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In voicing their opposition to the building of a Muslim cultural center near ground zero, several public figures have expressed concern that the project would interfere with the healing process for those close to victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Thus at a pitched point in the controversy last August, Sarah Palin tweeted, “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing.” Around the same time Abraham Foxman made a statement against the building of the center, referring to “strong passions…keen sensitivities…counterproductive to the healing process” (Pollitt, 2010, p. 10) evoked by the plan.
As people who might claim to know something about healing, we as psychoanalytic therapists should be alert to occasions when the trope of “healing” is deployed in support of political agendas. Whether cynical or sincere, these figures' remarks beg the question of how healing from traumatic loss actually takes place, as well as where we are as individuals and as a nation in our “healing process,” nine years after the attack.
Our psychoanalytic understanding of grief and mourning has become deeper, and more relational, since Freud provided the essential insights of Mourning and Melancholia (1917/1957). Grieving requires another's acknowledgement of one's loss, and seems to be further facilitated when one is able to see past her own loss to recognize the losses of others. Further, and perhaps counterintuitively, the most “successful” healing often is accompanied by a willingness to take responsibility for the injuries one has inflicted on others, or that have been inflicted in one's name. Contrarywise, an insistence on the uniqueness of one's loss does not bode well for one's recovery from that loss.
A recent Newsweek profile of two women who lost their firefighter sons in the 9-11 attack offered a fine example of this. Adele Welty traveled to Afghanistan in 2004 to try to cha