Wilderness and Ecopsychology

From Anthropocentrism to Ecological Awareness

Anastasios Gaitanidis, Alan Bainbridge, Isabella Mighetto

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Routledge
22 December 2025

Psychoanalytical theory (Freudian psychology); Environmental factors; Psychotherapy; Environmentalist thought & ideology

Series: Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies

Offering a radical interdisciplinary exploration of human-wilderness relationships during our current climate crisis, and drawing on psychoanalytic insight, political critique, and ecological wisdom, this volume diagnoses the profound alienation endemic to late capitalist modernity while delineating pathways toward regenerative forms of being.

The book begins by deconstructing wilderness as both geographical reality and psychological construct, tracing its evolution from Enlightenment instrumentality through Romantic idealisation to contemporary relational understandings. In doing so, it examines how dominant narratives illuminate our ambivalent encounter with wilderness as both threat and salvation. The book then moves on to explore concrete alternatives to extractive agriculture, positioning reciprocal land stewardship and agroecological practices as embodiments of interspecies ethics. The culminating vision articulates a ‘wild psychology’ that advocates for collective liberation through practices of deep attention, material engagement, and transformative empathy offering not solutions but threshold experiences for reimagining human-earth relationships beyond the ruins of modernity.

Wilderness and Ecopsychology is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in environmental humanities, critical psychology, ecotherapy, and posthumanist therapeutic approaches seeking to understand psychological distress as inherently ecological and political. It is also designed to aid therapeutic practitioners, health professionals and clinicians in thinking more radically about human and planetary health, and to encourage them to incorporate ecological thinking and nature-based/wilderness experience into their clinical practice.

By: Anastasios Gaitanidis, Alan Bainbridge, Isabella Mighetto
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781032702834
ISBN 10: 1032702834
Series: Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies
Pages: 164
Publication Date: 22 December 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction: Re-imagining a Sustainable and Flourishing Community of Nature 1. Defining Wilderness: A Philosophical, Ecological, and Psychoanalytic Perspective 2. Giving and Receiving the Wild: Developing an Ecological Ethic of Attunement 3. Symbiosis & Reciprocity: Human-Land Relationships and Entanglements 4. Dreams, Wilderness and the Sacred 5. Ecosocialism: Learning to Live Well with the World 6. Place-making in Precarity: On Domesticity & Nomadism 7. Wilding Education: From Monoculture to Messy Margins 8. Art as Resistance, Empathy, and Reimagination: Overcoming Ecological Crises Gathering at the Threshold - The Beginning, Not the Conclusion

Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor, and Supervisor. In addition to his clinical work as a Psychoanalyst, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies at Regent’s University London and University of Roehampton, UK. Anastasios is an Author who published numerous journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives. His recent work focuses on the intersection of psychological and political dimensions of cultural and environmental crisis. Alan Bainbridge is a Professor of Education at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and a Visiting Reader in Education and Sustainability at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He has an expansive view of education that ranges across ecology, psychology, politics, and sustainability. He uses broadly narrative-based research methods to work qualitatively; exploring the development of education professional practice, and the transformative nature of human/more-than-human relationships. Isabella Mighetto is a Counselling Psychologist based in Bristol. She works in a community mental health service in the NHS and has a small private practice. In her clinical and consultation work she seeks to encourage a deeper connection to the body, as well as connection to the natural world. She is an advocate for incorporating nature-based practices into healthcare settings. Her framework attends to sociopolitical, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic contexts, seeing the human as embedded in a much wider ecology.

Reviews for Wilderness and Ecopsychology: From Anthropocentrism to Ecological Awareness

""Wilderness and Ecopsychology is a beautiful and insightful work: personal yet scholarly, urgent yet expansive. Its authors engage in what they call a “wild conversation” amongst themselves in which the natural world, too, is an active interlocutor, and which the reader is encouraged to join. As the talk ranges freely from ecology to psychoanalysis, pedagogy to politics, art and literature to philosophy, and much else besides, it enacts its main argument: that we need to open up in mind and body to a dynamic, unpredictable and desirous interweaving with nature. For that way lies true wellbeing for us and the world."" Dr Simon Richard Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Theology/Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, Christ Church University ""Drawing from multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives, e.g., psychoanalysis, phenomenology and political ecology, the authors take an important critical position on the issues of both planetary and human psychological health. They argue that the characteristics of modern, socio-political living create an alienation of humans from the world which sustains them. To counteract the illusion of separateness (for that’s what it is) requires conditions for genuine encounters with the other, not just welcoming the familiar, but letting the world enter into oneself and being changed by it. This volume has a vital and urgent message: in order to effect difference, we must find a way of being different and that will entail rediscovery of our human wildness."" Joe Hinds, Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling, University of Greenwich. Co-Author of Ecotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice