iPhone app iPad app Android phone app Android tablet app

Collective Trauma

The Boston Marathon Bombing as a Collective Trauma

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 04.19.2013 | Crime
Read More: Terrorist Attack, Trauma, Existential Vulnerability, Collective Trauma, 9/11, Nuclear Proliferation, Loss, Horror, Finitenesss, Death, Global Terrorism, Harm, Resurrective Ideology, Economic Collapse, Age of Trauma, Diminution of Natural Resources, Human Existence, World Trade Center, Boston Marathon Bombing, Limitedness, Global Warming, Relational Home, Crime News
Robert D. Stolorow

A tragedy like this brings us face-to-face with our existential vulnerabilities -- vulnerabilities to harm, death, and loss -- and the existential vulnerability of all those we love and, perhaps worst of all, the limitedness or our ability to protect them.

Read Whole Story

Time to Listen to Veterans Tell Their Truths

Leila Levinson | Posted 04.18.2013 | Impact
Read More: Military Sexual Trauma, Veterans PTSD, Trauma, Children, Writing, Combat, Emotional Healing, Collective Trauma, Healing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Ptsd War Veterans, Afghanistan War, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Veterans, Iraq War, History, PTSD Veterans, Iraq Veterans, Afghanistan Veterans, Alternative Healing, Military, Post Traumatic Stress, Posttraumatic Stress, Military PTSD, Theatre, Soldiers PTSD, Ptsd, Military Families, Post-Traumatic Stress, Impact News
Leila Levinson

We are 12 adults preparing for a play. We are veterans and family members of veterans. The audience will be civilians. Just as children learn through play, so is our play teaching us, transforming us.

Read Whole Story

A Shared Trauma: The Death of Pan Am

Helen Davey | Posted 01.16.2013 | Healthy Living
Read More: Job Loss, Trauma, Mourning, Collective Trauma, Loss, Traumatic Loss, Grief, Overcoming Loss, Handling Loss, Overcoming Grief, Dealing With Trauma, Dealing With Loss, Grieving, Grief and Loss, Healthy Living News
Helen Davey

Following the devastation left in the path of Hurricane Sandy, I invite those who are suffering from this massive collective trauma to view this speech.

Read Whole Story

What Did We Learn From 9/11?

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 11.12.2012 | Politics
Read More: Resurrective Ideologoy, President Obama, Existential Vulnerability, 9/11 Anniversary, Collective Trauma, 9/11, Human Finiteness, Martin Heidegger, Idle Talk, War on Terror, Osama Bin Laden, Bush Administration, Climate Change, Forgetfulness of Being, Dnc, Global Warming, Nuclear Power, Axis of Evil, Politics News
Robert D. Stolorow

Human beings have great difficulty accepting and dwelling in such existential vulnerability. We fall into what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called idle talk.

Read Whole Story

Collapse of a World

Helen Davey | Posted 02.15.2012 | Business
Read More: Trauma, Collapse of Pan Am, Terrorism, Collective Trauma, Flight 103, Aviation History, Pan Am, Bankruptcy, Lifestyle, Life Changes, Great Recession, Recession, Business News
Helen Davey

I'm struck by the similarity of the feelings of instability in the world now with how we Pan Am employees felt as our company began to fail.

Read Whole Story

Trauma, Death, and Resurrection: A Russian-American Conversation

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 11.07.2011 | World
Read More: Societal Collapse, War on Terror, Existential Vulnerability, George W. Bush, Collective Trauma, 9/11, Loss, Social Death, Death, Resurrective Ideology, Irreversible Trauma, Collapse of USSR, Vladimir Putin, World Collapse, Homo Mortalis, Man-God, World News
Robert D. Stolorow

(An invited conversation between myself [RDS] and Russian social philosopher and journalist Sergei Roganov [SR].) RDS: You were kind enough to contac...

Read Whole Story

Stories Of Loss And Chaos: The Ninth Of Av And The 10th Anniversary Of 9/11

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster | Posted 10.08.2011 | Religion
Read More: Rabbis for Human Rights, Interfaith Dialogue, Tisha B'Av, Tisha B'av 2011, Judaism, Jewish Mourning, Religious Tolerance, Book of Lamentations, 9/11 Anniversary, Collective Trauma, Jewish Storytelling, September 11 Anniversary, Religion News
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster

Tisha B'Av has been a way for the Jewish community to confront and contain trauma through the telling of stories. But after 9/11, how can we have unity when we aren't clear what story we are telling?

