Animal Totems and Taboos An Ecopsychoana

09/04/2020 ecopsychoanalysis: Joseph Dodds (2012) Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic Perspective
Joseph Dodds (2012) Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic

Perspective
'Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic Perspective', by Joseph

Dodds (2012), University of New York in Prague, PsyArt Journal for the
Psychological Study of the Arts, November 26, 2012
Abstract
What is an animal? In addition to biological and ecological answers,

the animal needs to be explored in its psychological and social
dimensions. The animal has long been a symbol of human psyche
and culture, from fairy tales to horror films, Oedipal pets to animal
phobias, scapegoating and large-group symbols, philosophy to
ideology and myth. This article explores animal symbols, totems
and taboos, and their interaction with non-human nature, through
the perspective of ecopsychoanalysis (Dodds 2011), combining,
psychoanalytic, eco(psycho)logical and Deleuze-Guattarian modes
of thought. Three animal-types are identified, and these are placed
within Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ of mind, society, and nature, seen
as in constant, complex nonlinear interaction with one another.
Expanding Bion’s ‘binocular vision’, we need to include along with
individual psychology and social dynamics interactions with non-
human nature. How does an idea or a phantasy impact on an
ecosystem or social system? How do our own minds shudder upon
collision with the hyperobject of climate change? These are some of
the core concerns that ecopsychoanalysis seeks to address.
I. Lizard and Porcupine: What Is An Animal?
In addition to biological and ecological answers to this question, the animal needs
to be explored in its psycho-social dimensions. As I argue in my
book Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: complexity theory,
Deleuze|Guattari, and psychoanalysis for a climate in crisis (Dodds 2011), the
animal has long been a symbol of human psyche and culture, from fairy tales to
horror films, Oedipal pets to animal phobias, philosophy to ideology and myth.
Here, our psychological use of the animal is explored in the context of emerging
ecological relations, which develop alongside object relations, and human
culture's relationship to the non-human world of nature. This article explores the
animal symbol from the perspective of ecopsychoanalysis, combining,
psychoanalytic, group analytic, eco(psycho)logical and Deleuze-Guattarian
(becoming-animal) perspectives.
We need to reflect on
the psychological
importance of the
https://ecopsychoanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/11/joseph-dodds-2012-animal-totems-and.html 1/21
ecological imaginary.
Our minds, films, and
artwork, are populated
with flora and fauna of
all kinds, some related
to 'real' existing
lifeforms in the external
world, some more the
product of phantasy
and ecologies of the
inner world. For
Deleuze and Guattari
(2003b, 184) “art is
continually haunted by Porcupine on Freud’s desk in his London home, (Prochnik 2007)
the animal”, both of
which mark out a
territory and embody dynamic forces of territorialization and deterritorialization. As
an expression of our inner space, these creatures stalk our dreams, our stories,
our myths, our fairy tales, our films, and our nightmares, and they influence the
way we deal with the nature around us. Paul Shepard (Roszak 1995, 36) notes
that “[g]ames and stories involving animals serve as projections for the discovery
of the plurality of the self.” There is an ecology of the inner world, an ecology of
mind (Bateson 2000), just as there is an ecology of nature.
Of course, there are major problems here. Do animals (or 'nature') have any
ontological status beyond being carriers of human symbolic meaning? Are they
just a backdrop for our projections? A tapestry to weave our dreams? Resources
to be extracted? Crucial here, is that whether we like it or not, we do use animals
in this way, but we need to get more precise. In The Animal That Therefore I
am(inspired by a look from his cat) Jacques Derrida (2008), in what he calls a
‘zoo-auto-bio-bibiolography’, returns over his own work to passages where
specific animals appear (monkeys, ants, horses, hedgehogs, eagles, worms, etc.)
Following Derrida, Žižek (2011) describes how in general philosophers tend to
have one particular animal in mind when defining ‘the animal’, such as
Heidegger’s lizard, who sits on a rock in the sun, without knowing it is a rock or a
sun. As Heidegger (2001) anthropocentrically writes, “the stone is worldless; the
animal is poor in world, man is world forming”.
We may also think here of Freud’s (1921, 101, see also Grimwade 2011) use of
Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who wish to huddle together for warmth on a cold
winter’s day only to be pushed away from each other by their spines if they get to
close. Before his 1919 trip to America (while he was writing Group
Psychologywhere the porcupine analogy appears), Freud announced to his inner
circle: “I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some
lectures.” (Prochnik 2007). In way of explanation, Freud went on “Whenever you
have some large objective in mind, it’s always good to identify a secondary, less
demanding goal on which to focus your attentions in order to detract from the
anxiety associated with the search for the true grail.” According to Ernest Jones,
“The phrase, ‘to find one’s porcupine,’ became a recognized saying in our circle”
(Prochnik 2007). Whatever other meanings the porcupine held for Freud (he did
eventually manage to spot a dead one on a forest hike with the Putman family in
America), he kept a bronzed porcupine statue on his desk for the rest of his life.
For Levinas, the animal is exempt from the gaze of the other, while for Descartes,
animals are automata who could not think and therefore could not suffer. Both
moves exempt them from ethical consideration. For Lacan, although the human is
seen as the speaking animal, the animal as such is denied language, and
expelled into the extra-discursive space beyond the Symbolic order. Derrida
(2008) interrogates philosophy’s anthropocentric use of the animal which aims to
demarcate a clear line with the human via lack, as well as noting the use of
animals to embody the human Other. Furthermore, under the rubric of ‘the animal’
all the extraordinary heterogeneity from ameobas to antelopes are lost. For
Derrida, such rhetorical strategies are intimately connected with the immense
violence and destruction evidenced in the human-animal relation. Derrida (2008,
229) coins the term limitrophy, to describe this exploration of the various lines
drawn between animal and human, “not just because it… concern[s] what sprouts
or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds
the limit, generates it, raises, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist,
certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating,
thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it
increase and multiple.”
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari have a
complex relation to animals throughout their work. Animality, for Deleuze and
Guattari, involves the construction of worlds and the marking of territories, even
worlds as tiny as the tick’s. They also form complex assemblages (eg. the wasp
and the orchid). According to Beaulieu (2011), crucial to their project is a de-
anthropomophisation of the animal-human relation (including a critique of the
animal-oedipalisation, reference, and metaphor), and an exploration of
the becoming-animal of the human. In my book I go into more detail on this
perspective. In this article I will limit my use of Deleuze and Guattari to the
specific examples given, and hope they can help to open up psychoanalytic
perspectives in this area, rather than replace them. My main aim in this paper is
to discuss the concepts of the three ecologies (Guattari 2000) of mind, nature and
society, with a focus on the animal.
II. Cat and Eagle: Animality and the Three Ecologies
Ecology is above all the science of relationships, and the relation of these
relationships to a particular environment. In its classic definition these included
the relationships between organisms and their environments, including other
organisms. Ecology is study of this world or home ('oikos'), ecosystem, including
the place itself, the specific animals it ‘contains’, the complex web of relationships
it constitutes and the fact that these can never be clearly separated (animal,
relationship, place).Ecological, relational, and situational thinking can be applied
to other ecosystems, whether social, virtual, or psychological. In his
book Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995, 91) called for a generalized science of
ecosystems or 'ecosophy', a generalized machinics with “resonances, alliances
and feedback loops between various regimes, signifying and non-signifying,
human and non-human, natural and cultural, material and representational”.
The structure of this paper will

