A Psychohistorical Retrospective on September 11, 2001 (article)

Psychoanalytic and psychohistorical concepts provide useful tools for gaining insight into the reactions to and impact of 9/11. Living 26 miles away from the George Washington Bridge, the Manhattan skyline is in plain view in the normal course of my doing errands. As a psychoanalyst, I have been trained in using my own feelings, fantasies, and experiences to understand those of others, while as a psychohistorian I use the methodology of an Eriksonian participant observer as my prime investigative methodology. Terror is something I had experienced during the Cuban Missile Crisis decades before the events of 9/11. In studying the motivations of Islamic terrorists I realized that they communicated their own sense of anger, fear, and rage onto America and me. The terrorists had achieved their goal to the extent that in the aftermath of 9/11 we in the metropolitan New York area awakened fearfully, feeling angry, and thinking of retribution. As much as we hated the thought, they had won.

In response to the World Trade Center attacks I did what I have trained to do as a psychohistorian and psychoanalyst. I focused on the emotions those around me and I felt. I intensely studied terrorism and its impacts; I deepened my study of Islamic society; I published on the impact of terrorism and the Bushes’ wars in the Journal of Psychohistory, I published articles on psychological issues including mourning and the terrorists mostly in 2001 and 2002, I sponsored

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meetings on these subjects from 2002-2009, and on four occasions I taught a course on the subject. I examined Islamic demonization of the U.S. and similar tendencies by Americans. “Educational therapy” helped me deal with the powerful emotions induced by terrorism. I also wanted to set an example for my students, whom I had counseled for hours after my college closed on September 11^th. Helping students to understand their own fears, feelings, and fantasies in courses, including War, Peace, and Conflict Resolution; 9/11 and the Psychology of Terrorism; and Psychohistory was also part of getting them to go from feeling like passive victims to active learners in the global drama of terrorism.¹

Psychological insights are necessary to explain how such an educated society could be so blind regarding the threat of international terrorism. The terrorism of September 11, 2001 came as a tremendous shock to America and has had an enormous impact on New York City, the United States, and the world. While it is true that we can say that these attacks should not have been a shock because of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bombings of U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East and Africa, and two 1999 books warning in their titles of dangers from Osama bin Laden who had declared war on America, the fact remains that they were a surprise because of the enormous power of the mechanism of defense of denial.

Denial, displacement, projection, intellectualization, regression, repression, and suppression are some of the defense mechanisms utilized by people in metropolitan New York City and America. These coping mechanisms and other psychological concepts help us understand the events of 9/11 and their impact. Although it is tempting to condemn or feel superior to those utilizing denial and certain other defenses for short sightedness, it is important to note that in itself denial can literally save the lives or the sanity of individuals in the face of catastrophe, combat, death of loved

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ones, or genocide, by enabling them to function effectively amidst the worst horrors of life and death.

Denial took many forms. The denial of a talented colleague whose apartment building in lower Manhattan is alongside of the Twin Towers was striking. She was going about her morning routine on 9/11 with her two-year-old daughter when she heard a large noise she presumed was a car accident. When she saw people looking up from the street she assumed there was an explosion in one of the towers, prompting her to call her mate to tell him that “we were fine, nothing to worry about.” Friends and family immediately started calling and again they were reassured that “everything was fine, there was just this fire in one of the towers but it was going to be put out soon.” She called her “mom” in Europe to assure her “that no matter what she heard on the news, we were okay.” In reassuring others she was attempting to assure herself that the safety of her home would not be violated.

A second noise led her to run to the window to see “another huge ball of fire coming from the second tower.” This prompted her to go to the windowless kitchen to avoid the disturbing sights and to make waffles—a comfort food. When she did look out a window the “things”—they seemed like “pieces of paper”—she saw flying out of the holes of the towers would turn out to be people jumping, but in her state of excitement and denial, this did not register at the time. When what was before her eyes was too horrible to acknowledge, denial shielded her from it. When the news referred to a third plane coming she ran to her neighbors and only reluctantly left her apartment building after the thunderous sounds of the first tower collapsing to go through a swirling dark cloud of smoke and dust as she fled to New Jersey carrying her baby.²

It was no lack of intelligence causing the multiple in-

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stances of denial of the dangers demonstrated above by this highly intelligent and sophisticated colleague, educated in Greece, France, and the U.S. Rather, it was a reluctance to think about the unthinkable. This disinclination was general in our society on the morning of September 11, 2001. In their ten-page “Reaction Papers to 9/11” invariably my students spoke of their denial as reflected by some of the following comments. One wrote, “I could not believe my ears…I yelled ‘Holy shit!’ [it had to be] simply an accident…” Another wrote that, “We both laughed it off.” A third, “I behaved in total denial by pulling the covers over my head and burrowing under the covers for the comfort of blessed unconsciousness.” A fourth student’s “mind could not register” that the people in the towers were all dead.

