Abstracts
In his presentation, Dori Laub describes the event of September 11 as an experience of collective massive psychic trauma. He focuses on the responses of those who have endured massive trauma and now face terrorism. His exploration of the encounter of these victims with terrorism show that they tend to the re-experience of their traumatic experiences and their accompanying affects. The author reviewed various strategies employed to avoid a reaction to trauma. He highlights mutedness as a direct consequence of traumatic experiences, common to victims of massive collective trauma.
In her contribution, Ilany Kogan explores the reaction of Holocaust survivors` offspring to the encounter with terrorism. The author defines the collective trauma of the Holocaust as a shared mental representation of the atrocities of the Holocaust which is transmitted from one generation to the next. The encounter with terrorism in the current situation in Israel reactivates the traces of the mental representation of the Third Reich in the unconscious of the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors.

September 11^th was an encounter with something that makes no sense, an event in that fits nowhere.It was an experience of collective massive psychic trauma. Nearly six months after the event that shook our world and our assumptions about our lives, there is no coherent narrative about September 11^th. This, too, is in the nature of massive collective trauma.We are still involved with the ongoing struggle between an imperative need to know what it is that has happened to us all, not only to those who were in the buildings the planes crashed into, and to their families and friends, but to all of us in America, no matter how distant from the scene of the attacks—and an equally powerful urge to not-know, a defensive wish to deny the nature of the tear in the fabric of our shared lives.

The events of September 11^th left world leaders and scholars seeking a context for such extreme, catastrophic violence. In an address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George Bush said of the terrorists, »They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20^th century. They fall in the path of Fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.« This was much more highlighted in the Israeli and European Press than it was here. It was an obvious connection for those who experienced the Nazi terror first hand. The drawing of parallels between September 11^th and the terrorism of Nazism and Fascism recalls the comments of Michael Nauman, the German Minister of Culture, in his address at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust on January 20, 2000, when he described the Holocaust as a form of terrorism whose target was life itself. »Hitler’s Germany deliberately set out to abolish the sanctity of life. The extermination of the Jewish belief that the protection of life is the highest human principle was the ideological terrorist epicenter of the Holocaust.« I believe Nauman offers us an insight into what we in America experienced on the beautifully clear autumn day of Tuesday, September 11. It was a blow against our commonly held beliefs about the value of life. Later in his speech, Michel Nauman, said that since the final defeat of Hitler’s Germany in May 1945, 100 acts of genocide have been documented in the world, every one of them an attack on the sanctity of life itself.

Following the events of September 11^th, we witnessed an instantaneous sense of paralysis, a helpless confusion experienced mostly in the U.S., but also in many parts of the western world. Normality abruptly ceased. Life as we have known it stopped. It seems gone, perhaps for good. Having seen the United States experience a massive deadly terrorist attack against which it had proven unable to protect itself, western society nearly lost its balance.


On being a psychoanalyst

I want to switch now to the mode of an analyst, or therapist, because that’s what I know best. I am a Holocaust survivor. My life’s work is listening to those who are seeking psychic healing. Many, if not most of my patients have endured massive trauma. Our work together involves a kind of witnessing that I have written about extensively elsewhere. On September 11, we were all, doctor and patient alike, witness to, and victims of, a kind of terror that was, until that morning, unknown to us as Americans.

That Tuesday, I was in my office seeing patients. My day began early. My second patient was late because she had been listening to the radio when she heard about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center and the only thing she could talk about was what was happening in New York City. Patient after patient kept talking about it all day long, and so it continued for the whole week. Those patients who did not mention it were the ones that were the most fragile, totally detached from life. Even psychotic patients who were not as damaged came back, joining the community of anguish and fear; they became part of the event. Yet, somehow, as the days passed, I felt the September 11^th experience lacked form. It was amorphous.Yes, there was a culprit found by the name of Bin Laden. But there seemed to be no clear direction emerging. Even the President was nowhere to be found on the first day, except for a five-minute address on the radio.

