Death in the Afternoon

One afternoon, a patient who had been in three-times-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy for over five years with the author left the office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile away, and sat down facing an oncoming train. Her suicide occurred a little over a year after 19 hijackers took over four passenger airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, and during the period of the massive buildup for a pre-emptive war with Iraq. This paper explores the very personal impact of these interlocking events of personal, political, and state-sponsored terrorism on the author. Interweaving the patient's and the author's personal struggle with the patient's overwhelming destructiveness—and how it ultimately failed—with the inability to stop the war despite the unprecedented mobilization of voices for peace across the world, it is a journey through the shattering impact of violence into the tentative discovery of a sustaining vision of hope. It explores the theme of terrorism, both personal and political, as a theater of violence designed to create maximum impact, and how fantasies of redemption, fueled and blinded by righteous certainty, can transmute into acts of breathtaking violence, and find justification in their own mad logic. Through the elaboration of the patient's story and its impact on the author, she offers a very personal attempt to understand and reckon with violence and destructiveness as manifested in these different forms, to grasp how openings of hope and new creative possibility are often followed by a violent regressive backlash, and to find a way to survive them without losing heart for the work.