Scientific Meeting: Facing the Existential Threat Posed by the Global Ecological Crisis – A Crucial Role for Psychoanalysis
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November 11, 2025
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
***This meeting is virtual and will be held on ZOOM.***
NYPSI’s 1080th Scientific Meeting:
“Facing the Existential Threat Posed by the Global Ecological Crisis – A Crucial Role for Psychoanalysis”
Tuesday, November 11 2025
8:00 – 10:00 PM (EST)
Panelists: Josephine Wright, M.D., Delia Kostner, Ph.D., & Lindsay Clarkson, M.D.
The multisystemic nature of the accelerating ecological crisis calls for multidisciplinary responses. Conceptual rigidity, society-wide cognitive dissonance, inability to imagine beyond cultural assumptions foster dangerous denial and inaction. Psychoanalysis and psychology must play a role – both in the consulting room and beyond, in understanding the defenses against fear, grief, traumatic empathy that prevent full appreciation of imminent danger and stymie creative re-imagining of how to be in and of the world. Panelists will discuss these resistances to knowledge and resulting affects that arise in therapist, patient and in society. The reality must be acknowledged alongside the unconscious unique conflicts aroused. The dissociation from kinship with the nonhuman world, a characteristic of the modern, techno-industrial civilization, has facilitated the ecological disaster; reconnecting to that kinship, and its common roots in childhood, can promote transformation.
2 Contact Hours. 2 CME/CE credits will be offered. See details below.
General Admission: $50
Student Admission: $35
Free Admission for current NYPSI members/students and HFI Candidates
Please note registration closes at 2PM on Tuesday, November 11th.
THIS MEETING IS VIRTUAL; READ INSTRUCTIONS BELOW:
***Registration in Zoom Before the Meeting is Required to Attend***
After you have completed registering for the event, please look out for a confirmation email with more details on how to receive your Zoom Link.
Evaluation Survey and CME/CE documentation will be emailed after the event.
Please make sure you type your email correctly when you register! Contact with questions.
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- Haseley, D., & Lament, C. (2024). A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight: Climate Anxiety in Our Youth – Introduction to the Section. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 77(1), 330–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2023.2287378
- Clarkson, L.L., & Rockwell, S. (2024) Receptivity to the Weight and Heft of the Natural World in our Inner Selves. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 72(4), 583-612. https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651241247222
- Johan Rockström, Gupta, J., Qin, D., Lade, S. J., Abrams, J. F., Lauren Seaby Andersen, Armstrong, D. I., Bai, X., Bala, G., Bunn, S. E., Ciobanu, D., DeClerck, F., Ebi, K. L., Gifford, L., Gordon, C., Hasan, S., Norichika Kanie, Lenton, T. M., Loriani, S., & Liverman, D. (2023). Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature, 619(7968). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8
Josephine Wright, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who served adults, adolescents and children for many decades in New York City and Northwest Connecticut. She is a graduate and former faculty member of the the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and a founding member of the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute. In more recent years of her psychotherapeutic practice, Dr. Wright found many patients eager to bring their profound awareness and deep distress of the multiple crises facing our world into their therapy. At times, this called for acknowledgment of the deranged external reality as well as helping the patient understand their own unique responses. Now retired from clinical practice, Dr. Wright continues to explore these issues in study groups, writing and working with environmental issues. She has published papers and essays in several journals including: JAPA, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and is the author of the 1997 Avon book: Do We Really Need Ritalin: A Family Guide to ADHD. Her essays on Substack are meditations on home, migration, and the environmental crisis. After many years of raising sons, dogs, vegetables and sheep in Northwest Connecticut, she continues to pursue her love and knowledge of the natural world in her new home in coastal Washington State.
Lindsay L. Clarkson, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is currently a supervising and training analyst emerita at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and a member of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Study Group at Dartmouth. She explores our relationship to the natural world with the hope that the inquiry might contribute to a more benign and preservative response to the evolving environmental catastrophe. Dr. Clarkson combines a lifelong interest in natural history with an appreciation of Klein and Bion, and the contemporary aspects of their tradition and perspective. She has used clinical process, narrative and environmental literature, poetry and biography to extend the purview of psychoanalytic listening and developmental theory to include the place of the environment within our internal worlds. In addition to presenting on various aspects of this topic at meetings of APsA and the IPA, and as an invited speaker at society meetings, her essays have been published in four anthologies. Her most recent journal contribution, with Dr. Shelley Rockwell, appeared in JAPA 2024, “The Weight and Heft of the Natural World in our Inner Selves.”
CONTINUING EDUCATION
Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Summarize the current nature of the environmental disruptions that are stimulating defensive denial or causing anxiety and grief in themselves or their patients.
- Utilize this understanding in helping patients with their feelings about the ecological crisis and assess the degree to which previous unique experience and trauma may complicate their adaptive responses to the current real situation.
Psychologists
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY – 0073.
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education programs for psychologists. New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content. DISCLOSURE: None of the planners and presenters of this CE program has any relevant financial relationships to disclose.
Social Workers
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW – 0317.
The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the activity meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME’s identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support.
Training, Treatment & Outreach