As someone who experienced the chaos of World War II in Europe directly, I found myself wanting a Winston Churchill to come and address the nation, but there wasn’t one. It was very unclear what happened during the first day. Yet the foreign press gave a clear account of the events of the day. That week, the Israeli Press published precise profiles of all 19 hijackers; it took much longer for the American Press to do so. There was no dearth of media coverage here, but it either had a pervasive emotional flavor of flooding, or it took the direction of a defensive battle cry, a patriotic rally, or that of an obsessional, endless but superficial repetition of the scanty news that was known. European nations, indeed, came out very early with political statements of support. Arab leaders, on the other hand, were silent, except for one man who took a stand from the very beginning: King Abdullah of Jordan unequivocally condemned the attacks. Everybody else in the Arab world was silent. I want to mention that this is the grandson of the first King Abdullah who was murdered in Jerusalem in 1950 when he secretly entered into negotiations for a peace treaty with Israel. The present terrorists are but a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt who were involved in the murder of President Anwar Sadat, a murder carried out by a group of extremists, a member of whom was the second in command to Osama Bin Laden. History is continuous. Trauma survivors’ responses to September 11^th bear witness to this.


Trauma survivors’ responses to September 11 ^th

A woman, the daughter of a bipolar father who grew up in a very chaotic family, stopped sleeping after September 11^th, because her sense of not being safe had been further confirmed. Holocaust survivors living in New York City began to re-experience their terrors and their nightmares, some even needed to be hospitalized. It all goes on, they felt; it never stopped, and no place is safe. Four months after the attack, The Harvard Mental Health Letter (January 2002) reported that »The number of new prescriptions for sleeping pills rose by a reported 28% and the number of new prescriptions for antidepressants by 17% in the New York area.« On March 5, 2002, CBS News reported that »The greatest danger from a traumatic incident is now, the period from six months to a year, and psychologists say the second wave of trauma may be even tougher to treat than the first.« Therapists in New York reported a new wave of symptoms among New Yorkers - anxiety, depression, and other PTSD related symptoms. The effects of a trauma experienced some five or six months ago were being felt again. This phase of symptomatology seems to be more pronounced than that immediately following the attack. Recently, a New Haven, CT hospital reported its first case of a September 11-related psychosis - a woman who is experiencing a bottomless terror and suspects that terrorists are everywhere around her. Homeless people in the streets of New Haven were both more scared about what might happen, but also experienced a sense of familiarity with the lack of safety they had known all their lives. I had worked with them as their psychiatrist for six years. September 11^th was a communal experience that not only confirmed their worst fears but also ironically, brought them relief. Now, perhaps, the society that shuns them has caught up with them, and has begun to know what they have intimately known all along. There is no such thing as the safety of a home - it can vanish in a moment. Now, perhaps, they might feel a bit less isolated from the rest.

A child survivor of the Holocaust remembers her sense of despair when her father, who was always so in charge of life, couldn’t find an answer to her questions when the Jews were being executed in occupied Poland, and when the mass slaughter began. Once more, now, there is no authority who knows, protects, and can give direction. Statements of compassion, participation in the mourning and the loss, and in the new uncertainty of life, are simply not enough. They do not lessen the pain and the overwhelming terror. There is an overpowering need for a promise of safety, for reassurance and clarity of purpose. To say that the Al Qaeda has a new Chief of Operations, a Palestinian whose whereabouts is not known, but who is said to know all the sleeper cells in the United States and other countries, is at best disquieting.To speak of a dark lurking danger that can come from anywhere only intensifies the dread. Perhaps, though, all of this brings us closer to the truth of what has actually come to pass - that something unimaginable and incomprehensible has happened. Civilian airplanes carrying innocent civilian passengers to their destination were turned into a deadly missiles that brought the Towers down, caused everything to crumble and to implode, leaving only rubble - a huge pile of ruins and debris. Thousands of people simply vanished. Are they really dead? I found myself thinking of Paul Celan’s poem, »Death Fugue,« about the rising smoke over the crematoria, the graves in the sky. »We shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped.«

