A brief search for the social and psychological explanations for the phenomenon of climate change denial turns up a vast array of reasons for our current lack of action to protect each other and our planet. It looks like there’s been as much written about the denial of climate change as about climate change itself. After each of the recent large-scale natural disasters, commentators have trained their attentions on our ability to deny responsibility for the state of the natural world. Jargon from psychoanalytic theory and current behavioural and social psychology has been wielded in efforts to make sense of our inaction. What are we doing when we ask the question “why”? Have we substituted diagnosis for action?
In the mid 1890s, Sigmund Freud was refining his seduction theory, and presenting it to colleagues — who were less than receptive. His theory came from his understanding that for many of his patients, the origin of their distress was a history of sexual assault as children. He was aware at the time that this was not only difficult material for the medical world to absorb, but also that it went against the biological bias of most of his profession.
Freud famously later reversed his theory, opting instead to see these experiences as fantasies. He moved from exploring the impact and treatment of actual sexual assault on babies and young children, to a focus on the mind of the child. He abandoned the exploration of what causes distress, and chose instead to develop a model of how we deny our feelings and experiences, and in this way hamper our development. It is from this reversal, from this betrayal of sexual assault survivors, that we have the clever, attractive and sometimes useful concept of denial.
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