The Collective Trauma of 9/11 (and its connection to personal trauma)
In the past few weeks I've come to the conclusion that we (I mean the generation born in the late 80s until now) live in a world with a collective trauma. We live in a post-9/11 world. This is something that comes up now and again, but for me personally it seems that the impact of the Twin Tower's going down has far reaching personal consequences for everyone in our generation. Even when most people do not realise.
The idea of collective trauma is not new by any means. The trauma's generated by the Great depression in the English speaking world, the trauma of the World Wars, the trauma of colonisation are all valid and far reaching traumas that are still being dealt with, some more and some less as time marches on. However, the trauma of 9/11 and its repercussions is one that has been coming up more and more in recent years in all my research into film and imagery in society. The questions being asked of our generation and the next are all somehow tied to this loss that most of us did not consciously experience. The economic downturn in 2008 is linked to this, which is having a large impact on how the world has been shaped. We do not know a world in which American troops are not in the Middle East keeping the so-called 'peace'. I might be looking too much towards the Western world in this, as many other parts of the world have a different experience of this trauma. For large parts of the Middle East the trauma isn't the attacks themselves, but the repercussions thereof, in the Iraq war and all it's consequences. I do not know enough about the world to accurately describe how far the trauma of the Twin Towers reaches.
My personal trauma regarding 9/11 is something I keep rediscovering, after not thinking about it for a while. Every year, September 11th sneaks up on me to hit me in the stomach and makes me feel ill. And sometimes, like recently in one of the lectures of 'Making Time' it bubbles up again. The topic of the lecture was art, geology and personal perceptions of time. It was delivered by Ilana Halperin and Prof Andrew Patrizio. Towards the end of the lecture, Ilana talked about the upcoming exhibition called 'Minerals of New York'. My first thought after hearing those words was the rubble from the devastation left behind after the collapse of the towers. The actual work has nothing to do with this; I asked Ilana afterwards and she had not thought about it much, since she was mostly talking about her own time in New York as a child growing up there.
Dana Rose Garfin talks about how influential 9/11 still is on our generation, especially for those who didn't really know the world before the 2001. "The events of 9/11 ushered in a new era of media coverage of collective trauma, where terrorism and other forms of large-scale violence are transmitted into the daily lives of children and Americans families." The constant images of the attack on TV and in other media outlets did not allow anyone to get away from the trauma. And the stress that came with constantly being reminded lead to higher anxiety levels within the children who grew up after 9/11.
The whole idea of millennials being 'soft' and not being able to take anything has a lot of grounding in the fact that we, as a whole generation, have experience life altering trauma at a far too early age. How does a brain cope with the stress when it's still being formed? It creates paths for the stress to flow through. Our brains have absorbed the trauma, and our personal traumas are just heaping on top of the initial trauma of 9/11.
The idea of collective trauma is not new by any means. The trauma's generated by the Great depression in the English speaking world, the trauma of the World Wars, the trauma of colonisation are all valid and far reaching traumas that are still being dealt with, some more and some less as time marches on. However, the trauma of 9/11 and its repercussions is one that has been coming up more and more in recent years in all my research into film and imagery in society. The questions being asked of our generation and the next are all somehow tied to this loss that most of us did not consciously experience. The economic downturn in 2008 is linked to this, which is having a large impact on how the world has been shaped. We do not know a world in which American troops are not in the Middle East keeping the so-called 'peace'. I might be looking too much towards the Western world in this, as many other parts of the world have a different experience of this trauma. For large parts of the Middle East the trauma isn't the attacks themselves, but the repercussions thereof, in the Iraq war and all it's consequences. I do not know enough about the world to accurately describe how far the trauma of the Twin Towers reaches.
My personal trauma regarding 9/11 is something I keep rediscovering, after not thinking about it for a while. Every year, September 11th sneaks up on me to hit me in the stomach and makes me feel ill. And sometimes, like recently in one of the lectures of 'Making Time' it bubbles up again. The topic of the lecture was art, geology and personal perceptions of time. It was delivered by Ilana Halperin and Prof Andrew Patrizio. Towards the end of the lecture, Ilana talked about the upcoming exhibition called 'Minerals of New York'. My first thought after hearing those words was the rubble from the devastation left behind after the collapse of the towers. The actual work has nothing to do with this; I asked Ilana afterwards and she had not thought about it much, since she was mostly talking about her own time in New York as a child growing up there.
Dana Rose Garfin talks about how influential 9/11 still is on our generation, especially for those who didn't really know the world before the 2001. "The events of 9/11 ushered in a new era of media coverage of collective trauma, where terrorism and other forms of large-scale violence are transmitted into the daily lives of children and Americans families." The constant images of the attack on TV and in other media outlets did not allow anyone to get away from the trauma. And the stress that came with constantly being reminded lead to higher anxiety levels within the children who grew up after 9/11.
The whole idea of millennials being 'soft' and not being able to take anything has a lot of grounding in the fact that we, as a whole generation, have experience life altering trauma at a far too early age. How does a brain cope with the stress when it's still being formed? It creates paths for the stress to flow through. Our brains have absorbed the trauma, and our personal traumas are just heaping on top of the initial trauma of 9/11.
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