Introduction-
For all of human history, people have used natural metaphor and symbols to express the intangible aspects of the human condition. Nature has been cited as the source of inspiration for many of humanities great creative works and is itself the subject of countless works of art and literature (De Mello, 2021). Religions across the globe suffuse nature with divine energies and see it as a source of both good and evil spiritual forces, worthy of sacred reverence and fear (De Mello 2021; Kellert, 1993). More recently, psychologists have begun quantifying these abstract connections between humans and nature, demonstrating that we have an innate fondness for using natural forms over artificial ones, when telling stories and creating art (Kellert, 1983; Ulrich, 1983; Shepard, 1978), and that exposure to nature, in both its tame and wild forms, can be beneficial for physical and psychological wellbeing (Silva et al., 2023).
These benefits, termed “cultural ecosystem services”, represent one of the three pillars by which ecologists categorise the value of nature to humanity, alongside “provisional services” which directly support us with goods like food and water, and “regulatory services” which indirectly support society through the maintenance of essential ecological processes like pollination and carbon sequestration (MEM, 2005). When considered in total, these services are believed to be worth between 16 to 54 trillion US dollars a year (Costanza et al., 1997) but are increasingly threatened by the synergistic impacts of climate change and human land-use, which degrade ecosystem processes and reduce biodiversity (IPCC, 2023). This issue is further compounded by the increasing disconnect between humans and nature, with most 50% of people now living in man-made cities, limiting our exposure to the beneficial services ecosystems provide (Li et al., 2023; TWB, 2023).
a detailed understanding of the mechanisms that underpin these ecosystem services is needed to accurately evaluate the benefits of nature to society. However, despite great strides to quantify the provisional and regulatory services (e.g., Zolyomi et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2020), large uncertainties still remain over the mechanisms that govern cultural services. This is partly due to the multidisciplinary nature of the subject, which span ecology, psychology, and the arts, as well as the inherent subjectivity involved in analysing creative content. Ecologists have the necessary technical insight to explain how ecosystems function but lack the necessary breadth of knowledge of the humanities to assess the extent to which these processes might have influenced and inspired artistic, psychological, and spiritual insights. While artists, on the other hand, although able to captivate us with their creative expressions of nature, often lack the necessary technical training in either ecology or psychology to explain, with any substantive depth, the reasons why nature should inspire in the first place.
This series, Emotion is Ecology, seeks to address this gap in our understanding of cultural ecosystem services by examining popular natural motifs from myth, religion, art, and literature, through an analytical lens that brings together insights from ecology, the humanities, and psychotherapy. An analysis of art and culture that brings knowledge from ecology into its purview will give us a much more detailed understanding of natures role as creative inspiration, articulating themes that may be a source of meaning and fascination to people, even if not fully understood by the artists who expressed them.
Concepts from psychotherapy will help us to understand how nature interacts with the mind to either promote or degrade wellbeing, while also revealing potential feedback between the two systems, as our personal and cultural views of nature impact on the way we manage the biosphere in turn (Gainsburg et al., 2023).
In this first episode, we focus our attention on the motif of the flood, a classic force of both destruction and regeneration seen in myths and stories across the globe.
Analysing the flood
Myths of cataclysmic floods that wipe out humanity are seen across all cultures and time periods, revealing a fundamental human preoccupation with the destructive nature of flooding (Frazer, 1916). In modern times, floods are often regarded as amoral forces of nature, but the floods of myth serve as allegory with clear ethical implications. Omnipotent deities, angered by the overwhelming sins of humanity, seek to purify the earth through the force of a destructive flood, while allowing the few morally righteous individuals to survive so that they may repopulate the world and make it holy once more. The Ancient Mesopotamian god Enki sends a seven-day deluge to rid the world of impurity and instructs the hero Ut-napishtim to build an ark and fill it with “the seed of all living things”, which is to be used to regenerate the devastated earth (Frazer, 1916). The old testament God sends a deluge to rid the world of heathen sin, commanding the last righteous man, Noah, to build an ark so he and his family may repopulate the earth (Frazer, 1916). In the New World, the Cañari of Ecuador speak of two brothers who escape a great flood by taking refuge on a mountain and then marry magical bird-women who bare them the children who go on to become the Cañari race (Lammel, 1981) . The myth even extends into the remote reaches of the South Pacific, with the New Zealand Maori telling a tale of a flood that was sent by the creator god Tane, to punish the people who had abandoned his worship. The last righteous believers, the prophet Parawhenuamea and his farther, were instructed to build a boat and take with them women, animals, and plants, so that they could revivify the earth after the deluge (Saghir, 2019).
Be it Ancient Mesopotamia or pre-Columbian Ecuador, the basic structure of all these flood myths, whereby destruction of the corrupt leads to moral regeneration, is remarkably unified, and their ancient provenance in both the old and new worlds demonstrates that the flood story has developed independently across multiple cultural centres, without the aid of cultural transmissions, like word of mouth or written records. The independent occurrence of these structurally identical flood myths speaks to an underlying symbolic function within the story that expresses a universal, or ‘archetypal’, experience of humankind (Jung, 1968).
Widespread cultural anxiety towards flooding is easily understood, since human civilisation has, for the longest time, been at the mercy of flood-prone rivers. Ancient cities across the globe were built alongside the banks of major rivers, and were dependent on the annual floods, which, on the one hand provided fertile sediments from upriver to nourish crops, feeding expanding sedentary populations, but on the other hand, had the potential to drown crops and leave settlements in ruins (Angelakis et al., 2023; Mayoral & Olsson, 2022). However, this does not explain why such stories still occur among nomadic subsistence groups, like the Maori of New Zealand and the Cree and Hopi people of North America, who have never had the same dependence on rivers, being able to hunt and gather, across the landscape.
