In our work in the group we tried to comfort ourselves and to create new bonds to hold one another and to weave personal meanings in the midst of violent meaninglessness. Norma broke down and ran away as members of her group spoke about papers exploding from the WTC, papers, memos and printed e-mail all splattered and covered with human blood. Two of Norma’s friends followed her and I followed them, all of us rushing down the hall together, symbolically recreating escape from the events of September the 11th. I edged into the discussion, which was in Spanish, by asking for “Un vaso de agua, por favor, dos, two glasses of water,” one for myself and one for Norma. I followed Norma to a private office to speak to her alone.

Norma’s desk was placed catty-corner to a beautiful picture window that looks out on the shiny New York Harbor, with no indication of the massive destruction nearby. Norma is an attractive woman in her forties with long dark hair that she wears pushed back. She had on a stylish embroidered sweater set and a classic black skirt, but her worn shoes betrayed her financial problems. She and her husband emigrated from Peru about twenty years ago. We spoke together in a mixture of Spanish and English.

“Should I cry?” Norma asked me. “Do you cry?”

“Yes. I cry.” I hoped to help Norma feel less guilty and more connected to her emotional life by giving her a piece of my own life as an example.

Norma described the events that she had witnessed. She had been leaving the subway station near the WTC just as the world exploded. Norma has epilepsy and has endured this condition in silent shame for her whole life. Her attacks feel like explosions inside of herself. The chaos and doom that she observed outside doubled the chaos and doom that she feels inside. She was terrified that she would have an attack in the middle of this toxic whirlpool. She saw people jump through fire to their deaths, watched the buildings fall and walked through the black wind that rose up like a whirlwind from the Underworld. Norma faced these stone tornadoes alone.

After a time everyone was told to walk north. Norma kept on walking in a massive emigration of thousands of people until she met her husband on 23rd Street and Third Avenue where he was waiting for her. “He saved me,” she said, “I kept my eyes closed the whole time.” Of course, she really saved herself. She is attached to the myth of a powerful parental figure that will care for her and protect her from internal threats and outside threats as well. Norma “kept her eyes closed the whole time,” she maintained denial in an attempt to shut out the noxious vortex. She is a traditional woman and she has cultural as well as personal reasons that prevent her from seeing that it was her own actions that saved her. I think that she cannot face her power and helplessness and the unbearable aloneness that is part of being in this universe. She can’t face her own aggression either, just as I sometimes feel shaken by my strength and vulnerability. We are all part of this upside down, fulminating world together.

Norma is a strong, proud woman who accepts neither help nor pity. She has survived, and does not believe that she deserves to feel anything other than gratitude, but she is terrified, sorrowful and incensed. Norma believes that only the dead are permitted to have strong feelings of rage, fear and sorrow. Perhaps powerful feelings are safe only with the dead. She feels her own feelings might cause an epileptic attack and kill her. She feels unworthy; she should be punished for surviving and for leaving others behind. I wonder about the parallels between her two trips north, the first from South America to the US, and the second just now away from southern Manhattan and towards Flushing, Queens.

“What should I do?” Norma said. “I pray. Do you pray?”

“Yes.” I said. Sometimes when I light the Shabbat candles, meditate or do yoga I manage to act with intention. Sometimes when I listen to people in therapy I hear them with devotion. That’s prayer. I usually take comfort that everything is temporary, but then again, this temporary includes me and right now I feel a little too impermanent and scared. That’s another kind of prayer.

I thought how ironic it was that I was working hard to help Norma feel that we had something in common so that she might talk to me. I spoke to her in Spanish, I talked about the neighborhood that she lives in and the number 7-subway line she takes to work. I know her route very well. Norma thought we were completely different while I struggled to show Norma how our lives touched, and inside I knew how much the same we were. We were both in shock about the New York Troubles, and that called up other horrible memories and inspired paranoid thinking. Norma was scared to leave her apartment. I was nearly as jumpy as I had been when I was a kid. I thought about my emotional and physical emigration from my parents, who offered me little protection and often put me in danger.

I wondered yet again, as I wonder over and over when I work with clients, how I come to sit in the analyst’s chair. What makes me different? The work that I did and do with my analysts, my supervisors, my teachers, my colleagues is part of it. My unconscious has earned a Ph.D. My pens and paintbrushes in my hands show me how to value and pursue my feelings, thoughts and ideas.

Meditation and art and psychoanalysis have helped make space between my experience and myself so I have a little wriggle room to look things over and maybe play with them if I feel comfortable. Then I take that space with me when I sit with clients and we talk and breathe together. Some days I breathe in rhythm with their agony.

Later that day, after I had said good-by to Norma, I walked to the WTC site with a friend so that we could see the destruction again. We could not believe that this had happened, we were still in denial. I imagined a morass of lost, severed souls, each trying desperately to realign dismembered parts of the self with the shape of the world, in order to reenter the pool. The catastrophic and savage deaths at the WTC seemed to me to imbue the entire area with the stench of terror and meaningless violence. Where was the Great Pool?

Amid the acrid and sweet smells of burning people and burning matter I detected the scent of incense, and followed my nose to a street corner where Buddhist priests had set up an altar where they prayed and chanted to help undo the terrible confusion and allay the fears of all those poor trapped, incinerated souls. I imagined the dead following the incense, stroked and smoothed by its scent, helped to find a doorway out of the Hell Realm.

Today I am back in my office with my clients. We are working together to center ourselves and to make meaning so that we can include the world’s awful pain and within it our own particular and private griefs. The ground shakes beneath our feet.

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