52 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
Ecopsychology
The theoretical grounding of ecotherapy is in ecopsychology.
Ecopsychology reclaims our “vast self ” which extends beyond our
skin into the living body of the Earth (Rust 2009, p.45). Ecotherapy
and ecopsychology both embrace the idea that humans are inseparable
from the rest of nature and are nurtured by healthy interaction
with the Earth. Historian Theodore Roszak (2001 [1992]) first
introduced the field of ecopsychology in The Voice of the Earth: An
Exploration of Ecopsychology. Roszak asserts that the health of humans
is related to the health of the planet, defining sanity as an awareness
of the connection between the environment and the human soul. He
proposes that environmental problems such as toxic waste, polluted
air and water and the greenhouse effect are the psychopathology
of everyday life. Ecopsychologists see the field not just as a subset of
traditional psychology but as a radical shift from the objectivist,
mechanistic worldview of Western psychology toward a worldview
of systems and interrelationships.
In Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Roszak,
Gomes and Kanner 1995) Roszak and his colleagues further
explore how the psychological health of humanity, individually
and collectively, is inextricably linked to the health of the Earth.
This book includes, among other noted environmental writers,
a foreword by archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Hillman’s
earlier essay “The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World”
(1992) foreshadowed the emergence of the field of ecopsychology
with his statement that he could no longer distinguish between
neurosis of the self and neurosis of the world. Hillman states that
to place psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional
repression of actual experience. He suggests that being in a “bad
place” personally is not just an individual condition of anxiety or
depression. Such conditions may also be related to being in a bad
place literally—in a jammed freeway, a sealed up office building or
the suburban home. Hillman calls for returning psychology to the
root meaning of psyche as soul, a living responsive reality.