The Interpretation of an Architect's Dream: Relational Trauma and Its Prevention

by Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, New York

During the eight months she has been in analysis with me, my patient has often dreamt about our work. We go on journeys together, we build new houses or renovate old ones, we make nice meals for a child—herself. In these dreams, she usually appears both as she is now, a widow in her forties, childless, an architect, and as a child whose age often points us to the developmental meaning of the dream. The dreams both recreate her past and recreate how our work has brought her past newly into her present experience. Several times she has remarked that she doesn't really understand, or really feel, something we have said about her childhood in a session until she dreams about it afterward. The interpretation of dreams is a new discovery for her, a new way of being and being intimate, talking more freely than she can otherwise. "Real life makes me choke up, it's too confusing."


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An Eleven-Year-Old Boy's Reaction to the World Trade Center Disaster

By Richard Zuckerberg, Ph.D.
Brooklyn, NY

On the morning of Sept. 13, 2001 I received a consultation request from the Pediatrics Department of the hospital where I am a psychologist. I called the inpatient unit and spoke with Dr. Gray who told me that an 11 yr. old boy was admitted to pediatrics from the ER on the night of Sept. 11, after being brought to the hospital's ER by his grandmother. He told me that the boy presented with the following symptoms: he had a choking sensation in his throat, he was not able to talk, he indicated by gesture that he had chest pains, and responded to questions only by writing his responses. His written responses were simple, his spelling was poor, and his penmanship looked poor as well. In addition, his right leg had a tremor, and both his arms were experienced as "heavy" by the boy and he appeared to have problems lifting his arms in front of him. He had a difficult time breathing as well, and the grandmother reported to the ER staff that he had chronic asthma. Based on what they saw, the ER physicians suspected that he might have had a seizure, or some other neurological problem. The boy was worked up neurologically, was given a CT scan of the head, an EEG, and an MRI. Over the next two days all findings were found to be negative.


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Giving and Taking Away: Generosity and the Need to Mourn

By Eileen A. Kohutis, Ph. D.
Livingston, NJ

The events of September 11, 2001 have had a profound affect on us all. None of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing when heard that the towers at the World Trade Center had been hit by two domestic airplanes. As tragic as that day is, it provides us with an opportunity to learn about mourning and loss as we consider it as a narcissistic injury. The loss of a spouses through and unexpected and premature death is devastating. The survivor may experience narcissistic rage due to the damage to self-esteem, but how is the mourning process complicated when the spouse is lost before the entire world? How do the feelings of entitlement, an inability to feel empathy for others and the defenses of splitting and idealization affect mourning in the surviving spouse? These are some of the questions I will try to address in this essay.


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The Appearance of the Other in the Attacks of September 11

© David Lichtenstein, Ph.D., February 2002

The attacks of last September opened a space for the other which has yet to be repaired. In addition to mourning the tragic loss of life, the challenge of that otherness demands extraordinary psychic work.

Many of us, watching the attack from the streets of New York, worked hard to grasp its meaning even as it was taking place. That people were intentionally responsible only became clear when the second plane hit. Before that it was a common impression that we were witnessing a tragic accident. So radical a sense of otherness, of an incomprehensible difference, would be attached to conscious intent, that many first rejected that possibility. "No one in his right mind could possibly do a thing like that!" Akin to the not-I, a sense of not-We emerges, that is, not we civilized, rational human beings. We (human beings) don't do things like this. It is other than human, inhuman, to act this way. Of course it was an intentional attack by rational people, although even now this seems too strange to be true. Religious trances and notions of evil cultic devotion are proposed as explanations for incomprehensible actions. The work of otherness confronts us still. Psychoanalysts, if they can help at all, can encourage and foster a certain working through of this otherness. A coming to terms with human acts that are tragic and criminal but nevertheless, still human. My writing here is meant to be a contribution to that effort.


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