Between Unconscious Processes and Willful Erasure: Harold Searles as Seer of the Holocene Extinction

This paper engages with and builds upon American psychoanalyst Harold Searles’s 1972 thesis that action on the environmental crisis is stunted by unconscious ego defenses. These defenses are said to be rooted in three aspects of development: the paranoid, the depressive, and Oedipal positions. Searles sees these unconscious defenses as key drivers of our potential extinction while also identifying the United States’s disproportionate role in perpetuating the crisis. While Searles argues that psychic reactions to ecological deterioration evoke realistic paranoia, rational depression, and relative apathy, these responses represent only part of the psychological landscape in the contemporary context of ongoing mass biodiversity loss. Given scientific consensus that human activities are fueling the Holocene extinction, systemic disavowal and willful erasure also illuminate psychic obstacles that continue to hinder action on structures driving ecological collapse.