration with the natural environment and that this might be an interesting baseline to use for the definition of sanity as we move into the next century. That is, we need to recapture of being embedded in nature, being in the condition of reciprocity with nature that you do find in traditional forms of healing. I don't think we can simply adopt any other culture's conception of sanity and madness. We have to work out our own. And that I want to suggest is as much a job of the ecologist as it is of the therapist. So eco-psychology is the term I've used to try to define a common ground between two fields that have so far not been on speaking terms. Psychologists on the one side and ecologists on the other. Psychology needs ecology; ecology needs psychology. Ideally, you know, someday we wouldn't use a term like eco-psychology, psychology would be understood to have a ecological framework. But at this point, that is still to be worked out.
JM: At this point we have ecologists that are like profits in the wilderness, warning us that the course our civilization on a global basis is madness. That we're headed for self destruction. That what we are following are habitats.
TR: I've been concerned about the fact that many environmentalists have been sounding out very few notes on appealing to the public. They refer to fear, they're afraid of guilt, they seek to shock, they seek to shame. I understand why. The problems are urgent, and I accept the urgency of these problems. I don't question that at all. But it maybe important to ask at some point whether we've done too much of that in the environmental movement, which I consider myself to be a part of? And that perhaps we have to find other themes to introduce, other notes to sound that are more positive and more affirmative. At a certain point this becomes a challenge to the environmental movement. Do we believe that human beings are bonded to this planet in a way that would allow us to invoke trust, love, respect and reciprocity as positive motivations for becoming good environmental citizens? Or do we believe there's nothing more to fall back on than duty based upon guilt, based upon shame? Guilt and shame have their place. But an appeal that is exclusively related to guilt or to shame is, I think, at a certain point going to have detrimental effects. It's going to turn people off and it's going to sound terribly negative and challenging in that bad sense in which you confront people with a problem greater than they can take hold of. I would like to see the environmental movement ask it's self this question: Are we not bonded to this planet by something which is life enhancing and life affirming and which we can appeal to people to find within themselves a voice of the earth which speaks to them with a sense of love, respect and trust?
JM: I suppose ultimately the question is, which will be more effective. The environmentalists see that there's a job to be done and they're probably using the means that they believe to be the most effective right now. And I hear you challenging them.
TR: Well, one way to decide this is to simply recognize the truth for us to be told. To begin with we're dealing with problems that are urgent and life threatening and threatening the lives of other species beyond our own. You simply have to say that if it's true, it's true. Now in many cases we're not sure that it's true. We're troubled perhaps because of the uncertainty of the problem and we have to invoke prudence more than certainty in the matter. But in addition to that, even if the problem is an urgent one, you still at some point, I feel, connect with something more positive and affirmative in people. And I believe it's there. I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't believe it was there. So my article of faith is that at a very deep level the human psyche is grafted to the planet out of which we evolve, that there is what I call an ecological unconscious. Now whenever we invoke the unconscious, the depths of the unconscious, what we're essentially doing is pursuing a philosophical discussion of human nature. We're asking what makes people tick, what are the foundations of human behaviour?
And there's been of course a lot of speculation about that throughout psychiatric tradition. Some people find sexuality there, others find the archetypes of the high religious traditions there. I'm suggesting that at a certain level of the unconscious mind, what we find is ecological wisdom. And indeed, if that were not there, our species could not have survived and evolved as it has. Exactly what the ecological unconscious is and how it asserts itself and makes itself known, that's perhaps yet to be discovered once we attend to the problem. But I have floated this phrase, suggested this phrase as a hypothesis-- that at the lowest level, the deepest of the unconscious mind, we find a ecological unconscious deeper down even than Freud's ideas about sexuality or Jung's ideas about religious archetypes It's something that connects us intimately, companionably with the flora and fauna, mountains, rivers, the natural world around us.
JM: Well, it would seem to be a pretty logical and sensible thing when you think that we each carry within our bodies, the genetic codes that have evolved over billions of years on this planet and are applicable to all other living systems.