Denial extended (and in so many ways continues to extend) to every level of our society. The highest officials of our government declared for at least a month that no one could imagine terrorists flying planes into buildings even though this scenario had been discussed in testimony by terrorism experts in congressional hearings as early as the late 1980s. The endless repetition of images of the two planes flying into the World Trade Center served numerous psychological needs, not the least of which was to combat the inclination of viewers to deny—to think (and hope) that this was all just a bad dream from which they would soon awaken. Seeing the actual extent of the damage also helped to limit the apocalyptic fears provoked by the attacks. The wildly inaccurate statistics bandied about in the media on 9/11 served the same purpose. Even if 10,000 people were killed in the attacks this meant that all of New York’s over seven million people were not dead! Apocalyptic fears diminished over time.

In the face of the horror of the devastatingly successful attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, people felt an overwhelming need to connect with loved ones, each

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other, and the victims. Knowing that others were experiencing the same catastrophe somehow made it more real. The phones rang off the hooks and the cell phone networks were overwhelmed. There were contradictory impulses both to get close to the destruction and to run away from it. As the World Trade Center buildings burned and began to fall, police and people fleeing from them in terror literally had to warn women pushing baby carriages running toward the towers,³ as people have run to the scenes of fires and other catastrophes since time in memorial. On television the nation and world could emotionally run to these disasters in the safety of homes, colleges, restaurants, workplaces, and so forth.

Some people felt compelled to go to Ground Zero even as the buildings were falling. A student just “had to go” despite his mother’s attempt to restrain him. As he wrote in his “Reaction to 9/11 Paper,” he had to be there when “the world changed,” going from New Jersey on that Tuesday afternoon with a friend at a time when only vital personnel were supposed to be allowed into Manhattan. “Covered in pure hell” [the dust of the site] he and his friend were mistakenly thought to be amateur rescuers and sent home. He then “felt stunned and somewhat catatonic.” His motivation appeared to have been the desire to see the destruction himself so he could say he was a part of an historic event.

A former student, who had been a rescuer at the 1993 World Trade Center Terrorist bombing as a volunteer ambulance corps member, had to be specifically ordered in the strongest terms not to go with her ambulance corps because of her obligations as a police dispatcher in the suburbs. Subsequently, her life was organized around going to the funerals of firemen (she is also a firefighter and comes from a family of firemen), police, and medics killed in the collapse of the towers. Her motivation was based on her identification as a rescuer, intense desire to be part of the action, and then solidarity with her deceased “brothers.” Completion of

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her college degree became a casualty of 9/11.

While some people were drawn to the events and site of the attacks of September 11^th, others were repulsed. Three phobic responses come to mind. The young adult son of a neighbor across the street left his job in “dangerous” New York City to move to San Francisco where he thought he would be safer. The mother who worked in a Manhattan high-rise building, whose young child was in my daughter’s care during working hours, quit her job and refused to ever go back into “the City.” A student was so terrorized by uncertainty about her father’s safety at his job in mid-Manhattan that after 9/11 she developed a phobia making it difficult for her to drive to college and to sit in a classroom. Determination, psychotherapy, and “writing therapy” enabled her to stay in class as long as she sat in the seat closest to the door.⁴

Identification is a powerful coping mechanism. From our infancy we learn by identifying with our mothers, fathers, siblings, caretakers, teachers, and others around us. On September 11^th my goal was to use the terrorist attacks as an “educational moment” working to set an example for my students of rational inquiry amidst societal hysteria.⁵ Though the students talked of their disbelief, shock, fear, and anger, the most intense focus was on who had a parent, relative, friend, neighbor, or acquaintance working in the World Trade Center, lower Manhattan, New York City, and the Pentagon with whom they identified. Individuals and groups got caught up in a type of “victim Olympics”—presenting their wounds, their traumas, as evidence of greater suffering entitling them, in their minds, to special status and treatment.⁶

