Book Review

Abstract

This critical review both summarizes and critiques each book, addressing strengths and oversights. The anthology, Lacan and the Environment, deals with a broad range of issues, which are comprehensively addressed in the review. Recurring themes are the psychology of coming to terms with the extent of environmental destruction humanity has wrought, emphasizing the interface between capitalism’s surplus value and the psyche’s surplus jouissance. Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis looks at humans’ individual and societal defenses against this accounting from an object relations perspective and is readily accessible to a lay readership. The former book hits hard, necessarily so; but it omits any activist concerns or questions, which would have been most welcome from the theoretical perspective provided. The latter is generously engagable, but riskily conflates neoliberalism and capitalism, as well as subsuming the multitudinous forms of environmental devastation under the rubric of climate crisis. If these concerns were addressed by the authors through the radical lenses of Ian Parker’s and David Pavón-Cuéllar’s Psychoanalysis and Revolution, we would have a dream for a Badiouian Event in hand.