Nor does it explain how these destructive floods became associated with moral righteousness and spirituality, given how disastrous they have proven to be throughout history (Angelakis et al., 2023; Mayoral & Olsson, 2022). Superstitious ad-hoc reasoning, whereby the proof of one’s moral character is lies in whether or not they survived the flood, thus indicating their worthiness in the eyes of god, could well be part of the explanation. However, it cannot be the whole explanation, as it does not explain why we continue to find these stories meaningful in the modern age, when scientific observation leads us to treat natural floods, excluding those linked to anthropogenic climate change, as amoral forces driven by physical processes, completely separated from any divine will. The ability of these myths to maintain their dramatic potency, and widespread appeal across cultures, speaks to a deeper underlying mechanism inherent to the human psyche.
Indeed, when we look to psychoanalysis, clear synergies between the flood myth and the process of psychotherapy reveal themselves. The ailing patient comes to the analyst with neuroses, states of poor mental wellbeing, where unintegrated aspects of personality, i.e., undesirable or unknown aspects, are knowingly suppressed or are unconsciously repressed (Freud, 1924 a, b; de Oliveira Moreira & Drawin, 2015). These unintegrated aspects indirectly express themselves through strange behaviours, like projection, where feelings directed towards the self are displaced towards other people, and a multitude of negative emotions, including depression, mood swings, rigidity, and impotence, to name a few.
The healing of neuroses, and the transformative personal growth which comes with it, occurs when the patient becomes aware of those unintegrated elements of the personality hidden in the unconscious (Jung, 1963, 1968). This meeting, achieved through the analysis of feelings, dreams and artistic expressions is often a very disturbing experience, as the patient confronts painful or ugly aspects of themselves that they would rather not admit. The old dominant beliefs and routines that are no longer helpful to the patient are destroyed in this process, as the counter-truths from the unconscious flood into awareness, in the same way that the mythical deluge rids the world of corruption through destruction.
It is only when the slate has been wiped clean and the old attitudes are surrendered, that new perspectives can grow up naturally from the unconscious. The patient can then cultivate a healthier synthesis of ideas, emotions, and routines which is more synchronised to the desires of the unconscious. With this integration process achieved, the individual gains a more mature and holistic sense of self, which comes with a range of benefits including restored vitality, a widened or deepened perspective, greater resilience, and a re-established awareness of intuition and feeling. This mirrors the chosen hero of the flood myth, who once was held back by corrupt forces, is then freed to repopulate the world in accordance with divine will. These heroes are often instructed to save wild animals and plants, powerful symbols of instinct and intuition, so that they can regenerate the devastated earth, in the same way that the reintegration with unconscious forces can revitalise the psyche of individuals.
These myths use floods and other nature symbols, like animals and plants, to express unconscious forces because the unconscious is intimately tied to nature.
Water is one of the most powerful symbols for expressing the unconscious, as its physical attributes mirror the intangible aspects of the unconscious. Water is fluid, and takes on many forms, from gentle and effortless streams to furious torrents, expressing the whole spectrum of human emotions. Water is also regenerative, it is essential for all life and nourishes the body and the land, in the same way that the unconscious nourishes a worn-out consciousness. Finally, and perhaps most importantly in the expression of disturbance narratives, water is a cleansing agent, clearing away impurities from the body in the same way unconscious insights clear away unhealthy behaviours with honest clarity. We even see the same associations play out in ecology, with water dominated wetland ecosystems, like swamps, peatlands, and mangroves, acting like filters in the landscape, cleansing the catchment of pollutants via plants and soils which absorb excess nutrients and chemicals (Ferreira et al., 2023).
The prevalence of water purification rituals seen across religious traditions, and its close association with the sacred, further speaks to the universal potency of the water symbol. In Christianity, the Baptism absolves the individual of sin and opens them up to God, while the Holy Spirit is often called a “fountain of wisdom”. In the Koran, there is the “blessed water” which falls from heaven as a sign from Allah, while impurities are absolved through “al-wudu”, the ritual washing of the body. In Shinto, the face and hands must be washed in the “temizu” ritual, before one can enter a shrine and commune with the gods, in an act that traces its lineage back to Izanagi, the creation deity, who washed himself free of pollution after descending into the corrupt underworld (Cartwright, 2012). Finally, in the elaborate symbolic tradition of Medieval Alchemy, water is called “aqua divina” or “aqua permanens”, the medium of ablution which cleanses gross matter of its impurities through dissolution or drowning, called the “nigredo”. This dissolving of the base physical nature of material is one of the chief procedures in the craft, as it awakens the spirit and allows for a kind of transcendental growth to higher states of being-
“The mystery of everything is life, which is water; for water dissolves the body into spirit and summons a spirit from the dead.”
(Philaletha et al., 1678, pg., 262)
While the stakes are certainly higher and the waters more destructive, the flood myth is essentially a recasting of this universal purification ritual on an epic scale, replacing the sanctity of the individual with that of all civilisation.
