Learning to lack? Towards a psychoanalytic interpretation of climate anxiety as a political emotion in education for climate justice

This paper mobilises psychoanalytic political theory—drawing on Kleinian and Lacanian registers—to analyse how climate anxiety might foreclose or facilitate education for climate justice. It develops a conceptual framework centred on anxiety, disavowal, and enjoyment to examine how climate anxiety functions as a political emotion within and against educational institutions. Climate anxiety is framed not as a singular experience but as reflecting ambivalent psychic and ideological investments in the status quo. By distinguishing between depressive and persecutory anxiety (Klein), and analysing the libidinal economy of enjoyment and its disavowals (Lacan), the paper explores how educational institutions can become sites of both epistemic closure and political possibility. Particular attention is paid to how knowledge itself can act as a fetish that sustains different forms of disavowal and enjoyment. Rather than advocating for more ‘rationalist’ education, the paper proposes reflexive, creative pedagogical practices that engage with the psychic dimensions of anxiety and loss. Advancing the concept of ‘learning to lack’, it argues that by relinquishing fantasies of wholeness and control, we may foster more reparative engagements with climate injustice—seeing others not as obstacles to our non-lacking enjoyment, but as ambivalent interlocutors in the work of collective transformation.