My office, and everything in it, was destroyed five days after the Northridge earthquake of January 17. The quake itself did not destroy it; a wrecking ball did. Demolition had been decreed by the City of Los Angeles, which had declared the partially crumpled six-story building a safety hazard.
Whether a “quick and dirty” means of solving an acknowledged civic problem was appropriate, in view of all the records, equipment, and furnishings that were destroyed in the over 150 professional offices housed in that building, may be settled in future litigation. That wrecking ball pulverized the offices of fifteen members of The American.
It is now two weeks since the destruction began, and a diminishing pile of rubble is being scooped into dump trucks where the Barrington-Olympic Medical Building once stood—a solid, attractive edifice in whose inner chambers people entrusted their pain to the care of others. Scattered among the shards of metal, concrete, and glass are a few torn and crumpled pieces of paper. An armed guard prevents me from knowing: Is this a page from one of my patients' records? From one of my filed letters? One of my reprints? Will sensitive information about a publicly known person be scattered by the wind to land at the feet of some pruriently inquisitive passerby?
Los Angeles is relatively calm now; an occasional aftershock reminds us, in this quixotic city, of our uncertain tether to the planet. I am outwardly calm for my patients, but as they express their condolences I make no effort to conceal my sense of loss. A medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic library collected from my first days at medical school fifty years ago, and including many recent publications, is totally gone. Correspondence from friends, colleagues, patients. Letters from Karl and Will Menninger, from Fairbairn, from Bion, and others. Cherished artwork, figurines, a little “Medicine Buddha” in deep mediation over the ongoing psychoanalytic processes in that consulting room.
Two of my patients wept over the loss, and thus helped me to realize that it was my patients' loss as well. The office had been a haven for them, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the pain they felt and had come to express and share there. They appreciate the cozy study in my home where I am seeing them temporarily. The house shakes from time to time, but much less so than buildings in other locations, because it sits on the solid rock of a canyon rim. There will be apprehension in my patients and myself when I open a new office, bookshelves almost empty, on the twelfth floor of a high rise that was undamaged. They will come to see me in that office; together we will work it all through.
The many condolence calls from friends and colleagues have helped me in working through my own sense of loss. The pain lessens each day, as plans are made and carried out to buy furniture and supplies. Friends have been generous in offering books no longer needed.
I find it to be a lesson in attachment (not in the Bowlbian sense) and in impermanence. The tangible anchors of much of my intellectual life have been destroyed. To what extent have I defined myself by that assemblage of material objects?
There is much sadness and no small amount of anger, since I believe the dismantling of the building could have proceeded with care for its contents. For this reason, it is unlike a loss by fire or windstorm. I am a very unparanoid person, but the feeling of victimization is very strong. Perhaps it can be a lesson to an affluent Westsider that vulnerability to arbitrary assault is not the exclusive preserve of the disadvantaged poor. I feel damaged, helpless, raped.
Looking for lessons to be learned can perhaps mitigate feelings of powerlessness.
What can an earthquake teach us? Mother Earth can shake hard enough to temporarily cancel gravitational force, which in addition to damaging human structures, creates an untethering experience that can occasion the ultimate separation anxiety. Even social isolates, whose inner world is impoverished of self- and object configurations, can rely on that ongoing reminder of a primal connection: we stand, we lie down, we sit, we lift, we walk (part of which is the process of falling). We are always, unconsciously, taking gravity into account. I have come to the belief that the fear felt in an earthquake is not primarily the fear of injury or damage. It is the helpless fear that Mother Earth may never stop shaking, and it is that fear of ultimate physical disconnection, a complete loss of a primordial tie, that massively potentiates separation anxiety. A sense of powerlessness and the anxiety engendered by the uncertainty even of terra firma are clinically observable in patients who “freak out.” In most cases, it is not difficult to see that the quake has been experienced as a coup de grace in a life already emotionally shaky.
At this point, the impressive explanatory power of psychoanalysis appears to have its limitations, as its fascinating exploration of meanings must stop short of the meaning of existence itself. At times like this we are confronted by Weltanschauung considerations: must we seek some Ultimate Being or Cause as a surrogate rock to cling to in the face of the earth's unreliability, or do we accept the cold comfort of our ultimate aloneness in the universe? Those who have been happily spared these experiences are freer to consider such questions, if they are so inclined, at their detached intellectual leisure.