Abstract
The memorial at the site of the former World Trade Center will open on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to help us commemorate, honor, educate, and mourn. Memorializing is an act that involves shared memory and collective grieving—aiming also to restore severed communal bonds and dismantled cultural ideals. As such, it is a form of cultural renewal that can transform traumatized mourners into an ethical community of memory. The active rituals of memorial activity utilize both inscribed and non-inscribed practices to help survivors of mass trauma manage fear, disorganization, and helplessness as well as sorrow. To bear witness to horrific events and the suffering they induced is a moral act. To do so together with people who may have seen the events of 9/11 from other perspectives, while also remembering one’s own vision of what mattered, may mean learning to tolerate multiple conflicting narratives about the events’ meanings. It is time to turn our attention from the memorial to memorializing.
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Notes
Perhaps it was a toxic mixture of longing, self-loathing, grief, helplessness, shame, and guilt that fractured Orpheus. He behaved as if dead while alive, and was so fragmented he couldn’t protect himself from dying. That the Muses created the funerary rites for a proper burial suggested that burial without symbolization could not bring an end to a story of terrifying, violent death, because trauma inflicted by other human beings (as opposed to natural disaster) sundered trust, communication, and the fidelity to communal ideas. Without mourning, terrifying death can continue to pose a threat to the very foundation of our social world.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at The New Directions Program for Psychoanalytic Writing and Critical Thinking at The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, Washington DC, on April 1, 2010. I am most grateful to Dr. Dodi Goldman, Dr. Jesse Geller, Dr. Lee Salamon, Dr. Christine Erskine, Dr. Yehuda Levy-Aldema, Mr. Tom Hennes and Dr. Michael Harty for their astute comments on other early drafts of this paper.
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Pivnick, B.A. Enacting Remembrance: Turning Toward Memorializing September 11th. J Relig Health 50, 499–515 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9517-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9517-1