Link Search Menu Expand Document
Cybersecurity Research
  1. Ecotherapy

Ecotherapy

The term ecotherapy was first used in 1996 by Howard Clinebell (Atkins, 2017). Clinebell defined eco-therapy as the healing and growth nurtured by healthy interactions with the earth (Buzzel, 2010). Since then, the field has grown and diversified to contain many modalities of nature-based therapies. Examples of such modalities are garden/horticulture therapy, animalassisted therapy, wilderness therapy, adventure therapy, surf therapy, and forest therapy (Atkins, 2017; Harper, 2020). These modalities have their uniqueness in perspectives and practices, yet they all share the acknowledgment of the vital role that nature plays in the human as a whole.

Ecotherapy is a field of mental health that puts into practice theories created from the field of ecology and psychology (Harper, 2021). It is an umbrella term that encompasses different nature-based therapies. It is also referred to as applied ecopsychology where the interventions and techniques used emphasize the reciprocal relationship of humans and nature (Delaney, 2020). These practices focus on the relationship and connections between humans and nature. It’s a practice that incorporates nature back into the equation of human wellness and health (Harper, 2021). Just as in art therapy where art becomes a third and essential part of the therapeutic process, in ecotherapy nature becomes that third element. Therapy becomes a threeway relationship between participant, therapist, and nature (Harper, 2021).

The practice of ecotherapy has its theoretical background in ecopsychology yet it is enriched by numerous individuals in other fields such as David Abram, Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Arne Naes, and Mary Oliver (Atkins, 2017). Historian Theodore Roszak has been credited with the creation of the term ecopsychology. Roszak (1995) believed humans had an ecological unconscious that reciprocated a relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. For him, the goal of ecopsychology was to “bridge human culture’s long standing historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological, to see the need of the plant and the person as a continuum”(Roszak, 1992, p.14). He defined the following eight principles that have become the foundation for the field:

  1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society. Open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.

  2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as “the universe.” Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience.

  3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment.

  4. For ecopsychology as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn’s enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child’s innately animistic quality of experience in functionally “sane” adults.

  5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.

  6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the reevaluation of certain compulsively “masculine” character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on the insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.

  7. Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some lifeenhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is postindustrial, not anti-industrial in its social orientation.

  8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term “synergy” is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet. (1992, p.320-321)

Before Roszak, German psychologist Erich Fromm used the term biophilia to describe an individual’s love for living systems and life itself. In 1984 Edward O. Wilson introduced the biophilia hypothesis. Biophilia is the “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” (Roszak, 1995, page 4). His hypothesis suggested that humans need to connect with others and nature for their survival and their mental and physical stability. Thomas Berry an eco-philosopher writes that humans have developed “an autism towards the world” (Roszak, 1995, page 59). Most humans no longer communicate with the non-human world. We have silenced our capacity to participate in the greater.

Table of Contents