Psychohistorical Insights on Remembering September 11th

It will be a long time before we have the emotional and historical distance to best judge the political, psychological, and societal impact on America and world history of the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, being able to reflect after eight years does provide an inkling of how our society has changed as a consequence. At the Psychohistory Fo-

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rum’s September 12^th meeting, “The Psychology of Remembering 9/11: The Uses and Abuses of Trauma,” there was an extraordinary energy and intellectual involvement. This mood stemmed from more than the insightful and stimulating presentations by David Beisel and Danielle Knafo, as well as the comments of those in attendance. (As usual, papers were sent out prior to the meeting, including one by this author.) Three crucial stimulants were the location, the participants, and the continued, but more distant, societal focus on the subject.

From the 15^th floor balcony of the conference room of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) on Eight Avenue and West 14^th Street, Margery Quackenbush, psychoanalyst and NAAP Director, had viewed the horror of the collapsing twin towers on that beautiful Tuesday morning eight years ago. In addition, several of the participants at our meeting had twice written about their therapeutic work to meliorate some of the trauma of those days. Psychoanalyst, artist, and author Robert Quackenbush worked with rescuers in the months after the 9/11 attacks and continues to worry that some who searched in the smoldering rubble for their “brother” rescuers may have succumbed to lung diseases or suffered serious effects of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In our discussion, Robert acknowledged he was in grief because the eighth anniversary of the events of 9/11 was the day before the September 12^th meeting—recollections of the event were still prominent in his mind. This was evident to everyone when David Beisel told how a veteran from the Iraq War attended one of his courses and described in detail to the class the horrors he experienced in the war. Nevertheless at the end of the term he chose to reenlist. It was also evident when Ken Fuchsman talked about a recent reunion he had with some of the members of

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his squad during the Vietnam War—how they were all still haunted by the memory of the death during their service. Quackenbush was so moved by these accounts that he had trouble speaking, becoming tearful when he gave his observations on what had been said. He wondered if the reason the Iraq War veteran’s decision to reenlist was facilitated by being allowed in Beisel’s class to speak his mind, unburdening himself. In thinking back on his own period in the military, as he listened to Professor Fuchsman, he felt certain that many men who served in the military during war time are haunted by memories from those times because their memories are connected to their youth and the innocence and feelings of entrapment that goes with being called into the service.

In the course of our discussion, psychotherapist Irene Javors vividly described the incredible psychic disruption of employees and the incapacity to work in a company whose office location gave a full view of the terror that day. She was called in to help because the employees had regressed to the state of feeling like terrorized children. Accordingly Irene, who was used to working one-on-one in her office rather than with groups, decided to work on providing a sense of security, as she would for children.

American society has gained a certain distance from that day of being the target of suicide bombers. Less psychic energy by society as a whole appears to be devoted to arguing about the nature of the memorial site. Society’s focus at the moment is much more on economics, health care, and whether our new president, elected amidst so many messianic fantasies, will lead us in the direction of dystopia or utopia.

With typical humility, focusing on his students and using the Eriksonian method of disciplined subjectivity, Professor Beisel described his own denial on 9/11 when, during class that day, a student told him of a plane flying into the World Trade Center. He told his class it was almost certainly

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a case of a plane accidentally flying into the building as one did to the Empire State Building in the fog of 1948. He only later, and reluctantly, accepted the horrible reality when his students brought news of the second plane crashing into the second tower, followed up by word of the attack on the Pentagon and rumors of a third plane about to hit New York City. David related his denial to the lethargy experienced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, as well as to Joseph Stalin’s retreat into the Kremlin after the shock of the attack on the Soviet Union by the forces of his ally Adolf Hitler on June 22, 1941.

David Beisel, who has won many awards for his outstanding pedagogy, described how the day before our meeting he worked in his classes to get his students to probe the traumatic events of eight years before psychohistorically. He began by writing on the board the words “history,” “memory,” “remembering,” forgetting,” “ignoring,” “memorials,” “memorializing,” “myth,” “ritual,” and “fantasy,” and then encouraged the students to discuss those words in the context of 9/11.

Beisel has spent recent years focusing on the societal impact of group trauma and did an excellent job of putting the “Remembering 9/11” focal point in historical perspective. He suggested setting up a category of ”Surprise Attack Trauma,” bringing our attention to the surprise attacks of the Japanese in 1904 on the Russians in Port Arthur and in December of 1941 on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. He reminded us of how traumas are utilized in American history by citing the slogans: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” “Remember the Maine!” and “Remember the Alamo!” (Should you not have gone through the American school system, or were daydreaming in history class at the time, the sinking of the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor refers to the justification for touching off the war against Spain in 1898, while the Alamo

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is a reference to the American citizens living under Mexico’s rule, who died at the Alamo in the course of their 1836 rebellion against Mexico.) The blood of the beloved countrymen thus becomes the battle cry to justify wars of vengeance, retaliation, imperialism, and aggression.

World War II traumatized America to the extent where they felt the need to have a presidential commander-in-chief with military experience; consequently, all nine Cold War presidents were veterans. During the Cold War, the two great powers were reacting to being traumatized by the separate surprise attacks of 1941—Operation Barbarossa on June 22 and almost six months later, the attack on Pearl Harbor. The impact of these surprise attacks was so great that a few years after the demise of the Axis Powers in World War II, Russia and the United States devoted the next 40 years to defending against a similar catastrophe while making plans on how to win a thermonuclear war by beating the other side to the punch in a surprise attack. American school kids learned to “duck and cover” under their school desks in the hope that would save them nuclear destruction. While Beisel did not directly focus much on the paranoia of the Cold War period, it was certainly implicit.

