Terrapsychology: encountering the soul of place.

Terrapsychology is a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the deep connections between people and places and for hearing and interpreting the language of Earth. It is:

1. A call to conscious re-emplacement: coming home to where we live in a deep way by discovering how the places where we live function as facets of our own psychological life and well-being.

2. A methodology (Terrapsychological Inquiry) for demonstrating the mutuality between human wholeness and planetary health. Terrapsychology started as the study of mostly unconscious interactions between the deep human psyche and the psychologically animated presence, or “soul,” of place and the things within it. The orienting root is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. The story of a locale includes how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions gather into a meaningful narrative anchored in its unique geography.

3. A program of healing the cultural split between self and world that underlies the environmental crisis through education on a variety of perspectives that bring psychology into the environmental crisis discussion, diagnose the crisis, and offer sustainable alternatives.

4. A practice of understanding a place’s sufferings and health from inside its stories while experiencing one’s own story as part of the place’s (“heartsteading”). This includes training and practice in researching the details of particular places—terrain, history, ecology, lore—so that people who live there bond with them strongly and begin cycles of mutual healing. Because these places take on the qualities of the psychological field or “life space” of the inhabitants, heartsteaders treat the land and its features, soils, water, animals, etc. as living things deeply implicated in their psychological life, just as they inhabit the place’s.

5. An invitation to dream up a “new myth” for the kinds of Earth-based communities that match our needs and deepest desires. This myth involves the collective creation of a truly planetary psychology that offers a meaningful vision of where we belong in the world.

In summary, TP is an area of inquiry and a “call to reemplacement” that seeks to demonstrate through extensive research and practice the mutuality between human wholeness and planetary health, and to explore how the cultural split between self and world that underlies the environmental crisis can heal through discovering how the places where we live function as facets of our own psychological life and well-being. A key goal of this approach is to understand a place’s sufferings and health from inside its stories while experiencing one’s own story as part of the place’s (“heartsteading”).

Isn't it odd that the environmental crisis has not provoked more publicity or curiosity about how it affects us psychologically?

For the last five hundred years of Western history environmental research has confined itself primarily to looking at the world from the outside, through a screen of self-interests, numbers, theories, and concepts. Whether prompted by profit, curiosity, fear, or concern, this heavily quantitative style tends to frame the world as an object and ourselves as detached observers of it.

Yet every culture, including ours, has insisted throughout its pre-industrial stages that the world—including the sky, the air, the sea, and particularly the land—is alive, reactive, and very present to what human beings do upon it. From kami to lorelei, naiads to dryads, the Navajo Changing Woman to the Neoplatonic World Soul, every local folklore reflects what the Greeks and Romans knew as the genius loci, a resident “spirit of place.”

That such animated images have been depreciated as mere projections or primitive superstitions says less about indigenous or rural psychology than about an economically and colonially vested need to see the land as an exploitable resource and ourselves as above it, masters (as Paul Shepard put it) rather than dwellers or guests. Nevertheless, they recur time after time in place after place. Artists, poets, naturalists, nature healers, and wilderness guides have born frequent witness to the strength of this influence of the surround. So, finally, has psychology as it extended outward from inside the person to inside the family and beyond with constructs like the transference (Janet and Freud), the psychological field (Lewin), intersubjectivity (Stolorow and Atwood), the relational matrix (Mitchell), and ecopsychology.

Terrapsychology seeks to hinge the two great traditions of inner and outer knowledge—the richly animistic and the empirically scientific—by listening into the terrain and its features and occupants without losing what more external knowings can tell us about them. Put simply, terrapsychology is the deep study of the animated presence, or “soul,” of locale, made visible through deep connections with the human interior and contextualized by a multidisciplinary focus on place. It treats the places and things below and around us as psychological presences in a widely flung field. It studies the connection between what we do to the biosphere and what we do to our social and psychological selves. And it eschews easy explanations of "vibrations" and "energies" to insist on full substantiation of the person-place resonances we work to understand more fully--without falling into the old messianic trap of believing any particular mode of knowing to be supreme.

The orienting root around which terrapsychological research turns is Story: Story as a weave connecting people to place. Even the body's connection to the land is storied, imagined, fantasied in the depths. The terrapsychological approach seeks to learn the many-sided story of a particular locale by discerning how its empirical, ecological, cultural, personal, and even folkloric dimensions tend to gather into a meaningful narrative framework anchored in its unique geography.