“Think like a mountain ”-“ to think of Oedipus ”: a psychoanalytic contribution to environmental ethics

Abstract

ABSTRACT The guilt and shame of participating in an indecent consumerist way of life that causes climate change and mass extinction of species inflicts a moral wound on us. This moral wound arouses an indignation of which the “Greta generation” is one of the spokespeople, and it involves developing an ethic of relations between our species and non-human species. We must learn to “think like a mountain”, in the words of Aldo Leopold, that is to say in an ecosystemic way, in order to accept our true place in the biotic community of microorganisms, flora and fauna: that of “children of the biosphere”, a biosphere on which we are as dependent as an infant is its parents. The author argues that developing such an ethic requires a work of culture to think about new environmental paradigms, especially the fact that humanity endlessly artificializes nature, even its own nature, to the detriment of the wild part of them. Can the Œdipal situation, its taboos and its respect for fecundity be extended to our biotic family?