Razorsmile:
Hi, I'm here with Eric Harper and we're here as the Freudian Spaceship and we're talking to Gemma and Blake about a couple of essays they've written that we think are really, really interesting. And we have Anna with us as well, who's also read the essays and is going to join in our conversation. Both the essays are kind of very closely connected to themes that the Freudian Spaceship research project is interested in. think in terms of skits analysis but these are sort of more specific essays that deal specifically with certain elements of psychoanalysis so Gemma can I get you to just tell us who you are and a little bit about your essay?
Gemma:
Yeah, my name is Gemma Reese and a recent graduate of the master's program in psychodynamic counseling and therapies from Goldsmiths. And I wrote an offering in the form of an academic essay called How Do We Bring the Outside In? An Excavation of Ecological Apathy and Its Relevance for Psychodynamic Practice. And it's essentially looking at how we can come to terms, have like a sobering acceptance of the current predicament and how that will change the future of psychoanalysis and how we perhaps get creative with the frame in order to connect or reconnect with nature and thus ourselves. And it's framed with psychoanalytical theories such as denial and disavowal and some Jungian concepts. concepts such as the dead mother complex and other interesting kind of ideas. But at its core, it's looking at the kind of algorithms in today's societies and how we need to acknowledge that in order to reconnect with nature and the outside world and thus ourselves. But it really is kind of focusing on a transversal practice, how to move beyond individualistic. human-centred practice to something more life-affirming and life-centred on a whole. So yeah, that's kind of my blurb.
Razorsmile:
Excellent, excellent and Blake, how about you? Same kind of thing. Tell us who you are and a little, just to introduce your essay.
Blake Byles:
Yeah, thanks. Yes, my name is Blake Biles and I'm studying on the same course as Gemma. This essay was kind of a culmination of themes I've been looking at over the course of my postgraduate and undergraduate. Ideas around indigeneity, eco-psychotherapy, psychedelic studies, like psychedelics assisted psychotherapy. And it's quite like a personal journey. I've kind of experienced those fields in different formats like throughout my life. And like I say, this was a kind of a culmination of those things. It was titled Oceanic as Ancestral Self Towards a Woven Psychotherapy. And I was for a long time, I was trying to think about how to corral these things together into something that made sense, something that I hadn't already talked about before. And eventually I struck upon quite a personal reflexive approach that provided a through line for each of these things. Not just to show how they work together in an academic way, but rooting it in my personal experiences. Not only that, like I say, while it was quite personal, I tried to frame it in a way that was not too personal that it wasn't relatable to other people. So some of the things I moved with and the way I kind of juggled them together, hopefully, and some of the feedback I've received from people, kind of has been positive, that it has been applicable to other people's experiences as well.
Razorsmile:
Yeah good, I'm not surprised you're getting positive feedback and it was interesting reading both the essays because they're quite different in style and methodology as well so that's actually it was maybe we'll get to that towards the end when we can maybe talk a little bit about that. I wanted to just begin, it's a sort of naive question but let's you know you're dealing with eco therapy and dealing with a situation in which we're looking at kind of living in an eco crisis some people call it poly crisis there's a kind of situation that seems doom like and in fact that kind of question about what happens in the doom situation is there in Gemma's essay explicitly kind of talked about at one point. But in that context and in terms of your responses to how to deal with that, would you say there is an optimism or a pessimism to your particular engagement with ecological issues or is it more complicated? And I'll start with you Blake. Do you think you're optimistic or pessimistic with regard to issues or is it more complicated?
Gemma:
Thank
Blake Byles:
It is more complicated, though I do think the way it's framed in my essay, I feel like it is quite optimistic. I feel like a lot of what I explored were elements of things I've perhaps felt excluded from in the past, indigeneity being one thing. And there's quite like a spiritual theme in my essay as well. I grew up religious and it didn't quite sit right with me and I think in my journey with this work and the expression of it in the essay it feels a bit more like a coming home in a way to wider ecological and spiritual networks that I felt connected to but alienated from. And so. I feel there's an optimism in that it does feel like a reconnection and also I've felt a lot of, and express this in the essay, a lot of euphoric communion with nature and with others, know, human and non-human animals and actors. Yeah, so the optimism for me, I suppose, is just this feeling of being brought back into the fold, that those veils that have been placed there through various hegemonies are able to be bypassed or penetrated or completely destroyed. Yeah, it does feel optimistic. Coming away from the essay, I have felt quite invigorated, let's say.
Razorsmile:
And you're dealing with, I mean, you mentioned the word euphoric, but you're dealing with things like peak experiences. I mean, maybe there's an element of that and Gemma, you're dealing with something slightly different in this kind of relationship of loneliness, for example, that you talk about at certain points. So again, the same question to you. Do you think your approach to kind of ecotherapies is as optimistic, pessimistic or more complicated?
Gemma:
I think it certainly started from a place of pessimism. I think I embarked on this particular topic because I was scared. And I felt powerless in some way. Like, what can I do? Because my essay, suppose, is a little bit more rooted in pessimism insofar as we are quite... I look at the political and how in order for serious deep ecological... change and biodiversity kind of celebration and championship does require the policymakers and the governing bodies to unite and value that as a really ⁓ fashion and important issue. But then as I you know when I talk about that sober acceptance of what is I felt like I moved through to a place of something that is more optimistic because I grew a little bit more fluid and flexible. in how to tolerate and work with the anxieties that comes from... Disaster. know, big disasters, environmental disasters, upheavals, the idea of, you know, environmental scientists explaining that societal collapse is inevitable or already occurring in certain areas of the world. And how do we respond? How do we hold that? And how do we work? with that in a therapeutic way. And sometimes I think when you think about it on a whole, it can feel very overwhelming to an individual of what can I do? I feel powerless. And that's where it came from for me, where I started it and how that can seek or eke into and bleed out into relationships. So it does come into something very personal. And it just got really exciting. found it really, I agree. relate to Blake when he says that he felt invigorated coming away from it because I was filled with hope when it comes to working with the reality as opposed to distorting it through insidious defenses and just noticing how they play out. So I do feel like it is a bit pessimistic in some ways. or at least started there, but as I moved through it and the more I read, the more I took in, I felt like I had more tools in my toolkit and I felt a little bit more equipped and informed and that in itself made me feel, maybe optimistic isn't quite right, maybe it is a little bit more complicated than those two, those binaries as such, but I suppose it allowed me to be a bit more flexible with how I mediate. the anxieties and being able to tolerate when something feels a little bit more akin to despair or manic and just being able to notice how that shows up and what I can do in order to feel like I can reconnect with myself and the world around me in a way that is not governed by the political sphere.
