To Be after September 11

I was in Riga on my mission to spread psychoanalytic therapy among domestic professionals when it happened. Paradoxically, this mission was to repair the destruction of psychoanalysis by the communist totalitarian ideology in the previous Soviet Union - a pretty long process of restoring European cultural values (psychoanalysis is a part of it). And now the start of a new apocalyptic experience, and by a quite unique weapon? I tried to switch on the TV set in the rented flat but it was broken. One patient told me he met people on the streets talking about World War III, which was so menacing during the existence of the Iron Curtain. I did not know much about what really happened, then I got the telephone call from my colleague living in London. He said ‘No war, it happened to America but the world cannot be like in the past, some important change in our life will happen.’ But what will happen? What can we, professionals in psychoanalysis and social dynamics, bring to the discussion which seems to have started some 2 weeks after the initial shock, panic and severe trauma which called for an immediate vendetta?

First, people have lost for a while an access to their archaic, omnipotent saving objects. Safety as a private and group feeling was shaken in all parts of the Western world while intense despair and grief affected more those who were directly touched by loss of relatives, friends and co-workers. Some features of the paranoid-schizoid position were and still are massively diffused together with feelings of helplessness regarding the impossibility of defending our existence. So the psychotic part of the personality was evoked and strengthened temporarily. But we know from the works of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham that people after some time adapt themselves to the bomb in the school yard which somehow ‘forgot’ to explode immediately (Freud & Burlingham, 1943). Recently we could see that people living