Psychological Impact of Superstorm Sandy on America: Annihilation Anxiety (article)

Natural and man-made disasters have played out cyclically upon the U.S. national stage over the course of its rise as a global empire. The 2012 Superstorm Sandy that devastated large segments of Long Island, New York, and New Jersey, however, differed from all other regional and national emergencies. Unlike past large-scale crises, this hurricane struck the nation at a most vulnerable historical period, namely during its economic and sociopolitical decline. Viewed within the context of macrohistorical currents, Superstorm Sandy can be readily classified as one of the most psychologically traumatizing natural disasters experienced by the U.S. population in the 21^st century.

The severity of shared psychic trauma, like somatic injury that is sustained at the individual level, cannot be accurately assessed without considering pre-existing conditions (e.g., prior injuries to a group’s sense of cohesion/group-illusion) and survival mechanisms of the subjects in question. This paper theorizes that, given the magnitudes of economic problems, loss of identity, series of man-made and natural disasters, armed conflicts and changing global dynamics, Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath are among the cumulative stressors that have undermined the U.S. group’s defense systems against annihilation anxieties. Superstorm Sandy, when considered within the constellation of macro-level crises that have confronted the U.S. population for more than a decade, has augmented the collapse of the nation’s immortality ideologies.

Impact of Superstorm Sandy at Micro Group Level

In assessing the U.S. population’s emotional disturbances and intrapsychic conflicts that were activated by Superstorm Sandy, the work of Robert Jay Lifton and Lloyd deMause are of indispen-

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sable value. First, the psychological impact of Superstorm Sandy on the directly affected populations—ground zero—of Long Island, New York, and New Jersey has to be examined. Among the core psychological effects of all man-made and natural disasters on survivors are the sense of time collapse and loss of connection with larger life regenerative forces/defense systems against fears of mortality. For example, Lifton, in his interviews and observations of Hiroshima bombing victims, discovered a pervasive phenomenon of what he terms as “psychic numbing.” The sudden confrontation with death and destruction on a massive scale triggers a “psychic closing off” by survivors that is concomitantly experienced with a loss of collective narrative.

The damage that Superstorm Sandy brought is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The damage to infrastructure was extensive: residents of Long Island, New York, and sections of the New Jersey coast not only lost homes, electricity, employment, access to roads, food, and fuel, but were also profoundly dislocated from their geographical place of existence.

At an unconscious level, land that human beings inhabit is experienced as a maternal being—a good mother (“object” in psychoanalytic terminology)—that is internalized during infancy and childhood. In fact, according to Lloyd deMause, emotional attachments to land, nations, and micro and macro communities/groups also are experienced as womb surroundings. Group members project early attachment anxieties, fears, and needs onto modern urban communities. The love we have for our land, for example, like the love of our parental figures in childhood, involves repressing hostilities and death wishes for it. Hence, physical displacement and emotional dislocation of populations from geographical locations are experienced as the loss of the protective womb-mother.

The loss of connection with land and community has far-reaching repercussions within the shared psyche. One of the shared intrapsychic processes that profound loss of cities of residence, vital infrastructures, significant others, or group leaders (and other idealized attachments) triggers is the mobilization of memories organized around fetal, birth, and childhood traumas. For example, as the group experiences the total loss of its community—protective mother—deeply repressed memories of the punitive, demonized

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maternal figures of childhood are activated within the collective unconscious. DeMause has termed this negative internalized entity as the “killer-mother” or “killer-caretaker.” Psychoanalytically, adults experience maternal engulfment anxieties during times of stress that compromise defense systems against the punitive/“bad” parental alter. According to his psychohistorical theory, this shared psychodynamic is activated during periods of socioeconomic growth, as well as crisis situations when the external-environmental changes correspond with perinatal and postnatal psychic shocks imprinted during the fetal and childhood phases of life.

