Abstract
This paper argues that processes of sublimation underlie experiences of ecological grief. In contrast to the role of sublimation as an ego-object relation in fantasies of visually representing and externalizing loss, this reading of sublimation identifies the value of internalization and of the ego’s relationship to itself in three analytic scenes: Freud’s death drive; Heimann’s ego capacity; and Searles’s human/nonhuman conflict. While grieving implies that environmental loss is recuperable, these relations of sublimation conceptualize destruction in the nonhuman environment as beyond human recuperability, and this notion of irrecuperable loss informs our understanding of the psychical aspects of environmental consciousness.
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Trapp, E. Unconsciousness rising: Sublimation and environmental loss. Psychoanal Cult Soc 26, 65–83 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-021-00209-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-021-00209-5