There was identification with the aggressor on and after 9/11. In some parts of the Arab world, among Palestinians on the West Bank for example, there was some cheering

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as the events unfolded. After Osama bin Laden became famous for 9/11 there were widespread reports of Osama becoming the most popular male name in the Pashtun sections of Pakistan and some other Islamic areas. Rumors of glee in the Arabic section of Paterson in New Jersey abounded, but were not confirmed. It is unclear to me if this phenomenon represented pure projection on the part of Americans wanting to find an enemy closer to home than Afghanistan, or if some reactions of a few immigrants and resident aliens were hushed up by the government and media wanting to avert a lynch mob mentality. In America, there have been several cases of people converting to jihadist Islam.

Conversion to Islam in the U.S increased sharply for reasons that are not clear to me beyond most Americans becoming much more aware of its existence and impressed with the religious devotion of many Muslims. Two years after 9/11, I spoke with a student in my Holocaust course about her recent conversion to Islam. This very nice, blond-haired, blue-eyed, suburban girl of distant Germanic ancestry said that she had converted because she was extremely impressed with the religiosity of the Islamic family that lived next door to her. America discovered that there are some millions of its citizens, immigrants, and resident aliens who looked to Mecca for religion. The President and the media worked hard to distinguish between “good Muslims” and terrorists making public appearances with Islamic leaders.⁷ Nevertheless, several Sikhs were killed by bigots who mistakenly thought they were Muslims. Similarly, a historian colleague at my college with a Muslim name had Islamophobic graffiti written on his office door on a regular basis. Partly in response to these hateful actions, at my college in public forums, political correctness was loudly voiced in insisting that jihad means internal spiritual struggle, thus making it difficult to speak realistically about the relationship of Islam to terrorism.

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Projection runs rampant in moments of crisis and trauma as in desperation, people project their fears and hopes onto the situation. My colleague who lived across from the Twin Towers finally fled with her baby when she believed the fantasy, the rumor bandied about in the media of a third plane flying into the towers. On the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, popular talk radio programs projected guilt for the terrorism on an Arabic businessman, fantasized to be the bomber, who flew across the U.S. and then to London. To their surprise, the perpetrator was an American named Timothy McVeigh who had been awarded medals for his service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq. When President Bush got word of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center, he declared, “We are at war!” Of course he did not know with who we were “at war.” He projected his own cowardice onto the 19 suicide bombers of 9/11 when he denounced them as cowards.⁸

The need for enemies was never as apparent to me as on that beautiful September day marred by suicide attacks. When in June 1999 as a campaigner for the presidency, George Walker Bush had commented that it seems strange to no longer have the Soviet Union as our enemy, I wondered if he had a need for enemies, but I refused to rush to judgment. After learning of his first reaction to 9/11 from a statement by Karl Rove, there was no doubt that he needed enemies in times of stress. Enemies can be a great advantage to politicians because they make it easy to provide a simplistic black and white view of the world to the public. Social scientists have long known that the clarity of life in wartime is quite reassuring to most people. Indeed, in World War I and II, America’s home-front death rates went down and there was less illness. George Walker Bush found enemies in Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. To capture and punish the Saudi Arabian terrorist he declared he wanted “Dead or Alive” and for whom he posted a twenty-five million dollar

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reward, he only sent the CIA, some Special Forces, and some Northern Alliance soldiers. By contrast to get the Iraqi President, who had nothing to do with causing September 11^th and who had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, our commander in chief sent the full force of the U. S. military.

Attacking Hussein was a case of displacement, but not in the classic case of the defense mechanism of displacement, which often takes the form of kicking your dog when you’re mad at your boss, but as a political slight of hand. Bush’s enmity focused on the Iraqi president because of his personal need to both avenge and surpass his father who had defeated, but not gotten rid of Hussein.⁹ However, the American president could only do this because of the anger felt by the citizenry in response to 9/11. In effect, he was given a free pass to go to war. Though Bush subsequently insisted that he did not say that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington, as late as 2004 up to 70 percent of Americans still thought this was the case because of his insistence that the war on Iraq was vital to the war on terror.

