ROOM With a View

In the weeks after 9/11 the IPTAR Clinical Center received a grant to fly in mental health professionals from Ireland, the Middle East, and South America to talk about the experience of doing psychoanalysis in the midst of existential terror. Hundreds of therapists practicing in New York came to “Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space” a conference that was held in shadow of the twin towers.

Two things have stayed in my mind about that conference. One was the sanguine tone of some of the presenters. It was as if Americans (you can fill in the inflection) were just catching up to something that the non-American psychoanalysts who came to speak to us had lived with all their lives. Of course gas masks and bomb shelters were part of everyday treatment. Of course an entire economy could crumble to nothing in a matter of days. Of course random acts of deadly violence were every day occurrences. Of course, in other words, the sacredness of the “analytic space” was permeable to a shared, uncertain, and often violent external reality. Emphasis there on the word shared. You American analysts, Lord John Alderdice told me that weekend over coffee, you thought you left the bad stuff in Europe when you left in the 1940s. You actually thought you could create an analytic space behind four walls that would be a safe world apart.

But wasn't that, in some measure, the point? Development, transformation, and real change can't happen outside of a safe, predictable boundary between outside and inside. Even the wall, permeable as it must be between

“You actually thought you could create an analytic space behind four walls that would be a safe world apart.”

consciousness and unconsciousness, is paradoxically a barrier that makes expanding consciousness possible. But I got his point.

The other thing Alderdice shared with me was his very dim view of ego psychology. For example, he said Americans can be way too interested in the constitutional and historical reas