take as a starting point
Deleuze and Guattari’s (2000,
2003a) distinction of three

‘types’ of animals: 1. Oedipal
(individuated, pet) animals, 2.
State (mythic) animals, 3.
Pack (wild, nomadic) animals.
Broadly speaking, we can
identify these animals with
what Guattari (2000) called
the three ecologies, the
ecology of mind (Bateson
2000), the ecology of society,
and the ecology of nature.
Social ecology: State (mythic) animal, British Lion Although these ‘diagrams’
don’t overlap completely, we
might identify mental ecology with individuated, Oedipal family pets (‘my’
cat); social ecology with the powerful group symbols of mythic (State) animals
(British or Czech Lion, American Eagle); and natural ecology with wild, nomadic,
pack animals, outside of individual or social human control. We can see here a
parallel with Lacan’s triad of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. However, Derrida’s
and Deleuze-Guattari’s critique of Lacan is precisely the attempt to define
animals by their exclusion from the human symbolic, and the related denigration
of systems of animal signalling and communication. Deleuze and Guattari refuse
a priviledged placed for the ‘human’ signifying regime, and instead describe a
world where “a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an
electron crashes into a language” (Deleuze|Guattari 2003a, 69),
What this possibility alerts us to is that even when focussing on one level,
whether the meaning of an animal symbol in a patient’s dream, or the ritual use of
a totemistic ancestor-animal, a large-group animal identification, scapegoating
and projective processes, or when studying an endangered species, the three
ecologies need to be seen as in constant, complex, nonlinear interaction with one
another. Our fantasies about animals do tell us something about ourselves, and
about the human relationship with the nonhuman other, but they also have
real effects on that other, through interactions with social ecology and natural
ecology. Jung was basically correct in that the animals in our patient’s dreams
reflect not only individual meanings but also form part of our collective fantasy,
although the alternative is just as important. However, in our current time of
ecological crisis, it is likely that on at least some level the animal ambassadors in
our patient’s dreams reflect the effects of the ecological crisis, as the ‘hyperobject’
of climate change impacts on our minds, individually and collectively.
Timothy Morton (2010) claims we are entering the dawn of the age of the
‘hyperobject’, objects massively distributed in space and time such as climate,
which are increasingly becoming the main objects of our reality, with more prosaic
objects such as the rain falling on our head losing density or substance as we
understand more of their contingency on ‘objects’ such as ‘climate’ or ‘global
warming’. These objects were there all along, but as they impact on our psychic,
social and physical spaces there is also a vague sense of mourning for the
passing of a world where things at least felt more stable and real. But this stability
was an illusion created by the fact that things we gave names to like ‘winter’ and
‘summer’ had gone on as they did for a sufficiently long time, in terms of the
human temporal horizon, that we just accepted them as a fixed background,
rather than the highly contingent confluence of factors which lay beyond our
limited phenomenological experience of temporality and causality. Morton’s
(2008) ‘dark ecology’ (see also Žižek 2007) suggests we may need to accept not
only that this stable background is lost, but rather we must mourn for the fact that
it was never there, that the very idea of a stable background is part of the
problem, and that we need an ‘ecology without nature’. However, there is
something here that is difficult for us to let go. This winter in Prague was perhaps
the first in living memory (or at least my memory) without snow. The sledges
remained in the cellar.
In terms of the three ecologies, when we fly on a plane to have a powerful

psychological and symbolic experience of communing with nature, embodied
perhaps by an animal such as an elephant in India or Sri Lanka, we cannot in
reality (no matter how much we try in our minds) separate out this experience
from the damage done to the world through our carbon emitting flight, or the
effects on the social ecology of the places we visit, as we become vectors for
spreading our own cultural memes no less then our biological diseases. For
another example, we can turn to The Harry Potter films and books have been one
of the most successful cultural products in recent times, with their powerful
archetypal symbolism and engaging developmental processes in the characters.
The owls of the wizards embody many human ideas around wisdom, (in)sight,
and nature, and draws on dense mythological and psychological symbolism.
However, this cultural-symbolic level has real ecological effects. In 2010 the
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh blamed Harry Potter fans for the
reduction in number of wild owls in India, which are increasingly under threat, as
more people seek pets to connect with the animal-mythical symbol popularised by
these films (BBC 2010).
Therefore, we need to analyse the complex meanings of the animal at

psychological levels, without losing sight of the constant conjunction of nonlinear
effects between the three ecologies. How does an idea impact on an ecosystem
or social system? How does a phantasy, anxiety or defence impact on
biodiversity, and vice versa? How do these responses affect nature itself, even if
nature perhaps never existed (Žižek 2007, Morton 2008), at least in the form we
assumed? Like the collision between the Earth and the strange
planet Melancholia in Lars Von Trier’s (2011) hauntingly beautiful film of the same
name, how do the new hyperobjects appearing on our horizon impact our
individual and collective psyches?
The film Melancholia is framed