Read Whole Story

The Meaning and the Rhetoric of Evil: Auschwitz and Bin Laden

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 08.27.2011 | World
Read More: George Bush, Freud, Manichaeism, Trauma, Ronald Reagan, Rwandan Genocide, Terrorism, Japan Nuclear Crisis, Existential Vulnerability, 9/11, Collective Trauma, Heidegger, Holocaust, Hannah Arendt, Evil, Osama Bin Laden, Nihilism, Radical Rvil, Nazis, Resurrective Ideology, Crusades, Auschwitz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Global Warming, Totalitarianism, World News
Robert D. Stolorow

Is there an alternative to ideological illusion and the rhetoric of evil? Yes, there is. We must remember our common human vulnerabilities and bring them into a collective conversation within which our existential anxiety can be held and better borne.

Read Whole Story

Death and Resurrection

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 07.03.2011 | World
Read More: Collective Trauma, 9/11, Osama Bin Laden Dead, Resurrective Ideology, Southern Tornadoes, Japan Nuclear Crisis, Existential Vulnerability, World News
Robert D. Stolorow

The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was a devastating collective trauma that inflicted a rip in the fabric of the American psyche. In horrifyin...

Read Whole Story

Japan's Earthquake and Apocalyptic Terror

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 11.17.2011 | Healthy Living
Read More: Japan Tsunami, Japan Earthquake, San Andreas Fault, Earthquake Preparedness, Collective Trauma, California Nuclear Power Plants, Los Angeles, Japan Nuclear Catastrophe, September 11, Post-Traumatic Stress, Healthy Living News
Robert D. Stolorow

Earthquakes, especially catastrophic ones, shake our confidence in the very ground we stand on and confront us with the groundlessness of our existence, wherein no certainty, safety, or continuity of being can be assured.

Read Whole Story

Earthquakes, Trauma, and Existential Anxiety

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 11.17.2011 | Healthy Living
Read More: 9/11, Haiti Earthquake, Existential Anxiety, Groundlessness, Los Angeles, San Andreas Fault, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Collective Trauma, Healthy Living News
Robert D. Stolorow

Angelenos who live by the San Andreas Fault Line live in a vague state of anxiety. It is an existential anxiety -- about our own existence and the existence of all those whom we love.

Read Whole Story

The Lesson of 9/11

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 05.25.2011 | Politics
Read More: Collective Grandiosity, Collective Trauma, 9/11, Bush Administration, Global Terrorism, Existential Vulnerability, September 11th, Al Qaeda, Politics News
Robert D. Stolorow

The attack of 9/11 shattered our collective illusions of safety, inviolability, and grandiose invincibility, illusions that had long been mainstays of the American historical identity.

Read Whole Story

Blues, Trauma, Finitude

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 11.17.2011 | Healthy Living
Read More: Dialogue, Collective Trauma, Finitude, Trauma, Existential-Vulnerability, African Americans, Slavery, Blues, Healthy Living News
Robert D. Stolorow

With roots in African music, the blues was born in the Mississippi delta as a distinctively African American musical genre in response to the de-humanizing traumas of slavery and its aftermath.

Read Whole Story

'Empathic Civilization' in an Age of Trauma

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 05.25.2011 | Books
Read More: President Obama, Empathic Understanding, Resurrective Ideology, Trauma, Mirror-Neurons, Economic Crisis, Existential Vulnerability, 9/11, Collective Trauma, Loss, Global Terrorism, Death, Jeremy Rifkin, George W. Bush, Arianna's Reading, The Empathic Civilization, Books News
Robert D. Stolorow

If we can help one another bear the darkness rather than evade it, perhaps one day we will be able to see the light.

Read Whole Story

Horrors of the Haiti Earthquake and the Power of Human Understanding

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 05.25.2011 | World
Read More: Collective Trauma, Empathic Understanding, Haiti Earthquake, World News
Robert D. Stolorow

"There is so much to tell, but I hope that this small sample will convey the feelings and needs of the Haitians. In many ways, I feel that our trip was such a small contribution that it barely has meaning."

Read Whole Story

"Radical Evil"

Robert D. Stolorow | Posted 05.25.2011 | Books
Read More: Theodicy, Collective Trauma, 9/11, Atrocities, Morality, Auschwitz, Eichmann, Evil, Destructiveness, Totalitarianism, Nihilism, Books, Books News
Robert D. Stolorow

Richard Bernstein has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil (Bernstein 2002), an inquiry that will be of great value to psychoanalysts.

Read Whole Story