It is no coincidence that the unconscious takes the form of natural symbols, since the unconscious is the natural part of the human psyche. Human beings are distinguished from the rest of nature by our superior conscious abilities, like our ability to understand, record, and transmit knowledge across generations, which has facilitated technological and cultural transformations of our environments and bodies. Yet, it is the unconscious, that ancient, instinctual part of our psyche that reconnects us with the rest of nature. While consciousness has fuelled the proliferation of our species over a remarkably short space of time, i.e., the last 6,000 years, our unconscious has evolved over the entire course of life on earth, from our earliest ancestors to now, forming structures in the mind that pre-date consciousness by millions of years (Fuentes, 2008). Like nature, it is always present in the background of our lives, being totally independent of conscious awareness, and when it does manifest itself in our field of awareness, it takes the form of spontaneous emotions, intuitions, and dreams, which cannot be controlled by the conscious mind, autonomous like the nature we see all around us, reminding us that we are not always the masters of even the most personal of our domains.
Freed from the constraints of scientific rationality, the pinnacling achievement of consciousness, the lives and minds of our ancient ancestors were much more intimately familiar with uncontrolled nature, both out in the environment and within themselves. As a result, their arts and stories were permeated with a symbolic language, governed much more by unconscious factors, which prioritised the emotional and intuitive associations between psyche and the natural environment, over any rational understandings.
The human psyche then, like the floods and animals that come to represent it in myth, is at its most foundational level an autonomous ecological process bound by natures laws. As a result of this intimate evolutionary history between ecology and mind, an analysis of ecological processes linked to disturbance and regeneration should give us important insights into the workings of the unconscious mind, as well as the flood myths and water rituals, in which the unconscious finds its expression. In ecology, disturbance is defined as a temporary destabilising or destructive change in environmental conditions, like floods, fires, and epidemics, which leads to a pronounced change in the wider ecosystem (Burton & Jentsch, 2020). This definition is, in essence, the same as that used in psycho-therapy, with the forcings of the unconscious being swapped out for physical forcings out in the environment, both of which destabilise the complex systems that they operate upon in an exogenous fashion. Furthermore, natural disturbances play a core role in shaping the species composition of ecosystems, and some ecosystems even rely on disturbances for their functioning and development, in a similar way that the human mind requires disturbance from the unconscious, in order to mature.
For example, in low-lying floodplains, seasonal disturbance, in the form of floods, destroys well-established vegetation, but in-turn create open ground for new pioneer species to colonise. The landscape becomes more diverse as a result, as the relatively small number of dominant and mature species gives way to a patchwork of habitats all at different stages of development (Nakamura et al., 2020; Kleindl et al., 2015).
In their race to become dominant, these mature species also deplete the ecosystem of its essential nutrients, like nitrogen and organic matter, but disturbances release these stored-up nutrients back into the system, and in the case of flooding, can bring new nutrients into the system, via rich sediments from upriver. These new nutrients trigger a proliferation of growth throughout the food chain, providing a fertile bed for the new colonising plants, which in-turn fuels growth in insect, fish, and bird populations, that latter of which migrate to the floodplains to take advantage of these refreshed abundances (Åhlén et al., 2023). These increases in nutrients, biodiversity, and ecological structure (i.e., different aged stands of vegetation) in turn increase the ecosystems overall resilience (Capdevila et al., 2021).
The proliferation and strength of the wetland ecosystem thus depends, counterintuitively, on the destructive flood disturbances that it is adapted to, in the same way the human psyche depends on disturbances from the unconscious for its healthy maturation, which break down rigid conscious barriers to growth.
No flood myth better expresses this tightly bound relationship between ecology, society, and psyche, then the story of Osiris, described as the most sacred and influential story in ancient Egyptian mythology. Osiris, the green faced god of life, growth, vegetation, and regeneration, was intimately associated with the River Nile and was believed to bring the yearly floods which rejuvenated the croplands along the parched desert riverbanks, on which the great civilisation depended-
“… I am Osiris, named water…”
(Preisendanz, 1931 pg., 73)
In his myth, Osiris is dismembered by his brother Set, god of disorder and violence, and is put back together again by Osiris’ wife Isis, so that they may conceive the divine hero Horus, in a grand saga of destruction and holy rebirth. The intricate associations between Osiris, the Nile, its plant-life, and the cycle of death and rebirth, demonstrates how the disturbance ecology of the Nile contained within it the natural inspiration for the Osiris myth (Sauder-MacGuire, 2009).
Here, the processes associated with disturbance are deified and anthropomorphised, emphasising both the sacred nature of the disturbance process, as well as the intimate association it shares with the mind. The nature god Osiris symbolises the beneficent aspects of the unconscious, facilitating growth and renewal, while the dismembering brother Set represents the disturbing force of the unwanted unconscious contents encountering, and shattering the preconceived notions of, the conscious state. Finally, there is Horus, the solar hero who represents the individual who has passed through challenging circumstances and has come out stronger and wiser because of his encounter with disturbance.
This intricate pattern of ecology and psychology, woven together by the threads of evolution, demonstrates how ecological processes have shaped the foundations of our behaviour, including seemingly complex cultural expressions like mythology, while also serving as the physical inspiration and sounding board that we have used for millennia to express the complexities of our inner-most psyches.
Exploring the archetype
Of course, if ecological disturbance does provide the basis for this archetypal pattern of destruction and renewal, its symbolic expression should not be exclusive to flooding but should also take the form of other natural disturbance agents.
Fire is one of the most compelling symbols of natural disturbance, with a rich ecological and cultural history. At the surface, wildfires appear to devastate nature, reducing once complex ecosystems to ash. Indeed, many ecosystems and human communities are now threatened by an increasing frequency and magnitude of wildfires caused by climate change (Hudiburg et al., 2023; Pandey et al., 2023; Geary et al., 2021).
