Harold Searles pointed out the degree to which we are symbiotic with the non-human environment. I grew up in an urban environment and I feel it’s become part of me: the concrete playgrounds behind public schools, the trains, the buildings, the stores, etc. It was within this environment in which I became interested in mentally ill neighbors. I remember one woman skipping down the street (I was playing ball in the street-which was a drag -- we always had to wait for cars to go by) and then stopping to face a concrete wall and continued staring at it for lengths of time (I think she was feeling boundaryless now and needed the containment and support of a hard surface -- when I was a child I was puzzled and also intrigued by this neighbor -- this memory stands out).

Searles lamented the lack of interest on psychoanalysts’ parts to the ecological crisis. In his wonderful paper "Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis" (contained in his volume Countertransference and Related Subjects, published in 1979 by IUP), Searles noted:

"The world's current state of ecological deterioration is such as to evoke in us largely unconscious anxieties of different varieties that are of a piece with those characteristic of various levels of an individual's ego-developmental history...Many aspects of the ecologically deteriorating world in which we live foster in us, at a largely unconscious level, the mode of experiencing seen in an openly crystallized form in paranoid schizophrenia and postulated as characterizing the most threatened moments of normal infancy before the establishment of a durable sense of individuality" (pp. 232-237).

This recalls an interaction I had with a person I saw in intensive long-term psychotherapy (originally at a state hospital and later in my private practice). We were hiking together (while he was still an inpatient) in a nature preserve, and while stopped on a bridge overlooking a rushing stream below, he stated that he used to feel his breath could poison the environment, wilt all of the greenery, etc. What is to become of us if the 'poison' inside is matched with increasing levels of 'poisons' outside?

Searles also pointed out that pollution is into Mother Earth (akin to Melanie Klein's projective identification) -- depositing poisons into that which sustains and nourishes us. Is the current Bush administration’s reversals of environmental protections (e.g., Bush has reversed the injunction to General Electric to clean the PCBs they have dumped into the beautiful Hudson River by defunding the reserves to have been used to accomplish this!), not only reflective of corporate irresponsibility and the power of large corporations to wield immense political power, but on a more personal note, reflective of split-off negative maternal/paternal transferences? Mother Earth shall continue to contain our 'poisons' so that we do not have to reflect on them and metabolize them in more realistic and responsible ways. I realize this might be a 'wild' speculation, but I believe it may contain some truth.

Brian Koehler