*Looking for Eros in the Long Hard Rain of Climate Collapse DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106561*

spirt (Eros). The aim is to generate a density of suggestion and, more particularly, to articulate likely trajectories rather than to confirm or disconfirm a single hypothesis.

Given the sweep of the task, it is not surprising that the materials used are, to a degree, diverse. For example, lyrics from several popular songs are cited as these excepts capture a particular mood or perspective. More technically, there are several instances where an 'extra-curricula' idea is imported because it serves a purpose that could not otherwise be advanced. This was particularly the case with Timothy Morton's notion of the 'hyper-object' [2], an idea that was imported for its ability to explicate why climate collapse is formidably difficult to comprehend.

Occasional outlier acknowledged, the materials used and, more centrally, the argument that is at the core of the work, are explicitly derived from psychanalysis as this tradition relates to the socio-cultural field [3–5]. In this engagement the focus is on the dynamic relationship between psychic life, both conscious and unconscious, and historical reality as a material, evolving context. In this ambit, variabilities, for example, in the regimes of repression between early ninetieth century middle class Vienna and island life in the 1960s Caribbean are as relevant as are the differing material and political realities present in each of these contexts. This allegiance clear, in the current exercise the decision was taken to employ a non-specialist form of psychoanalytic thought.

This decision reflects the premise that a non-specialist level of expertise does not, in itself, disqualify the validity of an argument and, for certain purposes, may even be advantageous. For example, Pierre Bourdieu argued that academic purists can lose breadth and perspective in so much as they devolve to a 'coquettish relationship … with selected works' (as quoted in [6] p. 39). Consistent with this idea, the current exercise avoids a partisan allegiance to, say, the conventions of Kleinian or Lacanian, classical or middle school, thinking. More positively, a non-denominational engagement with psychoanalysis has been preferred as an inclusive approach facilitates associative and divergent thinking above linear and convergent lines of thought. As the intention in the present contribution is to be inductive, rather than deductive, this preference has an explicit, if eminently contestable, rationale.
