Evolving into Ecopsychology
While the image of a living Earth has been kept alive in most Eastern and native traditions, in Europe it disappeared. It was only a small pirate band of hermeneutic Gnostics who kept this secret alive through their alchemical works. In dungeon laboratories, they secretly worked to retrieve the light in matter from the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. The concept of the Anima Mundi contained the human psyche as fully entwined with its surroundings, and inherently part of the whole. But at one point, this too got lost in the murderous sweep of religious fervour and the nature caging Age of Reason. In the early 1900s, psychoanalyst Carl Jung retrieved alchemical manuscripts and found in them the archetypal symbolism of the human psyche labouring new consciousness. Jung, in his later years, emphasized the importance of the Anima Mundi, considering the self as ‘embracing the whole universe’ the real mystery of life and what it means to be an awake human being. Jungian psychology and Carl Jung should not be considered as one and the same thing. Contemporary Jungian psychological practice largely centers on the consideration of the human psyche rather than the ecology of life. The importance of therapy as a service to the Anima Mundi seems to have gotten lost in the therapy room. Sufi mystic Vaughan Lee offers the same thought, that the self- care aspect of therapy outweighs its original purpose; therapy needs to be given back to the Anima Mundi.[1] What makes it so vital to return to these ancient roots with the knowledge we have today, especially in a therapeutic environment, and what might that look like?
In this current time, we stand at the pinnacle of worldwide ecological devastation and humanitarian crisis, and for the first time in history, this is happening at the hands of humanity. This era has become known as the Anthropocene; a human dominated epoch that marks a fundamental change in the relationship of humans and Earth, one characterized by extraction, mechanization, and control. Leading up and into the Anthropocene has been the domination of a patriarchal systemic structure. The word patriarchy has been used to mean as ‘dominated by men’, but I use the word patriarchy as a force of archetypal destruction as a will to power that finds expression in both women and men. This force represses the value of relatedness by denying the sacredness inherent to matter, out casting matter as devoid of the divine and thereby repressing the chthonic masculine and feminine principle. In its outward expression, patriarchy flourished from the rise of the solar principle as the transcendent divine and proliferated monotheistic religion, pushing rationalism, mechanization, and control to the forefront. With a Goddess centered culture on the decline, patriarchal rule repressed women while desacralizing nature and the way of the natural. Jungian literature, mysticism and native wisdom describe this one-sidedness of the world around us as a reflection of psychic disproportion and spiritual disconnection. But now, the image of a living Earth seems to be given back to the Western mind.
The dirty truth: an interdependent reality
Where our consciousness once separated from an organic experience of life lies the festering wound we tend to band-aid as quickly as possible, but leaving the internal tissue exposed allows it to become the crack through which the light gets in. It contains the ego’s selfish pursuit of individualism with its lust for power and greed, but also the memory that we are a dependent and symbiotic creature, down to the very making of our cells. In biology, no organism lives in isolated purity. We are a contaminated cosmos. We are of the soil, and soiled. It is our ‘faulty’ nature that conduits the miraculous. Billions of years ago, the absence or shortcomings in cells evoked a merging through some form of symbiosis, creating entire new species and abilities. Ancestor algae crawled onto dry land to become the plant life we known today because fungi rushed to their aid, serving as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants learned how to ‘stand and walk’ by themselves. As Merlin Sheldrake notes in his book Entangled Life, on both the microscopic and macroscopic, the history of life turns out to be full of intimate collaborations in which the idea of ‘self’ can shade off into otherness gradually. The human body even consist of more bacterial cells than human cells. Most of these bacteria live in our digestive tract, our gut and intestines. When we speak of 'gut instinct' as a form of primal, intuitive wisdom, who is doing the talking? To return to these most basic facts and fluid notions of how and what makes us, is also a return to the roots of hermeneutic alchemy. Alchemy praises the putrefied. Fermentation becomes a celebration of the soul. When this becomes physical, when depth psychology becomes dirty, we open into ecopsychology.