Razorsmile:
Both of you are kind of speaking of the process as in itself somehow therapeutic here, somehow engaging in a kind of therapeutic activity. I done right? I mean is that something that you feel... drove you with these essays more than, as it were, exploring a theory in the abstract. mean, both of you are engaging in this topic because it seems, you know, that it's in a sense politically and socially present, but your engagement is, as I say, seems to have this kind of therapeutic element to it. Would that be right? mean, is that reading too much into it?
Blake Byles:
100 % for me it was therapeutic. was quite, like naturally I'm quite a procrastinator and so like I will research all of the stuff I really love interdisciplinary research. I spread the cast of the net really wide but really kind put off putting pen to paper as it were. And like I say, those were all big tent topics that I've been interested in but I just didn't have my hook. And it was getting to like, you know, the end stages of of the process and I just started, I thought right I'm going to start doing some reflexive writing just to warm up, just to get in the zone and so I thought why don't I write about moments in my life that I feel were influential to me getting here to looking at these topics and the more I did that then I started to get into the academics stuff the more I looked at it the more I realized I couldn't really separate the two anymore I just kind of originally intended to discard the reflex of stuff, it was just an exercise. But the more I got into it and the more I was thinking about non-linearity and the philosophy that I was kind of thinking of, the reflex of stuff was so crucial and so deciding to keep it, and decided to make them quite integral kind of touchstones of the piece. It was inherently a therapeutic act because I went all in and I would just put myself in the paper in more ways than I ever have before. coming away from it, it was not just therapeutic for me in this space, but because I was drawing on these other moments of my life, it kind of recontextualised my life past, present and future.
Razorsmile:
Do you have a similar experience? You seem to be describing something similar along the same kind of lines, Jammer. Would that be right?
Gemma:
first I'm so pleased that you did keep the reflexive practice in there, Blake, because it was so beautiful and I encourage anyone who's interested in this topic to read it. it's, of course, it's 100 % it was a personal journey. I feel like everything that's in there, in some ways, it's not necessarily over-identifying with it, but it just feels relevant in some way.
Blake Byles:
Thank you.
Gemma:
to my experience, to my life experience. But it's also coming from a place, you know, the thesis, having this undertaking, because academia was something, academic writing especially, was something that really stressed me out. It's not one of my natural, it's not something I've done for a long time. Last time I wrote was when I was 16. But anyway, it was when I was thinking of the future of psychoanalysis and... the changing of the tides and what is happening in the world that is hard to accept, but even look at or notice. So it was personal because I felt like as a practitioner very early on in my career, but becoming aware of... you know, climate change or the climate disaster, the technological influence, deep ecological time, all these kinds of realms that influence the nature within ourselves and the dynamics that defences all the traditional psychoanalytical stuff. It just felt integral for the future of psychoanalysis considering what I was learning on the journey from what I was reading through environmental scientists, through, you know, post-humanism with that kind of frame, new materialism or... Yeah, it was incredibly, it was personal. But I find myself feeling like that it's so stimulating even now because there's so much to kind of grasp, I suppose, with this topic because it does feel very vast. And, you know, with the concept of the vast self, for example. But yeah, it was a personal journey, but it was very much rooted in my own fears, struggling to really look at the political side of things, but also the... what we need to do in order to achieve ingenuity in psychoanalysis considering what's happening in the world and that beyond our skin encapsulated ego as Blake beautifully described in his essay.
Razorsmile:
I mean, want to have conversation to kind of explore this relationship between psychoanalysis and what I call eco-activism, if you like, broadly speaking, or awareness of the ecological crisis or politics, if you like. But before we do that, Anna, I just want to come to you first of all. And although people, you know, we're not specifically going into the details of the text here, we're going to have a conversation that's kind of grounded on this. I just want to continue for a moment just talking about the text. I gather that you've had a look at them.
Gemma:
Mm-mm.
Razorsmile:
As an activist and analyst yourself, what was your experience of engaging with these texts? And obviously you can be as harsh or as kind as you want.
Ana Minozzo:
Hi everyone. It's so wonderful to see you both in conversation today and also be here with you and with Eric. What I'm sensing from what you're sharing, but what was really evident in both your writings was this aliveness of research. You know, doing research as not an empty, meaningless act, but something that you have a question and you're trying, you know, like being in analysis and you're trying to figure something out that is meaningful. So it's, you know, it's an implicated form of doing research. Of course it's personal, of course it's a mess sometimes, of course it's overwhelming, but there is also a technique to writing that you both... excel at. there's these two dimensions I think in these pieces. You know, a question that is profound and how to write that, you know, in text and making text and writing as alive as possible. It's really beautiful to listen to your experiences of wanting to depart from life. and then think, okay, what does psychoanalysis has to do with this or psychodynamic psychotherapeutic practice? Rather than think that there is this, you know, this canon that knows it all, this practice that knows it all, and we have to find their ways of fitting life. which I think happens quite often, especially, not especially, but a lot of times, for example, younger researchers or younger analysts think that that's the only way that they can think with psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas. And of course, there's lots of experienced researchers that do that only. And it's really refreshing to see you at this point in your intellectual journey. in your clinical journey already opening psychoanalysis in this way, you from the perspective of life. Because what is psychoanalysis about if not life? You know, it's not about the text. It's not about Freud. It's not about keeping that in one place. So that's how I've encountered this text. And they were just really good, really excellent. And of course, resonates to my curiosities too. But it's very personal, I think each of you have your own style and that's always so good to see, you know, the diversity of styles in thinking and speaking and writing is really important, you know, that we don't try to just do things in one way. Yeah, so that's that was my experience with this piece.
