This essay is concerned with ways in which primal psychic relations, socio-economic structures, and political imperatives have collaborated in the production of othering relations that have supported Bush's war on terror. Drawing on the psychoanalytic conception of the “third,” the authors identify alternative relational structures that can open up dehumanizing and hierarchical dyadic pairings. Finally, they consider how the events of Hurricane Katrina enabled journalists to occupy the space of the third and, therefore, to help in relational reconfigurations that grow out of the raising of consciousness and the acquisition of knowledge.