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How to Mourn the Future - Two Events (Session 2: Let's Collapse Together: Psychoanalysis and Eco-feminism)

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Central

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This event is free to attend - please register using the link above.

Event 2 (of 2) for researchers and students, developed by Dr. Catherine Lord (Media and Culture, Literature and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)

Format: Lecture, Q/A, Seminar.

Time present and time past are both rushing into time future. When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN in 2019, she shamed the audience for stealing her dreams and betraying future generations. How does one mourn a betrayed future? How can this be possible if acts of grief are retroactive? As Freud explained in 1917, there is a tension between mourning and melancholia, the latter being that psychical state in which one resists letting go of lost loves, lives and ideas. To release these is to recover vitality. That said, Freud’s later work presents a bleaker view. Mourning is a process which might never end, and therefore, its future is ensured. To grapple with planetary futures and ecological losses, together with Freud’s work, that of Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, Achille Mbembe, Timothy Morton, Jacqueline Rose and Sally Weintrobe will prove invaluable. Eco-feminism is key to our two sessions. It will be brought into productive tension with Morton’s insistence that critical thinking about the nonhuman world must jettison the fantasy that the planet can be reduced to being ‘female’ or a ‘Woman.’ Such gender-binaries smuggle into ecopsychoanalytic thinking their freight of patriarchy. The antidote is an eco-feminism kwhich can create new, cyclical narratives to rupture Western, linear myths of progress. 

In the fields of ecopsychoanalysis and climate psychology - the theoretical contexts for my two classes - we explore the intersection between planetary entanglements, eco-politics and psychoanalysis. The two lectures and seminars will explore how eco-futures include narratives about climate breakdown and civilisational collapse. How can mourning generate the thinking needed to confront polycrises and collective breakdowns? D. W. Winnicott’s reflections on the “nervous breakdown” will be in dialogue with Luke Kemp’s innovative Goliath’s Curse (2025). According to him, when societies collapse, so do oligarchies. I will argue that what is needed is an imaginative leap into yet unknown, resilient and equitable futures. 

The two sessions will engage with two literary texts, short cinematic fragments and one social media clip from the world of geopolitics. These will be announced with the readings for the classes and be made available to the participants who have signed up for the sessions.

Session 2: Let’s Collapse Together: Psychoanalysis and Eco-feminism

Eco-feminism argues that the way in which we treat women is equivalent to our treatment of the planet. Psychoanalysis and eco-feminism will come into dialogue with the canonical essay by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor - “End of Times Fascism” (2025).

 

Catherine Lord is a writer, scholar and senior lecturer in literary and media studies, tenured at the department of Literature and Cultural Analysis, as well as Media Studies, at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in ecological humanities, literature and cinema. She studies the overlaps between psychoanalysis, feminism and the climate crisis. Her recent publications have appeared in 'Comparative American Studies, Green Letters' and two Palgrave collections of essays. Currently, she is working on a book project about environmental mourning. She is also an artist, doing acting work in museal films. At present, she is developing practice-based projects which explore the intersection between psychoanalytic and ecological themes. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/l/o/c.m.lord/c.m.lord.html

Contact name: Dr Elia Ntaousani

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