Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the notion of collectively experienced trauma has taken on a new signifi cance. Prior to these events psychotherapeutic work with Holocaust survivors had shown that traumatic experiences can have lifelong consequences, their effects possibly even extending across generations. As I discussed in Chapter 5, study of the transmission of trauma has been extended to audio-visual media in the work of several critics, including Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman and Joshua Hirsch. It was claimed after 9/11 that potentially all Americans and everyone in Western societies experienced a traumatic shock. The idea of collective trauma now became more closely bound to the imagined community of the nation and to the role of mass media in defi ning the experience of that community. Precedents for 9/11 as a mass-mediated American event included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and television coverage of the Vietnam War. Each of these events gave rise to occasions for public mourning. After 9/11 the media went a step further, as “most newspapers and television stations labeled the event a national trauma without hesitation or explanation” (Trimarco and Depret 30). This therapeutic interpretation assigned the public the role of passive victim and thereby implicitly denied the possibility of political agency in response to the events (Furedi 16).