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, mental health professionals have reported that rates of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks are on the rise among the directly affected populations. Published news articles on survivors’ ordeals support key data on Acute Traumatic Stress and Post Traumatic Stress Disorders that prominent social scientists have documented over the last century on the neuropsychological injuries that violent events inflict on human beings. Psychic numbing and perceptions of time collapse/de-cathexis of symbolizations of continuity that survivors of the Hiroshima bombing experienced also are being observed in survivors of Superstorm Sandy. There are numerous news accounts of individuals who “can’t move on” beyond the memories of the storm, have frequent flashbacks, experience emotional numbness and detachment/disassociation from the social environment.

Impact of Superstorm Sandy at the Macro Group Level

The emotional impact of Superstorm Sandy on the U.S. population cannot be assessed in isolation from larger historical processes and collective crises. The Information Age and the Internet Age have made all regional, national, continental, and global events accessible to ever-increasing numbers of people, including the audio-visual transmitted imagery of conflict and violence. Twelve years into the 21^st century, the U.S. group has experienced massive immersion in death and destruction imagery. Psychiatrically, the U.S. population is afflicted with ongoing PTSD and ASD stemming from a series of macro-level traumas and unresolved conflicts. Beginning with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, followed by failed wars, economic recession, loss of civil liberties, and social safety nets, through a host of natural and man-made disasters (including

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Hurricane Katrina, 2005; BP oil spill, 2010; Alabama tornados, 2011; and Fukushima nuclear accident, 2011), the U.S. population is experiencing high levels of annihilation anxieties. Superstorm Sandy has significantly compounded the shared anxieties relating to loss of potency, fragmentation, and mortality.

The U.S. news media’s reporting choices during Superstorm Sandy’s activity, for example, reflected shared annihilation anxieties, emotional regression, and intrapsychic disturbances of the macro group. As Superstorm Sandy cut a swath of damage to the Northeast coast’s infrastructure, placing lives in jeopardy, major TV news channels such as Fox News and CNN abruptly stopped reportage on the historic storm and ran an exposé on CIA Director David Petraeus’ marital infidelities. Group psychoanalytically, the coverage of the sex scandal in the midst of national and international emergencies was symptomatic of the collective stress-induced dissociative state and regression to pre-Oedipal and Oedipal conflicts.

The U.S. group, in addition to being exposed to a natural disaster and violence in the Middle East, also was in the eye of an emotionally charged presidential election. Petraeus’ sex scandal, viewed through the lenses of deMause’s psychohistorical theory, served as a group purification strategy. Leaders are delegated parental figures—“poison containers,” to use deMause’s term—onto whom group members project their shared psychic toxins/death and annihilation anxieties. The presidential election momentarily undermined the U.S. group’s intense attachment to its leadership. The nation was overwhelmed by castration anxieties/fears of maternal engulfment. As deMause has extensively documented throughout his work, groups experience feelings of poisoning and have perceptions of undermined masculine potency during times of stress. Petraeus, a decorated former U.S. general who political pundits credited with handling the Afghanistan theatre of war with professionalism, was a needed sacrificial victim to assuage the collective feelings of guilt, helplessness, abandonment and impotence that Superstorm Sandy, the presidential election and a multiplicity of stressful events triggered. The staged fall of Petraeus via public exposure and termination of his post as the director of the CIA, at an unconscious level, was a castration/killing of a power elite figure from

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the U.S. military-industrial complex (i.e., a delegate of masculine potency and defense against maternal engulfment anxieties). His downfall (symbolic castration or death of the Oedipal father) communicated the U.S. group’s unconscious need to restore its sense of potency and purity and ward off fears of psychotic breakdown.

Conclusion

Superstorm Sandy played out at a vulnerable time in U.S. history. The nation is in the advanced stages of decline at multiple levels and is experiencing unrelenting domestic and international conflicts. Superstorm Sandy’s emotional and psychological impact on the U.S. population can most accurately be gauged within the context of macro historical matrix. For more than two decades, the

U.S. population has experienced a steady deterioration of its collective identity—“group illusion”—and core immortality ideologies. Starting from the loss of the Soviet Union, a “Godless” and well-defined external enemy in 1991, America has become a country in deep crisis. Superstorm Sandy is among the ghastly faces of climate change and within the currents of larger historical developments, natural and man-made disasters that are heightening the U.S. population’s death and annihilation anxieties.

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