Mikas blogg

One reaction people may have to extreme mental pressure is the blunting of their sensibilities, through unconsciously (or by volition) diminishing their capacity or inclination to feel; a blocking of feelings, images, or both. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls this “psychic numbing.” This reduced emotional responsiveness to overwhelming experiences “is a very basic tendency of human reaction toward threat, particularly when that threat is vast, ultimate, and yet so technologically distanced as to become unreal.” In a recent interview for Johan Söderbergs film Planet (2006), Lifton speaks particularly about numbing in the context of man- induced global warming. He maintains that humans share a profound fear, even a terror, of destroying the human habitat with our own technology, by our own hand, and to no purpose. That kind of fear, he asserts, enters into religious areas, because we now know that we can do what in the past only God could do, which is to destroy the world. According to Lifton, nothing that we do in the world is entirely free of this fear: “It is a shadow underneath everything.”
(quoted from: Jan van Boeckel : "Arts-based Environmental Education and the Ecological Crisis: Between Opening the Senses and Coping with Psychic Numbing", in Drillsma-Milgrom, B. & Kirstinä, L. (Eds.) Metamorphoses in children’s literature and culture. Turku, Finland: Enostone, 2009, pp. 145-164 , http://www.naturearteducation.org/Articles/Arts-based%20Env.%20Education%20and%20the%20Eco-Crisis.pdf ,accessed 12 December 2009.)