Continuing Education Course
Thursday, March 6, 2025 - Thursday, April 3, 2025
7:30 pm to 8:45 pm
Online
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
Facing up to the Unfolding Global Environmental Catastrophe: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Instructor: Lindsay L Clarkson, MD
Instructor: John Kress, PhD
Instructor: Donald Moss, MD
Instructor: Lynne Zeavin, PsyD
Professional Registration
$150.00
Student/Trainee Registration
$50.00
CME/CE Certificate fee
$20.00
Registration Coming Soon
We live amidst a global ecological crisis caused by human practices, with vast inequalities in its effects. In modern Western civilization, our way of living reflects an attitude of entitlement to the Earth’s resources, disregarding limits and our impact on the natural world. This has led to distraction and alienation from the part of ourselves that understands our dependence on the biosphere.
After describing the natural world from a historical perspective, we will explore how our inner worlds shape our understanding of external reality, encouraging psychoanalytic consideration of the complexity of our relationship with nature. We will discuss the factors that interfere with our ability to comprehend the ongoing destruction caused by the slow violence of environmental degradation. Together, we will examine the emotional factors that have led us to disavow our psychological and bodily connections to the natural world, thereby impoverishing ourselves. Using poetry and clinical material, we will highlight the vital role nature plays in our internal psychic balance and the internal strengthening that comes with an ecological perspective.
Learning Objectives
- Participants will be able to summarize the current state of the global environment from a historical perspective.
- Participants will be able to discuss the unconscious internalized relationships and processes that shape and influence our ability to perceive and respond to large-scale environmental changes.
Instructor: Lindsay L Clarkson, MD
Lindsay L. Clarkson MD is a training and supervising analyst emerita at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. The Kleinian and Bionian perspectives have greatly informed her analytic work, supervision and teaching over the past 35 years. In recent years Dr. Clarkson turned her attention to the relationship we have with the natural world. In panel presentations, essays and journal articles, she has used clinical process, narrative and environmental literature, poetry and biography to extend the purview of psychoanalytic listening and developmental theory to include the dynamic interplay between nature and our inner worlds. She received her education at Harvard University and her medical and psychiatric training at Duke University Medical Center.
Instructor: John Kress, PhD
John Kress, PhD is Distinguished Scientist and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He was Curator of Botany for over thirty years and formerly served as the Interim Under Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian. Dr. Kress received his education at Harvard University (B.A., 1973) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1981), where he studied tropical biology, ethnobotany, evolution, and ecology. Among his over 250 scientific and popular papers are his books Plant Conservation – A Natural History Approach, The Weeping Goldsmith, The Art of Plant Evolution, Botanica Magnifica, The Ornaments of Life - Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics, and Living in the Anthropocene – Earth in the Age of Humans. Dr. Kress has recently completed Smithsonian Trees of North America to be published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Parker-Gentry Award for Biodiversity and Conservation from the Field Museum of Natural History and the Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award. Dr. Kress lives in Dorset, Vermont, with his wife Lindsay L. Clarkson, MD.
Instructor: Donald Moss, MD
Donald B. Moss, MD is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in New York. He is the author of 60 plus articles, the most recent: "Traumatizing Disorders of Everyday Life", JAPA, 2024 and "Encountering Representations of Evil", Parapraxis, 2024. He has authored 6 books, most recently, "Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year", Routledge 2022 (2023 Gradiva Prize).
Instructor: Lynne Zeavin, PsyD
Lynne Zeavin, PsyD is a Training and Supervising analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute where she chairs curriculum and teaches the work of Melanie Klein as well as a new course examining the role of the external world in psychic development. An Associate Editor at JAPA, Dr Zeavin has authored numerous papers and book chapters on female sexuality, misogyny, and mourning, as well as various aspects of Kleinian theory and technique. A member of Green Gang, she is also a member of the IPA working group on the Environment that seeks to generate broader awareness of the importance of psychoanaysts’ engagement with the environment. She is the co-editor (with Donald Moss) of Hating, Abhoring and Wishing to Destroy: Essays on the Contemporary Psa Moment (NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, 2022) and co-editor with Sally Weintrobe of Clinical Conversations about the Climate Emergency (Routledge, forthcoming)