However, many ecosystems are fire-adapted, like tropical savannah and some seasonally dry forests, and cannot function without a natural fire-cycle (McLauchlan et al., 2020). In regions where natural fires have been purposefully suppressed, like in the seasonally dry pine forests of western North America, we see another parallel between ecology and psychology. Here, natural fire had been suppressed for nearly a century, under a false belief that it would protect the forests. This resulted in the build-up of a thick ground-layer of young trees which thrived in the absence of fire. These additional trees turned the forests into volatile tinderboxes, with the additional fuel-load magnifying the intensity of any fires which escaped suppression. Once mild and infrequent ground fires became devastating wildfires, which continue to threaten communities and degrade forest biodiversity into the present (Hagmann et al., 2012; Hessburg et al., 2021).
Here we see how an overly suppressive attitude towards ecological disturbance out in nature mirrors the suppressive and repressive characteristics that we explore in therapy. In both ecology and psychology, the fear of destruction and the desire to preserve the status-quo, tragically increases the volatility of those things that we seek to protect, be it the seemingly beneficial preservation of trees, which turn forests into tinder-boxes, or the feared emotions of the unconscious, which, when repressed, turn into harmful neuroses.
Credited as humanities first tool, the relationship between man and fire is perhaps even more intimately bound to culture and psyche than the flood. Evidence of humans using fire goes as far back as 400 thousand years (McDonald et al., 2021), and cultures across the world have used fire-based disturbance as a symbol to articulate the destructive force which leads to the ascension of the spirit.
Perhaps the most iconic example of the fire myth is that of the legendary phoenix, who the ancient Greeks believed had to burst into flames to give life to its young (McDonald, 1960). In Mayan folklore, the hero twins are incinerated by fire but are then reborn again through the maize plant, in a spiritual expression of traditional Mayan agriculture, whereby fire is needed to clear forest and produce the ash fertiliser essential for maize growth. Once the twins emerge from the maize plant, they kill the evil lords of the underworld and ascend to become the sun and the moon, thus purifying the world of corruption (Tedlock, 1996).
In alchemy, fire, like water, is often used as an agent that dissolves the impurities of base matter, unlocking their spiritual potential, in a kind of “baptism by fire”. Indeed, the Aurora consurgens identifies three kinds of baptism: “…in water, in blood, and in fire.” (Von Franz, 1966), and this interchangeability of fire and water would otherwise seem completely contradictory, if not for the underlying theme of disturbance and regeneration explored in our analysis. Even the philosophers stone, the ultimate goal of alchemy, could not be attained without fire and ash, saying-
“In the ashes remaining in the bottom of the tomb are found the diadem of our King.”
(Evola, 1971)
“This our stone is fire, created of fire, and turns into fire; its soul dwells in fire.”
(Jung, 1963)
Zosimos ascribes to burnt matter the “power of everything” and says-
“know that the ashes constitute all the mystery, which is why the ancients speak of the black lead, which is the basis of substance”
(Evola, 1971, pg. 68)
Lead corresponds with Saturn, who is associated with punishment, discipline, and wisdom, making him the god who forges growth out of pain and disturbance, in the same way that destructive fire leaves the potential for new growth in ash.
Diseases threaten ecosystems as they do people, and the mortifying similarities are symbolically stark. As pathogens and parasites destroy the body, so too can they ravage an ecosystem, and as the body decomposes and becomes energy for a whole host of scavengers, the same process occurs at the landscape level as mature vegetation dies of sickness, releasing their nutrients and competitive grip over the ecosystem, providing a fertile seedbed for new growth.
Again, as with flooding and wildfire, disease has become a key symbol in the expression of destruction and regeneration. Among young Araucanian women in Chile, the decision to become a shamaness is precipitated by a sudden illness which commands the woman to seek higher powers (Eliade, 1964). To the alchemists, rotting, otherwise called “putrefaction” or “blackening” was identical with the chief operation of dissolution. When the material or body is left to decompose, the “last residue of corruption” that remains is salt, which, despite its blackness and foetid smell, is the prime agent in generation which transforms into the “perfume of the flowers” (Jung, 1963, pg., 312).
Cultural expressions of disturbance and regeneration play out in their most abstracted form in the motif of the journey into the “underworld”. Here, heroes descend into terrifying and unknown depths to rescue something of immense value which restores the hero, or the world, representing consciousness as it faces the repressed fears of the unconscious. These underworlds are dominated by the forces of natural disturbances already mentioned, which are used interchangeably as a symbol of conscious dissolution. For example, in his Divine Comedia, the poet Dante, lost in life, descends into the fires of hell where he experiences the pain of the sinners, only to then re-ascend into the heavenly spheres, where he reunites with his beloved Beatrice. In the bible, Jonah, in attempting to flee from Gods fate, is swallowed by a whale, in a kind of watery descent into the abyss. Jonah repents and learns to have faith in God and is then vomited back safely onto shore. In Ancient Akkadian myth, Ishtar the goddess of fertility, was trapped in the underworld, hung naked upon a hook, and attacked by 60 diseases. In her absence, the world became sterile and it was up to the hero Enki to descend into the underworld, rescue her, and restore life to the world (Pryke, 2017).
