Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11

Abstract

Discusses the images from Ground Zero, following 9-11, that speak to other images that are tied to memories buried deep in the national psyche; to things forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously denied; things in the past that have never been confronted and worked through. On 9-11 did Americans realize that we were now experiencing, in diminished form, what it was like to be in Hiroshima city on 8-6-45? The knowledge of the underside of American history and the consequences of war on Iraq and in Afghanistan has become virtual, disembodied, and imageless and thus is already fading, leaving no residue in the national consciousness. What, then, are the possibilities of healing and renewal that we can derive from an awareness of the tragic complexities of 9-11 and its aftermath? Historical memory must become the process of creating a tragic culture: one for whom memory is conscience and not hagiography; for whom the past weighs like a nightmare precisely because it has not been constituted. What Hiroshima teaches us is that history remains irreversible in its tragic consequences until we find the way out of hell, that sustains trauma and depressive mourning as the destiny of historical subjects who know that reversal begins when we are willing to plumb the depths of our collective disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).