Perhaps, after all, there is a resemblance between the attacks of September 11 and something equally unimaginable that happened in the Holocaust. I want to emphatically stress that there can be no equating them. The scale is too disproportionate. The landscape around the Twin Towers destruction continued to be humane, filled with people attempting to comfort and to restore. This is completely different from the landscape of the Holocaust, in which the surrounding world was dumbfounded by the extraordinary impact of death, or stood back and let it happen.While it was happening, and for many years after it was over, nobody was willing to hear and to know what truly happened, in spite of overwhelming evidence. It took decades for a dialogue of testimony to emerge.Yet there is this similarity: the absence of narrative. No one can really tell the story of the Twin Tower disaster, and no one is really ready to hear it.


Trauma and speechlessness - a hallmark of collective massive traumaThis generalized amorphousness, bewilderment, and most of all, the numbness, seems to me a hallmark of collective massive trauma, a sense of shock so profound that it leads to both cognitive and emotional paralysis. It leads, too, to the loss of voice, and in this it feels akin to the »speechlessness« that Walter Benjamin wrote about in his essay, »The Storyteller,« as he witnessed the state of soldiers returning from the First World War.He describes the incommunicability of trauma, the demise of both storytelling and listening.

With the [First] World War, a process became apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience: What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

During the week after the attacks of September 11^th in New York and at the Pentagon, although I listened for hours to patients talking of their inner horror, their unsettledness, a sense of things having changed perhaps forever, of innocence and safety irretrievably lost, I found that I myself couldn’t focus. I could not formulate a clear account of what was happening either, much less write about it. Whenever I turned to my Dictaphone and tried to do it, I had to put it away. It was a struggle. Then I spoke with a colleague in New Jersey, a daughter of two Holocaust survivors, who was treating casualties from the Trade Towers, and she helped me understand what we were both experiencing. »Yes, I know,« she began, when I said I could not yet say anything coherent about what had happened. »I work with people and I help them, but I don’t know what I’m doing and I cannot write about it, I cannot speak about it. When I speak to you now I begin to understand not knowing what I’m doing, but other than that, I cannot put it into thought.« Coming back again to clarity from the cognitive paralysis in response to trauma is a long and cumbersome journey. Even for those of us who have made such a journey once already.

As I have written elsewhere, what occurs in massive trauma is the loss of the internal »other.« People are so affected by the violence that has broken into their lives that they can no longer maintain the dialogue with themselves that is ongoing in normal life. What they felt, what they saw, what they experienced, what they remembered - it suddenly becomes unavailable to them. It’s all a haze, like walking in a dream. There’s both an inability and a total refusal to keep one’s gaze centered on the eye of the trauma. Strategies are employed to avoid it, individual and collective - patriotic gestures, sentimentality, pseudo-unity, fantasies of revenge, concepts of justice or bringing those responsible to justice. All these in their own right can be very valid, but at this particular juncture, they are definitely being used to avoid the full absorption and recognition of the traumatic event, the primary step that would allow the resumption of that internal dialogue of knowing. With this internal dialogue comes the possibility of agency and of action - informed and effective response.

Let me speak for a moment about a patient I see who was shaped by another culture, a young Japanese journalist in her 30’s who works in New York. Her office is in mid-town, and through her windows, she could see the World Trade Center and she described the scene for me. »I could see the fire, smoke, it was so thick, but I was so busy. I had to prepare for the meeting taking place that day. People were coming in, flying in. I had no time to look. Only now it dawns on me what was really happening; the towers collapsed. Ben, that’s my husband, could have been killed. I walked out to the street. When I looked up the street in Manhattan, I saw that brilliant sky, the sun shining; looking down I saw billowing clouds of smoke. People covered with ashes.« Remember, she is Japanese, remembering stories of other ashes. »People were running. A few hours later, nobody was there. New York was a ghost town.« Weeks later, she was very angry with me. For a moment her defensive armor of being matter-of-fact, task oriented and tough had cracked. She experienced »the abyss« - intense terror, helplessness, and loss. I had witnessed and acknowledged her softness, attachment, and longings, the »weaknesses« she had worked all her life to overcome. Now she could no longer return to her former self. She re-visited New York and the smell was still there and she didn’t want to go to Ground Zero. She refused to look at it, refused even to smell the trauma.


