Terrapsychology

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Terrapsychology is the study of the deep connections between the human psyche and the geographical places we inhabit. Evolving from the work of Craig Chalquist, Laura Mitchell, and Matthew Cochran, the field has roots in depth psychology, environmental science, psychohistory, and ecopsychology. The field is explained in Chalquist's book Terrapsychology: Re-engaging the Soul of Place (Spring Journal Books, 2007). As explained by Chalquist, "When people inhabit a particular place, its features inhabit their psychological field, in effect becoming extended facets of their selfhood. The more they repress this local, multifaceted sense of environmental presence, the likelier its features will reappear unconsciously as symbolic, animated forces seething from within and from without."

He continues: "As the methods evolved for tracking the pain found in folklore, nightmare, romantic conflict, or historical reenactment back to the “pain” of place with a view to eventually healing them at the root, the question arose of what to make of healthier locales, like holy sites and relatively unspoiled expanses of land. The overall framework clearly wanted widening beyond its initial preoccupation with pathology. A freshly reengaging perspective on the world was needed, a standpoint wide enough to welcome in the reconnective paradigms of psychology, psychohistory, and ecopsychology, yet flexible enough to try out its assumptions anywhere on our highly reactive planet. It should also make way for a deepened understanding of “place” as a nexus of symbolic animated forces, from the actions of animals and the gestures of storms to the fascinations gleaming forth from everyday objects: gemstone facets, shards of glass, ripples across a pristine pond.

"This new framework for viewing “human-humus” interactivity offers a reverent outlook on a sentient cosmos as well as a more formal set of practices for minding matter and tending the matter of mind. Its mythopoetic (or “geopoetic”) eye envisions the cosmos as nested spheres of animation from intimate quanta to distant quarks: a natural world of emplaced beings beckoning our attention through their deep connections with the human interior. Its name is terrapsychology, the study of the presence, or soul, of place."

Using the psychoanalytic concept of the intersubjective field, terrapsychology draws a distinction between "literalized animism" (explaining natural events like storms or earthquakes as causally created by some animating force or spirit) and "intersubjective animism" (validating the inner experience of natural events as apparently animated and alive). "Terrapsychology is the study of how the currents of this aliveness, reactivity, interiority, or psychic animation of a geographical location and its creatures and features interact deeply with our own. It offers descriptions of this interaction, methods for registering it, and practices for managing it. Because we assume a confluence of sensitivities--namely, ours with the places we wish to tend--qualitative methods of direct encounter receive more space in this book than quantitative strategies that regard a living presence as an object to measure or control. Our endeavor is not merely to pinpoint matter from an “objective,” impersonal distance, but to reengage it more fully, heart and soul."

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