Mary-Jayne Rust is a Jungian analyst and art therapist based in London, and one of the UK’s leading voices in ecopsychology — the field examining how personal psychological distress and the ecological crisis are entangled with one another. Her article “Ecopsychology: Seeking Health in an Ailing World” was published in Resurgence magazine in February 2004, and is available as a free download from her own site.
Drawing on case studies from her own therapy practice, Rust explores how clients’ psychological distress can be read as symbiotic with the state of the wider living world — grief, anxiety and numbness that make more sense once they’re understood as ecological as well as personal. The piece argues that therapy which stays confined to the purely interpersonal misses this dimension entirely, and that psychotherapy itself needs to widen its frame to include our relationship with the more-than-human world.
She has continued this work since, including Towards an Ecopsychotherapy (Confer Books, 2020) and further writing on “Creating Psychotherapy for a Sustainable Future” (Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2004). Her own site, mjrust.net, is worth exploring further — a rich, current set of links across ecopsychology, art and image, and Jungian practice.