Volume 16 Number 2September 2009

9/11 terrorist attack, Cuban Missile Crisis, defense mechanisms, denial, Erik Erikson, identification, psychohistory, terrorism, trauma

This article offers a psychohistorical retrospective on reactions to the September 11, 2001 attacks, with emphasis on the New York metropolitan area. The author, a psychoanalyst and psychohistorian, describes his method as that of an Eriksonian participant observer using disciplined subjectivity. He draws on his own feelings, his students’ reaction papers, accounts from colleagues and neighbors, media coverage, and Bush administration statements and policies. Applying the psychoanalytic mechanisms of defense, he argues that denial explains why an educated society was surprised despite earlier warnings, while noting that denial can also protect people in catastrophe. He describes identification, phobic avoidance, and the pull toward the disaster site among individuals. He then discusses projection, displacement, intellectualization, and regression in the wider society. He contends that public anger and desire for vengeance gave the president latitude to go to war, and he interprets the invasion of Iraq as displacement. He is sharply critical of the Bush administration. He faults it for feeding fear and hatred, for treating terrorism as a matter for war rather than intelligence and policing, for assurances about the safety of lower Manhattan’s air, and for the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and through rendition. He attributes that treatment partly to a popular wish for retribution. He reports that post-traumatic stress remains widespread and largely untreated. He concludes that psychoanalytic and psychohistorical tools help individuals and societies deal with the emotions the catastrophe produced.

9/11 terrorist attack, American exceptionalism, fear, psychohistory, terrorism, trauma, violence

This article summarizes the author’s book-length manuscript on the World Trade Center disaster as experienced in New York City. The manuscript draws on interviews with survivors, witnesses, and other New Yorkers of varied ages, races, and ethnic backgrounds. Setting the attacks within the history of American exceptionalism, the author contends that a sense of entitlement and security, reflected in Lincoln’s 1838 “Young Man Lyceum Speech” and heightened by American dominance after 1990, left Americans psychologically unprepared. He maintains this was so despite earlier warnings, including the 1993 bombing of the towers, the attacks on embassies and the USS Cole, and Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack. Two themes organize the work. The first is zones of sadness, a term borrowed from Michael Flynn. The author proposes that, alongside the conventional view locating trauma in early experience within the self, trauma has a horizontal dimension shaped by proximity to the deaths, including through television. He traces this outward from Ground Zero across the city. The second theme is the apocalyptic character of the experience, seen in respondents’ accounts of the end of the world and of nuclear imagery. The author concludes that this apocalyptic dimension explains 9/11’s lasting influence, producing a culture of fear behind later changes at home and abroad. He names the Iraq war, torture, and domestic surveillance among these, and maintains that this would have happened even without the administration of George W. Bush.

9/11 terrorist attack, cultural memory, malignant narcissism, Minoru Yamasaki, psychohistory, screen memory, terror, World Trade Center

In this article, the author reflects on the destruction of the Twin Towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1970, as the loss of a symbol of New York’s monumentality and power. The author proposes that the collapse now serves as a screen memory, in Freud’s sense, for a collapse of authority in American culture and perhaps in the world. The author connects this idea to Paul Elovitz’s observation that students’ reaction essays on 9/11 became less personal and more a shared cultural memory over time. The author also connects it to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979), which the author reads as predicting that the erosion of authority would return people to harsher, more primitive internal controls. As illustration, the author cites films from 1982 to 2007, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, No Country for Old Men and Funny Games. The author also cites an encounter with teenage skateboarders in Central Park and patients in the author’s own practice, describing this conduct in clinical terms as a growing disregard for authority. The author expresses hope, tempered by doubt, that Barack Obama might provide direction. The author concludes that the world is largely without heroes and leaders, reading the closing dream scene of No Country for Old Men as a wish for a protector that reality does not fulfil.

