The Climate Crisis and the Entanglement of Psychoanalysis and Spirituality: Toward an Analytically Informed Approach to Spiritual Care

This article contends that Western philosophical traditions and Abrahamic spiritualities, while different, are entangled in the sense that together they represent distinct discursive performative epistemologies regarding how individuals inhabit the world. More specifically, what they share are social imaginaries that are founded on epistemologies of deficiency that radically separate human beings from other species and the Earth. It is argued further that these epistemologies are implicated in Western subjects’ instrumental, reifying, and exploitative dispositions and behaviors toward other species and the Earth, which the climate crisis makes apparent. Psychoanalysis can provide reasons for the emergence of these social imaginaries and their attendant resistance to changing how we dwell with other species and the Earth. In psychoanalytic parlance, epistemologies of deficiency entail projecting onto other species existential impermanence, which accompanies weak dissociation that assuages anxiety and fear regarding the impermanence of ourselves and our significations. Once persons become aware of this, they are ideally faced with deciding whether to take accountability and to change. Quantum physics/philosophy can provide a corrective lens for both psychoanalysis and Western spiritualities—a lens that accompanies more capacious epistemologies that invite ecologically inclusive, caring, and ethical ways of inhabiting a biodiverse world upon which matter–life–consciousness depend.