Trees and the Desire for Affinity

What would a psychoanalysis of trees entail? Is such a thing possible? A psychoanalysis of trees would have to begin with investigating human fantasies of nature.1 Many of these fantasies throughout modernity have been philosophical reveries formed in the wake of the scientific revolution. All fantasies share a disavowed traumatic kernel around which a frame of representation is constructed. The traumatic kernel in fantasies about trees and forests is that of the immanence of extinction, the Real that is repressed in such identification. We are reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of fire, a project motivated by his investigation of the scientific grounds for objectivity. Bachelard’s position was that the object of science reveals “more about us than we do about it” (1). The very task of a philosophy informed by psychoanalysis would be to restitute the schism between poetry and science, the former concerned with sensation, common sense, etymology, and experience, and the latter conditioned by the refutation of any elements of experience in developing an objective account of something. Science breaks with experience; never marvels about an object; always treats it ironically, i.e., brackets its historicity. The historicity of nature is a philosophical problem but not a scientific one: as far as science is concerned the natural world is “an inert world whose life is not ours, which suffers none of our sorrows nor is exalted by any of our joys” (Bachelard 2). When faced with this inert world, we are called on to repress our excitations and enthusiasms, to not project them on this world if we wish to know it.