Today, we continue our inquiry into trance psychology. The following selection is from Chapter 6 of Ralph Metzner’s book “Green Psychology”. —Jivan Vatayan
Also see: The Machine and Breaking the Trance!
Ralph Metzner
It is widely agreed that the global ecological crisis (which confronts the world today) is one of the most critical turning points that human civilization has ever faced. Furthermore, the realization is spreading that the root causes of environmental destruction lie in human psychology—in certain distorted perceptions, attitudes, and values that modern humans have come to hold. In this essay I discuss some of the diagnostic analogies that have been proposed to account for the destructive imbalance in the human-nature relationship.
Several different diagnostic metaphors have been proposed to explain the ecologically disastrous split, the pathological alienation, between human beings and the rest of the biosphere. None of these psychological diagnoses, incidentally, have been made by psychologists, who seem to have taken absolutely no interest in this question thus far. We can view these concepts as metaphors or analogies, transferred from the realm of individual psychopathology to the level of society and to the level of the human species in its relation to the nonhuman natural world. There are historical precedents for applying diagnostic concepts from individual psychology to the realm of collective or mass psychology. Wilhelm Reich’s work on the mass psychology of fascism and, more recently, Lloyd deMause’s psychoanalytic interpretations of historical and political trends are examples of this approach. To those who would question the relevance of such diagnostic speculation, the answer is simply that we are trying to discern the nature of the psychological disturbance that appears to have Homo sapiens in its grip, to be able to apply the appropriate treatments to the amelioration of the present ecocatastrophe.
THE AILING BIOSPHERE: METAPHORS OF ORGANIC PATHOLOGY
A number of people have proposed that in view of the excessive population growth of human beings in many parts of the biosphere, the best analogy to describe the situation is in terms of a malignant tumor. Tumors are made up of cells multiplying uncontrollably and destroying the surrounding tissue. The anthropologist Warren Hern has said, “A schematic view of the growth of London from 1800 to 1955 looks like nothing so much as an expanding, invasive, metastatic, malignant tumor.” He proposes the term Homo ecophagus (“ecosystem-devourer”) as the appropriate name for this pathological species. In pointing to the obvious malignancy of large megacities, Theodore Roszak has written about “Gaia’s city pox,” the spread of large urban conglomerations associated with the Industrial Revolution. The disease metaphor for our planetary condition depends on the following underlying analogy: Earth (Gaia) is a living organism, and humans and other individual organisms are the cells in this superorganism. The phenomenal expansions of human populations that we are now seeing, particularly the sprawling urban aggregates, can then be seen as clusters of cancer cells, spreading to more and more areas of Earth’s land surface.
The most completely articulated formulation of the disease analogy is by James Lovelock, in his last book, Healing Gaia. Trained in medicine, Lovelock has long been suggesting that geophysiology should be the name of the science of the structures and functions of Earth’s ecosystems and energy cycles (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.). Planetary medicine then concerns the disturbed functioning of this great organism. Lovelock’s preferred diagnosis is that Gaia is suffering from a parasitical infestation by the species Homo sapiens, a disease he calls disseminated primatemia. He points out that parasite-host relationships can have four possible outcomes: first, the invading microorganisms are destroyed by the host’s immune system; second, host and parasite settle down to a long war of attrition—the condition known as chronic infection; third, the parasite destroys the host and thereby eliminates its own life support; and, fourth, the parasitical relationship is transformed into one of mutualism or symbiosis. “The last [scenario], symbiosis, is obviously desirable. As intelligent microbes, we have the advantage of knowing the risks of failure and the lasting benefits of symbiosis. But will we achieve it?” Lovelock states that there are several strong precedents in nature for this kind of symbiosis between life-forms of very different scale, but he adds that there are inherent properties of humans that make it difficult for us to act sensibly and achieve symbiosis within Gaia. With this statement we enter the realm of human behavior and attitudes as the crucial levers of global change.
ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND THE HUMAN SUPERIORITY COMPLEX
Environmental thinkers, or ecophilosophers, were the first to point to the crucial role of distorted human attitudes, beliefs, and values in the generation of the ecological crisis. The concept of anthropocentrism, or homocentrism, was offered as a philosophical diagnosis of the human species’ ecological maladjustment and biocentrism or ecocentrism as the healthier corrective. This idea has been put forward by a number of twentieth-century philosophers, ecologists, and writers, including Aldo Leopold, Paul Sears, Aldous Huxley, Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Lynn White Jr., Robinson Jeffers, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and others; forebear of this kind of thinking can be traced to such nineteenth-century thinkers as John Muir, Henry Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as to the ethical cosmology of Baruch Spinoza. The anthropocentric critique has been articulated most cogently by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (himself strongly influenced by Spinoza) and by those identified with the philosophical orientation known as deep ecology, founded by Naess. To use the term anthropocentrism as a critique of the human attitude to nature in the modernist worldview parallels the use of “ethnocentrism” to critique racial discrimination and the use of “Eurocentrism” to critique the colonialist exploitation ideology of Western culture.
Although the role of anthropocentric attitudes in creating or aggravating the ecological imbalance of industrial civilization is unquestionable, there are reasons to question the use of that term, since it actually covers two distinct meanings. Anthropocentric literally just means “human-centered,” and some critics have pointed out that the human, like every other species, necessarily looks at the world from its own point of view, seeking to maximize its own survival advantages. A non-anthropocentric viewpoint, in this criticism, is both impossible and unnatural. But whether our human-centered perspective can be transcended is surely an empirical question—a question about the possibility of psychological change. Even if we assume that a homocentric attitude is a basic fact of human nature, this still leaves open the possibility that humans can learn to transcend their inborn homocentrism. This is, in fact, what Arne Naess, Warwick Fox, and others propose with their notion of extending identification to the natural world. Perhaps this is something humans can do and animals cannot. Or perhaps animals, or some animals, can also empathically escape their species-centered points of view and look at the world through human eyes. Certainly this seems to be the view of shamanistic cultures, which have much lore and mythology about how the human, the failure or disappearance of culturally provided developmental supports would have particularly devastating consequences. In his use of paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies as models of ecologically balanced lifestyles, including child-rearing, Shepard seems to be saying that with the advent of domestication, circa twelve thousand years ago, civilized humanity began to lose or pervert the developmental practices that had functioned healthily for hundreds of thousands of years.
He sees two stages where ancient patterns of development may have become chronically incomplete: infant-caregiver relationships and adolescent transition rites. Shepard argues that agriculture increased the distance between the growing child and the nonhuman, or “wild,” world of nature: “By aggravating the tensions of separation from the mother and at the same time spatially isolating the individual from the non-humanized world, agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the course of human existence.”
In Erikson’s developmental model, adolescence is the time when the child is enmeshed in a conflict between “identity and identity diffusion.” The notion of a collective fixation at the stage of early adolescence fits with the kind of boisterous, arrogant pursuit of individual self-assertion that characterizes the consumerist, exploitative model of economic growth, where the short-term profits of entrepreneurs and corporate shareholders seem to be not only the dominant value but the only value under consideration. It also fits with the aggressive and predatory militarism and the emphasis on the values and ideals of male warrior cults that have characterized Western civilization since the Bronze Age. Adolescents who have difficulty negotiating the turmoil of this stage often become, as Erikson writes, “remarkably clannish, intolerant and cruel in their exclusion of others who are ‘different,’ in skin color or cultural background.”
To provide guiding structures for negotiating the transition from the family matrix to the larger society was the function of rites of passage in traditional societies. The progressive deterioration and loss of adolescent rites of passage in the modern age are well known. As Robert Bly has pointed out, even the minimal father-to-son apprenticeship bonding that existed before the Industrial Revolution has since been lost. The only transition rites of manhood we still have involving elders, such as they are, are the boot-camp and combat initiations afforded by the military. Beyond that, there is only the stunted futility of attempted peer group initiation, whether in the pathetic form of college fraternity hazing or in the casual violence of juvenile street gangs, where twelve-year olds may carry handguns to school to avenge imagined insults to their “home” band.
