From dissociation to integration: the value of the 'green factor'

This paper will focus on what the author calls the 'green factor': the 'plant world's' ability to foster and manifest profound healing and self-healing processes. This factor could be considered an element capable of promoting the analytic couple's journey in individuation through a good enough rhythmical interaction. Such interaction is made possible by creating and maintaining, in therapy, a good level of empathy, mirroring and resonance that - echoing natural cyclical rhythms primarily in non-verbal communication - fosters the passage from dissociation to integration. This dynamic depends mainly on paying constant attention to the various kinds of images referring to nature, both inside and outside ourselves, i.e. attention on the green world that reconnects us with the wider ecosystem of which we human beings form a part. The author suggests that remembering and respecting the profound relationship between 'Mind and Earth' or Psyche and Gaia means developing and cultivating an ecological attitude or eco-oriented epistemology, a theory according to which, individual wellbeing can be considered a fragment of the health of our planet, in the same way as the individual anima is a spark of anima mundi. This theory has been embraced by numerous scholars ranging from Jung to Bateson, Mancuso and Schore.