Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with a powerful force at the end of August 2005. Levees were breached, flooding large areas of New Orleans. Most residents able to evacuate the city did so.
Three months later (as TAP goes to press), the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Center is still disrupted. The building sustained little damage and its first floor library and administrative office are intact. But its members have been scattered. They took up temporary residence with family and friends throughout the state of Louisiana and in locations as far apart as Maine and Oregon, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida. A number migrated first to Houston, Texas. Families have placed their children in new schools and will not be returning to New Orleans until school breaks in January or May. Three displaced analysts have been hired by the psychiatry department of the University of Alabama in Birmingham Medical School.
Patients have also dispersed. The abrupt cessation of contact has been very difficult, Lee Ascherman, a Birmingham analyst affiliated with the New Orleans Institute, notes. In the initial weeks, cell phones and e-mail were down. Most analysts have been able to find most patients, he says, but it has been a long process. According to Randolph Harper, president of the center, no analysts are working full time. At best, analysts have resumed only 40 to 60 percent of their previous caseloads. Many, New Orleans analyst Elsa Pool adds, are in places where they cannot work at all. While Harper is back in New Orleans, in October Pool was seeing analytic patients four days a week in Baton Rouge and three days a week in New Orleans. Her husband, Douglas Pool, works during the week in a hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi, and on weekends sees patients in New Orleans.
The center has suffered a loss of its recent momentum. A “self-examination and change process” begun after the last site visit about four years ago, Harper reports, resulted in the dissolution of the separate institute and society and creation of a psychoanalytic center (TAP 38/4). The new center was established in an attempt to create a community of clinicians, scholars, and lay people who share an interest in psychoanalysis. There was only one class of members, all of whom were equally enfranchised. This, according to Harper, expanded and revitalized membership.
The first board, comprising analysts, psychotherapists and lay people, met through the summer, right up to the week of Katrina, involving most of the full membership in various aspects of the work to come. With this “energy we didn't have before,” Harper says, a rich and enticing schedule of training and outreach programs was planned.
Michael Slevin, M.A., is editor of TAP.
These inaugural year plans included child and adult programs in psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy training program, teaching of Louisiana State and Tulane University PGY III residents, outside speakers such as Ralph Roughton and Peter Rudnytsky, who would have appeal to the larger New Orleans mental health and university communities, special lectureships on the arts in collaboration with the New Orleans Museum of Art—and more.
All of this has been interrupted, and it is unclear when the center will be up and running. Because of fixed expenses, it is in the red at this time. Fundraisers, which had been planned, are not possible. One of the center's two fourth-year candidates has begun a reduced course load by phone. Two second-year psychotherapy students were hoping to soon begin classes by video conference. The Louisiana State University psychiatry residents want to start a teleconferencing course soon. To provide video and teleconferencing equipment and to help defray fixed costs, application is being made for a grant from the APsaA psychoanalytic foundation.
Some center members who have returned to New Orleans met in early November at the center and were joined by other members in a conference call to plan a support group effort and treatment and referral services as part of an outreach effort for the New Orleans community post-Katrina.
There is hope that programs picking up on the inaugural year efforts could begin next September. Harper says, “We have to recover personally, we've got to kind of feel our way, get grounded” first. Ascherman says, “We're still in the event.” But Harper, Ascherman, Pool, and others emphasize that the energy behind the new psychoanalytic center remains.
New Orleans Psychoanalytic Center APsaA members Joy and Howard Osofsky, in New Orleans, and Lee Ascherman, in Birmingham, are working long hours to help states provide systemic help to displaced and traumatized children.
Ascherman has been working with the Alabama State Departments of Education and Public Health. He is working to reach children in need, and, through the children, their parents. The schools are seen as the anchor point for displaced families. The school systems, he reports, have been very receptive to absorbing and not segregating these children. Yet they have provided opportunities for the children to gather together in group work and to process their experiences. The children, he points out, went home Friday before the hurricane with no awareness that that
would be the last time they would be together in their schools with their teachers and their peers. Now they are in new locations coping with anxiety about property and about parents' unemployment.
The Osofskys evacuated only briefly. Both Joy and Howard Osofsky had relationships with the state Office of Mental Health and the Department of Education. Joy Osofsky is coordinating the child and youth initiative for the education and training of school personnel dealing with the 189,000 displaced children in Louisiana. She has worked on intervention, supervision, and coordination with providers in local communities to “build resilience” amongst children.
Howard Osofsky, who has an extensive background in the area of disaster, terrorism, and mass violence, has been working with the state Office of Mental Health to address the crisis needs of the state. C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, has asked Osofsky for help concerning the mental health needs of the police and fire department personnel and the city emergency medical system. The work with first responders has been difficult and challenging. Most police officers responded heroically. But it was extremely hard for them to not be able to protect the city or rescue trapped residents. Many were on site for 15 days in the same uniforms; 80 percent suffered damage to their homes; and their families were often displaced. Osofsky has been particularly involved with the systemic issues of providing for the needs of the many children of first responders now housed on the cruise ships docked in the port. Over 400 children are now living with their parents on the ships. Day care, respite care, and transportation to good schools are being provided.
The relief work, Howard Osofsky notes, is applied psychoanalysis, drawing on Bowlby's work on attachment and loss during World War II. At that time, it was considered humane to evacuate children to the countryside away from the London Blitz, even though it meant separating them from their parents. But the children who thrived best were those who remained with their parents in London. The Osofskys are working to “help these traumatized families [in New Orleans] who are trying very hard to cope.”