with the destruction of the
Earth, as it collides with the
mysterious eponymous planet
in a 'dance of death'. However
this is an incredibly slow motion
destruction, which evokes
aspects of our relation to the
ecological crisis. Timothy
Morton has described the
Melancholia (Lars Von Trier 2011)
feeling as like realising you are
in the middle of a very slow
moving nuclear bomb, and we are just able to notice what we are losing but seem
paralysed to act before the damage is done. The opening sequence of the film,
set to the powerful, beautiful and disturbing sounds of Wagner, captures aspects
of our own activity in relation to climate change, which oscillates between manic
denial and activity and frozen stasis. Combining several dream-like sequences,
which are framed so beautifully they appear like photographs, full of depth of
meaning in their compositional placement, but gradually we see they are also
moving, with the timelessness of the unconscious. The use of extreme slow
motion could be related to our sense of seeing disaster approaching. We act with
such slowness it is as though we remain stuck while we lurch towards the
precipice, unable to act, to move, or to escape. We can also contrast the
intensive movement we feel while the image’s extensive movement slows to a
halt, and toswitching between the intensive speed of paranoia and the frozen time
of the catatonic (Deleuze & Guattari 2000).
III. Lemur and Rhino: Natural Ecology
Jenkins et al’s (2011) study ‘Analysis of Patterns of Bushmeat Consumption

Reveals Extensive Exploitation of Protected Species in Eastern Madagascar’, is a
rather tragic example of how psycho-social-cultural shifts can have major
ecological effects. In particular that ideas and beliefs (via their effects on local
mental ecologies and social ecologies) can be devastating on local flora and
fauna (natural ecologies). Here we see the ecopsychoanalytic use of Guattari’s
(2000) three ecologies of mind, society and nature as nonlinear interlocking
dynamical systems of mutual contingencies.
Madigascar is one of the most ecologically important places on Earth. An ancient

island which split from the Gondwana supercontinent 165 million years ago, it is a
biodiversity hotspot where over 95% of its plants and animals, including all the
primates, are endemic to the island, which has lead to its description as the
‘eighth continent’. The continued existence of such biodiversity depends to some
extent on the continued psycho-social existence of taboos. Jenkins et al (2011)
write that:
Taboos have provided protection to some species, particularly the

Endangered Indri, but…this taboo is rapidly eroding... [leading] to an
unsustainable number of lemurs being killed for bushmeat... Some species
do not reach maturity for up to nine years and produce offspring once every
two or three years... Primates, in general, are known to be extremely
vulnerable to overexploitation.
The authors of the study

suggest the rise in illegal
hunting is due to rapid social
change (in particular as a
consequence of gold mining),
increased demand for meat
and lack of alternatives, and
importantly a decline in
traditional taboos. What are
these taboos? There are
Natural ecology: Madagascar Lemur, to eat or not to eat?
several traditions explaining
these. One tells of an Indris
Lemur who saved a man falling from a tree while collecting honey. Other beliefs
include the idea that they are ancestors that became lost in the rainforests and
turned into lemurs to survive. The latter is close to Freud’s (1913a) controversial
study of taboo and totemism, and looking at these taboos may not only have
practical consequences on the eco-psycho-social system of places such as

Madagascar, but may also help us explore ourselves and our relationship with the
nonhuman world.
In Freud’s (1913a) model, the flip-side of the taboo against consumption of the
totem animal is a strong desire to transgress, permitted in some groups on
socially prescribed totem feasts, including the Christian communion where the
congregation collectively eats the body and drinks the blood of Christ, as well as
the infantile experience of feeding at the breast where one devours what one
loves. What are the most forbidden animals for in Western culture to eat today?
The first choice would be the most endangered species, especially the large
fauna so beloved of conservation charities, like tigers. The interesting exception
here might be our cherished ‘Oedipal’ pets, ‘our’ dogs and cats, as many would
be more upset at the death of ‘their’ pet than the annihilation and extinction of an
entire species.
In ‘Biodiversity: Endangered and in demand’, Graham-Rowe (2011) discuses the

effects that traditional Chinese medicinal beliefs (where for example the rhino
horn is used to treat everything from fever to AIDS, cancer and
brain haemorrhages), and its collision with modern capitalist economic and
psycho-social dynamics, has on species biodiversity.
Traditional Asian medicine is on a collision course with wildlife preservation.

The rhino and its horn are not alone: powdered tiger bone is used to treat
rheumatism; the scales of the toothless, anteater-like pangolin are believed
to reduce swelling and improve blood circulation; and guilinggao, a jelly
derived from the shells of freshwater turtles, was used to treat smallpox in a
nineteenth-century emperor, with little success - in Taiwan it is now reputed to
cure cancer. It is a similar story for many other endangered species whose
commercial use is restricted - or banned outright - by the Convention on
International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
(Graham-Rowe 2011)
These damaging practices are now combining with the dramatically rising wealth
in China to form a new demand for high status consumables such as using tiger
bone in wine and shampoo, and tiger penis soup.
The illicit trade in wildlife is a booming industry, estimated by the US

congressional research service to be worth as much as US$20 billion globally
each year…a significant driver is traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
Indeed, despite showing signs of decline in the 1990s, the poaching and
trade of endangered animals such as tigers and rhinos is once again on the
rise. (Graham-Rowe 2011)
The role of such rare animal products is partly as status symbols, as only the
most wealthy can afford them, but this now applies to more and more people.
In 2008, a survey of nearly 1,000 people from six cities across China found
that 1.9% of respondents had consumed a medicine or tonic containing tiger
within the past 12 months. If this represents national consumption, it would
mean a user base of around 25 million people. In Vietnam, which is one of
the largest markets for TCM outside China, traditional remedies are sought
after. If incomes were to increase, so too would consumption of products
containing endangered species. This is hardly surprising…given the
perception that products such as rhino horn are capable of curing cancer.
(Graham-Rowe 2011)
Especially worrying here is the possibility that people are ‘investing in extinction’.
By buying up such body parts the animals themselves become rarer, further
pushing up the price. You can’t get any rarer than extinct. Psychoanalysts would
also look beyond the cold logic of monetary exchange in such practice towards
more perverse forms of positive delight in such behavior, related perhaps to what
Paul Hoggett (2009) identifies in the increasingly perverse natures of our
response to ecological collapse. Again, here we have the combustible mix of
psychological beliefs, social practices, economic forces, and major ecological
effects.
IV. Wolf and Rat: Mental Ecology
Animal totems and taboos

