On “The Edge of the Sea”: Climate Breakdown and Psychoanalysis

Abstract:This article connects Rachel Carson’s idea of what “seem[s] unchanged” to a specific point in psychoanalysis’s narrative of loss, where the tension between letting go of an object that is external (mourning) and the incorporation of the lost object (melancholia) persists to such an extent that the indeterminacy of the internal/external object becomes the matter at hand for interpretation. This indeterminacy is experienced in and as unconscious phylogenetic phantasy, which I locate in Carson’s figure of change at the “edge of the sea.” This article attempts to bring the realm of unconscious phantasy directly to bear on ideas of the environment, using Harold Searles’s ideas of the nonhuman environment and phylogenetic regression to explore the idea of the psychical significance of the environment. It then extends these ideas about the significance of the nonhuman environment to thinking about change and reality in the clinical psychoanalytic space in the writing of Betty Joseph and Hans Loewald.