Breaking through »screen memories«

Instead of looking directly into trauma, one encounters screen perceptions and screen memories. Perhaps describing a memory of my own will help here. As a child, I was deported to Transnistria, the part of Ukraine occupied by the Romanian Army who were allies of the Germans. What I remembered for years was sitting with a little girl on the bank of the River Bug, the demarcation line between German and the Romanian occupation areas. It was a beautiful summer day, there were green meadows and green hills and a blue river. It was like a summer camp. We were having a debate at age five, arguing whether you could or could not eat grass. I recounted this memory in my second week of analysis in 1969 and luckily enough, my analyst was Swedish. He said, »I have to tell you something. I was a member of the Swedish Red Cross that liberated Theresienstadt and we took depositions from women inmates in the camp. Under oath, they declared that conditions in the camp were so good that they received each morning breakfast in bed brought by SS officers.« There could not have been a more powerful interpretation of my denial. I stopped talking about young girls, green meadows, and blue rivers and started remembering other things, my own experience of trauma.

In the days following September 11^th, I myself felt impelled to break the grip of silence, to be released from the hypnotic fascination of the endlessly repeated television images, the continual repetition of already well-known bits of information, fragments that did not cohere. I did so by going ahead with a planned trip to Israel on September 16^th. Specifically, I went to help plan a video testimony project about Holocaust survivors who themselves had never broken the seal of their silence. All have been living in psychiatric hospitals for decades since the end of the war.

I had a meeting set up for September 16^th. On September 11^th I received an email asking me if I was going to be at the meeting and I decided that yes, no matter what, I was going to make it to Israel for this meeting. The skies were closed - there was no flying. I couldn’t get through to El Al in New York by phone. I could get El Al in Israel, but they would put me on hold, and after half an hour or so of listening to music, someone would pick up the phone and give me the flight information that was not available in New York. Once I started for the airport in New York, but turned back, having heard that no planes were taking off. But then, on September 14^th, I decided to try again in spite of all the statements on TV and radio that the skies were closed. The trip to New York was eerie. Usually there is heavy traffic. That day there were no cars. For long stretches, the highway was completely empty. Then, for no apparent reason, there would suddenly be a slow down. Soon I realized this was the result of rubber necking. On the other side of the road, oncoming traffic was at a halt. Several cars had been involved in accidents. They were overturned, smashed up, and everywhere there were ambulances, fire trucks, and wreckers waiting to clear the road of ruined cars. The drivers, it seemed, had simply lost control.

When I finally got to JFK, the parking lot was empty. Arriving at the departure building, I just walked in. Any terrorist could have gotten in. There were only a few people milling around. When I asked at the counter about El Al, I was told that yes, there were two flights leaving that day. When I landed in Israel, it was, for me, a return to normalcy. That evening there was a party in my family with 50 people coming from all over the country, a gathering for a 6-year-old girl’s birthday party. The place was only about 5 kilometers from Kalkilia in the West Bank. Yet it felt safer, more normal, despite being so much closer to danger.


The tower of Babel

The multitude of voices, public and private, that we are hearing about September 11^th testifies to the absence of a coherent narrative voice for the event itself. Therefore, we are faced with a multitude of diverse voices, versions of the event’s meaning that continue and co-exist, some driven by a wish to know, to bear witness, some driven by an equally powerful need to not-know, to deny and suppress the truth of witnessing. The latter meet with too little moral rebuttal. The Egyptian Press, as well as newspapers in other Arab countries, claimed from the very beginning that the Israeli Central Intelligence Agency, the Mossad, was behind the acts of terror against the United States on September 11^th. Proof of that was the claim that more than 2,000 Israeli workers employed in the Twin Towers didn’t come to work on that day, having been warned of what was going to happen. Other newspapers claimed that the number of Jewish workers who were absent on that very day numbered over 4,000. It is no secret that the Egyptian government controls the press and could have prevented such allegations, but obviously it chose not to. When an Egyptian scholar who attended a rabbinical meeting in Chicago in the month of October 2001 was asked about these allegations, he promptly responded that the Public Relations Services of the United States and of Israel had not been effective enough in counteracting such rumors. Not for a moment did he hesitate to wonder why he, himself, or other scholars who did not believe these allegations remained silent while they were published and re-published in the Egyptian Press. Some sources trace these theories to a Muslim college in northern India, part of the Deobandi movement that has influenced public education in many Muslim countries - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and others. This school is thought to be the origin of this particular theory, which spread throughout the Muslim world. General Rashid Qureshi, the public relations chief for Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, stated it to Newsweek a few days after the attack (April 1, 2002, p.26), and a poll cited by Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times gave a figure of 48% of Pakistanis believing that Jews flew the planes into the World Trade Center (The International Jerusalem Post, March 22, 2002, p.16).