The interchangeability of these disturbance symbols can also be seen in the myth of the king’s rebirth, a retelling of the Osiris myth that is common in alchemy and fairytales, which further emphasises the common process of destruction and regeneration which underlies all these symbols (Sauder-MacGuire 2009; Jung, 1963). These stories start with a king who has become old and sick, representing the dominant conscious function which has become worn out from overuse and is now stricken by neurosis. He is no longer fit to rule the kingdom, and in his impotence, the crops wither and the land becomes infertile or frozen, symbolising the severance of the spontaneous and creative unconscious contents by the overly one-sided and ridged consciousness. The old king is then sacrificed in a destructive ceremony, where he is either drowned, burnt to ashes, or left to rot, but is then miraculously reborn, allowing vitality to return to the kingdom, symbolising the younger and more adapted energy of the unconscious springing forth from the ruins of the old ossified ways of consciousness (Jung, 1963, pg., 312).
Modernising the myth
When taken together, myth, religion, and folk-belief, all demonstrate that natural disturbance agents have been potent historic symbols for the expression of painful, yet beneficial, psychological transformations. However, if this pattern is truly archetypal, it should not be relegated to history, and we should also expect to find it in modern artistic genres which bear little resemblance to the traditions that we have surveyed. Take for example, “Break!”, the 2022 EP from Fazerdaze, the alias of the indie bedroom pop musician Amelia Murray. Released after a five-year creative deadlock, due to the pressures of touring and a failing relationship, the EP explores the seemingly contradictory ways in which she was able to achieve personal and artistic growth, by surrendering to the negative feelings and hard truths in her life, despite the significant personal and interpersonal disruptions they caused-
“I lost a lot of confidence during that time and my sense-of-self really eroded. Eventually, I had to surrender to the truth of the toxic situations I was finding myself in, both professionally and personally. No longer being stoic and strong was the best thing I ever did for myself. Giving up on the people and things that weren’t working in my life was this big emotional release. I could finally put down this weight I was carrying. Ever since then, things have been flowing in my life again. I can hear my intuition, write songs and be creative again… Its like the floodgates opened for good stuff coming back into my life.”
(Murray in DIY, 2022)
The EP’s lyrics lucidly express the whole disturbance and regeneration processes, starting with the “…low key loser, a stranger to herself…” a repressed artist, who in her attempts to maintain the established order in her life, shuts herself off from her contradictory feelings, and as a result severs her connection to the creative and intuitive unconscious which fuels her art and sense of self-
“I let myself get lost in youGave it all too much, too much too soonAnd within you I would disappearSo when you wanted me I wasn't thereAnd when your hands searched throughSearched through the sheetsTo only find an empty shell of me…”
(Murray, 2022)
The track “Overthink it” alludes to an overly conscientious attitude which desperately tries to suppress the deeper intuitions of a failing relationship- “…here’s hoping, ah, yeah I, I’m overthinking it”, while “Winter” evokes the freezing of the true-self, the emotional reality which sleeps in a death-like slumber, distanced, and numbed by an emotionally negligent relationship-
“I told you not to worry, I triedForget it, now I'm distantAll day, all night, you were never on timeWalk out the door unresolved, never mind”
(Murray, 2022)
In interviews, the artist links these issues of loss of self, emotional suppression, and creative impotency to an overly ridged dedication to commonly held cultural ideals like perseverance, perfectionism, and loyalty without considering the toll they were taking from her inner life-
“It [Break!] implies a sense of rigidity, that I used to have, with being really fixed in the way I thought, in the way I approach things. That wore me down…”
(Murray in Stamp, 2022)
“Sometimes perseverance and being noble and loyal, and I think those values may appear to be ‘good’ values but you have to go deeper than that and ask yourself, ‘Is this situation really making my inner being feel full and happy? Or am I buying into these values and just playing them out accordingly?’”
(Murray in Jacob, 2022)
“…I was stuck in a cycle of my own toxic positivity for years telling myself I was ok, that I was ‘happy’ and meanwhile suppressing all my negative feelings…”
(Murray in DIY, 2022)
However, it was from this place of poor wellbeing that Amelia was finally able to confront her negative emotions and breakaway from her overly suppressive ideals. This is the same break that gives name to the album, which underpins and links each of the songs, acknowledging that growth and renewal can come from disruption, despite the pain-
“It’s actually ok to give up sometimes…It’s about the honesty of letting things unravel if they need to. Once you let go those constructs, that’s when you’re in a place of truth. It might look messy and it might be an ugly process, but it’ll be a place that you can rebuild and renew.”
(Murray in Lochrie, 2022)
In the namesake single “Break!”, we have the bombastic repetition of- “I'm just gonna break, break, I'm just gonna break…” emphasising the intense volume of the disturbance and the catharsis that came with it as a liberating agent. While in “Come apart”, the artist finally acknowledges the importance of her feelings in loosening herself from the negative bonds that were holding her back-
“I'm fed up of skirting around the truth when you look right through meWait a minute, Just admit it, Take a minute, To commit to a decision, Can we give in and, Admit this, That we've grown apart, We're falling apart, Don't make this hard, This is just the start, Of us coming apart”
(Come apart, Break!, 2022)
All of this turbulence crescendos in the EP’s final track “Flood Into” where the natural symbology of the flood emerges once again to express the regenerative quality of the disruptive waters, which bring the vitality of intuition and creativity back into the artists stifled life, accentuated by deep and soothing instrumentals which wash away the harsher sounds from earlier in the record-
“But when I finally found the sense to leaveI felt myself flood back, flood into me”
(Flood Into, Break!, 2022)
For Fazerdaze then, as in myth, the flood symbolises psychological healing (i.e., the curing of neuroses) through disturbance, by disrupting closely held ideals in the conscious mind, creating a space for much more deeply personal self-development. The artist is freed of the conscious, culturally transmitted expectations that have been imposed on her from above, which no longer serve her, and is allowed to grow naturally, without judgement, guided by unconscious forces emanating deep from within-
“With all of these songs I was just like, ‘what are they?!’ They’re just so strange, but something I had to learn was to stop trying to control my output while I’m creating. I had to let whatever needed to come out, come out…I can make whatever comes through me, just let it be, see it through to the end and not judge it.”
