At 4:31 A.M. my wife woke me with a start. There was no time for words. Within a second, the house began to roll around us like jelly. Earthquakes are reacted to in terms of their strength, their quality of motion, and—above all—their duration. This one lasted, continued on and on, not for two or three seconds, like the usual tremor, but more like thirty or forty, an eternity. With each prolongation or resumption of movement, we feared the worst: the roof would cave in on us. Literally, that is. The distinction between metaphor and reality was extinguished.
Having lived in Southern California almost half a century, I could feel this was “the big one,” or the closest to it yet. It was still dark, but the dark of the night became black, inside and out. In our bedroom the night lights, the signal lights that everything is in readiness to be lived—the clock dials, the display on the VCR, the “on” light of the answering machine, two green lights on the fax—clicked out. Outside our large picture window, the hills around us snapped to an ominous black. All the lights in streets and scattered homes were snuffed out. The city in the distance lost all markings. It happened in an instant and, as I remember, with almost a noisy click (here is the mind at work), as though someone had pulled a big switch in the sky.
Finally, the motion stopped. This was the first good news. The room was still a room. There was air between us and the walls. We were alive. We could breathe—physiologically and psychologically. We knew from years of experience that the first onslaught tells the most. We stayed in bed, and clung to each other. It was some time later that I groped for a flashlight and surveyed the damage. There was some breakage, things in disarray, piles of objects, unknown losses. A large mirror had fallen and shattered, and covered the carpet around us with splintered glass, making things look worse than they turned out to be. We were fortunate. No injuries; nothing had fallen on us.
It soon became light, and we learned more. The full impact, at close and long range, came gradually. With no communication for many hours, we received our first substantial news from callers from the East Coast, who reported to us what they were seeing on television. The enormous scope of the cataclysm became part of us only later. The sights, the bits of information, the experiences of those we know and love range from the harrowing to the tragic. I have spoken to people who were buried, who suffered crush fractures. One was a mother whose four-year-old daughter perished. She and her husband were rescued in mid-morning, many hours after their home slid down a hill and covered them. The mother is six months pregnant, with a broken pelvis; the unborn infant lives. The daughter “went from sleep to death and did not suffer,” was the opinion of a physician friend of mine who knew them. Wishes work.
Meanwhile, the Northeast is covered in ice, forty below. Eighty are dead in the cold. Florida just recovering from Hurricane Andrew, in the Carolinas tornadoes, in the Midwest the great summer floods, Los Angeles still reeling from brushfires, riots, and mudslides. Each exacts its human toll, and each imposes its own brand of horror.
The common ground in all such disasters is psychic helplessness, the ego's inability to cope. It accompanies the variable degree of physical helplessness in each case. Each perceived and internally registered traumatic experience elicits its unique and characteristic signal of danger. Fear of death is not the ultimate explanation, nor is it a uniform phenomenon. Part of life, it can be further broken down into modes and components. Modern history teaches us too much about that. There are people who, given the circumstances, choose one form of dying over another.
The basic anxieties of human beings address the dangers of separation and castration. Though developmentally earlier, separation is not necessarily the deeper fear. It takes some learning and development for the child to be able to be terrified. After that, castration becomes the more intense dread. Each of the two has its roots and its derivatives, the latter a constant shower of radiating effects.
The need to be attached, to counter separation, continues throughout life, from the infants early need for its mother through successive developmental stages, and eventually finds expression in the widest sociocultural phenomena. The instinctual need to be attached leads to the ubiquitous “need to belong,” which carries with it both adaptive and maladaptive consequences. Traceable to this motivational drive are bonding, friendship, love, group solidarity, and dedication to shared values and ideals. Unwanted or unassimilable disruptions in connectedness lead to strains and psychopathology. Sudden ruptures are the most traumatic.
Attachment to the ground, the physical basis and correlate of psychic attachment, is primeval, instinctive, a primitive condition that is also enduring and necessary. A cat at the end of a tree limb stays stranded there for days, starving, too panicky to jump or even fall. Animals, large and small, scurry around during an earthquake. Coyotes have been seen in residential neighborhoods this week. The quaking of the earth reverses an assumed steady state, creating the threat of a total disorientation—nowhere to turn, nothing to stand on, nothing to be attached to. A biological connectedness and unity is severed, and threatened with impermanence. The threat of a disruption in one's relation to the earth, whether through separation or an obliterating merger, is unsurpassed in its traumatic effects. Of all the natural disturbances known to human beings, the sudden threatened liquefaction of the earth beneath our feet produces the most unnatural psychic and somatic sensations, the most intense affects for the disrupted ego to deal with.
