6th December 2025 Lecture

Tragedy, the Climate Crisis and New Beginnings - Paul Hoggett

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 6th December 2025, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk 

Recent psychoanalytic investigations of tragedy suggest the phenomenon is characterised by transgression of limits and an irresistible compulsion rooted in blindness. This also happens to be an appropriate description of the dynamics underlying our deepening climate crisis. Tragedy and horror confront us with difficult truths we prefer not to face but engage with them we must if we are to avoid becoming inhuman. But perhaps we can go further than such stoicism. By exploring the closely connected phenomena of ‘natality’  and ‘vitality’ this presentation will examine the possibility that they offer the possibility of a post-tragic perspective, one which is more reliable and durable than the fickleness of hope. 

Paul Hoggett was co-founder and first chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance. He has recently retired from his psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice and is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol. His most recent book, from which this presentation partly draws, is Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition, Simplicity Institute, 2023.