TR: Well, I think that's one way to look at it, you know, that we carry within ourselves this heritage which takes the form of a genetic code. And then the question is to what degree that affects the psyche. Is the psyche not itself an evolutionary phenomenon? I believe that it is. For that matter, even Freud believed that it was. In fact one of the things that made Freud feel most scientific was the degree to which he could rely upon Darwin and evolution. But Freud had a very skewed idea about Darwin and evolution. Freud was very much of a social Darwin. His image of early humanity was a primal horde made up of rapacious, savage, people, perhaps rather the Victorian vision of primitive people in darkest Africa. There's a lot more personal projection in that than real science. So Freud's use of Darwin, his use of evolution was kinked, it was distorted. But if we take the same tact that he did-- that the human psyche must have evolved out of that kind of a background and that it has behind it thousands of years of evolutionary development-- then it's reasonable to assume that it does connect in intimate and significant ways with the natural environment out of which we evolved; that that's there to be found; and that the essence of sanity in this case and all cases is tapping the deep unconscious. But the question is what do you find there? And in eco-psychology what you're looking for is our bond with the natural world.
JM: Well, of course Freud's idea of the horrors of the id, the aggressive and sexual instincts that we must protect ourselves from, might be thought of as a restatement of the theological notion of original sin that separated us from nature.
TR: There is a lot more religion, crypto religion, lingering in Freud than he himself might have admitted. Psychoanalysis is after all a kind of right of confession. Some people have said that psychoanalysis is a confessional for Protestants. And similarly his vision of the primal horde where the Oedipus complex was established comes very close to being another version of original sin.
JM: Now let's define for our viewers the Oedipus complex.
TR: Oh, it's Freud's conception that once upon a time, he thought of this quite historically he was very literal about this, the sons of the primal horde in some original caveman community rose up against a heavy father that dominated the clan and killed him and then lived in a condition of guilt and that condition is visited down through the ages and is repeated in the life history of every individual human being. It has to do with children.
As Freud saw it there's always lust for the mother being punished by the father. It's almost an article of folk-lore now to talk about it because it's been called so much into question. But it's interesting that the imagery here is all sexual and it's all very negative. It has to do with the foundations of the human mind being filled with guilt, with shame. And psychoanalysis, like confession in the Catholic church, is a matter of confessing your guilty secrets. And this is pretty much what psychiatry has become for many people. What I'm talking about is the possibility that deeper down than that... but deeper down than that there may be a reservoir of joyous, trusting, and loving connections with the natural world that can also be tapped and brought to the surface. And if we draw upon that, if we find ways to enliven that, to make that vital within the lives of people, then it may then be possible for them to become good environmental citizens in a way that is rewarding and is joyous. And that I think is a possibility the environmental movement could use for good political purposes.
JM: One of the fundamental points you seem to be making is that much of the damage that we human being are doing to our environment, to our habitat, is the result of some sort of an impulsive and obsessive need to cover some bad feelings and some guilt that has been drummed into us unnecessarily; that we don't understand that we're basically okay.
TR: Well, we're not basically okay within a urban industrial society. I mean that I think the environmental movement is exactly right. We have invented a culture which is deeply toxic in many ways. No, I'm not sure we have to strip the hole in that culture, but a lot about it has to change; has to change rapidly and radically. In fact, the amount of change that the environmental movement is demanding of all of us, that we're demanding of ourselves, that makes it urgently important to find the right approach-- the right way to address peoples so that they will bring about that. I don't think fear and guilt alone will do the job. What I'm calling an eco-psychology, and incidentally it's now becoming a movement of some importance in the therapeutic community, is a matter of asking quite honestly why people do what they do when they are behaving in an ecologically united or backward or destructive way. Ask that question quite seriously. If we are not good environmental citizens, why not? Why do we do the things we do? And eco-psychology would pay attention to that as an important way of understanding human nature. We are out of balance, out of harmony with the natural environment, why? What are the reasons for that? Too often environmentalists will identify some of these habits as simply wicked or greedy in an entirely negative. Then I suppose the approach we take is to scold people and try to talk them out of these bad habits, or lecture them or hector them or bully them out of these bad habits.
I'm suggesting that there might be another approach. And that is to find out why people are doing what they are doing. That is, if you start with a basic principle that there is an ecological unconscious that binds us or bonds us to this planet in a thoroughly, natural way. And if we are not in effect responding to that bond, then there must be a reason why. And we should ask in all sincerity why people are doing what they're doing that's ecologically negative. And then listen to their answers. With the same therapeutic sensitivity that a therapists listen when he asks a question about imbalance say in a family or a relationship. This is a relationship. It's a relationship between people and the natural environment. Why is it out of harmony? And listen closely to the answer. I think the answers might often be quite interesting.
