Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD

December 10-12, 2021

Dr. Orange is educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis and teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York); IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis, and Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020).  2021 Visiting Professor of Phenomenology, Duquesne University.

Seminar Title: Psychoanalysis and Climate Justice

Seminar Description: For several years now, psychoanalysts, like the first-world public at large, have begun to take climate change as an emergency.  What took us so long, given that the warnings have been clear since the 1980s?  This seminar will consider psychoanalytic explanations, i.e. unconscious ones, including those belonging to the “normative unconscious” (Layton), and those belonging to the cultural unconscious in North America and Australia, those resulting from histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery.  Together, we will attempt to understand (nachträglich) the impact of this history, and to craft a sense of how organized psychoanalysis and those with psychoanalytic sensibilities might engage going forward.

Selected Readings:(Just to start)

Orange, D. (2017). Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics. London, Routledge. [Please read this small book before the seminar].

Weintrobe, S. (2021). Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. New York, London, Bloomsbury.

Gardiner, S. M. (2011). A perfect moral storm : the ethical tragedy of climate change. New York, Oxford University Press.

Hansen, J. E. (2009). Storms of my grandchildren : the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity. New York, Bloomsbury USA.

"In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen--the nation's leading scientist on climate issues--speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama's solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore signed on to, won't work; why we must phase out all coal; and why 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the horrific storms of the book's title"--Cover, p. 2.

Lifton, R. J. (2017). The climate swerve : reflections on mind, hope, and survival. New York, New Press.

Moss, D. (2016). "Our Crying Planet: An Approach to the Problem of Climate Change Denial." Psychoanal. Q. 85(1): 189-197