The grant to President Bush of the power to go to war was also a reflection of regressive tendencies in society. Americans rallied around the flag and its main standard holder—the President. September 11^th prompted an enormous surge of patriotism as represented by U.S. flags on buildings, cars, lawns, pins, and tattoos. In times of crisis, danger, and fear, leaders are granted far more discretionary power because their increased strength lessens the fear and trembling among the followers. This shift in power encouraged the fantasy that all was possible in the White House of our 43^rd President and encouraged the millennial fantasy, as expressed in the 2002 State of the Union Address, that he had the power to confront the worldwide “axis of evil.” John Rogers, writing for “The Psychology of Terrorism and Mourning September 11^th” Special Issue of Clio’s Psyche,

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argues that the enormous emphasis on the heroic firefighters and police of New York City represented a collective regression: Americans became like children in their idealization.¹⁰

Finding enemies and going to war enabled people to suppress or repress the enormous fear that surfaced with the attacks. For many people, the conscious effort at suppression of fear slips into an unconscious repression over time. Of course, repressed feelings are inclined to break through, much to the surprise of those who thought they were forgotten. Fears are often covered by grandiosity. A grandiose sense of self and power, whether individual or collective, is a cloak for disclaimed fears and other feelings. In the late fall of 2001 the virtual disappearance of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden without even an initial American casualty,¹¹ encouraged the fantasy that American power was unstoppable. Totally ignored was the history of warfare in Afghanistan, mountain regions generally, and the American Revolution against Britain. In these situations of asymmetrical power, guerrilla war involves receding from the field of combat and then subsequently “bleeding” the much stronger enemy. Before long the Bush administration was planning its next war, indeed, the war they were talking about as soon as they took over the presidency in January 2001.¹² In 2004, after the easy victory over Saddam Hussein’s army, leaders in our administration were thinking of going to war against Syria or Iran because of a grandiose sense of unlimited power.

On September 11^th the U.S. was shocked and awed. It was no accident that the policy for defeating the armies of Saddam Hussein was called “Shock and Awe.” For the pain caused to Americans, especially the American military with its proud tradition, there was a strong desire to retaliate by shocking and awing the enemy in Iraq. This easy victory made Americans feel so strong that former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld thought he could radically reshape the Army while ignoring the pleas of Secretary of State Powell (a for-

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mer Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and of General Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army, who got fired for his honesty in stating the military requirements of the situations.

Intellectualization is a mechanism of defense used quite extensively. For example, military planners discuss collateral damage without reference to flesh and blood human beings who are killed in the process. Such collateral damage contributes to why, in public opinion polls, a majority of Iraqis consider it proper to shoot at American soldiers. The killing of American soldiers by “friendly fire” is another intellectualized, propagandistic manner, of describing killing by your own forces. One of Freud’s greatest contributions was to heal the split between mind and body that has plagued Western thought since Descartes. We psychohistorians are not immune from these tendencies. As intellectuals, we need to be careful that we do not fall into the trap of intellectualization, totally separating feelings from thought and mind from body.

Ground Zero, which became a sacred site, had mesmerized the country while burning, collapsing into a pile ten stories high and smoldering. The vaporization of thousands sanctified the site turning it into a tourist attraction and a source of great controversy as different people and interest groups struggle to use it for their own ends. President Bush used it on September 14, 2001 when at it, he put his arm around a fireman with U.S. warplanes flying overhead and vowed that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” The nonpartisan 9/11 Commission skillfully used the emotional appeal of the testimony of the relatives of those killed at Ground Zero to help influence public policy regarding terrorism. The identity of a younger generation is declared to have been shaped by the events. In the fall of 2001 Newsweek was discussing the “9/11 Generation,” Reissman soon wrote a book on it, and in

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2007, Rudolph Giuliani used the term on the campaign trail as he ran for president as “America’s Mayor.”

