Typically psychoanalysis is characterised as an inward looking approach to mental health, emphasising the effects of upbringing and the power of an individual's unconscious. In contrast you argue for the importance of societal factors, including  the knowledge of catastrophic climate change, to psychoanalytic practice. Why? The simplest way of looking at this is to observe that social, political and environmental events impact on the minds of individuals. They produce emotional responses in all of us -- responses which can range from horror to empathy, from concern to indifference. At one end of the scale, public events can create space for people's imaginative creativity. At the other end they may trigger primitive anxieties to do with survival and existence. If public events become traumatic or even just begin to pose threats to people's well-being or accustomed ways of life, then we might expect to find psychological reactions to this, just as you would to any other threat. Psychoanalysis suggests that these psychological reactions are unlikely to be simple and straightforward. It assumes that the individual psyche is a place of conflict, typified by competing desires, impulses and injunctions, a system with many parts in dynamic interplay, shaped by personal history where individual responses are shaped as much by unconscious desires as by rational understanding and decision. Most critically, psychoanalysis argues that the human mind is equipped to defend against too much painful experience and most people unconsciously resist engaging with matters that will be too disturbing. So although on the one