Razorsmile:
Thank you. Okay, so I wanna push us into this kind of relationship between trying to deal with the ecological crisis. And now that's a ridiculous phrase because obviously none of us can deal with it. But trying to somehow have a relationship to it in the sense of making it change. We might broadly call this politics, you know. not just standing around thinking it's nothing to do with you, but encountering it and engaging with it as inevitably having something to do with you. And the first thing people often ask is what can I do about this? And the first response is often something we would traditionally think of as politics. perhaps join XR or JSO or sign a petition or get involved in activist work or these are often the responses people are given. And I think... quite reasonably so. And sometimes one might, if one was to not be entirely charitable, think, well, you know, if your response is to go into psychoanalysis, perhaps you're trying to somehow deal with an avoidance or deal with something, you know, that needs to be dealt with in a different terrain. Psychoanalysis really isn't sort of cut out for this. So, but you want to include psychoanalysis within this conversation about the eco crisis, that's broadly speaking. And I think that's, mean, I'm on board with that. But what does psychoanalysis add? What does it actually add to this? Because one might argue in some ways it can be used to give psychoanalysis more credibility than it should have and to greenwash psychoanalysis. There's a possibility there in which wellness industries and various other things can sell this greenwashed psychoanalysis as a response. And some people might argue that that's not very helpful. So what do you think psychoanalysis can add to that discussion of the eco crisis? What is its kind of role? Why should it engage in this? What can it offer in terms of that response? Gemma, do you want to sort of pitch in on that at all?
Gemma:
I mean, my initial reaction or response was the depth and the language, because I think it offers a couple of different or many, many different ways of thinking about our reactions or the opposite of that, why we don't react. But I think this is where it gets a bit creative, in my opinion.
Razorsmile:
that not reacting was kind of central to you when you begin from cell and this kind of sort of this diagnosis of a kind of apathy and broadly speaking and so you're trying to explore this like lack of reaction so to that I mean but would that be a psychoanalytic exploration is that is that in a sense an exploration that it would be useful for people involved in ecological politics to engage with as well do you think
Gemma:
Mm-hmm. I think that an argument can be that it can be, it could be, it could contribute to the conversation. It's not a case of psychoanalysis being a something that works for everyone by no means. And this is where I think that psychoanalysis could get, this is where the ingenuity comes in, the creativity of. perhaps part of the eco crisis, a way of working with that is let's look at stabilisation. What kind of contributes to feeling a sense of stability and perhaps that's splitting up into little parts of feeling comfortable and I suppose something realistic of how you feel like you are contributing and really leaning into that and perhaps that little bit could be a part of how the frame changes. Walk and talk therapy is something that's come alive in recent years and it's a really exciting shift.
Razorsmile:
Yeah, I saw a practitioner the other day actually advertising Walk and Talk and it first time I'd seen someone recently sort of just on a listing advertising it. It was like, ⁓ that's noticeable shift,
Gemma:
Yeah, and even that itself, it's, you know, I think that there's a, unnecessary... what's the word, like connotation or myth around psychoanalysis needing to be something quite dry and something where the analyst is a blank screen, not really necessarily being like it's working with, it's placing the analyst and in the purely subjective and objective position in some ways. Correct me if I'm wrong, Eric. But that's, think this is where it gets really exciting, where psychoanalysis could evolve to be something that is a lot more creative. Like why not bring music into the room? Why not go outside of the room? Why not notice the birds? There's a beautiful, I can't remember who wrote it actually, a myth in Holloway about the charisma of birds. And something she noticed in her practice was the clients would, many different clients. formed a kind of, not necessarily attachment, but the birds became almost in a transitional object, for example, when they were coming to the bird's nest outside of the window. And those kind of cues, if you will, something that's pointing towards a symbolic realm, maybe perhaps, that could be useful to the work. And why does it need to be something that's a lot more constrained? or smaller in some ways it feels quite small why not open it up and get creative with psychoanalysis and I think that's where when we talk about the eco crisis and from my stance feeling like it's it's very much about liberating or kind of working towards healing that disconnect by actually going out and getting making contact with the wealth fruits of all the wild nature that is out there. I think it's really exciting. And I think if that were the frame of eco psychoanalysis as well as it is in lots of writing, lots of literature, it doesn't even necessarily need to have eco at the beginning of it. I think it would be exciting if that was psychoanalysis anyway. So that's how I feel about that, I think.
Razorsmile:
No, I think that kind of makes sense. mean, I want to I want to just adjust the question slightly. Like there's there's and again, I'm kind of not devil's advocating, but I'm kind of doing that here. I'm not entirely sure. But one might argue that ecotherapy is a new sort of advancement of psychotherapy and follow Gemma and the idea that it's kind of opening up a kind of reframing of the practice. One might be accused by. bad faith interlocutors that in fact it's just a redressing of indigenous practice and we're engaging in something that other people are doing much better anyway and we don't need psychoanalysis we just go straight to the source. Obviously that's a complete caricature but I'm trying to suggest that sense in which sometimes psychoanalysis is often...
Blake Byles:
Hmm.
Razorsmile:
wrapped up in colonial structures, wrapped up in structures of a white western sort of position. And even when it takes up a language that's alternative, maintains essentially those structures, that might be the of slightly more pleasant way of putting that critique. mean, how would you sort of respond to that? What do you think's able to sort of push past that if that's a problem? What would be able to sort of deal with that?
