The Cost of Survival: Psychoanalysis and Adult Onset Trauma*

Survival is the twin brother of annihilation.

Survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral.

Jonah, a forty-one-year-old, moderately successful businessman, had been living in New York for five years when he came to my office. He was referred by friends, who were troubled by his sudden moodiness, and uncharacteristic isolation. Eighteen months earlier, Jonah had been attending a party on the roof of his upscale apartment building in the East Village. Toward the end of the evening, the partygoers watched as police battered down the door of an abandoned building in order to evict the squatters who had taken up residence there. When he was told that the police had now turned their attention to his own building and were battering down the front door, Jonah left the roof in order to go downstairs to “straighten things out.” As he reached the fourth floor, he heard “the noise of soldiers, many boots stamping.” Suddenly he was facing dozens of policemen in riot gear who pushed him up against the wall; some held guns to his head, cursing him and screaming that he shouldn't move, while others demanded that he lie down. “I didn't know what to do, they were out of control. I thought, ‘This is the end,’” he