Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

By “psychoanalysis” I intend here an inquiry into the collective unconscious that gave rise to our current thinking about the planet and its environment. In other words, by looking at the sources of the values and methods that underlie Enlightenment scientific thinking, a sort of religion in its own right, and one that clearly has its roots in Christianity, I hope to be able to bring to the surface and to examine the cultural metaphors that dominate our thinking today. The idea derives from the under-appreciated French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). In 1938, at the age of 54, while a professor at Dijon, Bachelard published two books, La formation de l’esprit scientifique: contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective and La psychanalyse du feu. In these works he developed two concepts that are particularly useful to a psychoanalysis of earth: the epistemological obstacle and the epistemological break. (Thomas Kuhn would later pick up on the notion of epistemological break, which he called a “paradigm shift.”) The point is that an analysis of the scientific/religious discourse that has produced the schizophrenia towards the environment that our culture currently exhibits aims to help us find a more healthy, holistic, symbiotic, and integrated relationship with nature.