Besides the loss of adolescent initiation rites, Shepard points to the “unity pathology” that develops if the earliest stage of infant-caregiver bonding is disrupted or disturbed. This is the stage Erikson identifies as the stage where the child’s developing sense of self is dealing with issues of “basic trust vs. mistrust.” If this stage is not negotiated successfully, we may have at best an attitude of chronic insecurity and at worst the suspiciousness and proneness to violence of the paranoid psychotic. Jean Liedloff’s studies of mother-infant bonding among Amazonian Indians and her “continuum concept” support Shepard’s assertion that in hunter/gatherer societies, the intense early attachment leads not to prolonged dependency but to a better functioning nervous system.’
Shepard summarizes his theory of ontogenetic crippling by stating, “Men [presumably he means “Western industrialized humans”] may now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure—by Paleolithic standards, childish adults.” One of the worst consequences of this collective madness is “a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us.” On the other hand, adults who in infancy developed a basic trust that the world of nature and society can provide for their needs are not likely to be attracted to a worldview that demands a relentless struggle for competitive advantage. Government leaders and opinion makers in the United States are now in the habit of promoting “competitiveness” as the value or goal that the educational system should develop in the nation’s children. We are suffering, Shepard says, from “an epidemic of the psychopathic mutilation of ontogeny.”
Shepard does not say much about the possible treatment for such a case of collective arrested development. Presumably the reinstitution of initiation rituals for adolescents, carried out by respected elders, and a much greater sensitivity to the fragility of early infant bonding should be two key ingredients in any attempt to reverse this pathology. Similar proposals have been made by many people. “An ecologically harmonious sense of self and world is . . . the inherent possession of everyone; it is latent in the organism, in the interaction of the genome and early experience. The phases of such early experiences, or epigenesis, are the legacy of an evolutionary past in which human and nonhuman achieved a healthy rapport.”‘
ADDICTION
Another analogy from the field of psychopathology that offers considerable insight, in my view, is the model of addiction (or compulsion, more generally). We are a society whose scientists and experts have been describing for forty years, in horrifying and mind-numbing detail, the dimensions of global ecocatastrophe. Just think of some of the book titles: Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth, The Death of Nature, The End of Nature. Our inability to stop our suicidal and ecocidal behavior fits the clinical definition of addiction or compulsion: behavior that continues in spite of the fact that the individual knows that it is destructive to family, work, and social relationships. This metaphor of addiction or compulsion, on a vast scale, also parallels in many ways the teachings of the Asian spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism. These traditions teach that suffering or dissatisfaction is an inevitable feature of all human existence and that craving or desire is at the root of suffering.
One of the first to develop the addiction diagnosis was the deep ecologist and mountaineer Dolores LaChapelle, in her book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex. In a chapter entitled “Addiction, Capitalism and the New World Ripoff,” she analyzes the interrelationships between the pursuit of addictive substances, including gold, silver, sugar, and narcotics, and the phenomenal growth of the capital-accumulating industrial society from the sixteenth century to the present. “The entire development of capitalism consists in making a group of people addicted to some ‘substance’ and selling it to them. Capitalism ‘worked’ as long as we had an enormous source of cheap natural resources (primarily in the New World) . . . . Continuing its history of ‘addiction,’ capitalism is now relying more and more on addictive drugs to fuel its growth.”
Several other authors have also pointed to the addictive nature of our relationship to fossil fuels, another major engine of unrestrained industrial growth and ecological destruction. More generally, one can see the spread of consumerism and the obsession with industrial-economic growth as signs of an addictive society. Chellis Glendinning, drawing on ideas from Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, has analyzed the “technoaddiction” that characterizes industrial civilization—with its compulsive craving for faster and more powerful machines, its pervasive denial, and its blatant attraction to retraumatization. The addiction model is quite useful. In the past forty years, we have learned something about addiction, how to treat it and how to prevent it. The twelve-step recovery movement does attract individuals who want to break the cycle of addiction, and it also appeals to people with spiritual values and interests.