9/11 terrorist attack, autobiography, Ground Zero, psychohistory, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychotherapy, survivors, trauma

In this article, the author, a psychotherapist, recounts eight years of reflection on counseling work near Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The author reports offering counseling within 24 hours of the attack to employees who worked in and around the Twin Towers, continuing for nearly six months while also seeing private patients who lived downtown. The author recalls being told by authorities that a facemask was unnecessary, not attending to personal traumatization while listening continuously to traumatic narratives, and stopping in early January 2002 with an eye infection and burnout. Trauma trainings and a therapist support group during 2002 are described as supportive, and the author states that prior training had not prepared for work outside the office setting. The author concludes that therapists working with trauma need ongoing peer support and training in models that address traumatic grief, multiple losses, toxic exposure, delayed mourning, loss of housing and workplaces, and continuing threat. The author questions whether trauma is best approached as a diagnostic category requiring cure or as a wounding requiring healing through meaning-making, cites Karen M. Seeley’s After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists, and Mental Health, and maintains that bearing witness to individual stories and their place in history is central to healing.

9/11 terrorist attack, American Red Cross, child writers, Clio’s Psyche, disaster, fear, first responders, Ground Zero, Mentors USA, psychohistory, terrorism

In this article, a New York psychotherapist reflects on work after 9/11 and on what the author sees as its lessons for living with fear. The author recalls an earlier program in which children near Ground Zero wrote and illustrated books about safe places, then describes a simultaneous program set up by the New York City Police Department, the Police Foundation, and Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry to coordinate care for the 55,000 police officers and staff affected by the disaster. The author recruited volunteer clinicians for its mandatory stress-management “town meetings” and led several of them. The piece recounts one meeting, held in March 2002 with about twenty officers who had been digging at Ground Zero. It reports one officer’s closing remark that many people’s problems predated 9/11 and were stirred up by it. The author regards this as an anticipation of how people would defend emotionally against fear amid terrorism, war, and recession. Drawing on personal observation of New Yorkers, the author describes withdrawal, increased smoking and eating, and inattentive, risky behavior in traffic, and cites 2009 opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on unhealthy habits and national anxiety. The author concludes that people should accept their feelings rather than flee them, follow the officer’s advice to know oneself, and take each day as it comes. The piece ends with the author’s sadness over the possible illnesses of the rescue workers.

9/11 terrorist attack, autobiography, Holocaust, Israel, psychohistory, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), survival, terrorism, trauma, Yom Kippur War

In this article, the author, a clinician who lived and worked in Israel for over twelve years before returning to the United States, reflects on the question Americans put to her after September 11, 2001: how Israelis live under constant threat of terrorism. She recounts her arrival in Israel in 1972, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the losses and trauma symptoms among relatives, friends, and acquaintances. She describes editing Living with Terror, Working with Trauma (2004) as a way of working through her own reactions as both an American and an Israeli. She contends that Israelis live with layered, cumulative, and repeated trauma rooted in the Holocaust and continuing violence, and cites Avi Bleich on the routinization of terror and the novels Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk and The Last Commander by A. B. Yehoshua. Drawing on a graduate classroom episode in Israel, she maintains that stress is experienced there as normative, so psychopathology must be understood in cultural context. She attributes the American reaction to 9/11 partly to lost invulnerability and to the incongruence of the event with prior expectations, and compares American mourning to the Portuguese saudade. She concludes that the challenge is to protect oneself while remaining open to life, invoking the second meaning of apocalypse as “opening up.”

9/11 terrorist attack, bias, communication studies, content analysis, nursing, psychohistory, Psychological Abstracts (PSYCINFO), psychology, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), residential rehabilitation, trauma

This article examines how the September 11, 2001 attacks affected American psychology as an academic discipline. The author reports a content analysis of 455 English-language article titles indexed in the PSYCINFO database that contain the terms September 11 or 9/11 and were published between 2002 and 2006, excluding dissertation abstracts, book reviews, calls for papers, and editorial introductions. Two coders independently sorted the titles, consulting abstracts where a title was insufficient, into six categories: social, clinical, social-clinical, cognitive, and developmental psychology, and professional development. The author reports that social psychology is the largest category (31.2%), most of it on how media, political rhetoric, and public discourse shaped American attitudes, and that these titles peak in 2004–2005. Professional development titles, which imply that existing therapeutic models were inadequate, and social-clinical titles on coping and community programs peak in 2002–2003. Clinical titles remain steady and rise in 2006. Titles on children are few. The author argues that the focus of publication shifted over the five years and that psychology is shaped by the same forces as the society around it. The author suspects that the later decline in such titles reflects 9/11 becoming background rather than waning influence, a hypothesis that the author says requires further research.

