Psychological roots of the climate crisis: neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture of uncare

Abstract

For over a decade, the psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe has been speaking, writing, and organising forums about the climate emergency (e.g., Weintrobe, 2013, 2015). Her commitment to helping people face the alarming reality about the state of the planet reflects her impassioned love of the earth, its myriad life forms, and the inanimate world from which all life has emerged, over aeons of time. Weintrobe draws on her psychoanalytic knowledge in order to deepen our understanding of the sources of resistance to evidence about climate change. Her mastery of a huge range of subjects is extraordinary. She marshals arguments from many disciplines: these include, most centrally, political and economic theory (neoliberalism), but also geology, sociology, ecology, and evolutionary theory. The book furnishes the reader ready access to a vast and interdisciplinary range of material, and provides helpful references for all aspects of the problem. But its principle aim is to help us manage our resistance, as individuals, as social groups, and professionally as psychoanalytic workers, in recognising our deadly and death-denying complicity, which minimises the overwhelming evidence that we are living in an age of climate breakdown. Weintrobe refers to our complicity, with denial as ‘the climate bubble’, and develops the notion of Exceptionalism (cf. exceptionalism), a rigid psychological mindset which is largely responsible for the climate crisis. To help us with this work, which requires a receptivity to potentially overwhelming information, Weintrobe skilfully uses very short chapters, unadorned language, and apt and interesting, often witty, examples. She makes a potentially difficult and complex argument interesting and easy to follow, and does this for the one central motivation that drives the book: to help us emerge from the climate bubble. I am grateful for her amazing grasp of how economic forces have led us by the nose into the slumber of ‘buy buy buy’, of how our desires have been fired by large corporations, and of how our ignorance of the social injustice this depends on has been so successfully camouflaged. Weintrobe does not diminish our complicity with the injustice of the global north’s dominance over the developing world, as she writes: