There's more anti-Muslim graffiti in NYC subways. President Obama has waffled on the subject of a mosque two blocks from the WTC site. Newt Gingrich trumpets on Fox: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington."
The raging debate about Park51 reveals how much residual feeling there is surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Ground Zero is still ablaze. In the words of psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, it is an emotional "hot spot."
Hot spots are places invested with intense group feeling: memorials, historical battlegrounds, and national cemeteries. These emotionally-charged locales represent injury by the hand of an enemy -- as distinct from natural disasters, such as the cataclysmic flood currently consuming Pakistan. I want to make three points about hot spots.
1). These locales provide access to the unconscious minds of groups, revealing what is usually hidden or repressed in daily life. Listening to what people say about hot spots -- whether a monument, museum, or gravesite -- is like listening to the dreams of groups. Such places are symbolic of important collective events. Discourse on the subject expresses unconscious feelings connected to an historical occurrence in that setting.
2). Hot spots are places of collective injury, where loved ones have been killed or humiliated. When a large group suffers a massive trauma induced by others, there is an affective bond among the victimized individuals. Those wronged share feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, rage, helplessness and a sense of appalling injustice in relation to the injurious event. These shared emotions forge group identification and bring people together under a common umbrella of identity.
Referring to the attacks of 9/11, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times recently asked: "Our enemies struck at our heart, but did they also warp our identity?"
Yes, the terrorists did warp our identity as Americans on that fatal, blue-skied morning in 2001. And this is how. The fall of the twin towers, the loss of over 2,700 lives, of American dignity and self-esteem, splintered our sense of collective self. Paradoxically, it also bent us the opposite way, too. The attack brought us together and shaped a common mental representation of our history as Americans. In the last nine years, 9/11 has become a national marker that binds us in our grief much like the assassination of JFK or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The catastrophic event was our undoing and also the material for our remaking as a nation. The recent furor over an Islamic complex so close to Ground Zero tells us how the wound still smarts.
3.) Finally, hot spots such as the site of 9/11 signal unresolved mourning. Following a group calamity of large-scale proportion the work of bereavement is complicated. How can we grieve when we are still enraged? Some Americans may find themselves caught in a cycle of what Volkan calls "perennial mourning," frozen in time and unable to move beyond loss so the missing person or horrific event is recalled continually.
Perennial mourners routinely try to reconnect to images of a lost beloved through "linking objects" -- things that belonged to the deceased: a piece of clothing, watch, eye glasses, an extension of their body such as a wisp of hair. They may also cling to "last-minute ojects," things related to news of the person's death or the last moment the person was seen alive. This sort of externalization provides a tangible meeting ground and keeps alive the fantasy of reunion.
By contrast, in adaptive mourning the loss of a person is worked through and, for the most part, accepted. The carrier of traumatic history is able to diffuse the internalized images of suffering and their associated emotions. The psychic imprint of historical trauma is neutralized and the mourner gradually detaches not only from the injurious event -- but also from others that continue to suffer endless grief. There's the rub: endeavoring to mourn necessitates departure from the group. The affective bonding created through shared trauma hinders the recovery of individual group members. When one works through grief they are likely to experience guilt and loneliness as they emotionally disengage from those of a common history. Feelings of abandoning those "like me," or being abandoned by them, are among the formidable challenges of mourning.
While important political and social movements have been mobilized under collective identities, groups can also prevent us from assimilating the effects of historical tragedy and acknowledging the changes in life caused by it.
References:
Slavica Jurcevic, Ivan Urlic, Linking Objects in the Process of Mourning for Sons Disappeared in War: Croatia 2001, Croatian Medical Journal 43(2): 234-239, 2002.
Vamik Volkan, Gabriele Ast, William F. Greer, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences. (New York: Routledge, 2002)
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