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About the Book
With contributions from Elizabeth Allured, Teresa Cochran, Martina Gast, Wendy Greenspun, Daniel Jacobs, Delia Kostner, Ines Schelhas, Daniel Sherrell, Penelope Starr-Karlin, Rita Teusch, and John Turtz, this volume covers a wide variety of topics related to patients’ response to the state of our planet.
The book addresses clinicians’ climate awareness and comfort addressing climate-related emotions. It offers insights into how psychoanalytic psychotherapists might broaden their thinking about the importance of the environment and effectively address climate distress with patients.
The content of this book is decidedly personal, with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, as well as one young climate activist, reflecting on their experiences of becoming climate-aware, and what they have learned working with patients at this critical juncture in human history. The authors highlight how patients express eco-distress, how childhood traumas and present-day climate traumas may be interrelated, and how therapists need to be mindful of their countertransference reactions. The aims of this volume are to increase awareness of how environmental degradation impacts our psychological functioning, and to demonstrate how an openness to a reality-based discussion of the climate crisis will enable us to better hear and attune to our patients’ legitimate concerns about the state of our planet.
The Climate Crisis and Beyond in the Consulting Room provides climate information, inspiration, and clinical resources to enable clinicians to face climate reality and increase comfort with introjecting patients’ complex climate feelings.
About the Editors
Delia Kostner, PhD, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Mont Vernon and Amherst, New Hampshire, where she works with patients across the developmental spectrum. She is a faculty member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI). She has written and taught widely on many topics relevant to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including on the interface of psychoanalysis and Buddhist theory and practice. She has also studied the ways in which the more-than-human world shapes the human psyche. She is co-leader, together with Rita Teusch, of Climate Conversations, a monthly discussion group at BPSI. Dr Kostner has completed the three year, low residency writing program, New Directions: Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge where she also occasionally teaches. She is an amateur naturalist and avid outdoors person who spends her free time hiking and exploring the hills and mountains near her home and abroad. Delia is a University of New Hampshire Natural Resources Steward (NRS) and a volunteer with the NH Coverts Program: Volunteers Working for Wildlife.
Rita Teusch, PhD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where she regularly teaches courses on Freud and Melanie Klein. She is a lecturer in psychiatry (psychology) part-time at Harvard Medical School, Cambridge Health Alliance. She is interested in the history and socio-cultural surround of psychoanalysis and has written on substance abuse, eating disorders, trauma, and gender in psychoanalytic journals and book chapters. She has a private practice in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA.
