Ecopsychology

History

Origins of ecopsychology

Sigmund Freud

In his 1929 book Civilization and Its Discontents ("Das Unbehagen in der Kultur"), Sigmund Freud discussed the basic tensions between civilization and the individual. He recognized the interconnection between the internal world of the mind and the external world of the environment, stating:

Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.

Robert Greenway

Influenced by the philosophies of noted ecologists Walles T. Edmondson and Loren Eiseley, Robert Greenway began researching and developing a concept that he described as "a marriage" between psychology and ecology in the early 1960s. He theorized that "the mind is nature, and nature, the mind," and called its study psychoecology. Greenway published his first essay on the topic at Brandeis University in 1963.

In 1969, he began teaching the subject at Sonoma State University. One of Greenway's students founded a psychoecology study group at University of California, Berkeley, which was joined by Theodore Roszak in the 1990s.

In the 1995 book Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Greenway wrote:

Ecopsychology is a search for language to describe the human-nature relationship. It is a tool for better understanding the relationship, for diagnosing what is wrong with that relationship, and for suggesting paths to healing.

Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak is credited with coining the term "ecopsychology" in his 1992 book The Voice of the Earth, although a group of psychologists and environmentalists, including Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner, were independently using the term at the same time. Roszak, Gomes and Kanner later expanded the idea in the 1995 anthology Ecopsychology. Two other books were especially formative, Paul Shepard's 1982 volume, Nature and Madness, which explored the effect that our diminishing engagement with nature had upon psychological development, and David Abram's 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. The latter was one of the first books to bring phenomenology fully to bear on ecological issues, looking closely at the cosmo-vision (or the traditional ecological knowledge systems) of diverse indigenous, oral cultures, and analyzing the curious effect that the advent of formal writing systems, like the phonetic alphabet, has had upon the human experience of the more-than-human natural world. Roszak mentions the biophilia hypothesis of biologist E.O. Wilson; that humans have an instinct to emotionally connect with nature.