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Nr 14. 2006 sid. 29–38
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On September 11, 2001, 1.1 million children attended public school. Of this group, grammar school age children in both public and private schools typically waited for a parent or other adult to retrieve them (Coates, 2003). The enormity of scope of this disaster is obvious. This study, a very small one, sought to examine children’s narrative constructions of the events of 9/11 as told to their therapists in the context of psychotherapy. I utilized an oral history format to interview (to date) 20 therapists who were trained in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic modalities. Many also utilized cognitive behavior therapy models of trauma intervention. In all, 45, different cases were reflected in the vignettes, some of which will be presented here. Vignettes encompassed children age 5–12 at the time of the event. The narratives appeared as narratives that were constructed solely by the child, narratives where the therapist predominates and narratives that became co-constructed (the co-construction of narratives typically came later on in treatment). The co-constructed vignettes often depended upon the therapists’ style and use of timing for interpreting symbolic play with reality. (Some therapists will wait a very long time before connecting events.) Some children, especially the ‘downtown’ cohort closest to the World Trade Center, witnessed the direct destruction of the buildings and were forced to flee with their teachers, relatives or friends. Some children witnessed the aftermath of the crash from rooftops. Children who watched the Spanish networks on television saw unedited versions of the event. For the youngest children there was a lack of clarity that this was a one time event, (not repeated over and over with each television viewing). Theories of narration in childhoodFreud and subsequent trauma theorists suggest that traumatic experiences are repeated and reenacted in “the subjects’ life” (Freud, 1958) in a kind of “absence” of conscious memory (Rimmon-Kenan, 2001). In child treatment, the narrative of trauma may be enacted and reenacted as visual i.e., drawings of events or symbolically enacting events that need no words. Mieke Bal (2002) writes that “memory is the joint between time & space” i.e., evoking a past that eludes mapping the sometimes problematic use of language to describe the agent that “sees that which is seen” (Bal, 2002). An example of this from the 9/11 experience was a child who managed to get the tape of 9/11. He ran and rewound the tape over and over so that the bodies falling from the towers were made to move backward in time and fall back into the buildings. In a sense this reenactment eluded language and mapping in a vacuum of unconscious repetition compulsion. Jerome Bruner (1986) has written that representation of an experience in narrative serves as a “cooling function” for children and provides containment of troubling or disruptive states. In child therapy, the child analyst’s predicament is to decode and interpret the language of play, gesture and other non verbal communications through a myriad of psychoanalytic possibilities; at once providing what Spence calls “active listening,” and interacting. “Active listening tends to occur in response to loosely organized associations” (Spence, 1982). Therapists seek to hear the unedited narratives of human life. But, psychoanalytic interpretation offers chimaera-like twists and turns of possible interventions and interpolations. In most contemporary psychoanalytic canons, it is today a given that patient and analyst co-construct a sense of meaning for the patient’s life based on mutual self and other interactive regulation (Beebe & Lachman, 1981). Beebe et al. have referred to the “forms of intersubjectivity,” in infancy as a “dialogic origin of mind.” ...
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Copyright: Allt material ©
MELLANRUMMET 2011-10-29 |
Professor,
Ph.D., Theresa Aiello, School of Social Work, Human Behavior Curriculum
Area vid New York University, har under många år arbetat med terapeutisk
behandling av barn. Hon är även handledare och lärare vid The National
Institute for the Psychotherapies, Child and Adolescent Analytic
Training Program. Hon har intresserat sig för barns sätt att berätta om
händelser de berörts av. I artikeln beskrivs hur barn i psykoterapi
återberättar händelser i samband med den terroristattack som skedde mot
Twin Towers i New York 2001. 
