The Political Mind: Cassandra’s Message 2 Nuclear and Climate Catastrophe
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
With John Keene
Chaired by David Morgan
Panel
Harriet Wolfe, IPA President Psychoanalyst (US)
Psychoanalysts Charles Strozier (US), Jill Gentile (US), Phil Stokoe (UK) Sally Weintrobe (UK)
and Ecologist Andrew Gaines (AUS)
Environmental crisis, climate emergency, pandemics, neofascism, unjust and destabilising inequalities, and the escalating threat of nuclear war pose existential challenges to global civilisation. It seems clear that the gaps between party politics, social movements, and intellectual life have widened, and the political system is not responding adequately.
John Keene
Human Instinct and the Survival or Destruction of Life on this Planet.
Our basic mammalian/primate instincts privilege tribalism, dominance and the rapid response to immediate well-defined threats. The unique additional capacities of homo sapiens enabled enormous technical prowess but also the capacities to deceive, deny – to believe what we want to believe and disregard the rest. These facilitate the smashing of our planetary life support system at a catastrophic pace and the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. The challenge as to how we might work around our instinctual predilections needs them to be well understood.