(Murray in Lochrie, 2022)
As a person gains greater emotional understanding, there comes a greater sense of self-trust and self-embodiment, as they become aware that they have an inner unconscious partner. This instinctual partner operates distinctly from their conscious sense of self but can guide them through their hardships in a way that is much more personally tailored to their individual circumstances, when compared to the top-down generalist guidance imposed by culture, given that it is embodied in their lived experiences.
This makes the expressed contents from the unconscious much more authentic and meaningful when compared to the slogans and cliches passed on second-hand throughout culture. Furthermore, these expressions are much more courageous and honest, as they are permeated with the pain that the individual has had to go through to attain these wisdoms, and, as with Fazerdaze, they may also go against the grain, opposing the currently accepted standards of culture, in the belief that authenticity can create a better world-
“I think that when people are brave enough to choose themselves and honour that- there will be so much more light people can give to the world.”
(Murray in Riddell, 2022)
In Break!, we see how universal themes of disturbance and renewal are alive and well in the modern world, manifesting themselves in a highly personal account of suffering and healing. The remoteness of the dream pop musical genre from traditional stories and myths explored earlier in the analysis, combined with the idiosyncratic and self-reflective lyrics of the EP, demonstrate that the disturbance motif has not simply been transmitted to the artist via culture, but has actually emerged from the artists unconscious in a spontaneous fashion, given how deeply ingrained the architype is in our nature. Indeed, the artist herself, has confirmed that the subconscious has played a critical role in guiding her personal transformation, expressing itself through song, without her awareness-
“…I couldn’t understand why I was writing these very angsty songs, like I almost didn’t want to admit it to myself. I think my subconscious was much further along processing than my conscious brain.”
(Murray in Stamp, 2022)
In turn, the deeply intuitive and unspoken nature of the archetype suffuses the art with an invisible magic, a qualia which reveals the universal in the very personal, where the individuals tender self-reflections can intertwine with the transcendent forces playing out within ecology and psychology, and the art becomes a true expression of nature, channelled from the unconscious, which can be meaningfully understood by all who hear it.
Implications and recommendations
Change, as precipitated by disturbance, and the underlying tension between rigidity and growth, has been a preoccupation of society dating as far back as the Greeks. Heraclitus took the example of a flowing river to express the fundamentally dynamic nature of life- “You cannot step twice into the same river…”, while Herodotus and others argued that animals and plants live in a harmonious “balance of nature” (Egerton, 1973). Every discipline, be it scientific or artistic, has had to contend with these opposing forces of dynamism and stability in their practices, revealing underlying patterns across the seemingly disparate fields of ecology, psychology, and music.
Fazerdaze’s sub-conscious approach to making art not only lends itself to the dismantling of creative blocks, which are often the result of an overly suppressive self-conscious attitude, but also encourages the cultivation of an authentic artistic persona (Lochrie, 2022).
Musicians, and artists more generally, are often lauded for the authenticity of their early works, which are seen as original and an intrinsic part of their unique artistic identity but are then criticised later in their careers for having become less authentic, or creatively bankrupt, as they try to stabilise their fanbases and capitalise on their earlier successes by falling back on the same old predictable formulas. This issue is particularly acute in the bedroom indie scene, where the specific, and often idiosyncratic, personality of the musician is much more of a selling point than in more mainstream music, where personality has to be standardised to meet the expectations of a very large viewership. The DIY nature of bedroom music, where artists can find their own success online, with greater freedom from the constraints of producers, lends itself to more honest and personal artistic expression, and as a result, a greater need to, or simply a greater flexibility to, change-up musical styles and themes to reflect the changes in personality and perspective that come with life-disturbing circumstances. Well-known bedroom artists, like Fazerdaze and Mac Demarco, are now very different from their 2017 peaks, perhaps due to this historic shift within the music industry away from control, towards greater artistic freedom which emphasises growth and change.
The history of ecology has been defined by its changing perspectives on dynamism and stability out in the natural environment, and the role that disturbance plays as an agent of change. The early ecologists of the 19th century took Herodotus’s balance of nature concept as the fundamental paradigm of their work, arguing that ecosystems exist in a stable and highly predictable equilibrium with the surrounding climate (Clements 1916). It was believed that if any disturbance occurred in the ecosystem, a slow but ordered succession of species would eventually lead the ecosystem back to its original ecological composition, called the “climax community”, thus restoring the balance of nature. The burgeoning preservationist movement, championed by naturalists like John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt, translated this theory into practice, establishing national parks and forest reserves, where they could preserve the stable balance in ecosystems (Nash 2014). Since succession was believed to take place over hundreds of years, it was imperative that the already, so-called “mature” ecosystems, were protected from disturbance, be they caused by humans or natural forces. Natural disturbances, like fire were suppressed, leading to the explosive tinderbox effect that we explored earlier in the analysis, and indigenous communities were forcibly evicted from these newly protected parks in their thousands, to ensure that they would remain pristine landscapes (Hessburg et al., 2021; North et al., 2015; Nash 2014; Burnham, 2000).