Blake Byles:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, first of all, I really like the point that Gemma makes about eco prefix almost being redundant, but I think it speaks more about where we're at with our relationship to our vast self. One day that would be redundant, but right now it does seem a bit shoehorned in, like you say, and yeah, there could be accusations of...
Gemma:
Mm.
Blake Byles:
of co-opting Indigenous philosophy and to kind of go back to the original version of the question of thinking about psychoanalysis, the position of psychoanalysis, over the course of my studies I did feel myself coming back to lecture as Eric and others a bit in a quandary of, okay, I've got these ideas but I feel like the psychoanalytic section is shoehorned in. I'm bit more interested with these other things and I feel like they are doing the heavy lifting for at least my position on psychoanalysis. And so I guess over the course of the work what I tried to do was I didn't want it to just be this benign thing off to the side of my side. I did really want to incorporate it to weave these things together and so I suppose I tried to look for kind of common denominators in a way and For me the things in psychoanalysis that I do find useful are like curiosity, relationality, terms I use in the essay are communion and reciprocity. So we're here together, there's an intentionality into leaning into the space and searching things out together, trying to find some kind of mutual understanding. Myth, you you mentioned caricatures. psychoanalysis and earth-based cosmologies deal a lot in myth, know, archetypes and things like that. There's interpretive acts. family systems as well are another big crossover. And so in my essay, when I talk about these mystical experiences that I encountered with non-human actors and my vast self and other elements of nature, the trees, the birds. ⁓ those things are all happening. The therapeutic aspect, it's all happening just as it would and to be honest, often in a much more profound way than it is when I'm in the analytic room, you know, with its four walls. I do find that... We talk about, ideally, the eco thing wouldn't be there and it is just life. And I do like to think about moving towards these directions of where we could be, but the fact of the matter is that I live in a world where I'm straddling multiple identities and cultures. And so in the weaving together of the stuff, I found a way to access the kind of... strengths of psychoanalysis and the strengths of these kind indigenous epistemologies that I was looking at, primarily Māori because that's my background, right? So one example is this takarangi framework that I was looking at. in Māori culture, space and time are represented in art as a flat spiral, a double helix spiral with this kind of void in the middle. So you have like a part of the spiral moving outward, part of the spiral moving inward. and you can have planes cutting through it. So it's like nonlinear time and space. You can move through the spiral and you have this duality of Earth, Earth Mother, Sky Father, lightness, darkness, consciousness, unconscious, body, spirit. And those are things within the epistemology and also in other many indigenous cosmologies. But there are also things that we work with a lot in psychoanalysis. And so for me, when I've kind of... landed on this, felt like this was a really great way to hold space and overlapping a circle so we can explore the creative interplay of edges, know, to call on Milner. So I do feel cynicism is helpful with these things. What does psychoanalysis provide? How's it holding us back? also... the creative tension to kind of go back onto some of my past research as well with indigenous studies, using that creative tension of a multicultural space, a pluriversal area to reflect, to relate, to muse and to grow.
Razorsmile:
I want to sort of just have a brief aside because you mentioned the role of kind of Earth Mother, that kind of sort of sense there. mean, Gemma in yours, it's the dead mother. That's a noticeable image. mean, do want to say a little bit about how that plays its role in your own account of like this species loneliness that you're sort of encountering and dealing with? The dead mother seemed to be an image there that stuck out to me.
Gemma:
Yes, it's... want to do the complex decent service of how I relay it but essentially I found that idea in an article about something completely different. I was talking about the dead mother complex arising when you're working with them or something you could notice or work with and through when you're working with a client who had a parent who was struggling with depression. in the early stages of their development. And when you're, they described it as when they're looking into the eyes of this caregiver searching for something. It's not, it's neither love nor hate, but it's dead, it's deadened, it's not enlivened, it's there's an absence. And how that informs what I think it was Schwartz described as a kind of a black hole in the psyche. and how does one reconnect or... How does one work with such a phenomena or how does one even locate that? And of course in psychoanalysis you kind of see how it shows up in dynamics, in relationships perhaps, but also very much in the relationship to self, ego, super ego and id. And there's so many diff... It takes a long time, I'm understanding, to really be able to kind of... not necessarily encounter the unconscious, think that that is kind of always present in some ways in the room. But to be able to truly work with that. But the dead mother felt relevant in this topic because there are people around the world where their environment and solastalgia, let me bring solastalgia, because solastalgia is about finding discomfort where one once found comfort and they're kind of that's happening with people who watching their environment drastically change and die, their ecosystems die. So it's not necessarily that needed to happen when they were first born, but they're trying to look out into their environment and where they once saw life, they're now seeing death. And it's not necessarily about the love and hate, but there's something in mother earth and put the the big O, as you know, there's something othered about Mother Earth as well, as something not connected with or to. But I think it's really exciting to think about mother and child, mother being Earth and child being humanity. And the dead mother complex being something that might be contributing to apathy. Because of that, the wanting to look away, you know, when you look at babies who are they might avoid looking into the eyes of a caregiver that is struggling with severe clinical depression. So I just thought it might be relevant for what's kind of happening in a larger response to the disavowal of the climate injustices and the biodiversity loss. and the symbols of it as well. Mother being something secretive but also seductive in a primal way. the searching for that attachment when it might not be possible to get it in the way that you'd desire.
Razorsmile:
want to connect it now, Anna, if this is for you really, you have this thing that Eric has told me about called your free analysis initiative. Do you think it kind of connects, that the work here kind of connects with what you would think of as your free analysis initiative? And tell us a little bit about that first to sort of give us a kind of brief definition of what you think of that. And is this work kind of possibly an example of this or does it kind of connect to it in some sense? how would you approach it from that perspective?