return us to the clinical
origins of psychoanalysis in
many of the classic case
histories, as well as to
Freud’s study on the origin of
religion and culture. For
Freud, both animal totems
and animal phobias involve
(at least for the boy) a
substitute for the Oedipal
father. In 'The Return of
Totemism in Childhood'
in Totem and Taboo, Freud Mental ecology: the 'Wolfman's' painting, Sergei Pankejeff
(1913a, 187; in Genosko
1993, 608) claims that
animal phobias are “a very common, and perhaps the earliest, form of
psychoneurotic illness occurring in childhood”. As Genosko explains, this
suggests that the “ambivalent attitude (to obey and transgress) toward the two
principle taboos of totemism” (Genosko 1993, 608) is identical to “the primal
wishes of children and the two crimes of Oedipus”. By displacing anxieties
relating to the father onto an animal substitute, the animal turns into an object of
both fear and fascination such as Little Arpad's chickens (Ferenczi 1952), and
Little Hans' horse.
Hans identified with his father by becoming a horse, trotting around the
household, neighing, wearing a nosebag, and, finally, by biting his father and
behaving in a fearless way toward him (Freud, 1909a, 213-214)... Ferenczi's
'Little Chanticleer' expressed that he had become a chicken in numerous
ways...cackling and crowing...singing songs with chicken themes, play[ing]
with toy fowls by 'slaughtering' and 'caressing' them. (Genosko 1993, 608)
(‘Slaughtering’ and ‘caressing’. Psychoanalysis from the start was at least times
exquisitely able to hold on to an extraordinary sense of ambivalence and
paradox). Freud (1913a, 187) writes that sources for animal phobias are both
'textual', where animals are “only known to the child from picture books and fairy
tales” and 'contextual' through direct contact, depending on the geographical
location of the child: “horses, dogs, cats, less often birds, and with striking
frequency very small creatures such as beetles and butterflies”. To explore this
further we can turn to perhaps the most famous of Freud's ‘animal-patients’, the
'Wolfman', and the dream around which his analysis, and to some extent his life,
revolved:
I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its
foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut
trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly
the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some
white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There
were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more
like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their
ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror,
evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My
nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a
long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had
such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting
on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some
danger, and went to sleep again. (Pankejeff, in Freud 1918, 29)
In ‘Freud's Bestiary: How Does Psychoanalysis Treat Animals?’ Genosko (1993)

uses Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Freud to open up a what he calls a
'zoological vision' for psychoanalysis. He notes that Freud's complex
interpretation of the scene in the wolfman’s dream (as reflecting the child’s
witnessing the parental intercourse of the primal scene, castration anxiety, and
fear of the father), ignores many of the crucial textual and contextual sources for
his patient’s wolf imagery, and involves a reversal so that it is the (human) child
“who takes the active position while other nonhuman animals assume the passive
role of being looked at” (Genosko 1993, 614). We could see this move as
representative of the repression of the ecological unconscious in Western culture
(Roszak 1995), as “Freud initiates a unidirectional communication appropriate to
the collector …a full-blown domestication of the scene” by which the “gaze of the
other is emptied” becoming “the unseeing look of zoo animals, objects for our
inspection” (Genosko 1993, 614). Freud does not see the wolf, but only the
substitute for the Oedipal father. The trees and wintry weather are also screened
out in this analysis (except in so far as their relation to the fairy tale he was told as
a child evokes castration imagery).
Animality lies at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari's (2003a, 240) critique of Freud
in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiophrenia, when they claim that “the
only kind of animals that psychoanalysis understands are individuated animals,
family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history”. For
them, Freud could not allow the Wolfman to become Wolf and join the pack but
instead worked to 'Oedipalize' the Wolfman's animal becomings” (Deleuze &
Guattari 2003a, 239). The point here is not that Freud is necessarily wrong in his
analysis, but rather that the fact that we may use animals in this way is highly
problematic and needs unpacking.
Barbara Creed (2005, 123), in Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal
Uncanny, argues that in his description of the Wolfman, “Freud focused too much
on his own phantasy of the castrating paternal figure and not enough on his
fearful folkloric icon, the wolf-man in sheep's clothing.” Creed (2005, 130)
connects the totemism described by Freud to the cannibalism theme of the
werewolf myth, where she suggests that “through metamorphosis and
cannibalism, the wolf-man points to the instability of the paternal metaphor and
the failure of civilization”. For Creed, “the cannibal meal of the wolf-man myth
symbolizes a pact not with civilization but with nature and wilderness.” The
wolfman is an uncanny creature of the inbetween, neither man nor beast, neither
a denizen of the city or forest but both and neither. Therefore, the werewolf
symbol refers not simply to the return of repressed desires which the City has
blunted and eroded, but rather “signifies those indeterminate, uncanny animal
spaces necessary to the creation and definition of their opposite: the familiar,
civilized human city...a modern reworking of murder and the totem meal which
celebrates not the emergence of civilization but its end” (Creed 2005, 133).
Woman, death and nature (the latter embodied especially by the animal),
constitutes what Creed (2005) calls the primal uncanny of patriarchal culture.
These connections can be explored in the image of the grave-womb, and the fear
of being buried alive (Poe 1998, Bakhtin 1984). For Freud (1919, 245): “This
unheimlich [uncanny] place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home]
of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time
and in the beginning...the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the
prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression”. However, what for Freud are merely
symbolic stand-ins for the mothers body may themselves point in a quite direct
way to something even more 'primal', the idea of a return to the Earth itself, the
home [oikos] from which we come. In horror at times these connections are more
explicit. In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum transforms into a giant insect after a machinic
rebirth in a metallic womb. In Dracula films, after each blood-feast the animal-
metamorphosing monster returns to his coffin containing ancient earth.
Similarly, in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets', Freud (1913b, 301) refers to the
three aspects of the mother for man, “the mother herself, the beloved one who is
chosen after the pattern, and lastly Mother Earth who received him once more.”
These relations are also studied in Bakhtin's (1984, 21) work in his research into
degradation and carnival reversals:
'Downward' is earth...an element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the