However, over the course of the 20th century, attempts to model and predict ecosystem dynamics proved more challenging than expected. Far from being in equilibrium with the climate, species populations were shown to be much more variable, existing in a state of near-constant flux, as they respond to disturbances in the environment, which in-turn impacts on resources, leading to a cascade of chaotic changes throughout the ecosystem as populations compete for resource control (Gleason, 1926; Holling, 1996; Wu and Loucks, 1995). Concurrently, when ecologists turned their attention to the past, through the examination of fossil pollen preserved in lake sediments, they found the same fluidity in ecosystems occurring over hundreds of thousands of years, as species compositions recombined in novel ways in response to climatic changes, natural disturbance regimes, and changing intensities in human land-use (Gillson 2015).
Ridged preservationism has since given way to a much more flexible conservation approach, drawing from the modern dynamic-nature paradigm, to emphasise an ecosystems overall resilience and adaptability, as opposed to its natural harmony or balance (Capdevila et al., 2021; Walker, 1995). Here, management interventions aim to promote the dynamic natural processes which allow ecosystems to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances. Disturbance then, far from being a perverse element to be suppressed, has become an essential part of the conservationist’s toolkit in the restoration of degraded ecosystems. Indeed, some ecologists go as far as to argue for a sort of goldilocks ratio of ecosystem disturbance, where the frequency and magnitude of disturbance in each ecosystem can be optimised for the generation and maintenance of biodiversity, a key indicator of ecosystem resilience (Roxburgh et al., 2004). As we have seen, in the absence of disturbance, certain species will eventually come to dominate the ecosystem, reducing species richness through competitive suppression. However, if disturbance levels completely overwhelm an ecosystem, as is often the case with the intensifying land-use pressures of humans, then species are also threatened with extinction. If an optimal, intermediate level of disturbance can be brought back to the landscape, neither too suppressed nor too out of control, the result will be a diverse mosaic of vegetation and substrate all at different growth and degeneration stages, offering an array of structural features which act as habitat for a proliferation of species.
Similarly, psychotherapy has had to strike a balance between accessing the healing aspects of the unconscious, which is an inherently destabilising process, without overwhelming the patient with their past traumas and negative emotions. At the extreme end of this spectrum is the psychotic break from reality, where uncontrolled unconscious contents take grip on the patient, and they lose the ability to differentiate material reality from delusional projections and hallucinations (de Oliveira Moreira & Drawin, 2015). As with ecosystems, the key to positive psychic growth lies in finding the optimal zone between disturbance and stability, where the patient feels secure enough to be able to face their negative feelings, knowing that even if it is painful, it will ultimately be rewarding. Indeed, this is a fundamental property of modern behavioural therapy, or “exposure therapy”, which emphasises breaking down overwhelming issues into smaller, more manageable components which can be more-comfortably faced (NHS, 2024; Neudeck & Wittchen, 2012).
Mythology also balances the beneficial aspects of disturbance with cautious warnings about how potentially overwhelming it can be. Take for example, Enkidu in Mesopotamian myth, who descends into the underworld to retrieve a sacred drum, but ignoring the laws of the dead, becomes trapped there for eternity, or Orpheus of the Greeks, who loses his beloved Eurydice to the underworld when he fails to abide by Hades’s bargain. Furthermore, in alchemy, the dissolution phase of the transformation process was thought to be very risky, potentially overpowering the beneficial solution, unless a balance between the elements was found-
“… the fixed becomes volatile for a while in order to acquire a nobler quality to fix the same volatile again … Fires that are too violent are ill-advised: because the force of the spirits would break the vessel and every benefit would be lost.”
(Evola, 1971, pg., 70)
Looking again to a modern artistic example, Fazerdaze’s Break! features the same cautious approach to navigating disturbance in the track ‘Flood into’, where the artist not only expresses the ability of the unconscious to generate authentic individuality, but also acknowledges the important role that boundary setting plays in defining and asserting a sense of self in the presence of destabilising forces-
“we dissolved right in but overtime, I was losing the edge of myself so I drew a line”
(Murray, 2022)
All these examples, from ecology, psychology, mythology, and art, acknowledge the beneficial power of disturbance while also maintaining a cautious respect towards its uncontrollable and overpowering nature. Be it an ecosystem or a human mind, a balance has to be struck between maintining the fundamental integrity of the system and allowing disturbance into the system, to rid it of those elements that no longer serve its long-term success, i.e., like neuroses in an individual, or oligarchies of mature species in an ecosystem. This opens up space for innovation, growth, and adaptation, while also preserving the fundamental character of the system, i.e., the unique composition of species that make up an ecosystem, or the unique personality of the individual. The result is improvements regarding the beneficial aspects of the system, e.g., carbon sequestration and biodiversity generation in an ecosystem, or resilience and wisdom in an individual.
When we speak of an ecosystem’s “health”, we unconsciously project out into the environment our own need to maintain resilience in the face of adversity. As a chaotic assortment of species and processes, an ecosystem does not care to what extent it is resilient, the extent it can store carbon, generate biodiversity, or mitigate floods. Nor does it care if it is barraged by disturbance, be it natural or man-made. However, we human beings certainly do care about these issues and this analysis demonstrates that our ways of viewing, managing, and conserving ecosystems are deeply influenced by psychological patterns relating to negative emotion and the healing and maturation that follows.
Ecologists, conservationists and land managers more generally should keep this in mind when making decisions regarding the protection or modification of ecosystems. An approach to conservation that is much more aware of its psychological underpinnings will likely be able to tap into the motivations of people more deeply and thus make for a much more authentic and intimate case for environmental activism and management.
