First days

Any effect has a cause. If the effect is to be removed, the cause must be removed. If one does not know the cause, or if it is not possible to remove it, one can only act on the effect, so as to mitigate it. But then we are reduced to mere palliation, and the situation is not fundamentally resolved. If circumstances permit, the same cause may reactivate the same effect, and palliative means may have their own effet-pervers.

Ecology does not escape this rule. Without going back to the root causes of the current impasse, the problem is not fundamentally solved. We can only stop the process, and again. Palliative measures to minimize environmental damage may be systematically overcome by indifference, impatience, forgetting, accidents, increasing consumer demands, etc. With the economic development of the Third World, and the foreseeable demographic expansion, the planet could be irrecoverable before the necessary changes could be implemented.

All the more so since pro-ecological measures are most often against personal interests, so they are confronted with colossal inertia forces involving billions of individuals. If we want to stop the mechanics, it is essential to know the psychological causes that have created the current situation and make us dependants on it.

Humanity seems to be the first dominant species to destroy its own biotope. It all happens as if the laws of harmony, which are the direct result of the laws of evolution (or divine laws for creationists), were inevitably undermined by man. Adam, the alleged guardian of the Garden of Eden, was made the first depredator…

The origins of this situation are not simple. There are immediate causes, lack of awareness among industry and the public, economic interests, unbridled advertising, insufficient legislation. There are also deeper causes: greed, egocentrism, fear of effort, difficulty predicting the effet-pervers of an invention. But we can go up the causal chain even higher.

For example, environmentalists criticize the priority given to economic interests at the expense of the planet and readily accuse general selfishness. This implies that selfishness would be a constitutional defect tainting human nature and should be combated by a moralizing discourse. Human ecogenetics aims to overcome such stereotypes, which have been largely inefficent. It raises the crucial question of the root causes of selfishness as it prevails in our society: what are the factors likely to place an excessive ego in our psychic structures?

It is therefore necessary to undertake psychological or psychoanalytic research into the psychodynamic origins of the hypertrophy of the ego and its consequences in terms of anti-ecological behaviour. Or on the environmental origin of this type of structure (knowing that the environment includes both the physical environment and the psychological and social environment).

This does not prevent all practical measures to limit environmental damage from being taken immediately. But she puts man at the centre of her analysis, and wonders about the still obscure roots of psychic dysfunctions, even in cases where they are considered normal because they are usual. It comes at the same time to describe what the natural functioning of psychism would be.

In summary, the ultimate goal of human ecogenetics is defined as the search for the root causes of ecological disorders in the functions and dysfunctions of human psychism and their specific origins.