Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life

By A. Fisher. 2002

258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Andy Fisher's book, published in the SUNY series in Radical Social and Political Theory, is to me the most comprehensive and compelling conceptual-theoretical contribution to ecopsychology to date. At the same time, the book is highly practical: one of Fisher's objectives is to propose (eco)psychology as a foundation for a critical theory of modern society. Conceived of as an original introduction to ecopsychology, Fisher argues that ecopsychology has to be a force for social change. In his foreword, David Abram praises it as " the most important work yet written on ecopsychol-ogy from a clinical perspective. " Fisher's book — the published version of his doctoral dissertation, Nature and Experience: A Radical Approach to Ecopsychology (York University 2001) — gives the field of ecopsychology a necessary and very welcome theoretical foundation. From this foundation, further conceptual work and empirical studies can proceed, perhaps now with more credibility and subject to less criticism from the mainstream that the field lacks academic rigor. Throughout the book, Fisher describes ecopsychology as a project, rather than as a field or discipline — yet his substantial , rich, and in-depth account of what he calls a 'psy-chology in the service of life' could well be the treatise which the field has needed to move forward to become a respected subdiscipline within psychology. In Part I of the book, Fisher lays the groundwork by describing this 'project of ecopsy-chology' and identifying the 'problem with normal,' meaning the dualism of outer, objective, and inner, subjective reality which has become part of 'normal' mainstream psychological discourse but which ecopsychology seeks to transcend. Further, Fisher critiques the economic and technocratic discourses within psychology and other sciences that prevent a true and radical 'greening' of the disciplines. He outlines four interrelated tasks to define his version of ecopsychology: the psychological task — " to acknowledge and better understand the human-nature relationship as a relationship " (emphasis added); the philosophical task — " to place psyche (soul) back into the natural world; " the practical task — " to develop therapeutic and recollective practices toward an ecological society, " in the sense of remembering how the human psyche is embedded in the larger psyche of nature and of re-learning how to live well within animate, and perhaps sacred, natural worlds; and last, the critical task — " to engage in ecospychologically-based criticism, " i.e., to challenge the widespread and pervasive anthropocentrism …

Subfields: General Health Professions, General Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d6685737a014789b7e16960b9605462ed696a2d

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Citations in the corpus

A Look at the Ecotherapy Research Evidence (2009, unknown): “As Andy Fisher observes, main-stream psychology remains too entrenched in mind–body and self–world dualisms to explore the lived relationship between the human and the nonhuman, as is true for most environmental psychology and its frankly technocratic agenda (Fisher, 2002).”
Employee workplace spirituality and pro-environmental behavior in the hotel industry (2018, background): “Other scholars emphasized that the prerequisite of environmental protection might be an individual’s sense of belonging to the natural community (Fisher, 2002; Roszak, 1992).”
Applying the pathways to nature connectedness at a societal scale: a leverage points perspective (2020, background): “The human exemptionist paradigm (Catton and Dunlap 1978) of our superiority over nature may be at the heart of the environmental issues currently facing humanity (Flikke 2014) and drives human disconnection from nature in the human psyche (Fisher 2013).”
The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature ☆ (2004, background): “The importance of feeling connected to nature is an early theme in the writing of both ecologists (Leopold, 1949; Orr, 1994; Berry, 1997; Norberg-Hodge, 2000; Pretty, 2002) and ecopsychologists (cf. Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995; Roszak, 2001; Fisher, 2002).”
Mindfulness and Sustainable Behavior: Pondering Attention and Awareness as Means for Increasing Green Behavior (2009, unknown): “Fisher (2002), for example, described the importance of “Recollective practices . . . activities . . . [for] relearning the essential human art of revering, giving back to, and maintaining reciprocal relations with an animate natural world” (p. 13).”
There is no ''I'' in nature: The influence of self-awareness on connectedness to nature $ (2005, background): “Leopold, 1949; Naess, 1989; Roszak, 1995; White, 1967) that has gained recent attention (cf. Kals, Schumacher, & Montada, 1999; Kidner, 2001; Fisher, 2002; Schultz, 2002; Clayton & Opotow, 2003; Mayer & Frantz, 2004) links these environmental problems to the way that modern individuals conceive of t”