Ana Minozzo:
Yeah, totally. So I have been for the last couple of years and will be still the next couple of years, part of a research collective at the University of Essex that is called FreeSci. It's a big research project. We are nine people researching the history and the legacies of free psychoanalytic clinics in different parts of the world and different times. And the idea is to rescue psychoanalytic radicality in its genesis. And that's what we have actual historical evidence for, is that from the start psychoanalysis is actually pretty radical and is concerned with material conditions for life. It's concerned with what goes on between and among people. and that the regulations, the bourgeois frames and deadliness comes after. So almost what we have been finding is that in different contexts, psychoanalysis inhabits this paradox of these two movements, one that pushes for radicality and one that contains it. But there is, you know, this underground history of this practice that seems to be transmitted. in different contexts, different parts of the world. And the way psychoanalytic ideas and concepts were translated and recuperated and used are also really creative. You'd have, we just launched a book actually a few weeks ago by this super interesting early 30s psychiatrist in Budapest who was a big reader of psychoanalysis and who was director of a hospital and And perhaps what we could agree is that it is a hospital that is pre-psychiatric reform, working with all the ideas that later became known as the anti-psychiatry. concept, know, to think about the institution and the asylum. So there is a lot of psychoanalytic history that is politically implicated and what we see in specific parts of the world and my field of research mainly is Latin America. It's all of this, know, when Gemma was talking about walk and talk, yeah, there's lots of collectives. We've counted a hundred collectives practicing psychoanalysis, mostly on the streets and public squares or in community centers, free. You know, so the idea of the frame is totally, you know, in a different place there. Not to idealize it, you know, because we can't idealize any social movement either. But there is air, it's something that is breathing. What I think is interesting, perhaps one thing that makes me think about, you know, climate disaster, ecological thinking, psychoanalysis, the unconscious, and the work that both Gemma and Blake have kind of brought together to think about this. think in Gemma's case, it's very clearly a feminist effort. you know, even being driven, when he said at the beginning, yes, but I'm also aware that the politicians and people that have power have to also do something. So there's this kind of feminist, you know, shock of reality that we move despite that, but we don't forget that, which is our relationship to patriarchy. You patriarchy is not what frames everything. and we exceed that, but we can't ignore it. And in Blake's case, by recuperating the pluriverse and specific, you know, indigenous cosmologies, you're, you know, inviting this real decolonial call into psychoanalytic thinking. Can we think about the unconscious without taking into account the effects of the colonial encounter, its devastations, but also, again, how worlds survive and thrive despite colonization, despite the worst, you know, the genocide of colonialism, there's still something that insists, just like the unconscious. And I think, yeah, I definitely see this relationship that even within the psychoanalytic movement as such, there is so many attempts of regulating, of institutionalizing, but... Nobody, know, in the words of Gautari, Psychoanalysis doesn't only unconscious either. work with the unconscious is fundamental and it doesn't have anything to do with an institution, with an accreditation, any of that. You know, with 50 minutes, with a couch, no couch, it's something else altogether. And I agree with, I think with everyone in the room today to echo your question earlier, Matt, what does psychoanalysis have to do with, you know, ecological thinking and activism in face of the climate catastrophe? Well, everything. It has everything to do with that. I'm reminded here of this so, it's such a beautiful quote. There's a little book, I think, I don't know, maybe you guys know about it or... like people that are listening. It's an indigenous thinker from Brazil called Ailton Krenak and he became, well he's a big political activist for indigenous rights and environmental rights in Brazil since the 80s at least. He's got a lot of visibility and he's a writer too but as of late in the last 10 years or so, he's become, in five years then, he's become really famous. He has published his little books that are very accessible and they're everywhere and yet they're profound. And he recounts in this book when people ask him how his people survived colonization, 500 years of colonization in Brazil. He says, my answer is always we've survived by expanding our subjectivity. And just that, I think it's, you know, it kind of... answers this question. Well, psychoanalysis has everything to do with climate activism because it's to do with the way we understand ourselves in the world. What's part of me? What is my life? You know, and really thinking that there's individual and boxed in our experience. And we can think about that materially. You know, we can think biologically how there is no life on its own. There's no life on its own. So it's a delirium of a particular kind of ideological framing of life, that life is contained. But the same goes for our subjective being in the world. You know, there is no life without being in relation to. And it again is an alienating delirium that there could be. And what we see is that that delirium has lots of consequences. know, what the Lakanians call the one. But, and so well, know, Lakin-Lacon himself pointed at the one, know, with capital O, the one. But haven't he didn't talk about the deadly consequences of this one. So it's not a one that we can take for granted. This, you know, the big other, this universal one that... imposes itself as this unique point of reference of life. Yes, but there's a lot of people paying the price for this one to be reproduced as feminist scholars have said for decades. So I think, yes, psychoanalysis has everything to do with... with climate activism, but not just any psychoanalysis. It's the same with feminism. Psychoanalysis has everything to do with feminism, but not any psychoanalysis, the one that is implicated, the one that perhaps we are all interested in, you know? Yeah, and I think it definitely resonates with this history of the fruit clinics and the current work in fruit clinics, for it doesn't presume neutrality at all, and it works, it invests. in the transference. But again, transference not as this dead concept either. Transference as what it is, which is what is shared and exchanged among people. It's about bond. think bond is a better word even. It's what... becomes of togetherness. And psychoanalysis is a work of togetherness. It's work through the bond, it's work through the transference. And we forget when we say we're working in talking cures, it's really not about the talking itself, because if it was, we could just talk to, you know, I mean, like people are doing now, talk to the algorithm and stuff. So it's not about that, it's about the relationalities both Gemma and Blake have mentioned in the things that they said earlier.
