Économie psychique et écoanxiété. Ce que la théorie freudienne apporte à l’écologie politique

Abstract

Context

The metapsychology expounded by Sigmund Freud in his First Topic of 1915, and the study of anxiety phenomena emphasized in the author's Second Topic from 1923 onwards, provide political ecology with conceptual elements for analyzing phenomena such as ecoanxiety.

Objectives

The aim of this text is to show how the psychic object is constituted in the original psychoanalytic theory, and how this approach enables us to measure the scale of the crisis represented by what is known in political ecology as ecoanxiety, but which is more often than not akin to ecoanguish.

Method

This conceptual approach proceeds by textual analysis, integrating psychoanalytical discourse with philosophical approaches, as was common practice in France during the last third of the 20th century.

Results/Interpretations

The result is an appraisal of the construction of substitute objects that the subjects of the epoch into which the ecological crisis plunges us tend to give themselves, out of an inability to give themselves objects in keeping with the unprecedented scope of today's problems.