womb) and...an element of birth...(the maternal breasts)...while in their purely
bodily aspect, which is not clearly differentiated from the cosmic, the upper
part is the face or the head and the lower part is the genital organs, the belly,
and the buttocks... To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in
order to bring forth something more and better.
This symbolism is ancient, with faeces playing an important, and also a

productive and joyful role in Rabelais' (1965, 597) carnivalesque prose, which
Bakhtin takes as the starting point for his study. The importance of shit in this
universe of meaning is of being “intermediate between earth and body, as
something relating the one to the other” (Bakhtin 1984, 175). Shit here thus acts
as a kind of transitional object (Winnicott 1999), occupying the intermezzo
(Deleuze & Guattari 2003a) “It is also an intermediate, between the living body
and disintegrating matter” (Bakhtin 1984, 174), and therefore provides a more
positive approach to Kristeva’s (1982) theory of abjection, and thereby a
counterpoint to Creeds abjection based reading of horror.
Just as for Bakhtin the degredation in carnival rituals ultimately served a process
of psycho-social renewal (a composting of the self), one important aspect of
Freud's descriptions of animal phobias from an ecopsychoanalytic perspective is
the implicit suggestion that psychological health involves working through such
ambivalences. According to Genosko (1993, 610) this shows that psychoanalysis
has “a certain unrealized potential in reconstituting the relations between children
and animals”.
To conclude this section, do we perhaps then need more taboos? More barriers
against unrestrained desire for ever greater levels of consumption (Bigda-Peyton
2004, Bodnar 2008)? Is even asking this question breaking a fundamental taboo
in capitalist society, where our first duty is as consumer rather than citizen, where
our cultural ego-ideal commands us to buy? Today however, in the new ‘austerity’,
we are made to feel guilty for both not living up to the demands of consumerism,
not buying enough to keep the economy moving, but also for following this
command all too easily. The rise of vegetarianism in the West is an example of an
emerging self-imposed taboo, which has major ecological impacts. The UN has
claimed that the two biggest decisions individuals can make to reduce their
negative effects on the environment is to stop eating meat or eat less meat, and
to stop driving cars (or flying) or drive (and fly) less. Breeding animals for meat
uses 10 times as many crops as it would to feed the same number of people, and
according to Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), “The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated
that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world's
total greenhouse gas emissions”, greater even than transport, and therefore that
“among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one
should consider” (in Black 2008).
In order to see the ecological effect of another newly introduced taboo we can
consider the traditional use of tigerskins in Tibet: “Following a campaign to raise
awareness of the tiger's plight, and an appeal by the Dalai Lama in 2006 for
Tibetans to stop wearing the fashionable tiger-skin chubas, demand fell
dramatically. Tiger skins were burned and it became socially unacceptable to
wear or sell them, and demand in Tibet has all but disappeared” (Graham-Rowe
2011). While the long-term ecological effects of this newly invoked taboo are hard
to predict, for example whether it will result in an increased reliance on imported
synthetic fabrics made elsewhere, whether we like it or not taboos will continue to
play an important role in the three ecologies. This article is not an attempt to
argue for or against taboos, rather to open up a reflective space to consider how
animal taboos can both tell us something about ourselves (teaching us about our
mental ecology) but also effect social practice (social ecology) with dramatic
consequences on biodiversity (natural ecology), and are worth reflecting on to
better understand their complex effects throughout the eco-psycho-social space.
V. Lion and Cockroach: Social Ecology
After looking at the interaction between mental ecology and natural ecology, we
turn more fully to social ecology. A useful resource here is the work of Volkan
(2000) on 'large-group' dynamics, where we can see important examples of what
Deleuze and Guattari called ‘mythic’ or State animals, the second category in
their tripartite scheme (Oedipal-individuated, mythic-State, wild-nomadic-pack).
We can think here of animals such as the Afghan snow leopard, the British or
Czech lion, the American or Moravian eagles, or the Indian Elephant or tiger (see
the useful page listing national animal symbols on Wikipedia, 2012). We might
also consider how scapegoat animals are used by opposing groups to attack,
denigrate or demonise the alien group-other, represented by alien animal-other
(e.g. the attribution of Jews as rats, or Tutsi's as cockroaches during their
respective genocides). This symbolism can also be resisted and reused, such as
the Banksy's use of rats in his graffiti art, and occurs in other religious or political
large groups (such as the Christian fish or lamb, the Rastafarian lion, or the US
Republican Party's use of the elephant). Exploring the roles of such animals in
the ecological imaginary can lead to further understanding of the intersection
between mental ecologies, social ecologies, and natural ecologies.
The expression of large-group

identities through animal
symbols are ancient and
ubiquitous going back to the
totemic use of animals and
nature at the beginning of
human history, studied
already in different ways by
Freud and Jung. Animals here
function as a collective
projection of human
Cockroach: dehumanization or deanimalization?
characteristics and also
provide objects of collective introjective identification, as the group internalizes
the characteristics of the animal in rituals such as the totem meal.
The symbolic significance of animals is sometimes obvious and primal, such

as those associated with fertility, warfare, wisdom…while in other cases
animals are used as symbols for complex and abstract ideas and beliefs…
[e.g.] that an omnipotent lion of the heavens swallowed the sun and thereby
brought on darkness each day (Biedermann, 1992). In ancient Egypt,
Sekhmet, the goddess of war and defender of the sun god Re, was
represented by a lion, and in Judeo-Christian tradition, the lion symbolizes
both divine and evil power. The wolf has symbolic significance in Old Norse
mythology, as well as in the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, China, and
numerous other cultures, tribes, and ethno national groups. The Turks’ use of
the wolf dates back thousands of years to their early history in the steppes of
Central Asia. (Volkan 2000)
In some cases, the origins of a particular large-group animal symbol can be

