Working in the Shadow of the Election: The Day After At Work in the Aftermath of the Trump Victory: Editors’ Introduction

In a recent op ed piece in the New York Times, Neil Gross (2016) noted that the aftermath of Trump’s election exhibits all the telltale signs of “collective trauma” (at least for his adversaries). Paraphrasing Emile Durkheim, the early 20th-century French sociologist and one of the principal architects of modern social science, Gross wrote, “norms, values and rituals [are] the linchpins of social order; they [provide] the basis for solidarity and social cohesion. Collective trauma occurs when an unexpected event severs the ties that bind community members to one another” (para. 5).

He went on to show how the Trump campaign and victory both reflect and contribute to just such a phenomenon. On one hand, there is the collective trauma of those whose communities have been hollowed out by the decline of the manufacturing jobs on which they had relied, who believed that Trump would restore the world order that they lost. On the other hand, Gross (2016) argued,

For progressives, moderates and “Never Trump” Republicans, the political order they long took for granted—defined by polarization, yes, but also by a commitment to basic principles of democracy and decency—is suddenly gone. … Mr. Trump’s victory signals that that world, with the assurances it offered that there were some lines those seeking power wouldn’t cross (or that the American electorate wouldn’t let them cross), is no longer. Rightly or wrongly, memories have been activated of historical traumas linked with anti-democratic politics, such as the emergence of fascism in interwar Europe and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. (paras. 11–12)

Perhaps, we might add, these voters have now come to feel something of what others, like many of the Trump supporters along with people of color and others for whom the American dream has long been a disappointment, have felt for a long time.

Many of us have been experiencing the effects of this collective trauma, living and working in states of distress, disbelief, fear, shock, and despair, even as we attempt to help our patients cope with the effects of the collective trauma that we now share on their personal efforts to use therapy to cope, to change, and to grow. We have seen and felt, as well, in our daily work, the activation, reactivation, and intensification of the personal traumas that shape our patients’ and our own unique personal responses to the threat to our personal and national identity that we find ourselves facing.

This seems unprecedented in our experience as therapists. Those of us who were working in New York City as therapists during the time of the 9/11 attack in 2001 have felt some echoes of a time in which we coped with a collective trauma alongside our patients. But for many of us, the current situation has felt even more disorienting and threatening. After the 9/11 attack, there was a sense that the country had pulled together in solidarity, with the support of much of the world. We believed that we could survive that trauma with the reassurances of pulling together. Now, we find ourselves feeling that the country, many of our families, and the broader world seems to be pulling apart at the seams, as we find ourselves coping—along with our patients—with what for many of us is an unprecedented sense of external disorder and internal disorientation.

With this in mind, we invited members of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues editorial group to write brief reports on their work with patients in the days following the election in November. These vignettes raise issues about the boundaries of psychoanalytic technique and the analytic relationship at times of shared uncertainty and vulnerability, something that has been familiar to our international colleagues for some time but from which North American analysts have been mostly protected—at least when we are White and working in our private offices. We also hope that this journal can be an island of support for those of us who are troubled and bewildered in the present moment, both as citizens and as therapists. We will be publishing several more such vignettes and reflections in our next issue, and we invite you to comment on the following vignettes or to send along some of your own for posting on our own Psychoanalytic Dialogues blog.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contributors to this section are members of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues editorial group or are affiliated with other psychoanalytic organizations.