Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics

"Donna Orange's prophetic voice once again rings clear, this time showing us the way psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, and politics can be drawn from to address the immediate existential threat to life on earth. Her book helps us respond to the greatest moral/political crisis of our time with intellectual complexity, moral vision, political immediacy ¾ and as always with her characteristic learnedness and humility. A brave, essential, inspiring book."-Philip Cushman, Ph.D., author of Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy. In private practice, Vashon Island, Washington.

"In a terrific addition to the literature on our paralysis in the face of the climate crisis, Donna Orange uses the thread of her psychoanalytic understanding to weave an analysis connecting climate science, theories of justice and radical ethics. Not surprisingly she comes up with some great new insights. In particular I love the way she locates denial and indifference to climate change in the context of racism, cultural entitlement and superiority, reminding us that it is the global poor who will suffer most and black lives really do matter."-Paul Hoggett, Chair, Climate Psychology Alliance.

"Entwining psychoanalysis, political critique, and research on climate change, Orange makes a a formidable argument: that climate justice is inextricable from social justice, and from the radical ethics she has been advocating throughout her scholarly work. Both passionate and measured, this beautiful book asks us to awaken to the call of our home, the earth, against which we have transgressed. And she calls upon psychoanalysts to illuminate, and challenge, the 'ethical unconsciousness' that is blinding us all."-Sue Grand, Ph.D, faculty and supervisor, NYU Postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, author of The Reproduction of Evil and The Hero in the Mirror.

"A significant contribution to the (still too small) psychoanalytic literature on what underlies our disavowal of the serious effects of climate change. Donna Orange's perspective is interdisciplinary (philosophy, relational psychoanalysis and social justice) and her scholarship is deep. I found very powerful her argument that an attitude of exaggerated entitlement - and disavowing the suffering of the poorest that results - is rooted in centuries of colonialism and slavery, This alone made her book for me a 'must read', but there is much more, including, for instance, an important in-depth analysis of the role shame plays in supporting the disavowal."-Sally Weintrobe, practising psychoanalyst, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, editor of (2012) Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge), founding member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.