ABSTRACT
I spent September 11, 2001 shuttling back and forth between therapy sessions and a friend's apartment across the alley where the television played and replayed terrorist Mohammed Atta's millennial Dance of Death; he had flown out of Portland earlier that morning. In the days that followed I was surprised to find that my work did not seem reduced to utter insignificance. In fact, I felt an added urgency—not to speed things up for people, but to try harder to connect with whatever was alive in my patients, even if that vitality constellated around such "mundane" therapeutic issues as marital discord, conflicts with a boss, a feeling of not being recognized for one's value, and the like. There was a heightened sense of energy and purpose that, in the main, has lasted. I was reminded of William Saroyan's adage, "In the time of your life, live!"
I tried, in this piece (Psychiatric Times, February 2002), to put a larger historical and archetypal context around my continued, and renewed, identity as a psychotherapist.