9/11 terrorist attack, experiments, gender, personality, psychohistory, real-world experience, terrorism, victims

In this article, the authors report on more than twenty years of laboratory experiments examining how young adults respond to simulated newspaper reports of international conflict and terrorist attacks. Participants, mostly U.S. undergraduates in samples of 40 to 100, read reports of military or terrorist attacks on a nation allied with the United States, stated how the United States should respond, and did so over five or six successive rounds. They then completed measures of personality and demographic characteristics. The authors report that reactions varied, with fear and anger both occurring, both increasing after repeated attacks, and forgiveness declining. Responses were less conflictual before 9/11, more forceful soon afterward, and less so as time passed. Attacks by terrorists produced more escalation than attacks by formal military forces, and attacks on military targets more than those on cultural or educational targets. The authors explain these findings through image theory of international relations. They describe gender differences that shift with the perceived prior relationship to the attacking nation, and contend that dominance versus submission in personality outweighs gender. They compare the results with 9/11, the 2005 London bombings, and the 2008 Mumbai attack. They conclude that laboratory and real-world evidence inform each other and can help leaders manage terrorism’s aftermath and shape long-term democratic responses.

9/11 terrorist attack, absurdity, cultural differences, gender differences, interviews, psychohistory, Singapore, teaching, terrorism, United States of America

In this article, the author reports on interviews with 26 university-affiliated participants aged 18 to 44 in Singapore and the United States about what they regard as absurd and how they contend with it, including terrorism such as the 9/11 attacks. Responses from the two countries were similar enough that the article pools them. The author reports that over two-thirds named terror or violence as an example of absurdity, applying the term mainly to acts that were public and seemingly unmotivated, and that most defined it as out of the ordinary rather than in ethical terms. Few mentioned victims’ suffering. The author proposes that participants were more troubled by perpetrators’ violations of social norms than by the violence itself, yet over 95 percent also called absurdity good or natural. The author interprets this ambivalence as a response to a world in which terror is supposedly unthinkable yet constantly displayed, and as reflecting young people’s own tension between economic survival and authenticity. Some participants normalized absurd events, which the author links to Melvin Lerner’s work on belief in a just world; others aligned themselves with absurdity to claim its power. The author concludes that witnesses’ reactions to the absurdity of terror should be distinguished from victims’ reactions to trauma: few participants seemed traumatized, but many seemed conflicted about integrating the possibility of committing absurd violence into their moral outlooks.

9/11 terrorist attack, defense mechanisms, fear, helplessness, mass trauma, psychohistory, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), repetition

This article applies the psychoanalytic concept of psychic trauma to the responses of senior United States officials to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Opening with a 2009 low-altitude aircraft incident over Manhattan that alarmed residents, the author distinguishes psychic from physical trauma: defenses are breached, effects vary between individuals, and adult events may resonate with earlier trauma. Drawing on accounts by Bob Woodward, Robert Draper, Barton Gellman, and Jacob Weisberg, the author contrasts the active roles reported for Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld with reports of Bush’s reaction at a Sarasota school. The author asks whether Bush’s later rhetoric of good against evil, emphasis on resolve, and reluctance to concede errors reflect trauma, his identification with his father, and existing personality trends. The author proposes that after mass trauma a leader who embodies the public’s condition gains great power, on terms dependent on promised retribution. The author then reports Richard Clarke’s Washington Post article “The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse,” which allows that trauma may have affected Cheney and Rice but notes that earlier warnings of al Qaeda attacks went unheeded. The author concludes that externally induced trauma met internal preconditions among those in power, which may have intensified their responses and contributed to what many now see as a rush into preemptive war against the wrong enemy.