traced to the identification of a particular leader with the animal in question.For
example, both Genghis Khan and Hitler had strong connections to wolves, the
former claiming to be descended from a blue-gray ‘chosen wolf’, and the latter,
whose given name means ‘Athalwolf’ in Old German, called the SS his ‘wolf-pack’
and gave the name wolf to his favourite dog (Volkan 2000; Ehrenreich 1997).
Such animals therefore become a collective unifying symbol around which the
group forms powerful bonds, through the processes Freud identified in group
formation.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921) wrote that in
groups, group members take the leader in place of their ego-ideal, abolishing
fears of difference and the responsibility of reconciling competing drives.

Aggression within the group, a minimum of which is necessary to maintain
individuality, is turned outward, to the enemy, and even small differences between
groups are accentuated, in what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences,
where powerful affective intensities become arranged around ‘badges’ of group
identity, policing the boundaries and maintaining inside-outside group-
membranes, while individual differences within the group collapse. Group
members’ egos become identified with one another due to sharing the same ego-
ideal, and they can thus literally love each other as themselves (narcissistically)
and create a kind of ‘group narcissism’ and a sense of collective power. As well
as leading us to our most tragic and violent moments, such dynamics can also at
times lift us to our greatest heights, as it enables us to move beyond purely
egoistic motives to an almost mystical oceanic feeling, feelings of merger when
the ego feels it has expanded to include the whole group, recalling to feelings of
at-oneness with mother before the difficult and painful process of individuation
began.
For Volkan (2000) during the process of development and gradual integration of a
sense of self, there are always elements that remain unintegrated. ‘Suitable
reservoirs’ are then sought in order to dispose of/deal with these ‘good’ and ‘bad’
internal objects which threaten to destabalize the always partially fragile core
identity of the self (and group). The child in question here is always part of a
group, a culture, therefore large-group animal symbols can function as an
externalization of uningrated self- and object-representations. Cultural symbols
are injected with fresh emotional charge with each generation, if they can
succeed in retaining their social role as containers, and they also provide read-
made channels for the flow of emotional meaning. Unlike transitional objects
(Winnicott 1999) which are chosen by the child for personal meaning in the
developing self-object differentiation, animal symbols as suitable reservoirs, for
Volkan (2000), are offered to children by adult members of a specific large group
and “become the foundation on which more sophisticated ideations and affects
concerning ethno-national…and large-group” identity.
Such large-group animals symbols are not only recipients of our internal
phantasies but themselves powerfully structure our internal worlds. A mutual-
amplification positive feedback process can then take place, especially if the
large-group identity is threatened. Here, the large-group regresses, turning the
animal symbols into ‘protosymbols’. We see a degeneration from what Hana
Segal called a ‘symbolic representation’, where there is a clear distinction
between a symbol (e.g. a word) and the thing it symbolises (which requires the
work of mourning of Klein’s depressive position) to a ‘symbolic equation’, where
there is no ‘gap’ and the animal symbol is felt to actually be the group identity in a
concrete way characteristic of psychotic thinking. We can consider for example
the intense emotional investments in animal symbols during the Cold War:
Americans characterized the Russian bear as a vicious, devouring,

castrating, or murdering animal, while Soviets portrayed the American eagle
as representing a combination of maliciously carnivorous and greedy morality
with exhibitionistic phallic activity. Such depictions invoked anger and were
considered deeply offensive by the respective sides. (Volkan 2000)
Where the large-group animal symbol concerns not ones own group but the
enemy-other, we find ourselves faced with the scapegoat. Psychoanalytically,
what occurs in scapegoating is a repression or denial of the bad and sinful
aspects of the self and a projection of these split off parts onto an other, who
thereafter embodies all the evil the self or community wishes to reject. They
therefore appear to deserve to be attacked and persecuted. Scapegoating is
about finding somewhere to put something we don't want, and of forcing the
container to accept the projection, often violently. Perhaps there are other ways to
achieve this goal, dealing with unintegrated, unwanted aspects of the self, without
resorting to violence? As Adorno and Horkheimer write in The Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1994, 187).
Impulses which the subject will not admit as his own, even though they are
most assuredly so, are attributed to the object – the prospective victim… In
Fascism this behaviour is made political; the object of the illness is deemed
true to reality; and the mad system becomes the reasonable norm in the
world, and deviation from it, a neurosis.
The animal (goat) therefore stands at the origin of the scapegoating process, but
also helps to provide the form and content of each scapegoating event. The
content of racist fantasies such as anti-Semitism also contains a lot of highly
primitive anal material, such as shit, insects, an infestation of rats and parasites,
as well as archaic oral phantasies of devouring. This allows us to see the
primitive psychological basis for racist splitting and hate, and recalls Franz
Kafka’s (2007) story The Metamorphosis where the minor bureaucrat Gregor
Samsa awakens to find he has turned into a giant insect, itself perhaps in part a
working through in the medium of art the racist projections saturating the
culture. The Metamorphosis can therefore be seen in part as Kafka’s ‘becoming-
animal’, his ‘becoming-scapegoat’.
Deleuze and Guattari

