ABSTRACT
Author's work with earthquake survivors in Armenia might be called applied psychoanalysis—which is true but somewhat misleading. The story starts not with professional identity, but with national identity. The major divide was not between Armenia and England. It was between Spitak, the epicentre of the earthquake, and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, physically untouched by the earthquake. Wolfenstein's thesis that the orderliness of a narrative has a therapeutic function in the mastery of trauma resonated to author's own experience. A genocide or massacre contrasts with a natural disaster in that there is somebody to blame. One might want to explain the outrage and anger directed against Gorbachev and the authorities as defensive: a projection outwards of an unbearable hatred, unleashed by the helplessness central to the experience of disaster against the primary internal object for its failure to protect. The relief was the greater because these children had little experience of anyone trying to understand them without controlling and constraining.