9/11 terrorist attack, ambivalence, apathy, psychohistory, statistics, Terror, Sexual Arousal, and Torture: The Question of Obedience of Ecstasy Among Perpetrators, terrorism, torture, trauma, violence

In this article, the author asks why the United States has been ambivalent or apathetic about the imprisonment and abusive treatment of civilians at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and about prosecuting those responsible. The article summarizes ideas from the author’s 2007 book Terror, Sexual Arousal, and Torture and draws on Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, reporting by Jane Mayer, and Mark Landau’s experiments on mortality salience. The author maintains that military circles widely regard torture as an ineffective way to obtain information, and that the scenario of imminent attack popularized by the television series 24 presents a false dilemma. Dread of attack, culturally and politically induced, is said to make Americans see enemies readily, divide good and evil absolutely, and treat compassion as weakness. The author cites Landau’s finding that self-identified liberals could be swayed toward supporting Bush administration policies. Pointing to the Abu Ghraib photographs and to the circulation of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind among guards, the author argues that humiliation, not intelligence gathering, was the aim, and rejects explanations based on role-playing or obedience. The author attributes this to a wish to dominate others and to project one’s own shame onto them, and contends that reluctance to prosecute reflects hidden gratification in that fantasy. The author is sharply critical of these tendencies and calls on Americans to examine their own attraction to violence when afraid and to take responsibility.

9/11 terrorist attack, The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About The Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombings, Clio’s Psyche, Human Terrain Team (HTT), interview, Nancy Korbin, Osama Bin Laden, political violence, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, terrorism

This interview, conducted by Paul H. Elovitz for the 9/11 special issue, features psychoanalyst, linguist, and counterterrorism consultant Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin as she prepares for Human Terrain Team training at Fort Leavenworth and probable deployment to Afghanistan. She recounts her fieldwork: prison interviews, lectures to police and military audiences in the United States, Spain, and Sri Lanka, and work with Minnesota sheriff’s deputies on the Somali community. She also recalls her first experiences of terrorism in Israel in 1972. Kobrin describes psychoanalysis as a branch of semiotics and draws on object relations theory and Falk’s concept of maternal fusion. She proposes a theory of imagery that relates Islamic suicide bombing, and its production of body parts, to Western domestic murder-suicide. She contends that ideology explains only part of terrorist behavior and that nonverbal behavior, which she compares to a child’s play in therapy, should be read as meaningful. She discusses the bin Laden family and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and attributes importance to the mother’s place in Arab culture. She credits Phyllis Chesler, Sander Breiner, and the Israeli specialists Yoram Schweitzer, Reuven Paz, and Anat Berko, and suggests that Israeli counterterrorism has made little use of psychoanalysis. She judges Falk’s Islamic Terror: Conscious and Unconscious Motives a lasting contribution. She voices concern that schools named for Tariq Ibn Ziad are not monitored for anti-Semitism. She mentions her book The Banality of Suicide Terrorism, her memoir in progress, and her plan to emigrate to Israel.

Beslan, child victims, political violence, psychohistory, Russia, terrorism, trauma

In this article, the author, a historian of Russian twentieth-century political violence, presents the September 2004 hostage-taking at School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, as emblematic of modern terrorism. The author contends that terrorism has shifted from targeting particular individuals to terrorizing whole societies through civilians, with killings serving as messages amplified by media coverage. The author characterizes contemporary terrorism as a form of death-worship, a phrase attributed to Moshe Hazani, and maintains that for the perpetrators struggle itself is the final end. The article recounts the siege from September 1 to 3, in which Chechen separatists held some 1,200 children, relatives, and teachers, and reports at least 339 dead, including 176 children. The author is sharply critical of the hostage-takers, compares the school to a concentration camp and its ruins to Auschwitz, and characterizes Beslan as a form of genocide distinct from earlier attacks on children at Ma’alot and Tel Aviv. The author cites Salman Akhtar on dehumanization, journalist David Brooks, and Jungian psychologist John Haule, and reports statements by Shamil Basaev. The author concludes that terrorists, in attacking children as the symbol of life, seek to replace life’s ambiguity and motion with the stillness of death.