Razorsmile:
I like your reference there to not just any psychoanalysis though. so perhaps I want to pursue that little bit because I mean one of the criticisms that might be offered against a kind of ecotherapeutic approach is that it has an implicit model of nature as good, positive, vibrant. And we've touched a little bit upon how the good earth mother might actually be countered with an account of something like a dead mother relationship. We've already mentioned that. But still... That relationship that's offered to you of like, you know, you're all kind of a little hippies and think that nature is wonderful and nature's somewhere over there and you're, you know, and it's all a lovely benevolent enterprise. And I remember Verna Herzog's film Grizzly Man, and there's a beautiful scene in that in which he kind of articulates nature as a kind of deadly, impassive, uncaring, has no interest in you. kind of like that's his account of nature as he stands and he describes it in this moment of staring into the bears eyes and he counters his this perspective he's offers with with the grizzly man's perspective if you haven't seen the film it's worth seeing it's an interesting kind of encounter between someone doing ecological work in a particular moment and their kind of psychological relationship to that work and so I mean Do you think that's something you can deal with when you're developing your work here? Is there a romanticised version of nature implicit in some of what you're doing, do think? I mean, how would you respond to someone who kind of dismissed it in that sort of sense of like, you're just romanticising nature, you're hippies really, know, something along those kind of lines. Possibly less so in Gemma's case, possibly more so in Blake's, and that's no, but you both seem to be maybe susceptible to that criticism, I don't know, how would you feel?
Blake Byles:
Yeah, one of the, I think this is really interesting point and I think there can be like a naive caricature that's placed on it but one of the things that I've thought in more recent years and this is based on the challenges placed on me by Eric and other lecturers when I was writing about this and other assessments was like how, like this is all well and good for me how I frame it but what about someone who has always had an urban life and they were raised in a council estate, perhaps what's their relationship with nature? And it kind of made me reassess what my relationship was when I was connecting with nature and how might someone in that urban environment, of which I've now lived in for a long time, away from these ancestral places that I felt a strong connection to, and I noticed a practice that I've taken up in recent years, which is noticing the light.
Gemma:
Hmm.
Blake Byles:
I'm standing there in the evening and the way that the light has shifted to these like apricot hues or this really glowing foreshadows and back shadows and I'll say to my wife, come have a look at, come check out the light right now. And she's gotten into a practice of doing it because at the time she's probably doing an email or something like that, something that's like about the world and here's this fanciful request to come and have a look at the light. But she does it because it's a practice of being present. And so what I would say to this idea about this romanticized version of a nature is that it's not just this like Disney-ified thing of good nature while avoiding like the tar pits and the poisonous animals and plants and things like that. It's actually seeing the nature within ourselves. And it's the presentness, becoming more, having the scales taken off of our eyes in the sense of this forced separation through societal conditioning and various hegemonies that we are that vast self and that we are right now and always and just reconnecting with those things because then that brings in the agentic capacity that so many people are looking for when they are in analysis. So for me this idea about the romanticization of nature, it is a naive view of it because in reality we're looking at us as nature. And that is not always pretty as well.
Razorsmile:
Yeah, okay. Okay, that makes sense. Gemma, any thoughts on this? Okay, that worked.
Gemma:
Blake said. No, I just I just I just it's so brilliant because I've got such kinship with the with the light working with the light because I was thinking before you said it I was sort of thinking about the sun and the moon because I think there's always a way in I think it's locating the path that is unique to an individual if they want that if they're ready for that I think that you know there's something that we need to consider about you know being directed by the client's need and being able to not come with an agenda. But I think that I am romantic with nature, but I'm not an imposer of that will. But I do think that it's a useful avenue of working towards something that's more mindful and something that is more present. I just, I thought it was beautiful how Blake put it and really resonates with me.
Razorsmile:
You both have interesting sort of comments on time. I mean, in particular, I was very struck by your, your ancestors of the future. I that was a lovely kind of way of reorganising the ancestor relationship. But Gemma, you also have interesting relationships to time that sometimes seem to occur in your essay there. If you were to sort of be able to separate yourself out, this is a kind of sci-fi transport yourself question. So in 20 years or so, let's say 20, maybe 40 years, What do you think it's going to be like to read your work? to read this essay again in 40 years.
Gemma:
That's a really curious question. In 40 years time to reread this essay. Blake, if you've got a response, go for it.
Blake Byles:
It's something I want to muse on but I guess my instincts is that it's a bit cute. As in like it feels like well-meaning, endearing, a bit naive because hopefully I've developed. One of the things being is that a lot of what...
Gemma:
Yeah.
Blake Byles:
took me to extra places with this work was my interrelation with other people. So this idea about our ancestral self that you referenced earlier, that was in conversation on a lovely acid-fuelled day, thinking about non-linear time and space in conversation with others and with the land. In 20 years time, 40 years time, hopefully I've had many more conversations with many more human and non-human friends and it will be more... I will be more in it but also less in it because it will be something that has been shared over and over. So yeah, right now reading back in it I'll feel like it's a little bit cute and but with some endearing qualities.
Razorsmile:
Okay, that makes sense. mean, some of this comes to mind, I mean, this is in some ways in part from from your reference to Searle in your essay, Jim, someone who I don't see reference very often. I have a lovely book of Searle's stuff on schizophrenia in my library that I enjoyed reading. And I have not seen that essay that you referenced before. So I'm going to have to get a copy of that because Goldsmiths wouldn't let me have it. So you're going to have to send me that. But when he's talking about that kind of apathy that he's beginning to sort of like diagnose a symptom. This is in the early 1970s. So this is like, this is a long time ago, this is 50 years ago. So in a sense, we can kind of, there is a way in which we can kind of track at least some thoughts about eco-therapeutic back to the 60s and 70s. And it seems in a sense, when we're thinking about the ecological crisis, we have to begin to try and think in large scale times at some point, which is why it was so interesting to see these different relationships to temporality in the work.
Gemma:
Mm-hmm.
