ABSTRACT
As a child and adolescent psychiatrist who has spent the past 15 years making yearly visits to El Salvador, the events of September 11 brought home to New York City terrors that I’d grown accustomed to experiencing on foreign soil. There, only three years earlier, the dean of psychology, Ignacio Martin-Baro, five other priest-professors, their cook, and her daughter had been slain by the military. It seemed appropriate to be offering workshops of creativity in this setting, for Martin-Baro had theorized that prolonged war changes the social fabric into one characterized by social polarization, violence, and lies, for war is a construct founded on the premise that might makes right. Political violence had scarred neighboring Latin American countries in the 1970s, and solidarity was sparked, calling neighbors from the Southern Cone to share what they had learned along their healing journey.
