<p>With notable exceptions, it is only in the last three decades that increasing concern around the dire consequences of climate change has spurred psychoanalysis to begin addressing the relationship between the human psyche and its non-human environment. This paper attempts to show that this relative lack of engagement may have its roots in the post-Enlightenment Western cultural imagination, which envisaged this relationship almost solely in conflictual terms. In contrast, this conflict was not only absent in the Indian cultural imagination but nature, especially the forest, was envisaged as essential for the leading of a full life. <i>Vanaprastha</i>, “retreat to the forest”, is the stage of life where the older person is enjoined to detach themselves from the life of a “householder” and retreat to a forest hermitage to contemplate wider social and existential concerns. The writings of Rabindranath Tagore, who perceptively explored the difference between the Indian and European cultural imaginations of nature, suggest that nature is an integral part of our “erotic field”, the land of life-giving and life-sustaining forces in which we spend our lives and whose drying out is most acutely felt in loneliness and in our imagination of death and dying. The article further suggests that mining the Indian cultural imagination can lead to an expansion of the analytic model of the person that includes nature as well as a reassessment of the ideas on the nature of the unconscious id.</p>