Castration anxiety, twin to separation, has its parallel spread of effects. Radiating from the
intense developmental fantasy of oedipal (and even preoedipal) castration, every inch of the soma is derivatively protected against tearing, invasion, or being pulled apart. There is a hierarchy of anxieties. Underlying both separation and castration is survival. Self-preservation, to stay together in one piece and to breathe, is the highest priority (though it might be argued that a mother's instinct to preserve her child supersedes this). The instinctual self-preservative thrust operates to embrace and contain the body borders, to preserve the integrity of the whole and its parts. The body, from boundary to internal organs, is under siege during each second the earth shakes, and the accompanying affect is revived in varying degrees during each after-shock. With each repeated threat the ego is suspended, or it shakes synchronously with the external movement, according to its expected capacity or incapacity for defense and mastery.
Death is not automatically the ultimate danger. The castration story in the news today (again, no metaphor), features Lorena Bobbitt, soft-spoken and mild-mannered, who is quoted in a friend's testimony as having said she would “cut her husband's dick off” if he were unfaithful, a punishment she considered more painful than death. So, too, a patient with diffuse sexual psychopathology associates frequently to “a fate worse than death.” This converges with dreams, symptoms, fantasies, and other associations to reveal a fear of literal castration. And it should be noted, too, that there are different ways of dying, some preferable to others. In duels of honor, which on occasion take place even today, the challenged can choose the weapons. A patient, associating to Holocaust victims digging their own graves, insists in a flight of fantasy that he would have taken a few Nazis with him. Euthanasia too has its adherents, and a now-familiar physician engages publicly in assisted suicide.
The two basic dangers and anxieties have their anlagen, their underpinnings. These anxieties trickle up developmentally to form the living fears of being alone and of being torn apart. Of all the natural upheavals to which human beings are exposed, earthquakes are particularly revealing of the inchoate origins of these prehistoric biological dangers. The sudden insecurity experienced when the supporting platform beneath the body is taken away, the profound sense of helplessness, can hardly be conveyed in words, as the assurance of a solid base under the self is an ontogenetic given that precedes, and indeed lays the ground for, the use of language.
Finding oneself where the ground under one's feet cannot be taken for granted produces a condition of psychic suspension unknown in conscious life but not without an existential basis in the human unconscious. At the termination of intrauterine life, the moment the infant figure is severed from its maternal ground, the “independent” neonate is attached to a new physical ground, no longer biological, even if at first the connection is mediated through the crib and the mother's lap. Though the linkages continually change, the connection to the ground remains ever present. When we jump or soar, for however brief a time, we return to earth, and without thinking know we always will. To conquer this obligatory base, even for a moment, leads to a temporary feeling of omnipotence, whether in a record-setting high jump or in the universal thrill of a roller coaster ride.
The sudden giving way of the earth beneath one's feet interrupts this permanent supporting base, this time not in a playful way but unexpectedly. Psychically, this is the space walker cut off from his tether. Such a sudden, undesired separation is to be born again, but into the weightlessness of space. While the repetition compulsion, in its deepest strivings, urges a return to the conditions of the womb, this always-latent drive backward also occasions and intensifies this primeval fear.
The necessary relation to the earth is defined throughout life. The only fear worse than separation from the earth is the fear of returning to it. One will be buried, either in debris falling from above, or from the earth's opening up and sucking one in. Both happen. The shock of a quake switches on our alertness to these possibilities. Being dead is not the ultimate trauma, to some it even conjures thoughts of respite and peace. Being buried alive is a strong candidate for the apocalyptic, cosmic horror. Clinically and empirically, claustrophobia, the dreadful feeling of being enclosed and suffocating, is at the base of panphobias. This is the universal dread we all identified with when little Kathy Fiscus fell into a well, and the world watched in a state of awe and suspension. In the earthquake, a custodian endured, and evoked in us, the same age-old drama. Buried
under tons of concrete, he was more fortunate than little Kathy. This time Everyman was heroically rescued. He had put himself in the hands of God, he said, and had been saved.
The other side of psychic helplessness is the ability to defend. One can dress against the wind and cold, avoid floods and raging rivers, flee from oncoming danger. But there is no defense against what the very earth itself can come up with. Neither fight nor flight, the classic defenses against anxiety, offer much help here.
