Ecopsychology
From Wikipedia:
“The basic idea of ecopsychology is that while the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, [it can not be understood in isolation from] the wider natural world, because that is the arena in which it originally evolved. Mental health or unhealth cannot be understood simply in the narrow context of only intrapsychic phenomena or social relations. One also has to include the relationship of humans to other species and ecosystems. These relations have a deep evolutionary history; reach a natural affinity within the structure of their brains and they have deep psychic significance in the present time, in spite of urbanization. Humans are dependent on healthy nature not only for their physical sustenance, but for mental health, too. The destruction of ecosystems means that something in humans also dies.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecopsychology
How does homeopathy relate?
Well homeopathy has recognized for 200 years, that every substance – be it of the natural world or not, can be anthropomorphized or related to human behavior through the homeopathic method of provings. What that means, in essence, is that in relationship to humans, every substance in nature has a personality, in terms of physical, mental and emotional symptoms when taken homeopathically. These are refered to as homeopathic pictures – and they can refer to any aspect of health or disease. There are substances when made into homeopathic remedies that have aspects of nausea and certain aches and pains; and that is what they are used in turn to treat. But there are similarly remedies made from substances that have other more subtle aspects, such as exhibiting the behaviour of a type A personality (Nux-vomica being an example). These remedies, when taken by an individual who is sensitive to the characteristics of that particular remedy, will exhibit those very behavioral, physical, mental and emotional symptoms that are unique to that remedy. Likewise, someone else who is typically a type A personality, would benefit from taking that same remedy; their behavior would in turn become balanced; they might not necessarily stop being a type A personality (that isn’t exactly a disease after all), but they would find themselves a healthier, more balanced version of who they are (in this case, of a type A personality). And so, if they were suffering from lack of sleep, over-excitability, over working themselves, burning the candle at both ends, suffering from insomnia, irritability, etc., they would find themselves in turn, going to bed for a change, taking better care of themselves, while experiencing better health, both physically and mentally. All this while still remaining no less a type A personality, albeit a healthy version of one.
And thus, Ecopsychology – or rather, the psychology of ecology, is in truth, no different then the study of homeopathy. True, homeopathy is the system of medicine based on treating similars – a symptom present in a human, with a remedy from nature that exhibits a similar symptom in a healthy individual. But the homeopathic materia medica – the description of the remedies used in its practice, is essentially a whose who of the natural world. Much of what is described therein, is strangely enough found to support much of what we know as the symbolic world and natural archetypes. In other words, we call a certain tree a weeping willow, and then find that homeopathically such a tree is useful in cases of depression. Though one may think that homeopaths have jumped to certain conclusions about nature in arriving at such descriptions, this couldn’t be further from the truth; as there is a standardized double blind approach to obtaining homeopathic pictures from new substances. Instead, homeopaths are startled to find that after such proving methods have been used, their symbolical impressions of many natural substances are quite close to the information they obtained through the provings.
And so, one could say that in homeopathy we find a detailed description of the natural world as a symbolical world – rich with personality, physicality, emotion, and feeling. Perhaps this for you, as it does for me, suggests a natural world full of humanity – or dare I say, a world that was mistaken for being human, waking up to its true nature.
All of a sudden, man realizes that he’s had it completely backward this entire time; after all, it isn’t a natural world full of humanity, but rather simply, a natural world (period), no matter where one looks. You can not differentiate the human world from its environment – nature has no boundary, or limitations.
Perhaps you can not separate the human world from its environment, and it’s all Nature, but surely there still is some distinction to be had in that natural world? Certainly!
Psychology and Psychiatry
As the branch of medical science that deals with the causes, treatment, and prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders, psychiatry is differentiated from psychology in its current focus on biochemical approaches to mental health. Whereas psychology approaches the health of the mind with an emphasis on the behavioral and cognitive-emotive dynamics, psychiatry includes that framework in its synthesis as a factor, but only secondary to the biochemical mechanics of the mind. This bias of course, lends to a focus in conventional psychiatry on treating the disorder through medicating the patient based on symptomatology, or in other words, palliation. Historically however, this has not always been the case, as Carl Jung points out in his memoirs, “Freud introduced psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a neurologist,” (p. 114, Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage: 1965). Thus, both Jung and Freud practiced psychiatry in this integrated style that based psychopathology on first understanding the psychology of the patient as the context for the arising imbalance or disharmony. Once the psychology was understood, the treatment could be decided upon based on how the etiology of the disharmony developed from being psychogenic (yang/neurological/functional/psychological/energetic) to organic (yin/biochemical).
Although presently, psychology and psychiatry are often distinctly practiced conventionally, this is not the case in naturopathic medicine, where this integrated paradigm is practiced in regard to all disharmonies and imbalances. The patient is understood as a whole; a physical, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural entity, that lives within other wholes (families, communities, companies, nations, etc.), or holons as Ken Wilber puts it in his Integral Psychology.
