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As news of the falling towers pierced the stillness of my west side Manhattan office, all that once felt strong and solid seemed suddenly insubstantial. Even the walls lost their sheltering thickness. They could no more block out the horror of what happened some 7 miles away than the walls of the doomed towers could withstand the screaming impact of the hijacked planes. Would I ever again feel safe behind these walls, I wondered. Would I ever feel safe anywhere?
My sense of the impermanence and fragility of much that I hold dear deepened over the next several days. I was disturbed to find that my confidence in myself as clinician, the mainstay of my self-experience, became increasingly unsteady. Reeling from many of the same crushing blows as those in my care, I worried that I might not feel strong enough to stand beside them in their grief and terror. At least for a time, my therapeutic relationships seemed to become more symmetrical as my patients and I found ourselves sharing equal space in our existential boat. Quite a few of my patients expressed concern about me. Had I lost anyone close to me? Was I feeling overwhelmed by the heavy demands now placed on me? “Take care,” many said as they left sessions, “Take care.”
Conversations with friends and colleagues soon convinced me that my feelings were widely shared. Let me paraphrase the sentiments I heard expressed in various ways over and over again: “Nothing will ever be the same; the world is a different place now. I have no idea what to expect. What will happen to me? What will happen to my loved ones?” These expressions of overwhelming uncertainty had a special and powerful resonance for me. For the last few years, uncertainty as a fundamental and pervasive aspect of the human predicament has claimed my interest. I have written several papers on uncertainty and its intersubjective regulation (Brothers), and, only a few days before September 11th, had been offered a contract by Brunner-Routledge to write a book o