NARCISSISM
Environmentalists have long argued that one of the key dynamics of the global runaway system of ecological destruction is overconsumption, particularly in the heavily industrialized, modernized societies. Consumerism—more and more people wanting and buying more and more goods—represents a fairly precise collective analogy to compulsion addiction on the individual level. Although consumption is massively and artificially pumped to extreme levels by advertising, there is much evidence to suggest that an underlying narcissism may play a major role. Narcissism is a personality disorder characterized by an inflated and grandiose self-image as well as feelings of entitlement that mask deep-seated feelings of unworthiness and emptiness.
The psychologist Philip Cushman has drawn explicit parallels between narcissism and the consumer culture. The relentless pursuit of ever more expensive and technologically advanced consumer goods feeds the entitled “false self,” while the insecure and empty inner self remains anxious and wounded—driven then to buy even more goods to cover up the inner emptiness. As Cushman writes, “the empty self seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alientation.”
Ecopsychologists Allen Kanner and Mary Gomes have expanded on this line of work to argue that if the diagnosis of mass narcissism in American culture is correct, it represents a difficult challenge for environmentalists. Since the average consumer feels inwardly inadequate and is constantly bombarded with a torrent of advertising designed to induce him or her to spend more and more to cure this unworthiness, the environmentalist’s plea for less material consumption may fall on ears made deaf by entitlement and fear. “When they [consumers] are criticized for excessive materialism, there is a danger that these admonishments will primarily increase their overall sense of failure rather than significantly alter their environmental habits.”
DISSOCIATION
In contrast to the Freudian and post-Freudian view of the centrality of repression in the creation of the “unconscious,” there has been in recent years a revival of interest in the concept of dissociation. Dissociative disorders, such as “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and “multiple personality disorder” (MPD), are being diagnosed much more frequently, though it is not known whether this rate of diagnosis is due to an increase in the actual occurrence of such disorders or to improved recognition of conditions previously misunderstood. Dissociation is actually a normal and natural cognitive function, the opposite of association. Dissociation plays a role in hypnotic and other forms of trance, when we progressively disconnect perception of the external world, to attend to interior images, memories, and impressions. Even the simple act of focusing or concentrating attention clearly involves some degree of dissociation, a screening out of awareness of anything that is not in focus.
In the Freudian view, psychic material (thoughts, images, feelings, etc.) that is in the repressed unconscious (also called id) is disorganized, primitive, and childish, functioning according to the “pleasure principle”. The conscious mind (ego), on the other hand, functions according to the “reality principle” and is capable of adjusting or adapting to the demands of reality in a rational, organized manner. The dissociationist view, as originally put forward by Freud’s contemporary Pierre Janet and in the neo-dissociationism of Ernest Hilgard and others, is that dissociation involves a “vertical” separation of strands of consciousness that may be equally well organized, rational, and in touch with reality. For example, the mental and emotional components of a painful experience may be dissociated, so that we remember what we saw and thought but not what we (appropriately) felt; vice versa, a certain stimulus may trigger a feeling of panic, but the cognitive memory of what happened remains dissociated. In MPD, the most extreme form of dissociative disorder, which has been shown in 99 percent of cases to have developed in response to repeated abuse in early childhood, two or more fragments of identity, sometimes called “ego states” or “alters,” are created. They maintain a continuity of their own, often with different names and different personality characteristics. As Hilgard says, “the concealed [or dissociated] personality is sometimes more normal or mentally healthy than the openly displayed one. This accords better with the idea of a split in the normal consciousness rather than with the idea of a primitive unconscious regulated largely by primary process thinking.”