(2003a) introduce their
concept of ‘becoming-
animal’ (see Dodds 2011,
2012) with a discussion of
the 1971 horror
film Willard (remade in
2003). Willard (who
happens to look a lot like
Kafka) is a social misfit
with an intense
relationship to 'his' rat Ben
and the many other rats
he 'collects' and fails to kill
at various moments in the
film. He eventually rejects
these rats in favour of a Rats: Oedipal or pack, scapegoat or line of flight? (Willard 2003)
human relationship with a
woman, at which point he plans to poison Ben and the other rats, who respond
with an attack and the rat-pack devour Willard, the film ending with a close up of
Ben's face. The horror of such scenes represent a reversal of the scapegoat
process, where the animal to be abjected (Kristeva's 1982) instead abjects the
human subject.
A first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out
into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents
a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with
everything that was 'bad' in a given period, that is, everything that resisted
signifying signs...everything that was unable to recharge the signifier at its
centre and carries of everything that spills beyond the outermost circle.
Finally...it incarnates that line of flight the signifying regime cannot
tolerate...an absolute detteritorialization (Deleuze|Guattari (2003a, 116).
Returning to Volkan, we can see how large-group animal symbols function in this
way to ‘dehumanize’ the enemy during scapegoating processes and intergroup
violence.
[The] large group regresses and begins to utilize protosymbols of the enemy
as their shared “bad” suitable reservoir… First, the enemy is demonized but
still is perceived as retaining human qualities, although they are
predominantly negative human qualities. Later, those of an enemy group may
be rendered as vermin or a loathsome animal that must be exterminated, or a
cancer that must be excised “for the sake of humanity.” In Rwanda, Hutu first
referred to Tutsi as evil people and later began calling
them "cafards,"meaning cockroaches.
However, while psychoanalysis and group analysis are crucial in exploring these
levels of the animal symbol, Volkan here remains unfortunately still too
anthropocentric in his analysis. In reality, it is not only that humans that are forced
to take on animal characteristics (dehumanization), but it is also the animal which
is forced to take on rejected and projected human attributes (deanimalization),
and that these two processes are locked in mutual interaction.
Here, ecopsychoanalysis can help provide a stereoscopic (binocular) vision, or

reversible perspective (Bion, see Grotstein 2007), to look again at the
psychodynamics of such problems from a new angle. Deleuze and Guattar’s
‘Oedipal’ or individuated animals or pets represents ‘humanised animals’, while
the denigrated animal-other of scapegoating is an ‘animalized human’ which
Wolfe and Elmer (1995, 147) call “perhaps the most troubling category of all”. In
both cases the animals concerned are ‘deanimalised’, reduced to carrying human
levels of meaning. Wolfe and Elmer (1995) also propose two further categories.
‘Animalized animals’ and ‘humanized humans’ relate to the clear distinction
Derrida maintains has been the aim of anthropocentric philosophy, to keep
animals a separate, absolute animal other from a definition of humanity shorn of
its creatureliness. Both are ostensibly ‘pure’ categories, allowing us to exercise
violence and exploitation by bypassing any sense of guilt, but remain ‘ideological
fictions’ only maintained through the frantic labour of constant redrawing of the
boundaries at ever new points.
VI. Parakeet and Sphinx: Complexity in the Three Ecologies
In Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos (Dodds 2011), I draw on

complexity theory (Stacey 2006) to explore how on the level of social ecology, we
can rethink Bion's (1961) work group and basic assumption groups in terms of
interactions which create regions of stability and disintegration, with potentially
creative fractal regions of bounded instability at the edge of chaos between them.
As Stacey (2006) argued, nonlinear fractal geometry undermines any clear line
between inside and outside, providing new ways to think about the individual and
group (and therefore also animals and humans) in terms of multidimensional

fractal borderzones. Attempts to define clear inside-outside boundaries through
animal symbols and animal-group scapegoats will therefore always be
problematic, and their very fragility lead to greater levels of violence to maintain
their function in our affective economy. While at times appearing remarkably
stable, complexity theory helps explain how they can also hide a marked
instability, and dynamic and sudden shifts always remain a possibility.
This opening up of a more complex view of boundary regions beyond simple

inside/outside binaries also applies to animal classifications such as Deleuze and
Guattari’s Oedipal/State/Nomad triad. Strange hybrid animals will always exceed
and blur such distinctions, embodying what Delueze and Guattari call, a line of
flight. Genosko's (1993, 617) aim is to “open the associative chain to animals not
so easily subsumed under the morals of castration and father surrogate” while
avoiding romanticizing the schizo-swarm by “treating the Wolf-Man as a psychotic
whose body was trampled by wild packs and teeming swarms, a body...that never
turned off, that never stabilized, and knew no decathexis.” For Genosko (1993,
627) Freud's (1921, 130) referance to Schopenhauer's porcupines represents a
mixed pack “stable in its instability, inasmuch as it composes and decomposes
itself in its very unfolding.” Here we could make a 'complexity' reading of the pack,
the 'strange' pack as a dissipative structure, a fractal pattern with complex
interminglings of order and disorder arising from far-from-equilibrium interactions
at the edge of chaos.
From this perspective, we can more clearly envisage that animal symbols do not
have to be imposed by a Freudian group-leader-father, but rather can be seen in
terms of Jaques' (1955) social phantasy systems as emerging through the self-
organization of individual defences, with global patterns feeding back to effect
lower levels recursively. This embodies a system of multistability, with complex
movements between basins of attraction as internal objects and affects flow
through the network, with major shifts between states. Such shifts sometimes
occur after long periods when the system seems stuck despite the best efforts to
destabilize it by pushing it towards a bifurcation. These dynamics can be
understood as weaving and unweaving animal totems and taboos in the three
ecologies.
For an example of a
nonlinear social phantasy
ecosystem in climate change
we can consider to Randall's
(2005) discussion of the non-
active majority who project
environmental concern onto
activists functioning as
containers for the split-off
collective environmental
superego, with complex and
shifting subjective positions
and affects coursing round
the eco-psycho-social circuit
(Dodds 2011). Randall
(2005, 176-7) suggests that Parakeets: containing both good and bad, when required
as collective guilt becomes
more shared, it can be “managed in more creative ways”, becoming “less
persecutory and destructive” where projections are reduced and a larger non-
psychotic space created for reparative action. Animal-symbols can provide
containers for such reparative responses, as well as the scapegoating dynamics
studied above. In Volkan’s (2000, 1976) analysis of the animal-reservoir ‘chosen’
by Cypriot Turks in response to the ‘tumultuous’ period following Britain’s
withdrawl in 1960, he writes:
[W]ithin three years a bloody conflict broke out between the two groups.
Between 1963 and 1968, Cypriot Turks were forced to live in increasingly
small enclaves that became more like prisons or ghettos. During this
traumatic period of their history, they raised hundreds…of parakeets, whose
cages hung everywhere… The Cypriot Turks were preoccupied with the birds
and obsessively kept track of which ones were fertile, which was the mother
of other birds, which one was crippled, and so on.
How can this be understood? For Volkan, this represented a positive reversal.
From representing ‘bad’ parts, of the “victimized, imprisoned Turks” and the
subhuman living conditions, it first allowed them to externalize their bad aspects,
to bear their sense of persecutory entrapment. However, the same symbol then
allowed a psycho-social shift by becoming a ‘good suitable reservoir’,
representing “hopeful, good parts—as long as the birds were fertile and sang
happily, Cypriot Turks unconsciously felt assured that they themselves could
survive imprisonment.” This situation changed following the 1968 military
intervention of Turky, which ‘released’ Cypriot Turks from their ghettos. While
some parakeets continued to be kept as pets, their previous psycho-social
function collapsed, and the birds set free.
A nonlinear social systems perspective lets us explore the affective feedback