In a somewhat less extreme vain, Arab propaganda still blames the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. Were it not for the Israeli subjugation and the endless Palestinian suffering, such terrorism, it is claimed, would not have happened. Notwithstanding Bin Laden’s declarations of hatred and threats of destruction towards the West, specifically towards the United States, which put the Palestinian question lower on his list of priorities, Arab governments repeated the anti-Jewish allegations while being rather silent time about condemning the September 11^th terrorist attack. Palestinian crowds were indeed celebrating the events of September 11^th in the streets until Yassir Arafat forbade such public celebrations and confiscated the videotapes that documented them.

On our side of the Atlantic, voices have been less vociferous and extreme. On several campuses, students and faculty demonstrated a short time after the bombings, some pressing for peace negotiations with the Taliban and against any kind of military intervention. An academic who represents herself as an expert in terrorism went as far as to state that »Terrorism is a communication of helplessness.« Marches and demonstrations were held by students in American universities in that particular kind of tenor, at odds with the majority of the nation. What is striking is not the opinions that were expressed; after all, this is a society in which free speech is allowed and even encouraged. What is striking is that there was no powerful rebuttal of such opinions. It is as though the voices of those who experienced the terrorist attack more directly were muted, and those most directly affected remained speechless in the face of such political expressions. Even though many opinions were voiced in different forums, there was little direct response either to the extremist claims of the Arab Press, or to the political agendas of certain academics who influenced vast bodies of students across the country.

What is most striking, in view of the multiplicity of voices that tell »the story of September 11^th« is that no unified voice has emerged to challenge, dispute and contradict the radically divergent, often mutually exclusive, versions of reality that are being spouted from different corners of the earth. It is as though there is no truth and no sense of conviction, a collective uncertainty regarding the veracity of the truth and of one’s own experience. Therefore, no source exists for an indignant rebuttal of the distortions and lies which are being repeatedly voiced. Something about our ability to feel and to know what happened on September 11^th has been muted. Propaganda and distortions go unchallenged, and those affected, including those who witnessed the disaster and its aftermath, remain silent and cannot yet create an authoritative narrative that could put things straight.

This mutedness about the truth is not a new or unfamiliar phenomenon, particularly when it is related to events of massive violence and massive destruction. We need only to think about the genocides of the twentieth century and the silence, even denial bordering on revisionism that regularly engulfed them. Let me refer to an article from the New York Times, October 8, 2000, having to do with Rwanda. In 1999 the United Nations released a report of an inquiry into its failure to prevent or stop the genocide in Rwanda. He was harshly critical of the Americans and the French and of most officials of the U.N., including Kofi Annan, who was then the head of the U.N.peacekeeping function.There was one man of whom the report was not critical. This was the commander of the United Nations forces in Rwanda, Lieutenant General Romeo Dalaire of Canada. After the massacre, the officer returned to Canada and continued to serve in the Canadian Army as a general. Four years later, he decompensated - he became alcoholic and started suffering from a severe case of PTSD, with flashbacks, insomnia, hallucinations. In an interview he described a scene that he kept seeing over and over again: »I’m in a valley at sunset, waist deep in bodies covered in blood. I’m holding up my arms trying to get out. Each time it comes back, the scene gets worse, and I can hear the rustle of bodies and I’m afraid to move for fear of hurting someone.« In January 1994, Romeo Dalaire had received information that the Hutu regime was planning an act of genocide. He learned that they were working out how to kill 1,000 people in 20 minutes. The general notified the United Nations. No response. In the beginning of April, he had 2,700 soldiers. Six times he asked the United Nations to increase the number to 5,000 and to give him a mandate to intervene. Six times he was refused. Instead of increasing the number of troops, 90% were withdrawn. Fewer than 300 soldiers remained under his command, and he could not intervene. That was the beginning of April 1994. In the ensuing two months, 800,000 people died. In October 2001 the Security Council and Kofi Annan received the Nobel Prize for Peace. A few years after the slaughter but before the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, President Clinton, on a visit to Rwanda, apologized, saying that what happened had not been fully »appreciated«.

