When twenty young children and six adults were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, I was again, as if it were new, shocked into awareness at the violence in our contemporary culture. Life is fragile and its end unpredictable. How, I wondered, do we help our patients absorb and integrate such an event?
When I was in my twenties, the war in Vietnam was brought into our homes each night with graphic footage on the evening news. That was the first marker of what is now the lightning fast disruption of our daily lives by news of that moment's crisis and trauma. The Boston Marathon bombing was one of the most recent markers. Violence is a magnet for the media.
When Congresswoman Gabby Gifford and members of her staff were shot in Arizona, I edited a special section in TAP (Spring/Summer 2011, 45/2) focused on some of the contributions of psychoanalysis—its theory and its institutions—to an understanding of the event. Leo Rangell pointed to a need for new theory.
Then the tragedy of Newtown hit. My thoughts turned to the consulting room. I asked Ana-Maria Rizzuto and Anne Adelman to think about what happens one-on-one in our daily practice. They have written two fine and very different articles. Rizzuto speaks of how our psyches understand and absorb death. She writes of working with mourning parents, with special attention to the experiences and needs of those who believe in God. Hers is an ancient concern, to witness the unspeakable, with a contemporary twist. Adelman, on the other hand, through the lens of an adolescent patient responding to Newtown, speaks to the challenge of the immediate, unfiltered intrusion of deeply disruptive, confusing, and at times traumatic news into the lives of our patients, our children—ourselves.
Whether it is our patients facing the unspeakable new iteration of the age-old problem of the death of innocent children or the intrusion of trauma into the lives of our adolescent patients and ourselves, there is much that happens in the consulting room that is still unknown.
Michael Slevin, M.A., M.S.W., a former TAP editor, graduated as academic associate from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he completed the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program. He works at Jewish Community Services of Baltimore and has a private practice.