loops carried around the circuit with complex social and psychological effects, as
projective and introjective identifications, splittings and scapegoating,
transferences and countertransferences, reverberate back and forth in new
iterations as the system moves forward in time. Complexity theory allows us to
open up the ecological vision of psychoanalysis through the gap prised open by
Deleuze and Guattari's critique. Of course, ecopsychoanalysis cannot stop here
with the psychological and social symbolism of such animals, but instead needs
to follow the circuits of effects onwards throughout the three ecologies, with
chains of effects both in the psycho-social space and in natural ecologies,
including actual (non-symbolic) animals. As Deleuze and Guattari (2003a, 549)
put it, a “territorial assemblage opens onto a social assemblage” which is also
“connected to cosmic forces” and to “pulsations of the earth” (Deleuze|Guattari
2003a, 549).
What happened to these

parakeets? While the image
of their flight of freedom from
their cages is an inspiring
one, did they die out, unable
to survive outside their
imprisonment in an
environment they were not
adapted to? How did the
dramatic shifts following the
Turkish intervention effect
not only the animal symbols
of the large group at a

social-psychological level,
but at an ecological one as
well? These are the kinds of
questions that we need and
Guattari’s three ecologies
helps us to conceptualize.
What is the primal animal in
psychoanalysis' zoological
imagination? Genosko
(1993, 629) argues it is not
the wolf, the rat, or even
Freud's dog, but the Sphinx.
That strange 'hybrid' animal
is already a pack, already
the becoming-human of the
animal and the becoming-
animal of the human. The
important work done by
psychoanalysis and group
Hybrid complexity: Becoming-animal and becoming-human. analysis on mental ecologies
Freud's Sphinx, Greek terracotta 4th- 5th century BC
and social ecologies remain
crucial, but ecopsychoanalysis suggests it needs also to be combined with a
greater awareness of the complex nonlinear reverberations with natural ecologies
of the Earth.
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Psychoanalysis. KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16-17 Dec. 2011
To cite this article, use this bibliographical entry: Joseph Dodds "Animal Totems and Taboos: An
Ecopsychoanalytic Perspective". PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. December 15,
2009. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/dodds-animal_totems_and_taboos_an_ecopsychoana.
November 26, 2012 [or whatever date you accessed the article].
Received: November 24, 2012, Published: November 26, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Joseph Dodds
PsyArt is an online, peer-reviewed journal featuring articles using a

psychological approach to the arts. The journal is open to any psychology and
any art, although PsyArt specializes in psychoanalytic psychology and literature
or film.
Copyright © 2010-2011 PsyArt v2.5a
ISSN: 2123-4434

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09/04/2020 ecopsychoanalysis: Joseph Dodds (2012) Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic Perspective

Joseph Dodds (2012) Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic

'Animal Totems and Taboos: An Ecopsychoanalytic Perspective', by Joseph

What is an animal? In addition to biological and ecological answers,

I. Lizard and Porcupine: What Is An Animal?

II. Cat and Eagle: Animality and the Three Ecologies

The structure of this paper will

2003a) distinction of three

In terms of the three ecologies, when we fly on a plane to have a powerful

Therefore, we need to analyse the complex meanings of the animal at

The film Melancholia is framed

III. Lemur and Rhino: Natural Ecology

Jenkins et al’s (2011) study ‘Analysis of Patterns of Bushmeat Consumption

Madigascar is one of the most ecologically important places on Earth. An ancient

Taboos have provided protection to some species, particularly the

The authors of the study

practical consequences on the eco-psycho-social system of places such as

In ‘Biodiversity: Endangered and in demand’, Graham-Rowe (2011) discuses the

Traditional Asian medicine is on a collision course with wildlife preservation.

The illicit trade in wildlife is a booming industry, estimated by the US

IV. Wolf and Rat: Mental Ecology

Animal totems and taboos

In ‘Freud's Bestiary: How Does Psychoanalysis Treat Animals?’ Genosko (1993)

'Downward' is earth...an element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the

This symbolism is ancient, with faeces playing an important, and also a

V. Lion and Cockroach: Social Ecology

The expression of large-group

The symbolic significance of animals is sometimes obvious and primal, such

In some cases, the origins of a particular large-group animal symbol can be

fears of difference and the responsibility of reconciling competing drives.

Americans characterized the Russian bear as a vicious, devouring,

Deleuze and Guattari

Here, ecopsychoanalysis can help provide a stereoscopic (binocular) vision, or

VI. Parakeet and Sphinx: Complexity in the Three Ecologies

In Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos (Dodds 2011), I draw on

group (and therefore also animals and humans) in terms of multidimensional

This opening up of a more complex view of boundary regions beyond simple

A nonlinear social systems perspective lets us explore the affective feedback

What happened to these

of the large group at a

Dodds, J. (2011) Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: complexity

Morton, T (2007) Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental

PsyArt is an online, peer-reviewed journal featuring articles using a

Copyright © 2010-2011 PsyArt v2.5a

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