Ecopsychology incorporates the alchemical principle of ‘to awaken to the Anima Mundi, is to awaken the Anima Mundi herself’ as embedding all matter with consciousness. Spiritual ecology is by nature an embodied experience, both pulled down into the soil and sprouting up from the chthonic earth into ordinary life. It extends out into the vast web of life and roots into local ecology and community. Stephen Aizenstat (1995) offers the term ‘world unconscious’ instead of collective unconscious to include ‘all creatures and things of the world’ to possess ‘intrinsic unconscious characteristics – subjective inner natures.’[2] This coincides with a shamanic worldview in which the human experience is part of a larger- than-human life. David Abram (1995) in Ecopsychology describes the role of the rural Balinese shaman, djankris, as mediating the inner and outer worlds to reestablish harmony as its primary aspect. From here ‘healing’ may occur. ‘
Disease, in most such cultures, is conceptualized as a disequilibrium within the sick person…..commonly traceable to an imbalance between the human consciousness and the larger field of forces in which it is embedded…..Any healer who was not simultaneously attending to the complex relations between the human community and the larger more than human field will likely dispel an illness form one person only to have the same problem arise (perhaps in a new form) somewhere else in the village…. The medicine person’s primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded.’[3]
Abram (1995) emphasizes that this 'larger field of forces’ has been ascribed to the supernatural in the West, while that which is viewed with great awe and wonder in most indigenous cultures, is nature itself. Recent research on the extensive mind of the spider shows cognitive capacity to extend far beyond its brain, down into its body and even showing the web threads and configurations to be integral parts of its cognitive systems[4].
The way of the natural is a reciprocal dialogue; it serves as the vital pulse that keeps the blood flow between the worlds alive. But this is not a tit for tat situation. Reciprocity doesn’t wait for a fair transaction, it believes in connectivity itself. It means being open to the myriad of more-than-human voices which will help navigate our action into nature stewardship. The path that leads into such conscious participation with life, with the Anima Mundi, is a path that bridges the inner and outer worlds. A Jungian analyst prone to embodying such experience can breathe new life into the shamanic aspect at the core of Jungian psychology. It beckons the question; what would depth psychology look like if replanted in an ecocentric worldview, instead of an egocentric one?[5] What if we wed our wounds to nature? We may come to realize it’s not about us.
Practically, one of the things it might change is the way depth psychology utilizes mythology. In Jungian psychology, mythology is predominantly applied in written format and examined for its psychic content. The oral storytelling of myth however, used to be the pinnacle of matrilineal ancestral society carrying belief systems and practical Earth wisdom. It is still the most effective way to store and convey information spanning thousands of generations. Stories were informed by dreams, ecological and cosmic landscape, social and political structures. Rooting mythology back into its original context reveals how stories speak of our place in the cosmological order and shine a light on archetypal figures not only for their psychic content, but for their specific connection with practical modes of life and natural phenomena. The newly arising discipline of geomythology partly addresses these aspects of mythology. Looking at mythology ecologically can help us relate into the stories nature tries to tell us each day. In an online lecture, Joe Cambray (2022) shared the individuation journey of a blister beetle larvae. This specific species of beetle attract male bees with a chemical signal that mimics the sex pheromones emitted by female bees, while optically creating a ‘bee shape’. Once a male bee has landed and finds, after a few frustrating attempts, his ‘bee’ unresponsive, he flies off again, this time with a handful of hitchhiking beetle larvae attached to his chest hairs. Not every larva will make the journey. Once the male bee has found a true female bee, they will mate high up in the air, carrying its passengers to a conjunction event. Only a few larvae manage to slide off the hairs onto the female’s back. She flies her passengers into the hive where those who made it disembark. The beetle larva has finally arrived in the land of milk and honey; it can only transform into a grown beetle by eating pollen[6].
Reweaving mythology and its wider biodiversity into depth psychology speaks to the unconsciousness embedded in the multiplicity of the Anima Mundi. While working with mythology and being open to its ecological wisdom, the unconscious responds. This mode of meaning stretches into the practicality of the light in matter, or the lumen naturea. The light of nature which guides us to know when to use which herb for what practiced by shamans, herbalists, and medicine people the world over. Many people working with nature in this way speak of an attunement with the inner worlds through the heart, an empty mind and bodily awareness.[7] I recognize this when working in the garden, sensing what needs to stay or go, receiving a dream that tells me to free up a rose bush, or foraging for mushrooms not by looking, but by responding with my intuitive senses. While working with mythology, I have received practical solutions to garden queries related to the nature of the archetype. An example is an image I was given on the existence of a mist catcher, and how to make it, while working with the fertility and water God Osiris. When revisiting mythology in both psyche and soil, it also frees us from an endless circle of Western-based pathologizing. A mother-complex from an eco-perspective can translate into feeling our own abandonment from ‘mother nature’ as an integral aspect of Self, and the pain nature feels due to us abandoning them.
