Society's Use of the Hero Following a National Trauma
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SOCIETY’S USE OF THE HERO FOLLOWING A NATIONAL TRAUMA Elizabeth Goren
The terrorist nature of the attacks on September 11th, the number of deaths on American soil and the direct involvement of society as virtual eyewitnesses of the events of that day had a traumatizing impact on the cultural consciousness. The interpersonal, socio-cultural manifestations of traumatic grief are explored through an analysis of the creation and transformation of its national heroes, the New York City firefighters, in the public mind over time. Mechanisms of identification, dissociation and splitting were manifested through the erection of physical and social boundaries around 9/11, which allowed for idealization at a safe distance followed by de-cathexis when the collective sought to abort the mourning process and overcome the pain and helplessness of traumatic grief by going to war.
KEY WORDS: heroes; society; trauma; grief. DOI:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350013
Just wearing a uniform doesn’t make you a hero. Firefighter Sean Cummins in the New York Times 4/16/02
The heroes created out of national catastrophes are a barometer of the collective’s moral and emotional state and conflicts. How the image of the hero evolves over time tells us more about the psyche of the society at any given moment than about the individual or group identified as the hero. Psychoanalytic literature on trauma has largely focused on individual psyche, in particular, studying individual survivors and other victims. In this paper, I would like to draw attention to the collective psyche, specifically looking at the national crisis arising from the terrorist attacks on September 11th through a study of the evolving relationship between society and the firefighters of New York City, those donned as the main heroes of the day. It is my contention that the firefighters were chosen as the appointed heroes because they represented a symbol that combined the personifications of society’s complex and conflicting emotions surrounding 9/11. Made into an iconic figure of the classic tragic hero, the NYC fireman became a place Elizabeth Goren, Ph.D., is Faculty, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and also in private practice in New York City. Address correspondence to Elizabeth Goren, Ph.D., 300 Mercer Street, Suite 23L, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: [email protected]
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marker and repository for the catastrophic loss, victimization and trauma felt by the collective while also symbolizing our courageous refusal to accept defeat in the face of death and defeat. As Cowen (2000) pointed out, “Heroes, by their very nature, serve as highly visible and sharply focused reflections of various qualities in their societies, including the moral,” and claimed that societies “use” heroes as role models “for their own purposes.” Bennett (2004) has put forth the thesis that the hero is created by a society as “a collective response to…. helplessness and dread of loss.” Further, he argued that in society’s “hunger” for heroism, heroes functi
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