Symbolic Storms: Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and the Collapse of Temporality in Climate-Anxious Youth

The accelerating climate crisis is reshaping the psychic landscapes of children and adolescents, giving rise to new clinical presentations marked by catastrophic imagery, symbolic foreclosure, and a loss of future-oriented thinking. This theoretical paper explores the phenomenon of climate change anxiety in youth through the lens of psychodynamic psychotherapy, arguing that such anxiety constitutes a unique form of developmental, symbolic, and relational disruption. Drawing on classical and contemporary psychoanalytic theories—particularly those addressing symbolization, temporality, containment, and transference—the paper examines how climate anxiety interferes with the child's ability to metabolize emotional experience, maintain trust in adult authority, and construct a coherent narrative of self in time. The work challenges traditional clinical approaches by emphasizing the role of the therapist not only as interpreter but as co-regulator and symbolic anchor in a saturated emotional field. In this context, interpretation must yield to presence, and the therapeutic task becomes one of holding the tension between internal reality and external catastrophe. Attention is given to the dynamics of anticipatory mourning, intergenerational rupture, and the therapist's own countertransference in the face of collective dread. Ultimately, the paper argues that psychodynamic psychotherapy, when reframed to meet the demands of the climate era, offers a unique space in which meaning can be reestablished, temporality reconstructed, and psychic life preserved. In doing so, it asserts the enduring relevance—and moral responsibility—of psychodynamic thought in a world confronting existential collapse.