Psychohistorians and psychoanalysts become experts in getting past the self-delusions and reaction formations clouding reality. Sadism and especially schadenfreude, the pleasure at the displeasure of others, are strong impulses growing out of September 11^th however, much disclaimed by the government, media, and American public. Americans had suffered and they wanted al Qaeda and all those harboring its members or sympathetic to its goals to suffer. This popular desire for vengeance encouraged some guards at Abu Graihb to not only humiliate and torture prisoners, but also to proudly photograph these abuses. Sadistic abuses increasingly delegated to the Iraq army and police, under “rendition” of prisoners in foreign countries, and at the Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp have mostly been kept quiet. This is precisely why the Bush administration has used these in an attempt to avoid international agreements and constitutional restrictions on interrogation and torture. Expert psychological testimony that the interrogation methods used in Iraq are amateurish and not very effective, tend to miss the point of the sadism behind them.¹³

Before the smoldering fires of the World Trade Center were put out, I was soliciting articles on the question of how the people of the U.S.A. felt and how they might mourn this devastating event. It was my faint hope that examining the emotional reactions and the question of grief might lessen some people’s inclination to turn hurt, loss, and anger into the desire for vengeance, which empowers a president to go to war. These efforts, and those of various other psychohistorians and psychoanalysts, may have immunized some people against the virus of war. Yet, they were but a drop in the bucket of public opinion as the Bush administration fed the flames of fear, hatred, and war.

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How did it happen that Americans were taken so by surprise? During Clinton’s second term, millions of Americas had narcissistically assumed that, having “won the Cold War,” their country could indulge in the voyeuristic pleasures of examining his sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky as a basis for impeachment. September 11, 2001 shattered America’s sense of invulnerability and threatened its self-image as the one superpower in the world. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Americans bought into the grandiose fantasy that terrorism required a war, rather than intelligence information from around the world and police actions.

The desire of Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, Environmental Protection Administrator Whitman, and others to assure New Yorkers that lower Manhattan was safe after 9/11, encouraged clean-up workers, public employees, and the general public to not take the necessary precautions to protect themselves from a toxic environment. Consequently, many have paid a high price for going along with this collective denial. However, by comparison, the price paid for the psychological costs of the attacks is harder to establish but far more widespread. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is rampant and mostly untreated. Millions of New Yorkers living in what Charles Strozier calls the “zones of sadness” have been left to struggle with the demons within them released by the collapse of the Twin Towers.

The purpose of this article is to show how the events of September 11, 2001 changed the lives of Americans, especially in the areas most directly impacted by the attacks. Starting with the concept of the scholar/professor utilizing disciplined subjectivity to access conscious and unconscious feelings and fantasies, I have examined some responses to this societal trauma from the perspective of the individual, student, group, and country. Psychological tools drawn from psychoanalysis and psychohistory, especially the mechanisms of defense, enable my students and all of us to deal

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more effectively with the horror and powerful emotions stemming from this catastrophe.

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Endnotes:

¹Paul Elovitz, “Teaching About War in Bush’s 21^st Century America,” Vol. 31, no. 1 The Journal of Psychohistory, pp. 2-48.

²Vasiliki Flenga, “Fleeing With My Baby,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 8 no. 3 (December, 2001), pp. 159-160.

³Charles B. Strozier, “The World Trade Center and the Apocalyptic,” p. 46, in Jerry S. Piven et al, eds., Terror and Apocalypse: Psychological Undercurrents of History, Vol. II (Lincoln, NE: Writers Showcase, 2002).

⁴Jaclyn Dilling, “Holding onto 9/11,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 10. no. 4 (March, 2004), pp. 154-155.

⁵This was the automatic response of a seasoned professor and psychohistorian. I did not feel especially successful at the time.

⁶Usually, “victim olympics” is discussed in terms of ethnic and national groups but the same psychological processes apply to individuals. In groups, this can readily lead to the mistreatment of others, as in the case of the Serbs under Miloševic. Vamik Volkan writes about this most extensively in a variety of books including Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts (Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishers, 2006.

⁷There was subsequent embarrassment as some of the “good Muslims” were tied to funding terrorist organizations in the Middle East.

⁸Herbert Barry, “Denigrating Terrorists as Cowards,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 8 no. 4 (March 2002), p. 195.

⁹“Teaching About War,” p. 9.

¹⁰H. John Rogers, “The Infantilization of the American People,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 8 no. 4 (March 2002), pp. 200-201.

¹¹The first casualty occurred in a prison where an undercover operative was killed.

¹²Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (2004).

¹³Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, “Advisors Fault Harsh Methods in Interrogation,” New York Times (May 30, 2007): pp. A1-A12.