Razorsmile:
So, I mean, if you were to read your essay, if he was to read your essay in 1973, do you think he would still have this encounter with a kind of apathy? Or how do you think he or you reading your essay, as it were, from Searle's perspective, you know, having watched what had happened during the course of the next 50 years over our relationship to the ecological crisis? Again, just trying to sort of let our brains slip aside from our conjunctive moment.
Gemma:
I suppose it made me think a little bit back to the first question of the pessimism and the optimism. I'm curious as to whether it'd be something that would ignite cells with optimism, of the fact that it's still being kind of elaborated on, or if there's something pessimistic that, you know, it's still allowed, it's still happening, and it's still rooted in psychological origin. So What's, pro, what, yeah. I am curious about what he would say, whether it would be something that would ignite some more optimism, curiosities or pessimism. And perhaps more people need some cells on their shelves.
Razorsmile:
Okay, so I want to kind of bring us to a little bit of a conclusion, but what I want to do now is just give you a moment. I want to ask you to sort of just share what you would think of would be a few key ideas that you'd like the listener to think about or know. It doesn't have to be strictly from your essay, but obviously that's the kind of background, and so we'll have links for listeners to confine those. But if you wanted to offer a few key ideas, and obviously they can't go through the same therapeutic process of writing the essay. But lessons that you might be able to take away, use, offer back in dialogue, what would be some of those key ideas perhaps.
Blake Byles:
parent, a teacher, your therapist and so from this nonlinear perspective I started thinking about what would my ancestral self be saying to me now and because we were in this mystical kind of psychedelic experience where we have this oceanic feeling this re-emergence into nature one of my friends posited I wonder if when we're feeling this it's our ancestral self giving us a hug back into the spiral like yes welcome back in so you could go as kind of out there thinking about it like that, or you could just think about it in a much more simpler way, like kind of the question that you posed to us earlier, what would our ancestral self be like? Like how would we project our life to be? And if we could have a conversation now, what would they say to us? What kind of advice or encouragement might they give us?
Razorsmile:
Timmer?
Gemma:
think that I just want to invite a reflection. on You know, I opened the first chapter with rage isn't the curse, apathy is. It's the, think when we're talking about enlivened states, rather than deadening states, indifference and the quality of that or something, you know, there's a difference between healthy ambivalence and something that's very stifling and rigid and inflexible and it's being able to perhaps just have a thing. about. how the indifference is being spread and whether you're able to express. anger, rage, I'm not sure. think it's, I'm going a little bit off paced and trying to search for something a bit more detailed, but I think it's just opening up that question of something reciprocal and kinship and this idea of connecting with nature doesn't necessarily mean going out and hugging trees, is all I'm saying. It is about being able to just notice. I think that the hue of the light and mindfulness and those activities, even the breath going in and out, like that is nature. Like that's a spirit, if that's something that you believe in. That it's flowing through us. We are watery bodies. But it's also just leaving that reframing of psychoanalysis as being something that's quite dry. It really isn't. And I encourage anyone to think about alternate, know, holistic therapies or walk and talk therapies as an avenue and a way in to something that might be a little bit more in depth with regards encountering the unconscious. But there are so many different avenues in there and so many enlivening ways in. It is not all dry.
Razorsmile:
No, that's I think a very important point. I want to ask you, Anna, one last thing. You mentioned earlier the relationship to transference and we've had conversations previously about about anxiety and about it shifting sort of conceptual landscape and you've like tracked a little bit of that. I mean, would Do you think it's a similar kind of situation with the concept of transference when we're talking about things like ecotherapy? I mean, you mentioned it earlier in terms of what transference is and how it operates in that sense, it's a kind of dialogue, a kind of talking. I mean, are we witnessing with ecotherapy a reorganizing of that kind of psychoanalytic concept of transference, think? Or is there a dissimilar history? Because I feel like there's some kind of similar history of shift in that. It's been a noticeable. relational psychotherapy except it's been a noticeable thing that's been sort of moving inside psychoanalytic concepts. And ecotherapy seems to be moving that concept in particular quite strongly. I mean, is that something you'd agree with or am I completely off base there, do you think?
Ana Minozzo:
Yeah, no, think it makes a lot of sense. There's lots of common threads there. I think it's difficult for us to disagree on what ecotherapy is. You even though it's like our common denominator today, I guess even like Jemma and Blake mean different things and other people might mean different things. Does it even exist? Ecotherapy? Do you know? Or are we as analysts, therapists, whatever? aware of the climate catastrophe. And with that, we are aware of the production of this catastrophe as a production of a particular way of living that has reverberations. So therefore, we think about patriarchy, coloniality, extraction, know, then racial politics, misogyny, everything is connected. And in that way, I think It could be as simple as thinking about paying attention in the transference in the work to that which escapes, to that that doesn't fit. Equally, to thinking about this space of the therapeutic or the analytic and try and listen to the social reproduction inscribed in the symptom. which is something that I've been trying to think about recently. We think about social reproduction as having effects, as feminist analysts for example, as having an effect, or as anti-racist analysts having an effect on lived experience, a traumatic. And how important it is to acknowledge that in an implicated psychotherapeutic environment. That trauma comes from the political realm. And sometimes to name it, it becomes something that we do together with many people that we work with that haven't been able to name it for themselves. But I also think it's interesting to think about the symptomatic production as a defense against another kind of excess, you know, a crappy defense. one that, you know, a symptom is symptom. It's not great. It's something there, like something that's, you know, trying to keep something else at bay, but it's also taking its toll, usually. But you think about what kind of universe we are reproducing with that. So how are we situated as subjects by keeping something else at bay that is excessive? I think there's something there for us to think about in terms of... thinking about the ecological realm and a political psychoanalytic listening. And thinking about the transference, think what is really important is to be transversal, as the word that Gemma rescued earlier. It's a concept, as we know, that Gatahi formulated alongside colleagues at Laborde. that situates the analyst also as somebody that is alive in the world. Therefore, me as an analyst, not as somebody that is particularly safe, particularly distance from colonial patriarchal eco-side of capitalism. I'm part of that, just the same. So you're not removed. So of course that calls for a relational practice of kinds. And again, not a relational practice that is about feelings. You know, it's not about how we can feel together. Because that I think can be a really dangerous slippery slope that we universalize yet again, something. And I don't think that's what it is about. It's about working in the difference. I don't feel you don't feel me necessarily. And maybe it's not about that, but it's about making common in that difference. I think if transference is about that, it's about affective bonds, indifference. Then I think all this kind of efforts that we've been discussing today, they resonate there. I don't know if it makes any sense.
