Wilderness and Ecopsychology

A radical interdisciplinary exploration of human-wilderness relationships during our current climate crisis, drawing on psychoanalytic insight, political critique, and ecological wisdom, this volume diagnoses the profound alienation endemic to late capitalist modernity while delineating pathways toward regenerative forms of being.

Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor, and Supervisor. In addition to his clinical work as a Psychoanalyst, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies at Regent's University London and University of Roehampton, UK. Anastasios is an Author who published numerous journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives. His recent work focuses on the intersection of psychological and political dimensions of cultural and environmental crisis. Alan Bainbridge is a Professor of Education at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and a Visiting Reader in Education and Sustainability at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He has an expansive view of education that ranges across ecology, psychology, politics, and sustainability. He uses broadly narrative-based research methods to work qualitatively; exploring the development of education professional practice, and the transformative nature of human/more-than-human relationships. Isabella Mighetto is a Counselling Psychologist based in Bristol. She works in a community mental health service in the NHS and has a small private practice. In her clinical and consultation work she seeks to encourage a deeper connection to the body, as well as connection to the natural world. She is an advocate for incorporating nature-based practices into healthcare settings. Her framework attends to sociopolitical, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic contexts, seeing the human as embedded in a much wider ecology.

Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction: Re-imagining a Sustainable and Flourishing Community of Nature Anastasios Gaitanidis, Alan Bainbridge, and Isabella Mighetto 1. Defining Wilderness: A Philosophical, Ecological, and Psychoanalytic Perspective Anastasios Gaitanidis 2. Giving and Receiving the Wild: Developing an Ecological Ethic of Attunement Anastasios Gaitanidis 3. Symbiosis Reciprocity: Human-Land Relationships and Entanglements Isabella Mighetto 4. Dreams, Wilderness and the Sacred Alan Bainbridge 5. Ecosocialism: Learning to Live Well with the World Alan Bainbridge 6. Place-making in Precarity: On Domesticity and Nomadism Isabella Mighetto 7. Wilding Education: From Monoculture to Messy Margins Alan Bainbridge 8. Art as Resistance, Empathy, and Reimagination: Overcoming Ecological Crises Anastasios Gaitanidis Gathering at the Threshold : The Beginning, Not the Conclusion Anastasios Gaitanidis, Isabella Mighetto, and Alan Bainbridge Index