Emotional Management in Catastrophic Times

Abstract

Abstract How can we feel safe in a world riven by conflict and in the grip of “the crazy”? What emotional strategies are available to make unbearable realities bearable? Should we side with liveliness and engagement over despair and resignation? The books under review converge on these questions. Sally Weintrobe focuses on responses to the ongoing climate emergency, offering a bracing indictment of neoliberalism’s failures in fomenting it and making a case for the role understanding the psyche—split between caring and uncaring parts—can play in countering it. Arguing that all of us harbor desires for omnipotence and entitled dominion over nature and over others, Weintrobe calls on us to mobilize the caring parts of our selves to counter indifference and resignation. Heather Murray focuses on the twentieth century’s shifting emotional regimes, using the asylum and its records to chart the displacement of passivity and resignation as culturally virtuous modes of engagement by a valorization of activity, intensity, and struggle. Yet, she asks, should we not pause to consider resignation as a sensible psychic strategy offering refuge from the clamors of a world out of control? Is opting out a viable strategy for survival or a fantasy doomed to fail?