Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche after 9-111

Those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it.

A screaming comes across the sky.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Gandhi, on a hunger strike to protest fighting between Hindu and Muslim after the Partition, is confronted by a man in agony: “I am going to hell. I killed an innocent child. My son was slain and in my rage I killed a Muslim child. And so I am going to hell.” Gandhi's reply: “I know a way out of hell. Go, find a homeless Muslim child, adopt him and raise him as your own. But raise him in the Muslim religion.” Gandhi knew a way out of hell. I think I know a way in—and why it is the route we must follow in addressing 9-11.

Trauma occurs when something happens that shatters the ego and its defenses. An event persists as an image that awakens other images buried in the psyche, images bound to repressed memories that bring with their return an anxiety that threatens psychic dissolution. The hidden, buried history of one's life presents itself as an awareness one can no longer escape, a self-knowledge one must now construct since that act is the only route to “recovery.”

Can what is true for individuals also be true for nations? And thus with respect to 9-11: our task being not to resolve the trauma but to do all in our power to assure that it is fully constituted? But for that to happen it is not enough to cite the traumatic images that were blazed into the nation's consciousness that day: a plane embedded surrealistically in a building; bodies falling from the sky; that great granite elevator going down; the terrible black cloud rushing forth to engulf a fleeing multitude; and then the countless dead, buried alive, passing in endless queue across the shattered landscape of the nation's consciousness. Nor is it enough to note the precise correspondence of these images to the anxieties that define the