What is Ecopsychology

The awareness of how important nature is on the mental and spiritual balance of the individual, is as old as the world itself and has been developed in all continents through philosophy, culture, religion and science.

In the modern science of the soul, top psychoanalysts have reported the influence of nature on human psychology in their writings, such as Fromm and Jung. In particular, the German Erich Fromm, in his work “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” (1973) introduces the term “Biophilia” describing it as “passionate love of life and what is alive”. The term was later used by the american biologist Edward O. Wilson in his book “Biophilia” (1984), in which he suggested that peoples’ tendency to focus and relate to nature and other forms of life has, in part, a genetic basis. There is a suspicion that the increasing dependency of human species on technology has led to the weakening of human movement towards the connection with  nature.

For many years, interdisciplinary studies have explored how people respond to open green fields, scattered trees, pastures, waters and elevated landscapes, resulting in positive outcomes, and these approaches have varied terms that still apply today: green psychology, green therapy, global therapy, ecology, shamanic counseling, eco-therapy etc. Ecopsychology is an approach that emerged through interdisciplinarity and is the result of the proposed dialogue between Psychology and Ecology, since the central focus of Ecopsychology is human relationships with the web of life.

The term “Ecopsychology” was born in 1989 in a group of Berkeley academics – Robert Greenway, Elan Shapiro, Alan Kanner and Mary Gomes – who met to discuss the contribution that psychology can have to managing the modern ecological crisis. Theodore Roszak has formalized the term “Ecopsychology” in his book  “The voice of the Earth” (1992)- term that has  already been used in some cases to describe the work of other psychologists and environmentalists in Berkeley. Theodore Roszak, who pioneered the understanding of anti-culture, was interested in exploring the implication of global health and human well-being.