Nature and Self—An Ambivalent Attachment?

This article explores how our attachment to nature is formed in our early love relationships and draws on ideas from psychodynamic theory and contemporary research in developmental psychology to explore the development of the self, the importance of attachment, how “splits” have formed between self and nature as a protection against vulnerability, and potential ways forward in dealing with this. The article argues that at the heart of our current ecological crisis are fundamental problems of dependency and vulnerability, resulting for many in an ambivalent attachment to nature. Understanding the complex ways in which humans react to intimacy as a result of early attachment is central to the project of ecopsychology and the ways in which people can help understand and shift the nature of their relationships, both to the planet and with each other. The article concludes by looking at evidence for a securely attached “ecological self” and the potential for developmental models to promote this. Links Between Person and Planet M y aim in writing this article is to propose that our love for nature and concern for the planet is intrinsically tied up with our early love relationships. Our current societal ambivalence toward nature is being sorely challenged; to acknowledge our dependency on nature is central in solving aspects of the environmental crisis in which we fi nd ourselves. From the perspective of psychodynamic theory, I will explore how the “self” is formed in early attachment to caregivers and how good attachment is central to emotional health and well-being. I will then explore how by incorporating nature into a broader system of attachment relationships it can play a central role in helping us to regulate our emotional worlds. I will explore the problem of the “split” between nature and psyche and consider why such splits form in relation to vulnerability and poor early experience. Finally I will suggest how we can heal some of these splits and foster stronger attachments to nature. In using psychodynamic ideas to illustrate the points I am making, I will go straight to the issue of anthropocentrism in my argument. A critique of my argument is that it is fundamentally anthropocentric, seeing human relatedness as the central concern in relation to our environmental crisis. There is a danger in linking psychodynamic thought with ecopsychology; all relationships, including those with nature, can be reduced to parental imagos. I would argue there has to be a movement between the intrapsychic understanding of the development of self and then how this self goes about forming object relationships, particularly with the environment. It is not nature itself that needs therapy, rather the humans who inhabit it. There is a growing body of evidence and argument that natural environments do much better without human interference (Mabey, 2008; McKibben, 1990; Terborgh, 1999). The issue of human dependency and how this becomes enacted in our relationship to nature needs to be addressed. We need to understand how complicated patterns of dependency and intimacy are constructed by humans in relation to one another and how, subsequently, these become manifest in our relationship to nature. As far back as 1960, Harold Searles proposed that, although essential psychodynamic concepts were contained within Freud’s writings, Freud failed, as have others since, to explicitly acknowledge the signifi cance of the nonhuman environment in the development of human psychological life (Searles, 1960). Later writers in ecopsychology have further attempted to elaborate Freud’s concepts. Roszak (1995) posited that the core of the mind is the ecological unconscious, where repression of the cosmic consciousness of man’s evolutionary relationship to nature is repressed in an act ORIGINAL ARTICLE EXPLORING THE PROBLEM OF OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE © MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • VOL. 1 NO. 1 • MARCH 2009 ECOPSYCHOLOGY 27 giver (Gerhardt, 2004; Schore, 2001, 2003; Stern, 1985). Schore (2001) focused on infant attachment and the primary caregiver’s psychobiological regulation of the infant’s limbic system as it matures and how this is closely related to the infant’s autonomic nervous system in the form of an ability to cope with stress, proposing that the attachment relationship is central to helping the infant cope with stress. The ability to regulate our emotional world and maintain good mental health from this perspective is intrinsically linked to attachment in early infancy. The capacity to experience union with another and, therefore, a felt sense of attachment to nature (Fisher, 2002), results from early positive experience of the self-being with another (Stern, 1985). Without this fundamental, positive, early experience and the development of the capacity to relate, meaningful attachments are diffi cult to form. The Importance of Attachment in the Development of Self Attachment theory places the role of mother (or caregiver) as central to the infant’s developing sense of sense and emotional stability (Bowlby, 1969, 1988; Main, 2000; Stern, 1985). Bowlby’s original research into attachment has achieved worldwide recognition (Bowlby, 1969); he proposed that we develop internal working models of attachment, ranging from secure to insecure, the subsets of which are avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized. Ainsworth developed these ideas further subjecting them to experimental research, developing the strange-situation experiment. The experiment looked at how an infant dealt with separation from their caregiver while in the presence of a stranger and how attachment behavior—secure, insecure, and avoidant—could be seen in the infant’s responses (Ainsworth, 1978). If we see attachment as manifest in patterns of behavior then we can explore how aspects of internal working models can be applied to relationships with nature. I will outline aspects of internal working models as defi ned by Main (2000). Securely attached individuals fi nd it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on people and having an interdependent relationship: They don’t often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to them. Those with avoidant attachment patterns are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others: They fi nd it diffi cult to trust others completely and have diffi culty to allow themselves to be dependent. The third style is anxious/ambivalent; those who fi nd that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like, and they often worry that their partner doesn’t really love them or want to stay with them. of collusive madness that results in the industrialized society. As the original goal of psychotherapy was to awaken the unconscious, for Roszak the therapeutic goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious, healing the alienation of person and planet. Though I agree with Roszak’s project for ecopsychology, I propose we have to understand the human-to-human dimensions of our crisis because they are intrinsically linked to the planetary crisis. The issue of interdependence is at the heart of the growing awareness of the current planetary crisis: We need to understand the human complexities of dependency and intimacy to understand the diffi culties in our relationship to the environment. I intend to start with some very human concerns and make attempts to link these into problems of attachment to the morethan-human world (Abram, 1996). Development of Self in Contemporary Psychology My starting point is recent trends in developmental psychology that have been informing psychotherapy practice. The developmental process for human beings follows three main aspects that the human infant needs to negotiate: (1) encountering and realizing that it has a “self,” (2) the growing realization that this self exists in relation to others, and (3) realizing that this concept of self and others can then be expanded to include a relationship with the wider world. In forming and developing a self the infant must negotiate issues of dependence and independence. Winnicott (1986) proposed that the baby moves from absolute dependence to relative independence to independence, via the facilitating environment with the caregiver. The early experience for the infant is a state of subjective oneness with the world and an undifferentiated sense of self. This movement between dependence and independence, toward a mature state of dependence is described by Searles (1960) both in relation to the mother and what Searles terms the nonhuman environment: The human being is engaged, throughout his lifespan, in an unceasing struggle to differentiate himself increasingly fully, not only from his human, but also from his nonhuman environment, while developing, in proportion as he succeeds in these differentiations, an increasingly meaningful relatedness with the latter environment as well as with his fellow human beings. (p. 30) There has been a convincing argument based on sound research that babies grow their own minds in relation to the primary care-