September 11th 2001: Some Thoughts on Racism and Religious Prejudice as an Obstacle

The events of September 11th were brought home to us all by wall-to-wall television coverage of airliners crashing into the twin towers like giant guided missiles, followed moments later by the towers collapsing into heaps of rubble. These were awful, shocking images of devastation on a scale that was quite simply unbearable. It is one thing to think ‘It's just like a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie!’, but how can you take in the fact that there, in front of you, a jet full of people is ploughing straight into offices also full of ordinary people? And that the explosion, flames and smoke you see speak of people being burnt and suffocated to an unimaginable death at that very moment? And, in the sequence showing the collapse of the towers, you were watching perhaps thousands of people being crushed to death under tons of shattered glass, mangled steel and broken concrete? And the chilling realization that those tiny specks hurtling down beside the towers, moments before their collapse, were real people jumping to certain death a hundred floors below - a death that must have felt preferable to an infinitely more terrible and horrifying fate inside. For all of us living in the West, here was a human catastrophe that we could not keep at an emotional distance - it was all too obvious that there but for the grace of God go you or I.

As psychoanalysts we know that psychically unbearable events call into play powerful defences whose aim is to protect us from perceived danger. To the normal mind, racist modes of thinking1 constitute the most readily available constellation of such defences, and these have been evident from the very outset. Early that afternoon a close friend rang, deeply distressed that ‘They say Muslims have done it’, terrified that they were about to bomb Pakistan (where she has relatives), and desperately praying that, like the Oklahoma bombing, this would turn out to be another home-grown attack. The following day a patient addressed this same issu