Mourning and melancholia in the modern age: grieving the more than human

This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of University & College Counselling published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/university-and-college-counselling/ ©BACP 2025.

As ever, I start this column with a distinct sense of seasonal syncopation. At the time of writing, I’m bedding in these seedling words in the depths of winter darkness, when the first snow has already come and gone. You’re reading them, perhaps, in the brighter hours of a spring morning, as the days begin to grow warmer. It’s rather like the nature of therapy itself – you’re interpreting the past in the present, foraging away in the mind’s earth, in the hope it might inform something of the future.

I’ve previously explored the relationship between common emotional responses to climate change: anxiety, fear and anger. As we approach the end of the academic term, I’d like you to stay with me, hard as it might feel, as we explore another kind of ending – the loss and grief that come with environmental breakdown.

To begin to think about this kind of grief, let’s return to the roots of psychoanalysis itself. In 1917, Freud wrote that while mourning focuses on the loss of a conscious object, melancholia may be connected to the loss of an unconscious object, leaving an unknown sense of what exactly it is that has been lost.1 ‘In mourning,’ he says, ‘it is the world which has become poor and empty. In melancholia, it is the ego itself.’1 In contrast to grief, where the loss of another is mourned, melancholia can make the individual lifeless, lacking in energy, motivation and clarity of mind.

In the present day, the rate of modern melancholia, or depression, has risen significantly. Recent research by teen mental health charity, stem4, found that a staggering 43% of respondents aged 19 to 21 had been prescribed antidepressants.2 This modern treatment similarly represents a divergence from the analytic method. With such limited resources, the NHS and overstretched services cannot offer the time and space required to witness this sadness in the spilling of words and tears. Instead, it is swallowed alongside pills that most often repress symptoms rather than reveal, and truly treat, the cause.

It’s understandable that there is much talk at the moment of the ‘student mental health crisis’. It’s an interesting phrase, one that seems to locate the crisis as originating in the students themselves, as though Gen Z got together and decided to have a monolithic breakdown. A TikTok-ing timebomb, perhaps, experiencing a cataclysmic glitch in the algorithm of the collective unconscious. Yet, it’s hardly a surprise that young people are in crisis right now. They’re contending with both mourning and melancholia of epic proportions, coming of age against a backdrop of mass death that, in the UK at least, has no place in cultural grief narratives. I’m talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, which shaped their formative teenage years. Death anxiety also pervades in ever-increasing global conflict and the threat of imminent war.

We must remember that the students we now see in our consulting rooms were weaned from infancy on the bottle of impending ecological loss. They grew from a soil of uncertainty, learning about greenhouse gases, melting ice caps and rising oceans at school. They were appointed ‘recycling champions’ or ‘lights monitors’ in their classrooms, responsible for monitoring the energy consumption of their teachers and friends, always holding a darkness, or a wasteland, in mind. They have learned about whole species becoming extinct, with the current estimates citing that we could be losing up to 10,000 a year.3

For most students of today, whether conscious or not, there was never a time when they didn’t know that their future was under existential threat. While older generations might liken this to the fear surrounding nuclear war, there is a fundamental difference. The bombs have already gone off, with an explosive chain reaction of ecological collapse already in motion. As far back as 1972, in one of the earliest psychoanalytic works to draw attention to the environmental crisis, Harold Searles treated the matter with an urgency most still lack today, deeming it far beyond the nuclear threat.4 Whether directly in touch with it or not, young people have always known the urgency of the climate crisis. Consequently, they’ve grown up carrying a collective existential dread heavier than any humans in history have before – that of having to save not only the planet, but ultimately, themselves.

In my private clinical work, the majority of my clients are in their early to late-20s. Existential questions are a natural part of the work, emerging in the exploration of identity, needs, desires and the age-old question of what might make for a meaningful life. Alongside this, has emerged this darker underbelly of existentialism, in the question of what it is to live at all. Bereavement by suicide, the threat of it, or direct suicidal ideation, has been present in around three quarters of my client caseload. It is heavy, yet essential, work to weather this coldest winter of grief and stay alongside the idea of the extinction of the self. Beyond this, loss and mourning ebb and flow in the work in all the ways they might usually: less tragic deaths of family members or pets; the loss of friendships as people grow apart; heartbreak, rejection, loneliness; and the ultimate loss, if they were lucky enough to have it, of childhood innocence in the transition into adulthood.

