Disavowal
psychoanalyse[edit | edit source]
onmipotent position to see that there is a problem, and to use onmipotence to solve it, a magical thought, S named it a manic repair for example: governments setting ambition targets it creates a virtual world , a quick fix - that is a manic repair . the area of climate change is filled with manic repair and magical thinking.
denial of reality - causes anxiety? a person thinks a magical thing that makes the anxiety go away
anxiety generating subjects - when ppl get overanxious ppl go away from the subject need support to bear the anxiety
social pressure to avoid to talk about the seriousness of the crisis culture of uncare = it suits the culture we dont talk about climate change, we dont talk about how serious it is, because it keeps us consuming. Our 'cover stories' well there is nothing I can do, and we change the subject But culture drives this.
We have internalised a whole culture that is in disavowel about climate change . It is not only that us as indivuduals are in sisawoul
How do you brake with the culture so you see things more clearly and how do you survive the anxiety you feel when you look at the situation
Disavowal and culture[edit | edit source]
Zerubavel (2006) saw everyday denial as cultural: children learn from adults what to ignore as ‘irrelevant’ - taboos, euphemisms, tact, avoiding the obvious. Denial is socially structured: the silent bystander implicitly accepts the speaker’s denial, and silence-breakers are sanctioned by being discredited or ridiculed. Norgaard’s (2011) study of socially organised denial within a small Norwegian community showed how cultural norms, and the fear of social consequences, inhibited individuals from speaking freely about climate change. Randall’s work with groups wanting to lower their carbon emissions (Carbon Conversation groups) has also highlighted the pressure groups can place on people to stay in disavowal (for example, said loudly in a work situation, “Here comes Barbara girls, best stop talking about flying!”) (Randall & Brown, 2015).
Sally Weintrobe (2019) has written on how neoliberal culture actively disassociates us from our caring side. It works to un-care us. She has termed this a culture of un-care, hyphenating the word un-care to indicate this is actively driven disassociation.
Denial – and particularly disavowal – is a concept that can help us better understand our difficulties in facing and responding to the climate emergency, but not when applied in a blanket way. In general, the concept can help us see we have a range of ways to ward off reality, either by keeping it at bay for the moment or by finding more rigid ways to block awareness. --
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slimescapes - comes from the trenches of wwi when the reality on the ground was reduced to corpses and mud , military maps were planned to avoid slimescape . By placing abstract plants on the forefront of our minds we may minimise feeling disturbed by the human cost and devastation and the vliolence of war.
more general we use slimescapes when planning for the future we make risk assessements in states of disowawel to minimise the true consequences of climate change
example: in the cold war, the britisch governemet asked the medical profession to draw a plan of medical services for the event of a nuclear attack, this would be a slimescape - the medical professionals didnt want to do this because there would be no services.
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2 kinds of diswal we are more prone to use
- disowal in the risk assessement
- plan future events based on this assessement
Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012):