Beneath Our Feet: 
A Dissertation on Ecotherapy in the New Zealand Context
By Michael Apathy

Chapter Eight: A Model For Clinical Application

So far this review has drawn on a literature from a wide variety of disciplines including natural history, sociology, politics, and a variety of forms of psychology and psychotherapy. This attempt has been in line with Scull‘s (2004) call to honour the diversity of approaches within this diverse field, rather than to propagate a monoculture of approaches to ecopsychology. 

The danger of including these diverse disciplines in this review is that the whole may become incoherent and self-contradictory, and therefore difficult to confidently apply clinically. In the model below are some suggested clinical applications of the ideas from prior chapters, arranged in a model intended to assist clinicians in navigating the bewildering array of possibilities. 

A Dialectical Clinical Model

Empathic Materialism
Involve clients in nature and educate them about physical and mental health benefits of this. 

Use outdoor contexts for therapy to evoke natural themes, to mirror symbolically the client‘s inner world, and to promote playfulness. 

Participate in or lead group activism such as environmental restoration projects. 

Recognise and work empathically with the impact of stressful unnatural environments on clients. 

Empathically work with client‘s conscious and unconscious defences and affect in response to the destruction of natural environments.

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Empathic Idealism
Reawaken ecological unconscious/id. 

Use transpersonal approaches to unify/join with nature. 

Attune to issues of power and control. 

Attune to issues of shame over dependency, as they relate to mother-nature, and as they may relate to gender identities. 

Promote secure attachment to nature and to specific places. 

Work with insecure attachment styles to nature. 

Recognise and utilise the role of community in constructing the meaning of places and in promoting identification with place

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Analytic Materialism
Analyse colonialism from Marxist (and other political/economic/ecological materialist) perspectives. 

Make links between forms of economic organisation and patterns of land use.

Increase awareness of natural history and physical transformations of the environment. 

Apply political analyses of effects of unequal power relations. 

Interpret alienation from nature caused by technology. 

Raise consciousness of both personal polluting and systemic causes of pollution. 

Analytic Idealism
Interpret/confront narcissistic objectification, grandiosity and entitlement in regard to nature. 

Critique environmentally destructive cultural dynamics, including sense of entitlement of citizens of first world countries, the amorality of science, and religious devaluation of nature/material. 

Interpret underlying anxieties and oral dynamics involved in compulsive consumption. 

Interpret infantile oedipal/competitive dynamics as they play out in relation to mother earth. 

Reinterpret Western cultural stories to reveal or re-reveal ecological themes. 

This model does not imply that the four groupings of ecopsychological ways of working with the human-nature relationship are separate and unrelated to each other. The placing of these ways of working on two axes is not meant to suggest that empathic or analytic stances, or materialistic or idealistic theories are incompatible. Instead, each axis is intended to be seen as a dialectic, a spectrum at some point along which clinicians might situate themselves with different clients, in different contexts, or at different moments of the therapy. Furthermore, each axis represents potential splits for clinicians to hold in awareness. The historical Western tendency to split mind and matter is represented in the idealistic-materialistic axis, whilst the tendency to split victim vs victimiser or guilty vs tragic is represented in the analytic-empathic axis. Being represented as a dialectic, the invitation is to hold both ends of the dialectic in mind, as well as to hold in mind the paradox that one end may be right or wrong at different times, or that despite seeming contradictions both ends of the dialectic may be true.

More practically speaking, different clients in different therapeutic relationships may be more open to being engaged by one of the approaches than by others, or may profit from developing in an area that they are underdeveloped in, or which they might be consciously or unconsciously avoiding. Similarly, clinicians may wish to play to their strengths or develop in areas they feel are their blind-spots or that they are less capable in.


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