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“I am a New York City psychoanalyst, a professional decoder of messages from the unconscious, guardian of memories and stories.” Dr. Elizabeth Goren worked in a New York City Firehouse for over a year following the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001. Among the nearly 3,000 individuals who perished in the Twin Towers were 343 New York City Fire Fighters who entered the buildings to save them. Goren's book, Beyond The Reach of Ladders is the story of the firemen with whom she worked both in the firehouse and for several years afterward in her therapy office. It is a layered chronicle of trauma and loss. It is also a book that vividly demonstrates the ways that psychoanalytic principles can be used to address the most extreme of human experiences in settings far from the analyst's office. Dr. Goren learned how to work as effectively from her perch on a fire truck's bumper as she does from her analyst's chair. We would do well to learn from her.
Her disturbing first chapter evokes viscerally the horrors that survivors and first responders lived through, and that were seared into their beings. Throughout the book, Goren presents her own experiences unvarnished. In the first days following September 11, we see her seated at an Information table:
I was a field guide in a futuristic landscape with a science fiction topography. What was I supposed to say, do? By this point I was sure they must all be dead, and thought that the families and friends should be notified. But then I questioned myself. I only saw the Towers collapse from a distance. But what about that unbelievable smell that wafts in every time they open the door? That smell that we were not yet able to admit was human life incinerated with the buildings. Are we really helping these people to placate them with this sham of going over a list? Who am I to say?
It was good to have orders to follow … Words not to be spoken, ‘bodies’, ‘morgue.’ Dead … So we spoke ‘Information.’
Dr. Goren did not toler