Adolph Hitler, Chiang Kai-shek, Death By Government, Genghis Khan, genocide, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, political power, psychohistory, psychopathology, R. J. Rummel, terrorism, violence

In this article, the editor’s introduction to a group of pieces on state terrorism, the author contends that terror and terrorism are not confined to the twenty-first century. He maintains that current attention to small groups of stateless terrorists obscures the fact that most people terrorized and killed throughout history have suffered at the hands of governments, their own or others. He cites the estimate in R.J. Rummel’s Death By Government (2000) that 262 million people were killed through the actions and policies of leaders including Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Chiang Kai-shek, Pol Pot, and Genghis Khan. The author argues that leaders have terrorized their subjects to secure or hold power and, in many cases, for reasons of their own that he characterizes in clinical terms. He proposes that once a government is in control, power is best maintained through custom, ideology, and law rather than through terror, which he describes as an expensive instrument. The article closes by introducing Richard Lyman’s article on state terror in classical Greece and Rome, which the author invited.

ancient warfare, classical Greece, classical history, classical Rome, psychohistory, state terror, terrorism, violence, victimization

This article considers the use of terror in ancient warfare through Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War and Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, with reference also to Caesar’s The Civil War. The author maintains that killing with a sword at close range and with a bomb dropped from height differ little morally, and urges readers to set aside self-congratulation and present-mindedness toward ancient violence. On Thucydides, the author contends that the Athenian ideal of Pericles’ Funeral Oration is overemphasized, and contrasts it with a later Periclean speech describing the empire as held like a tyranny, the Mitylene Debate, in which an order to kill a city’s population is reversed, and the Melian Dialogue, which ends in the killing of men of fighting age and the enslavement of women and children. The author reads these episodes as Athens yielding to the temptations of power, cites E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational, and questions the tendency to cast modern societies as open counterparts to repressive adversaries. On Caesar, the author discusses his experience of the Social War, his settlement of Gaul, and an exemplary assault on one city during the pursuit of Pompey, after which Thessalian cities complied. The author characterizes this terror as restrained and purposeful and proposes that Octavian inherited the approach. The author concludes that restraint, precision, and respect for the enemy’s humanity underlie lasting peace.

Encomium of Helen, Gorgias, Peloponnesian War, philosophy, Plato, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychohistory, Socrates, trauma of war

This article examines the “Encomium of Helen,” a speech by the Greek rhetorician Gorgias composed in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, as testimony to the psychological effects of combat. The author brings modern understanding of combat trauma, including Jonathan Shay’s list of symptoms in Achilles in Vietnam, to a passage in which Gorgias describes armed men terrified by the sight of weapons, some losing presence of mind and others becoming unable to work or falling into madness. The author argues that the remark, made in passing in a speech about the power of persuasion, is valuable because it is unintentional evidence, citing Arthur Marwick on primary sources. The author answers the view that Gorgias was merely playing with words by pointing to his experience as a diplomat. Parallel cases are drawn from Herodotus on the Athenian Epizelus at Marathon, the inscription of Anticrates of Cnidus, and Xenophon’s portrait of the Spartan commander Clearchus in the Anabasis. The author reads these as different forms of war trauma, from physical and mental incapacity to impaired social functioning, and compares Athenian losses at Delium with American losses in Iraq. Drawing on his own service as an infantry officer in Vietnam and on press reports about Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, the author concludes that such responses persist across eras and that Gorgias was perhaps the first Western intellectual to connect war with trauma.

anthropology, applied psychoanalysis, Howard Stein, psychohistory, psychology, Robert Jay Lifton, social sciences, sociology, trauma, Vamık Volkan, Viktor Frankel

In this article, the author sets out a view of what psychohistory is for, framed by how the question arises in his classes. He describes practitioners of psychological history as divided, like those in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, between pure researchers who value knowledge for its own sake and scholars who hold that research should serve social, political, and economic change. He gives as examples Robert Jay Lifton’s work with Vietnam veterans with PTSD and against nuclear weapons, Vamik Volkan’s work in zones of ethnic and national conflict, and Howard Stein’s work helping groups mourn losses. He suggests that psychoanalysts’ prominence among those who left Europe in the 1930s may reflect applied psychoanalysis. Citing an observation in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he concludes that psychological history can help people survive.