JM: One of the things that you suggest is that Freud may have almost gotten it backwards when he talks about a primal crime against the father that perhaps the crime was against mother-- nature.
TR: Well, that's a rather lyrical way of putting it. But it's true. I mean usually we think of the earth as a mother figure. And what if the foundations of human madness have more to do with a crime against that mother than they have to do with any transgression against a hypothetical primordial father. At least that's what I'm suggesting might be the deepest rout of madness and that madness is most highly emphasized most crucially in a society that is becoming more and more urban and industrial and growing further and further away from the mother earth that bore us into life in the first place. So it's an interesting new image to use for understanding human nature, the nature of madness, the nature of sanity.
JM: It also raises many questions that possibly tie in these ecological issues that you raised with other injustices in our society, for example sexism. And I think many symbolic psycholinguists also view the unconscious itself-- the great water-- as being feminine.
TR: Well, there are elements here of deep sexual psychology, sexual stereotypes that have to be questioned as well. And again these are issues that did not arise prominently in the psychiatric mainstream until very recently when a feminist critique of standard psychiatry came into prominence. And that's only been very recently. That also has to be included because they are in any assessment of psychiatry and in the creation of eco-psychology because sexual ballads between the genders is an important aspect of the way in which we address the natural world.
JM: Well, I suppose one of the fundamental issues here is that psychology and psychiatry as we know them today are the products of this very same society which is damaging the planet.
JM: Yes, that's a problem you see. And I've talked with some fledgling eco-psychologists who have developed very strong reservations about the possibility of treating problems of neurosis within a urban framework. That is what if the city is itself shot through with a kind of madness. And I'm talking about something that's so apparent in the pace and tempo of our daily life that I think it's almost taken for granted that we are living a kind of crazy life. And all we have to do is be caught on the freeway in a traffic jam you know to recognize the madness of the way we've constructed the world around us. The amount of waste and the amount of stress and the amount of tension that we inflict upon ourselves. There's something crazy about that. Now my problem is, and this is what I observe in my book, The Voice of the Earth, that when we say we are crazy with what we're doing in this urban environment, this quite simply has no professional meaning. Because psychiatrists who are themselves products of an urban culture and practice within a urban context are often not prepared to call into question a context that they themselves are tied to. But the madness of cities is an important consideration in eco-psychology. And cities are becoming the only way of life left in the modern world. There's very little that's outside of the city. Now if the city is a crazy context in which people live, then there would also be a crazy context in which to carry on psychotherapy. I'm not saying there's any easy answer to that but again the question is basic. If this is true, then we have to confront that truth and make something of it.
JM: Well, I'm sure virtually every school of psychology would agree that one of the fundamental problems that people have that causes unhappiness has to do with the conflict between the social roles that we are placed in our jobs and in other artificial context that we create as oppose to you know the natural person underneath.
TR: Well, I would think so, you know urban culture is very recent, it's a very recent development. The first urban society which was England is no more than about a century and a half old. So we're talking about something very recent in human affairs that may not connect very sensibly with our evolutionary heritage. Eco-psychology has to take that historical context into account, that we are talking about a culture which is very new, very come lately. And to which human beings may not be well adapted. The fact that we're trapped in it simply means that we're capable of creating a culture that can rise up against us like a Frankenstein's monster and perhaps destroy us. While before that happens what we need is to get a grip on that culture and subject to it a sort of deep critique that I think only eco-psychology, as opposed to a mainstream psychology, could carry out.
JM: Theodore Roszak, it's been a pleasure talking to you in this first part of a three part series. We've had a chance now to identify some of the fundamental problems of culture as a whole and of the ecology movement and of psychotherapy.
TR: Good to talk with you Jeff.
JM: Yes. And thanks for being with me. And thank you for being with us. I hope that you'll stay tuned for parts two and three of this series in which we'll begin to explore further some of the anecdotes to the problems that we have described today. We'll begin to look at movements in cosmology and in psychotherapy and in culture that offer us a new ecological vision.
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