Terrapsychology & Chaucer

artwork by Mychael Barratt

 

Terrapsychology is a multidisciplinary set of approaches for investigating the deep connections between us and the presence of our animate, sentient, and reactive Earth.

These approaches represent:

1. A call to conscious re-emplacement: coming home to where we live in a deep way by discovering how the places where we live function as facets of our own psychological life and well-being.

2. A methodology (Terrapsychological Inquiry) for demonstrating the mutuality between human wholeness and planetary health. Terrapsychology started as the study of mostly unconscious interactions between the deep human psyche and the psychologically animated presence, or “soul,” of place and the things within it. The orienting root is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. The story of a locale includes how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions gather into a meaningful narrative anchored in its unique geography.

 

3. A program of healing the cultural split between self and world that underlies the environmental crisis through education on a variety of perspectives that bring psychology into the environmental crisis discussion, diagnose the crisis, and offer sustainable alternatives.

4. A practice of understanding a place’s sufferings and health from inside its stories while experiencing one’s own story as part of the place’s (“heartsteading”). This includes training and practice in researching the details of particular places—terrain, history, ecology, lore—so that people who live there bond with them strongly and begin cycles of mutual healing. Because these places take on the qualities of the psychological field or “life space” of the inhabitants, heartsteaders treat the land and its features, soils, water, animals, etc. as living things deeply implicated in their psychological life, just as they inhabit the place’s.

5. A genre for writing movingly and even poetically about the living presence of places and things.

6. An invitation to dream up a “new myth” for the kinds of Earth-based communities that match our needs and deepest desires. This myth involves the collective creation of a truly planetary psychology that offers a meaningful vision of where we belong in the world.

The orienting root around which terrapsychological research turns is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. Even the body's connection to the land is storied, imagined, fantasied in the depths. The terrapsychological approach seeks to learn the many-sided story of a particular locale by discerning how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions tend to gather into a meaningful narrative framework anchored in its unique geography.

The uncanny aliveness of the locations we inhabit seems to be the rule rather than the exception. It’s as though what the conscious mind sees as dead places and things, the unconscious reacts to as animated presences and metaphors. Borderlines and borderlands, polluted bays and polluted moods, personal complexes and apartment complexes all seem to resonate together. This should not surprise us. Not only can events in the world symbolize aspects of the human self, those aspects in turn point back to the features of the world that evolved our minds.

 

Terrapsychology also takes on the questions which mainstream, empire-era psychology and psychiatry have demonstrated themselves incapable of tackling:

 

 What is Earth asking of me?

Text by Craig Chalquist PhD