In the course of our subsequent discussion, Professor Beisel pointed out that as much as the British consciously prepared for German bombing in World War II, the emotional shock was enormous when the Blitz actually began. In the end, members of the general population could not really prepare themselves emotionally. During the Blitz, there was also the phenomenon of many people, not only Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, because of their utter fascination with the carnage and fires, risked their lives by insisting on going up to the roofs of houses as the bombs fell.

Professor and psychoanalyst Danielle Knafo’s paper, “Learning from Israel, Open to Life,” highlighted the psychological aspects of 9/11 and trauma. She pointed out that

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the psychological literature demonstrates that not everyone who experiences a disruptive event, as she prefers to call it, comes away clearly traumatized. For example, only about 35% of those surviving Nazi concentration camps fit the clinical definition of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. However, if they subsequently suffer setbacks in life the symptoms may surface. Having just returned from Israel, she gave an example of an Israeli survivor who functioned very well until a variety of health problems and heart surgery led her to describe her psychic condition with the words, “Now, every day I’m in Auschwitz!” Professor Knafo passed around a copy of her lengthy 2004-edited book, Living with Terror, Working with Trauma: A Clinician’s Handbook, to which a variety of distinguished authors contributed their expertise.

Dr. Knafo distinguished between aggression and violence. She said that in aggression, one is aware of the identity of the aggressor and this awareness allows preparation to defend oneself practically and psychologically. In the case of violence, the threat is masked, hidden, and nonspecific. One is taken by surprise and thus feels trapped and unprotected. Most importantly, there is not a sense of having a choice of behavior to defend oneself. Terrorism, unlike combat situations, creates a violent world, a world in which the enemy can be anywhere and attack at any time.

She lauded my paper’s emphasis on the mechanisms of defense (“A Psychohistorical Retrospective on September 11, 2001”), but wished I had more explicitly discussed the defenses of somatization (conversion reactions) and dissociation. She noted the ways in which trauma is stored in different centers of the brain and body. This led to general discussion of the current craze for body piercing and tattooing as ways of reacting to trauma and of getting control of the body. Knafo gave the example of the Israeli mother, locked in an intense struggle with her teenage daughter. She worried so much about her daughter being killed by terrorists

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that she reversed her position on tattooing when she decided if her daughter was blown up by a bomb her body could at least be identified by the tattoos! Danielle Knafo also noted that Israelis and Palestinians have varying psychological capacities, and experience war and terror differently, with the Palestinians having a much higher rate of casualties. This author commented that the greater casualties are in part a result of having few resources to protect their population, as well as some of their politicians wanting to show their casualties to the world, to gain support as victims.

Rather than give a formal presentation, this author chose to let his lengthy article, “A Psychohistorical Retrospective on September 11, 2001,” express his views. He limited his initial comments primarily to a discussion of how, on the previous day, the eighth anniversary of the attacks, his psychohistory class discussed the impact of those events on themselves. Each and every one of them remembered exactly where they were when they heard of the attacks, although at the time they were mostly ages nine to 13. Consequently they are rightly referred to as the “9/11 Generation.” What the implications of this identification will be for their future support of war in the name of anti-terrorism, remains to be seen, although there is some evidence that they are more hawkish then their elders (Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, Rutgers University, 2008, p. 104).

The discussion became more defuse toward the end of the meeting, with interesting insights on American society, health care, trauma, and war. Irene Javors pointed out that people want magical change without disruption to their lives and that we have been living in the politics of fear. There was the discussion of the privatization of war, with the Halliburton Corporation doing the cooking, instead of having Army chefs. Ken Fuchsman, who ably chaired the meeting, focused on the enduring appeals of battle. He provided vivid

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memories of being stationed in Da Nang during the Vietnam War, waiting for the shelling to get closer and closer. He also addressed how veterans feel when they return home from war to find that the public is oblivious to what they have been through. This author noted that in the current war in Afghanistan soldiers experience terror at the hands of an unseen enemy who blows them up with improvised explosive devices. Danielle spoke quite highly of the award-winning Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir, as one of the best war films of the year—”a great film.”

Fuchsman argued that America has become a “Crazy Eddie Society,” referring to the advertisements of the now defunct Crazy Eddie electronics retailer whose advertisements always ended with the words, “Crazy Eddie, his prices are IN-SA-A-A-A-A-ANE!” By that he meant society’s wanting instant gratification without regard for consequences, as did Crazy Eddie Electronics before it went bankrupt, with its principal owner fleeing the country. The slogan that you can get everything you ever wanted at the guaranteed lowest prices ever, epitomizes a consumer culture sensibility of instant gratification at a bargain. Professor Fuchsman noted the breakdown of cooperation in American society, and the growth of what Richard Hofstadter referred to in his path breaking 1964 article as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

Although many of the subjects were disquieting, all the participants agreed that the meeting was quite valuable. The Psychohistory Forum wishes to express its appreciation to Margery Quackenbush for arranging for the space to hold our meeting in the conference room at the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

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