David Beisel, Denis O’Keefe, Evan Brown, International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), Matt Heitman, Nancy Kobrin, psychohistory, psychotherapy, Ravi Gurumurthy

In this article, the author recounts several ways individuals have used psychohistory and invites readers to consider how they will use it. The examples are a former accounting student at SUNY-Rockland who turned to psychotherapy after taking David Beisel’s psychohistory courses; the psychoanalyst Nancy Kobrin, who researched and published on the September 11, 2001 attacks in Clio’s Psyche, wrote a book on the psychology of terrorism, and in 2009 left private practice to train with the U.S. Army before an assignment to Afghanistan as a contractor; and three Ramapo College students, Evan Brown, Ravi Gurumurthy, and Matt Heitman, whose independent study of the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency led to a student-panel presentation and an award at the International Psychohistorical Association’s 2009 meetings, and to a paper now under anonymous review. The author closes by presenting readers with options: integrating psychohistory into general knowledge, becoming a scholar and teacher, applying it in business, or popularizing it as Rachel Carson did for environmentalism and Carl Sagan for astronomy.

book review, bereavement, death, Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss, educational breakthroughs, Jeffrey Berman, loss, pedagogy, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychology

This book review considers Jeffrey Berman’s Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss (SUNY Press, 2009), an account of a university writing course in which students write about death and bereavement. The reviewer places the book among Berman’s earlier works on psychoanalytically informed writing pedagogy, including Diaries to an English Professor, Surviving Literary Suicide, Risky Writing, and Empathic Teaching. She describes its use of literary readings, student journals and essays, syllabi, and letters from former students. She reports that the book grows out of Berman’s experience of his wife’s terminal illness and death. Assignments include invented obituaries, eulogies, a letter to a deceased mother prompted by Wuthering Heights, readings of “The Book of Job,” and reflections on things to do before dying. The reviewer outlines Berman’s safeguards for student privacy and his stance that he is not a trained therapist. She questions whether such methods suit every student and whether teachers should probe topics like sexual abuse, addiction, or suicide. She judges his handling of religious belief, given his disclosed agnosticism, to be the riskiest element. She concludes that the book addresses an important topic, that publishing student essays as literature rather than case studies helps readers reflect on cultural taboos, and that it offers a way of learning about loss.

American artist, art historian, Cassandra Langer, childhood experiences, Irene Javors, meeting report, psychobiography, psychohistory, Psychohistory Forum, psychotherapy, Romaine Brooks

This meeting report describes the January 31, 2009 Psychohistory Forum Work-In-Progress meeting, at which Cassandra Langer, an art critic and art historian, and Irene Javors, a psychotherapist, presented their collaborative book project on the American expatriate artist Romaine Brooks (1874–1970). The pre-circulated paper concerned Brooks’s childhood and was written partly as a dialogue between the two presenters. The report gives a biographical sketch covering her birth in Italy, her mother’s abusive and neglectful conduct, her placements with a laundress, at a boarding school, and in a convent, and her brief marriage to John Ellingham Brooks. It then summarizes the discussion with participants, including the psychoanalyst Robert Quackenbush. Topics include the available sources, among them letters and the unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories. The report gives reasons for Brooks’s limited renown: her independent wealth, which kept her paintings out of museums, and the unpopularity her pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic inclinations brought her after World War II. It also covers her relationships with Natalie Barney and other twentieth-century figures. Participants raised psychological questions about her stoicism, elitism, sense of being an outsider, sexuality, and ambivalence about being seen. They also discussed her non-avant-garde, largely black-and-white work, its links to music, and the works Self Portrait (1923) and Caught (1930). The report concludes that Brooks remains a mystery, noting the presenters’ reference to her epitaph.