Linking Psychoanalysis To The Natural World
Madeleine Lansky originally had deep interests in ecology, humanities, art, literature and film. After realizing that the people-side of ecological studies suited her skillset better, she became a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, combining the ecological study of the human with an understanding of our potent, promising, and perilous brains.
As the millennium approached, it became clear that humans were entering a confluence of wicked problems where pollution, climate change, poverty, large-scale disease & pandemics, and mass-scale social & psychological dislocation would be emerging.
This work is driven by a desire to facilitate human adaptation to the rapidly-changing demands of the modern world. In essence, psychoanalysis is the science of adaptation and finding wellness in imperfect settings and situations. Shifting brain structures can take years, and problematic brain structures can lead to terrible medical illness. When systemic oppression and environmental injustice are added in, anybody is at risk of getting very sick or very disenfranchised very quickly. Frontline workers know this and by offering to be of service, they expose themselves to the joys of being useful but also a kind of heartbreak that comes from seeing suffering beings who can’t adapt quickly enough to difficult circumstances.
We can take frontline workers for granted, asking them to hold the pain of the world so that we can lessen the psychological burden of seeing a world that is, at times, unraveling. A grant from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation made it possible to make a microdocumentary, Compost Happens, about just that topic. Yet with our rapidly-changing world, many of us are becoming frontline workers in a variety of ways and it is easier to get good work done when one has a blueprint for structural difficulties that are getting in the way of better outcomes. We live in a world that will ask us to be smarter, more empathetic, more creative, more courageous, and more generous. Some frontline workers are addressing the climate crisis. Others work in ICUs during super-pandemics. Many are in primary care clinics. Some are kids in playgrounds. Many brave chaotic elements to bring us the solutions, goods, and services we need to survive and thrive. All are essential workers. The truth is that our human ecosystem relies on frontline workers to metabolize the unbearable and to create and maintain sense and order.
This work acknowledges how exhausting it can be to work on the frontline and how challenging it can be to maintain compassion for help-receivers who are too overwhelmed by their internal and external circumstances to request help in a productive fashion. It introduces core psychoanalytic concepts from first-wave psychoanalysis and incorporates curriculum from outdoor education for students learning about environmental sciences. In so doing, it acknowledges that Wilfred Bion’s hopes for the capacity of the frontline worker were developed before we understood all the structural problems of our modern industrial world. "Managing Compassion Fatigue in Trauma-Informed Care" (aka The Kitty Bunny Talk) is part of a body of work available in and expanding to multiple languages that embeds psychoanalysis in millennia of wisdom traditions that locate humans on and in interaction with the Earth.
