Climate Change

The phenomenon of climate change and human responses to it are indeed massive and discussion of these subjects might incorporate ecology, energy science, public health, geography, political science, geology, finance, government, medicine, and many fields. The unique contribution of psychoanalytic discourse to these debates is to isolate the subjective factors in the way people frame the subject. The “stance” to climate change or the sense of urgency to issues of the individual or social response to it are all reflective of a particular way in which the person will frame the issue—both the easy to frame aspects and also more importantly those less apparent to the person, those more opaque to human representation. In the first paper in this chapter, a comparison is made between the interpretive process of psychoanalysis—taking something that causes anxiety and putting it into words—and the reading effect of a recent near-future novel of climate change, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. The second paper in the chapter puts attention on a certain idealism that features strongly in how some represent nature.