Razorsmile:
No, no, resonates completely. It's the word bonds in particular that sort of kicks in. Eric, yes, go on.
Eric:
I just have a question for the three of you. I remember once reading something about the uncanny and the argument was it's not that psychoanalysis has a theory of the uncanny, but psychoanalysis should be part of the uncanny itself to shift the realm. So I suppose I'm wondering how do the three of you having engaged with these ecological questions think about the unconscious? Especially in light of what Guattari says where he wants to embrace both one-to-one relations group relations And what he talks about is institutional, but in our terms we would talk about his community or earth relations How do you guys think about this unconscious? Is it something that is? Human or is it something more than that? But that's just been my one or last money question to contribute to this discussion
Razorsmile:
I think that's a nice way to end on that. What is the unconscious for you in your particular situation? think that's a nice way of maybe ending. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I I love the thing about pebbles and licking pebbles as well, kind of like relation. That was, to me, it's a very nice way of thinking of wet relationality, this tongue and the lips and the tongue. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of a stone I have in my house. Witches and sorcerers, Quirty and Sussex often have these things we call holy stones we get off the beach, little pebbles with holes in that have been driven through. You sort of end up collecting them for all sorts of reasons. But I have one that's attached to the string in my bathroom. So for the last 30 years, every member of the family has pulled the light cord on this particular stone. And it's now, like you say, got that kind of glaze of like hundreds of thousands of times it's been touched. I know that Gemma has some, her battery was dying so she may have slipped away. I'll give her a moment.
Gemma:
Am I still here? Hello?
Razorsmile:
If we have no further questions or nothing pressing, go on.
Eric:
Would it be nice, sorry, could we hear from Anna how she perceives the end?
Razorsmile:
yeah, that would be good. take a pause. Anna, how about you? Where does the unconscious play its role in your work?
Ana Minozzo:
on everything, I can't even respond, it's all about the unconscious. And of course it depends on what we understand to be the unconscious, you know, it's not this removed part of us, it's not something that has to be unraveled in this archaeological way, it's not just repression, but it's everything that is beyond ourselves and it's with us the whole time, you know, this me beyond me. this I beyond itself. To me that's the matter of the unconscious. It's about all the encounters, all the excesses, some impossibles and some possibles to, you know, I think that's what the the clinical work is all about. And it's interesting because we started the conversation today hearing about how Jem and Blake wrote and how much unconscious went into that process. You know, it's what was difficult for you. What he couldn't grasp and yet is what allowed something novel to be formed. I think this is the unconscious at work. Yeah.
Razorsmile:
Yeah, I was kind of struck, I think, by that relationship of the therapeutic engagement with the problem and whether, in a sense, psychoanalysis had prompted that engagement or whether the engagement had prompted psychoanalysis and which of the two was kind of kicking around there. Gemma, I'm going to ask you about the unconscious. Where do you think, in a sense, the unconscious plays its role in your thinking and work at the moment?
Gemma:
As a somewhat connected to how Blake described with the porous. I love that idea because initially I was thinking about the embrayment of the body, the embodiment of the brain and the embrayment of Yeah, you said it made you scoff, which I thought was funny. But I think that that's the nice way of thinking about it because the collective unconscious, the ecological unconscious, which believes that we are intrinsically and inherently tied to animal, vegetable, mineral, parasitic, viral, and all of those bits and bobs, wonderful, alive things. I think it's just a useful way of thinking about the unconscious as something that's not just within its surrounding, and it is vast. And I love the way of thinking about the embrayment of the body, because it notices the physical self and how sometimes that can be disregarded when we think about psychoanalysis, because it's something very internal processes, when actually our physical self is holding so much useful information. And it's something that we do notice in the unconscious nonverbal communication with what Anna was bringing in earlier. It's not just talking, there's so much in the encounter that goes beyond just language. And I think that's something that is quite present in my essay as well. How can we move beyond just thinking about it in terms of how it can be externalised through language? And actually, it can be something much more sensual, sensuous. and It's still quite abstract, the idea of the unconscious for me at this stage. think that it shows up in so many interesting and valuable messages and ways that we can't necessarily, I'm not sure, I haven't experienced it yet, gotten to the bottom of as such, because the unconscious almost feels like, I always think of the iceberg in the water, that's the tip, that's the conscious, and then the unconscious is this huge iceberg that's underneath. the surface. But yeah, I will leave it with the embodiment of the brain and the embranement of the body because I think that's a useful... something that I find useful as a way in to keep noticing all the ways in which the unconscious shows up but also not to disavow or ignore the way in which the environment informs. how the unconscious is driving us.
Razorsmile:
That's lovely. Yes, that kind of notion that it has to be kind of like we have to have some kind of way in and even a nice some formula or some kind of piece of wisdom or all these hooks that we can kind of keep attach ourselves to things with I think can sometimes be vital. It's been lovely talking to you and it's been a really fascinating conversation and eco therapy is plainly as it were, central to some of our ideas and the development of this as a kind of thought, a practice and a reframing, as think Gemma mentioned a number of times and something that I think is fundamental. So once again, thank you very much, Eric, Anna, Blake and Gemma. And thanks for listening.
Gemma:
So, Thank you.
Ana Minozzo:
Thank you, it's been great, great
Razorsmile:
Okay.
Ana Minozzo:
to listen to everyone today.