Central is the factor of control. In an earthquake there is no control of the movements felt and encountered. The effects are capricious and random, in the hands of something outside the self. The next moment is unknown, and cannot be influenced. The ego, aiming for control and mastery during every moment of its existence, is dethroned in a sudden, unexpected flash. A lifetime of gradually acquired control, and of reliance on it, is summarily overturned, as regression to a primitive, passive state is instantaneous and complete. Unpredictability furthers helplessness. The only certainty is uncertainty. The only hope is that the new conditions will cease of themselves.
Nature only occasionally provides the experience, but always presents the possibility, of facing challenges to our deepest, most primitive defenses against the dissolution of body and mind. For the most part, these dangers are experienced only vicariously, through books, films, the news media. But in this quake, in just a few minutes of compressed time, millions faced the challenge directly, with no cushion, first alone and then together. Some seven million people experienced this trauma in common. This was the number closest to the epicenter; also affected were many millions more, as tremors and blackouts were experienced as far away as Santa Barbara and San Diego.
The state of sudden vigilant alert felt in common when the quake hit is normal fear, not neurotic anxiety. The collective state of alert vigilance helps people ward off and work through the trauma. The ubiquitous reaction is not pathological but an adaptive expectation of a realistic threat. What is coming is a trauma, not a traumatic neurosis, and it will challenge the ego's assessment of its capacity to cope. A neurotic outcome is to think this is neurotic. Counselors focus on this one point. Anxiety, guilt, and depression cumulate upon it. What one can expect from oneself in meeting danger of this magnitude is negligible. The only hope is that the external threat will come to an end of itself. The state of anxiety so induced can later merge into a post-traumatic stress disorder, with restlessness, insomnia, traumatic dreams, and a variety of psychosomatic symptoms, often cardiac or gastrointestinal.
Trauma from without and trauma from within converge in a common focus, each testing the mind's ability to cope. With massive trauma coming from the external world, internal traumatic pressures stand aside. Instincts begin to serve the person during such events, sparing the beleaguered ego further stress. Clinically, our patients' neuroses do not worsen during natural disasters. In my experience, they in fact let up. Phobic patients become temporarily more realistic when faced with an immediate threat.
Every type of psychopathology is seen also in milder but related forms. For instance, the major disorientation between figure and ground that is experienced in earthquakes becomes, in its milder form, the syndrome of seasickness, or motion sickness more generally, conditions in which the earth's surface and the horizon do not remain in their accustomed places in relation to the individual. The organism responds with psychosomatic symptoms, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract, which seems to refuse all intake from the external world. Queasiness, nausea, and unease take over, with no end to the disturbance in sight. The dystonic sensations feel like they will last forever. Indeed, it has been said that the feeling in seasickness is not a fear that one will die, but that one will not.
Trauma brings out the dual nature of human beings. During a crisis, there is a surge of altruism and heroism; reports of rescuers risking their own lives are not uncommon. Many commentators have noted the solidarity and mutual helpfulness of people enduring a common stress. Many praise the traumatic events, crediting the earthquake with the outpouring of fellow feeling from neighbors who have never met. Later, the normal ratio of togetherness and isolation will return. And alongside all the sharing and commiseration, looting and price gouging are already being watched for.
Right now, a week or two after the quake, we see normal vigilance and response. Eventually, we will see more and more post-traumatic stress disorder, although this will also be used as a scapegoat diagnosis for psychopathology unrelated to the quake. Every jolt, every aftershock, however mild, is experienced as a threat that it will go on and on, turn into “the big one” again. From experience, however, we know there is less chance of that now, which makes for relief, and leads some to the point of euphoria. Here and there, of course, one also hears, “That's it. I've had it with L.A. I'm outta' here.” The key is in comparative unconscious fantasies: the speaker would rather be blown around on the earth than fused into it. But few have left. Although one prominent visitor turned right around and took off for Palm Springs, many tourists have been drawn to the scene of the accident.
A Los Angeles Times poll shows that even among the hardest hit, only 3% say they will leave L.A. This is where they live, and they like it better than anyplace else. Both hope and denial, the rational and the defensive, combine to produce a generally positive mindset. What is more likely to send people back to other places is a depressed economy and long-range ego interests, not the fear of crime and riots, not the superego's disgust at the shallowness and corruption so often laid at Tinseltown's door, and not the id-based, instinctual turning away from the recent trauma. A seriously depressed patient, who has not become worse since the earthquake, goes for a ride with her nurse in the hills above her house before coming to her hour. It has lightened her up. “L.A. is a spectacular place,” she says. It is. And it has been calm here now for most of the day.