Continuing Education Course

Recent years have seen growing interest in the intersection of psychoanalysis and the environment, driven in part by the mental health consequences of climate change, including climate anxiety, ecological grief, and solastalgia. Much of this contemporary work, however, remains disconnected from Harold Searles’s pioneering text, The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia (1960). Searles, who worked alongside Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge treating borderline and schizophrenic patients, developed a groundbreaking account of the role of the nonhuman environment in psychological life. His book offers remarkably prescient insights into how human relationships with the natural world shape development, psychopathology, transference, and defensive processes. Searles also explores the psychological benefits of a healthy sense of kinship with the environment and raises important questions about cultural attitudes toward nature. This course uses Searles’s work as an introduction to environmental psychoanalytic theory, providing a clinically rich and experience-near foundation for understanding this increasingly important field.

Learning Objectives

• Describe Searles’s concepts of the nonhuman environment in personality development.
• Explain the role of the nonhuman environment in psychosis, neurosis, and transference.
• Discuss the cultural and clinical implications of Searles’s theory of the nonhuman environment.