You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One hundred or so pregnant women lost their husbands during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, their lives forever transformed. These precipitously widowed mothers-to-be were faced with fore-boding circumstances—grieving their husbands, their familiar selves, and their futures while delivering babies and sustaining new lives in a time of national chaos. It is upon this group of women that Beatrice Beebe immediately focused, as if drawn by an internal magnet, to help them grieve, heal, and attach to their (and our) next generation.
Together with a core group of seven colleagues—Anni Bergman, Phyllis Cohen, Donna Demetri Friedman, Sally Moskowitz, Rita Reiswig, Mark Sossin, and Suzi Tortora—Beebe initiated and still continues the Project for Mothers, Infants, and Young Children of September 11, 2001 (the Project, as it is referred to). It is conceptualized as a primary prevention project to “facilitate the mother-infant and mother-child relationships, the development of the infants… the ongoing development of the toddlers who had lost their fathers, and the mother's own recovery processes” (p. 13). I will be focusing in this review on the primary prevention work with the bereaved mothers/infants/children.
This multimodal project offered support groups for the widows and their children, and annual or semiannual mother-child “video bonding” filming and communication consultations, all provided without charge. Forty mothers and eighty children participated. Twenty therapists were involved along the way, running support groups with mothers; countless other students, researchers, and psychoanalysts contributed. The Project also established a research component, although those results are not yet available.
Before Routledge issued this book in 2012, the Project was presented on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 in a special issue of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, with Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen, and Sara Markese as guest editors. When I fir