Transformations of Self and World I: Modeling a World

This is a short paper that I wrote for some non-academic audiences in 2013. I didn't publish it, but the approach that it sketches is developed in detail in my book Experiences of Depression: a Study in Phenomenology (OUP, 2015).

Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1994

Affect, Cognition and Change -Re-modelling Depressive Thought. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hove (1993). xv + 285 pp. 24.95.

This paper will discuss the notion of solastalgia or climatic anxiety (Albrecht, G. et al., 2007; Galea et al., 2005) as a form of anxiety connected to traumatic environmental changes that generate an emotional blockage between individuals, their environment (Cloke et al., 1991) and their place (Nancy, 1993). I will use a phenomenological approach to explain the way in which emotions shape our constitution of reality (

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 2022

This chapters gives an overview of the development of ecopsychoanalysis, a new transdisciplinary approach to thinking about the relationship between psychoanalysis, ecology, ‘the natural’ and the problem of climate change, as well as viral pandemics such as COVID-19. It draws on a range of fields including, psychoanalysis, psychology, ecology, philosophy, science, complexity theory, aesthetics and the humanities. To do this, it is important to identify the different developmental lines and research traditions out of which ecopsychoanalysis is emerging. These include psychoanalysis first and foremost, but also ecopsychology (Roszak 1992; Roszak et al. 1995; Buzzel & Chalquist 2009; Rust 2008; Rust & Totton 2012; Winter & Koger 2004) and ecological thinking more generally; cybernetics and systems theory beginning with Gregory Bateson (2000, 2002); complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics; philosophical approaches to nature from deep ecology to post-nature and the new materialisms; postmodern and posthuman understandings of animality, human and nonhuman (Derrida 2008; Dodds 2012b, 2020a); the work of the Climate Psychology Alliance (Hoggett 2019); and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (2003). Dodds, J. 2022b. Ecopsychoanalysis and Climate Psychology, in Govrin, A. and Caspi, T. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 508-522, Routledge.

2020

The Coronavirus crisis links to the climate crisis in ways that challenge humankind to demonstrate an unprecedented creativity and adaptability to change. This article discusses, both in content and style, this need for creative change and what that might look like. It asserts that the current discourse, with its linear rationality and logic system will fail in the face of the enormity of such epistemological and ontological disturbance. Using the example of social dreaming as a different form of thinking, the article encourages the reader to radically reconsider thought, feelings, reason and creativity as a means to rethinking solutions for a shared future.

EC Psychiatry and Psychology, 2019

Climate change in all its manifestations produces stresses that affect the mental health and wellbeing of both individuals and cultures.

in Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Arthur Kleinman and Byron J. Good, ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pp. 153 74., 1985

It is my contention that depression can neither be dissolved through an insistence on the culturally constructed nature of experience nor reduced to an isolable malfunction of some part of the human organism. For me, the model of depression employed in Western psychotherapies is the dialectical product of ‘objective’ characteristics of human experience and the practical interpretation of those conditions as constituted within a particular cultural tradition. In this approach, one should not attempt to discover the ‘real’ roots of depression, as those who take a radical biomedical view are wont to do, but to identify the characteristic predispositions found among humans everywhere which conduce to what in certain therapeutic practices is construed as a distinctive mental illness, depression. I argue (in accord with those psychiatrists and psychologists who assume that humans possess a mind as well as a body) that, whatever the physiological correlates of these predispositions, they stem from moods that entail mental assessments of the relationship of the self to the world in which one is an actor. Such moods, while universal, do not necessarily manifest themselves as illness. Illness entails a break from the commonsense stance a person normally takes toward the world, and the adoption of a perspective that stems from a consciousness of pain. The sense of painful distress which might otherwise lead one to see oneself and to be seen by others as ill could be muted and dissipated through some ‘work of culture’ that makes sense of the distress as other than illness. The work of culture – a production that provides a coherent statement of what some experience means – that is turned to when a person feels personal distress might well be a religious ritual. In such a case, the person experiencing pain could view the experience from a religious perspective instead of seeing it as illness. When an illness perspective is adopted, the treatment that will function to restore the ill person to quotidian existence will depend on the available ‘medical’ works of culture. It follows, therefore, that although the Western model of ‘depression’ like other disease models, does entail a representation of the experience of pain rooted in moods found among peoples everywhere, it has practical significance only as an element within a distinctive work of culture. I use an ethnographic rather than a clinical case drawn from my long-term research in a Thai-Lao village in northeastern Thailand to demonstrate the utility of my approach. Mrs. K., a 27 year-old village woman became significantly emotionally distressed following a truck accident in which her younger brother, three other villagers, and especially her mother were killed. While Mrs. K. during her grief was understood in local terms to be unwell (bo sabai), no one thought she should seem ‘medical’ help for a disease. Drawing on my long acquaintance with Mrs. K., her husband, her siblings, and her mother, I came to realize that the prolonged grief Mrs. K. experienced was primarily owing to the loss of her mother, the most significant other in her life. Because her mother’s death was one that villagers understood to be especially inauspicious (in the local dialect, it was a hung death), she was not initially consoled by the usual Buddhist funerary rites. She eventually emerged from her grief following a combination of traditional and exceptional works of culture. These all centered on making offerings at the local Buddhist temple-monastery based on the belief that the ‘merit’ made from these offerings would accrue to Mrs. K.’s mother’s spirit and ensure her a good rebirth. The process culminated in Mrs. K. and her family sponsoring the erection of a new costly bell tower in the village Buddhist temple-monastery, a tower dedicated to the memory of Mrs. K.’s mother.

Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry, 1989

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2019

A Wintered Mind is a collection of poems that explores the space and place of North Dakota through the eyes of an outsider. Having moved to North Dakota from Southern California, the author’s experience is initially one of disorientation and displacement, but through meditative engagement with the landscape and working to understand his place in it, the author finds a place rich in austere beauty. The speaker of these poems turns often to the language of Zen Buddhism, using the North Dakotan landscape as a lens to explore inner geographies. In turn, these inner geographies implicate the reader in their inward movement, generating ontological and epistemological questions that propel these poems in and out of physical space. The title of this dissertation, A Wintered Mind, suggests that ultimately the speaker—and by extension the author—is inextricably changed by his time here. The introduction to these poems works to ground them in both the author’s personal experience and a Heidegg...