The mutedness of trauma is perhaps most visible in the public domain. It took nearly half a century for a meaningful dialogue on the Holocaust to begin taking place in Germany, and Austria has not yet reached this phase. The same holds true for the Armenian Genocide. That this very mutedness is a direct consequence of massive traumatic experience is again and again observed with traumatized individuals. It is quite common that victims of massive trauma do not know, do not remember, and do not believe what they really experienced and what was done to them. Recall my screen memories of the lovely days spent on the grassy banks of the River Bug with a charming girl, while in reality we were both Jewish children held prisoner by Nazis. Trauma survivors desperately seek confirmation that the events that shattered their lives were real, sometimes even through wanting corroboration from the perpetrator of the violence. It is a common phenomenon for women who have been victims of rape or incest to remember the events only decades after they happened. When such memories led to court action in the 1980s, a whole movement was created, the False Memory Foundation, supported and generously endowed by people who identified with the accused perpetrators and perhaps were concerned about being accused themselves. Experts were hired, studies were conducted, legal action was paid for, and publications were sponsored to support the theories of the false memory movement. What is unfathomable about this is that no movement originated to protect the truth. No such foundation was created on behalf of the victims, and their advocates - including their therapists - were often sued for libel and convicted in courts, ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages. To this day, no »true memory foundation« exists, and no resources comparable to those of the false memory foundations are available to those who protect the truth and give it expression. It’s as if truth, when it comes to traumatic experience, has no voice and no advocate.


A story in a search of a voice

This holds true for a narrative of the extremely violent events of September 11^th. Its truth is still fragmented, piecemeal, and disorganized, a story in a search of a voice. I do not want to foreclose the emergence of that truth by declaring that September 11^th is about evil - because I don’t know yet. What I do know is that it was about something unfathomable, at the root of which there may be evil for which no ways of explaining or understanding yet exist. September 11^th stands alone in its starkness, in its deliberate, whimsical exercise of total power.

We can neither give up on creating a cohesive narrative, nor can we succumb to our need to create a story that will quell our fears and give direction to our rage and grief. Both approaches may bring us temporary relief. On the other hand, we know that it takes time (sometimes decades), sustained effort, and most of all the courage to hear and to know, for the truth of witnessing to come into being. But time alone is not enough."Time has not apparently healed children’s psychological wounds after the attack," Marla Diamond of CBS News reported on April 5, 2002. A six-month follow-up of 421 parents by the Children’s Health Fund »found the same number of kids, 52%, still worried about their own safety.« A health care specialist added, »Almost 4 out of 10 children are having problems like being distracted or nervous or anxious.« What do the children know that the rest of us may be too good at hiding?
Now that we have had our own experience of suicide bombers, it is harder for us to distance ourselves from the terror Israelis are feeling and from the international threat that terrorist bombers pose for all of us. But we have no choice.As journalist Thomas L. Friedman put it in the New York Times on March 31, 2002, »If America, the only reality check left, doesn’t use every ounce of energy to halt this madness and call it by its real name, then it will spread. The Devil is dancing in the Middle East, and he’s dancing our way.«


* From TRAUMA AT HOME: AFTER 9/11 edited by Judith Greenberg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.  «


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