In theoretical terms, much of this work, of course, focuses on the loss of a human object, providing a direct locus for the work of mourning to attach to. Yet, there has also been climate-connected loss, which, like melancholy, has brought an intangible sense of loss to the work. It has shapeshifted in the lamentation of predictable seasons, or the void of sessions lost due to the disruption of local flooding. It’s the shadow in conversations about the uncertainty of the future, of the devastation of natural disasters and discussions of climate preparedness in different homelands. It has shaped the space given to the ghosts of children who might never be born for fear of the future, taken before they’ve even been wholly conceived in the mind.

How are we to make sense of a grief so abstract in nature? First, we must acknowledge that we even have something to lose. In a return to theory, principally object relations, we can reconceive of the earth as a pre-parental latent object, as outlined by Susan Bodnar.5 Renée Lertzman also believes in a more expansive approach to object relations, highlighting how natural phenomena, such as rivers or woodlands, can constitute ‘environmental objects’ of both the external and introjected internal environment.6

The stark repression of the environmental object is a malady particularly infectious to European thought, synonymous with colonial attitudes that place the white man as the apex predator, in a position of mastery to both other humans and the earth. Yet, indigenous peoples have always known the value of the earth and their dependency on it, with a cultural and spiritual reverence that reflects this.

Within Europe, grief practices have begun to emerge in recent years that reinstate the value of environmental objects. In Iceland, for example, a funeral was held in 2019 for Okjökull, a glacier declared dead in 2014.7 Alongside Okjökull’s funeral, a death certificate and memorial plaque were produced; a mirroring of the bureaucracy of human death, so to the marking of it so that others will know it once lived.

As a reporter who attended Okjökull’s funeral writes, ‘This is one of the most distressing things about being alive today: we are witnessing geologic time collapse on a human scale.’7 Perhaps one of the most distressing things for therapists today is this – we are witnessing human collapse on an epochal scale. How do we begin to work with this, in the knowledge that we, too, are only human, are also nature?

Rather like children are taught to reduce, reuse, recycle, we perhaps need our own therapeutic mantra to champion: reorient, reorganise, restore.We must reorient our relationship with nature; reorganise our internal world of object relations, making space to restore our lost environmental object, the one that facilitates all mental and physical life, to its primary position. Only then can we understand how the environmental object facilitates the conditions (oxygen, water, food) for the secondary human object, the primary caregiver, who nurtures the infant. From this, we can understand ourselves in a new triadic relationship: a triangulated reciprocal exchange of care between the earth, the human caregiver and the child.

By now, we’re all familiar with the ‘Save the Planet’ slogan, yet this message is long overdue an update. This rock that we call home will go on spinning through space whether we’re here or not. Ultimately, it is not the planet we have to save, but ourselves. Searles recognised this back in 1972, likening the lack of action on the environmental crisis to a depressed patient intent on ‘suicide by self-neglect’.4 It’s a devastating thing to recognise, but by bringing the environmental object into consciousness, we can begin to know what we have lost. In doing so, we can reimagine both mourning and melancholia as radically creative acts, in which grief can inspire the very thing it mourns: life.

REFERENCES

1. Freud S. Mourning and melancholia. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/4a3xa3ru

(accessed 16 December 2024)

2. Stem4. A third of teenagers say they have been prescribed antidepressants: new survey

finds. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/4eycbr6e (accessed 16 December 2024).

3. World Wildlife Fund. Biodiversity. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/yne2ejp3 (accessed 16

December 2024).

4. Searles HF. Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis. Psychoanalytical Review 1972; 59: 361–74.

5. Bodnar S. Wasted and bombed: clinical enactments of a changing relationship to the

Earth. The International Journal of Relational Perspectives 2008; 18(4): 484–512. [Online.]

https://tinyurl.com/4pmmmhzy (accessed 16 December 2024)

6. Lertzman R. Environmental melancholia: psychoanalytic dimensions on loss. Oxon:

Routledge; 2015.

7. Thurston B. How to mourn a glacier. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/yde34y56 (accessed 16 December 2024).