One of the mycorizzal roots of ecopsychology, ecofeminism, speaks to the connection between ecology and human behaviour, specifically focusing on how forces of domination that despoil the earth and subjugate women are intimately connected. Gomes and Kanner (1996) ascribe to feminist theologian Catherine Keller’s term ‘separative self’ instead of separate self, because the latter cannot exist as we are all interdependent beings. The fight against this biological fact and esoteric truth is what creates the separatist self; ‘an ego armoured against the outer world and inner depths.[8]’ When we acknowledge and live our inbuilt dependence, reciprocity flows freely. Feminist ecopsychology equates the maturation process as moving towards greater complexity in relationships, differentiating between those that foster growth and those that bind people into restrictive predictable patterns. Individual empowerment derives from shared greater awareness. By unshackling the inner and outer patterns of domination and control we can define relationship more inclusively thereby opening up new spaces of connection on the inner and outer planes.
Nature is a family ecosystem
When we treat nature as family and systemically include nature as part of psyche, as a relation that carries as much weight as our human kin, we can invite nature into the conversation as we do mother and father relationships, or partner and sibling dynamics, as standard practice. The word ecosystem etymologically even derives from the Greek oikos, meaning "home," and systema, or "system." We can speak to specific memories, relationships, and experiences throughout life. We can explore time in nature, and the impact of us on our direct ecosystem and vice versa. How does the landscape that surrounds us imprint on us? How do nature beings utilize our consciousness? We can explore old or new modes of being with nature, while being open to the ecological symbolism in our dreams that direct our attention away from our personal psyche into the many voices of the living world and their needs, both as client and analyst. If we take Einstein to heart when he said ‘when you look deeper into nature you will understand everything better’ it can help us open up to each other as well. Through resilience ecology we learn that any landscape is better equipped to withstand natural disasters and climatological pressure if rooted in greater biodiversity and more interconnectivity. Therapy can embrace the techniques of liberation psychology and the need for decolonization that speaks to our collective societal structures as endemic to the individual problems we face. Instead of pathologizing our individual ‘issues', we can extend into group dialogue and offload into a collective dynamic that is part of a systemic imbalance and needs to be addressed as such. Dialogue may then lead to constructive action.
It is high time we bow down to a mentorship by the more-than-human world and view ecopsychology as much as a response to the need of the time, as a voice from the depths. If anything, nature shows us that we need to drop below our striving for individuality down into the underworld reality of symbiotic interdependence.
[1] Vaughan Lee (2007) Audiorecording, Golden Sufi Centre
[2] Aizenstat, S. (1997). Jungian Psychology and the World Unconscious. In: A.D. Kanner, M.E. Gomes and T. Roszak, eds., Ecopsychology : restoring the earth, healing the mind. San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books, p. 96
[3] Abram, D (year) The Ecology of Magic, p 304-305, in Ecopsychology
[4] Yaypyassu & Laland (2017) Extended spider cognition Animal Cognition 20, 375-395
[5] The question is put forward by Aizenstat, see note 2.
[6] Joe Cambray lecture (2022) Towards a 21st century model of the Psyche for The Guild of Pastoral Psychology, online
[7] Wolff, R. (2001). Original wisdom : stories of an ancient way of knowing, Inner Traditions
[8] Gomes, M & Kanner, A (1996) The Rape of the Well-Maidens in Ecopsychology ed Roszak, Gomes & Kanner p119
[9] Baring, A. (2019). The dream of the cosmos : a quest for the soul, Archive Publishing.
[10] Chief Oren Lyons (2008). Listening to Natural Law. In: M.K. Nelson, ed., Original instructions : indigenous teachings for a sustainable future. Bear & Company.
[11] Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. Oxford University Press.
[12] Sheldrake, M (2020) Entangled Life, Penguin random House
