America’s Therapists Counsel Us To
America’s Therapists Counsel Us To Get over 9/11
It is a tendency of the human mind to forget painful events. Acquainting patients with their past is often a difficult task of psychotherapy for it involves re-experiencing forgotten pain. It is true for groups as well as individuals that the pain of traumatic experiences tends to succumb to rewriting and effacement or even to being altogether jettisoned down the sink hole of history. And yet the avoidance of reality extracts a heavy price, often in the form of a tendency to repeat in ever more painful ways the original trauma. Like many New Yorkers I saw from a safe distance the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of thousands of innocents. This national trauma inflicted on us in our own home by murderous barbarians requires remembrance in all its horror in order for us to mobilize the necessary will to overcome our enemies. And what is the response of the representatives of our therapeutic culture? Here is a sample in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:
In clinical work, the "anniversary reaction" is a well-recognized
consequence of trauma. On the anniversary of a traumatic event, a
victim may re-experience the emotions and, at times, "flashbacks" of
the episode itself.
As Eric Mink points out (Op-Ed, Aug. 30), the TV industry will do the
nation and its citizens a major disservice if the horrifying images
of Sept. 11 are once again beamed into our homes.
Many people nowhere near Lower Manhattan were victimized by the
repetition of dramatic footage on television. These included many
children who reported nightmares months after the event.
Repeated traumatization by re- exposure to these events by dramatic
repetitions of these images will not contribute to our ability to
place these events into historical perspective and allow people to
work through their personal traumas. These efforts at resolution are
all the more difficult at a time when talk of war and further threats
is so prevalent.
RICHARD P. FOX, M.D.
Dennis, Mass., Aug. 30, 2002
The writer is a former president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association.
Thus the goal is to get over it, to “place these events in historical perspective” thereby draining them of their immediacy and diminishing our awareness of the actual individual lives destroyed. We should all make efforts at “resolution”, so hard to do when we are reminded, for example, of two year old Christine Hanson on her way to Disneyland aboard one of the planes when terrorists brutally murdered the flight attendants, then the crew, before plowing into the WTC while her parents Peter and Kim Hanson tried to calm her. No, the ‘victimization’ has not been inflicted by television but rather by the Islamofascists who carried out the attack. This cant thinking must be confronted at every turn. The challenge is not for Americans to “work though” their traumatic experiences but to eliminate the enemy which inflicted the trauma. This is why in the past such slogans as “Remember Pearl Harbor”, “Remember the Maine”, “Remember the Alamo” have served to brace and sustain us in a way that “work through your personal trauma” can never do. For now, let our slogan be “Remember the World Trade Center” and let the remembrances never cease until we have finally triumphed.
