ABSTRACT
Even now, as I look back, I find I am not ready in a personal way to write about what happened to me and to people I know. And yet I feel that, as a psychoanalyst who writes about trauma and the manifold human responses to it, I should have something to say. This battle, in myself, goes on without resolution. I could say, by way of excusing myself for not going more fully into the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, that life must go on, that we must resume the endeavors that were so horrifyingly interrupted, in my case writing about trauma. I do not know if this reasoning will satisfy you-or even me. It would be closer to the truth to say that, as I have worked and reworked this chapter, my
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memories and my felt indecision about what I should do kept returning and echoing along the tracks of my sentences as I reviewed them. The best I can hope for is that what I have to say here will cast some light on what I and many others felt that day and on our inability to come to any final feeling of resolution. Let me begin with a memory from my childhood that can perhaps be read as allegorical, a memory that emerged while I was in the throes of struggling with these feelings as I attempted to write.