The notion of the “splitting” of two or more equally rational and organized psychic fragments or identities was also used by Robert J. Lifton in his analysis of the Nazi doctors, who were able to enjoy listening to Beethoven in the garden and playing with their children after a day of torturing and killing people. I believe that this concept of dissociation, or splitting, provides a more accurate and more useful understanding of the collective human pathology vis-‡-vis the environment than the notion of a repressed and primitive “ecological unconscious.” The entire culture of Western industrial society is dissociated from its ecological substratum. It’s not that our knowledge and understanding of Earth’s complex and delicate web of interdependence is vaguely and inchoately lodged in some forgotten basement of our psyche. We have the knowledge of our impact on the environment; we can perceive the pollution and degradation of the land, the waters, the air—but we do not attend to it, and we do not connect that knowledge with other aspects of our total experience. Perhaps it would be more accurate, and fair, to say that individuals feel unable to respond to the natural world appropriately, because the political, economic, and educational institutions in which we are involved all have this dissociation built into them. This dissociative alienation has been a feature of Western culture for centuries or, in some respects, even for millennia, if Paul Shepard is right.
In the Western psyche, the dissociative split between humans and nature is entangled with a split between the spiritual and the natural. In a subsequent chapter, we shall consider the complex historical roots of this dissociation. Basically, it’s as if we had two selves. One is spiritual, which we think of as rising upward into higher realms. The second, the natural self, which includes bodily sensations and feelings, sinks or draws us downward. As a result of this dualistic, value-laden conception, the spiritual (and human) is then always regarded as superior to the natural (and animal). With this notion, we find ourselves back with the humanist superiority complex described earlier.
In some versions of this core image, the contrast between the two realms, or tendencies, is even sharper; not only is there a separation of the two tendencies, but there is also opposition between them. Then we are taught that to be spiritual, to attain salvation or enlightenment, we have to overcome our “lower” animal instincts and passions and conquer the bodily ego. In the alchemical tradition, which mostly was based on following and imitating nature, this special kind of spiritual work was called the opus contra naturam, “the work against nature.”
This dissociative split between human spiritual values and the realities of nature, the flesh, and the senses, survived the demise of the religious worldview and appears again as a purely psychological pattern in Freudian psychoanalysis. In this version of the ancient split, the conflict is between the ego, which is basically human consciousness, and the id, which is the body-based animal instincts and impulses. The ego has to struggle against the id to attain consciousness and become truly human. At the collective level of culture, Freud held that this conflicted relationship with the natural brought about the discontents of civilization (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)—this was the inevitable price we had to pay for the possibility of civilization.
The ecologically disastrous consequences of this dissociative split in Western human beings’ self-concept becomes clear when we reflect upon the fact that if we feel ourselves mentally and spiritually separate from our own nature—our body, instincts, sensations, and so on – this separation will also be projected outward. We see and experience ourselves as separate then from the great realm of nature and Earth all around us. If we believe that to advance spiritually, or to be true human beings, we have to go against, to inhibit, and control the natural feelings and impulses of our own body, this same kind of antagonism and agenda of control will also be projected outward, supporting the well-known Western “conquest of nature” ideology. For most people in the West, their highest values, their noblest ideals, their image of themselves as spiritual beings striving to be good and come closer to God have been deeply associated with a sense of having to overcome and separate from nature.
It does not take much imagination to see how the consequences of this distorted perception have been played out in the spread of European civilization around the globe. And it is a distorted, counterfactual image: we human beings are not, in fact, separate from or superior to nature, nor do we have the right to dominate and exploit nature beyond what is necessary for our immediate needs. We are part of nature—we are in Earth, not on it. We are the cells in the body of the vast living organism that is planet Earth. An organism cannot continue to function healthily if one group of cells decides to dominate and cannibalize the other energy systems of the body.
Furthermore, the idea that the spiritual and the natural are opposed or that spirituality must always transcend nature is a culturally relative concept not shared by polytheistic religions or traditional animistic societies. In indigenous cultures around the world, the natural world is regarded as the realm of spirit and the sacred; the natural is the spiritual. From this belief follows an attitude of respect, a desire to maintain a balanced relationship, and an instinctive understanding of the need for considering future generations and the future health of the ecosystem—in short, sustainable. Recognizing and respecting worldviews and spiritual practices different from our own is probably the best antidote to the West’s fixation in the life-destroying dissociation between spirit and nature.
Ralph Metzner’s “Green Psychology” at Amazon.com