Concurrently, therapists and health practitioners focusing on the therapeutic effects of the natural environment should be aware that landscapes with different frequencies and magnitudes of ecological disturbances will potentially influence psychological states to different degrees through a process of acclimatisation. It stands to reason that if nature, particularly natural disturbance, serves as a catalyst to reconnect people with the unconscious and a creative toolkit with which to explore with the self, then its absence, for example in urban centres, will result in a severance with the unconscious and will lead to greater neuroses, reduced wellbeing, and an increased sensitivity to psychological disturbance when it inevitably occurs. Without the counter-position of the unconscious, consciousness becomes inflated and its ordered and controlled approach to life becomes all-encompassing, resulting in a mind-set and landscape that is dominated by controlled artificiality and machine like systemisation, creating a negative feedback loop that denies nature.
Working together, land managers and therapists, could design landscapes that draw out a wider range of ecosystem services than if both disciplines continued to work in isolation, creating resilient landscapes that are simultaneously sensitive to the psychological needs of its occupants and the requirements of a properly functioning ecosystem. For example, greener cities can be cultivated, where permeable raingardens and wetlands act as protective sponges around our towns to mitigate the worst impacts of extreme flooding, while also purifying our waters, and providing habitat for other species (Zhou, 2014).
In turn, when we tear out the old grey infrastructure and sacrifice some of that engineered oversight on the behalf of ecosystems, we learn how to trust in the uncontrollable unconscious, and we can begin to tend our inner natures with purpose and caution. Increasingly, people will see how the proper management of ecosystems, is in essence, the cultivation of personal resilience on a grand scale, helping us to combat the seemingly overwhelming disturbances of our time, like climate change, in a grand physical expression of that most important of psychic processes, integration of the unconscious into the conscious self.
This analysis also clarifies important misunderstandings in the belief structures of environmentalist and anti-environmentalist groups, and could provide a means to de-escalate the increasing polarisation between these political camps. On the one side, are the anti-environmentalists, typically conservatives who paint nature as an entirely hostile force, that does not need, or deserve any help from society, likely stemming from an internal fear of the potentially overwhelming negative emotions from the unconscious, which threaten to change the status-quo of the conscious. On the other side are the environmentalists, typically liberals, who distil only the beneficent aspects of nature and fail to recognise its negative aspects, likely a projection of an infantilised psyche that has failed to integrate the painful and ugly aspects from the unconscious.
In recognising that the beneficial aspects of nature, both inside and outside of the mind, are actually underpinned by the disturbances that we find troubling, we can combine the isolated viewpoints of each political camp into a synthesis where the merits of each side are acknowledged. Our mechanism also shines a light on the potential psychological maladaptation’s which have motivated these extreme views towards the environment, while simultaneously providing a therapeutic method with which to address these maladies by using nature outside of us as a tool for self-expression. Art as well, like Fazerdazes “Break!” EP, should be utilised to communicate these more-abstract ideas in intuitive ways, to reach a greater audience. This art must champion authentic emotional expression and be tempered by a purposeful acknowledgement of the ferocity and ugliness of nature, both inside and outside the psyche. Authentic artistic expression, channelled from the unconscious, may also assist in bolstering the catalytic effect of self-discovery in places where nature is absent and thus unable to provide that creative and individualistic form of inspiration, like in cities.
Conclusion
Natural ecosystems provide the original substrate for creative expression and act as a vital resource in self-reflection, with their myriad forms and processes shining a light on our inner natures. Our psyches and cultures evolved alongside disturbances in nature, like floods, fires and plagues, and within these awe-inspiring forces our ancestors found a kinship which mirrored the destructive yet transformational power of their own unconscious minds. They saw that the crops that were washed away, or the forests that were set ablaze, cleared the slate for a new growth that was more vigorous, resilient and diverse, in a cycle of destruction and renewal that matched the ability of unconscious energies, like feelings and intuitions, to destroy unhealthy and repressive thoughts within the mind, and allow our authentic inner-natures to grow up through the clearings.
The ancient myths and stories that once intuitively captured the importance of disturbance in life, as a means to reconnect with the unconscious, and grow through exposure to novelty, now seem nonsensical to our modern logical brains, where self-preservation, comfort, and an overbearing conformity to cultures ideals dominate. This mind-set is reflected in the artificial and overly conscientious urban environments that we have designed, as well as the suppressed ecosystems of the preservationists, who fear disturbance and the changes it brings.
To revivify these ossified minds and landscapes, we must champion balance, finding the optimum threshold where destabilisation of the system, be it psychological or ecological, is neither too overwhelming, nor too stifled. This will require a kind of authentic emotional understanding and expression which is tempered by a purposeful respect and caution towards the ferocity of nature both within and outside of the mind. In doing so, it will become apparent that vulnerability need not be naïve, but courageous, and utterly essential in the growth of personality.
If we can trust in our inner natures, despite the pain of disturbance that comes with it, we might be able to develop greater trust in nature outside of ourselves, and then we will be able to open ourselves up to disturbance, and allow nature, both within and outside of the mind, to begin healing the soul of the world. For every natural space restored, there will be a song like Fazerdaze’s, where people can find a quiet moment to reconnect with their authentic selves, like glistening light on the surface of a lake with depths that encompass all of ancient myth and the evolution of the mind.
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United States Forest Service. (1952). Smokey Bear Forest Fires PSA. Production: United States Forest Service
United States Forest Service. (1957). Vision in the Forest. Production: United States Forest Service
Walter C. Miller. (1982). The Rodney Dangerfield Show: It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me. Producers: Estelle Endler, Patti Person, & Harold Ramis
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