Chris Packham’s urgent, intimate and political appeal in ‘Is It Time to Break The Law?’ (Channel 4) is profoundly uncomfortable and rousing viewing. A necessary and landmark piece of television where politics and the deeply personal are vividly intertwined. Reviewed as “beyond merely thought provoking” (Jack Seale, The Guardian) Packham wrestles with his frustration that a life’s work as a conservationist has fallen on deaf ears and urges us to find new ways to be heard as, his desperation laid bare, he seeks to do the same. Perhaps it is in the face of his vulnerability that I feel able to expose myself and raise my voice publicly in writing for the first time. Psychoanalytic ideas offer a perspective that is underexplored in mainstream media and so it is here, in this (re)quest for new ground, that I feel compelled to share a perspective and response to his central question “Is it time to break the law?”. When, like Packham, we seem to be going round in circles, psychoanalysis can offer an interruption, a space for something new to emerge. And we must find something new. We must interrupt this deathly inertia.

“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety”

(Freud, 1930 “Civilisation and Its Discontents”)