This book investigates the September 11, 2001 attacks as a case study of cultural trauma, as well as how the use of widely-distributed, easily-accessible forms of popular culture can similarly focalize evaluation of other moments of acute and profoundly troubling historical change. The attacks confounded the traditionally dominant narrative of the American Dream, which has persistently and pervasively featured optimism and belief in a just world that affirms and rewards self-determination. This shattering of a worldview fundamental to mainstream experience and cultural understanding in the United States has manifested as a cultural trauma throughout popular culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Popular press oral histories, literary fiction, television, and film are among the multiple, ubiquitous sites evidencing preoccupations with existential crisis, vulnerability, and moral ambivalence, with fate, no-win scenarios, and anti-heroes now pervading commonly-told and readily-accessible stories. Christine Muller examines how popular culture affords sites for culturally-traumatic events to manifest and how readers, viewers, and other audiences negotiate their fallout.

Hans Juergen Wirth, a leading German psychoanalyst and editor of the journal Psychosozial, brings cultural breadth, historical perspective, and analytic astuteness to bear in considering the "collective trauma" of 9/11. His meditation, which brings into its compass the psychic structure of suicide bombers and the psycho-political causes and consequences of the Iraq war, is especially insightful in considering the psychological meaning of 9/11 for the world outside the U.S. In complementary forays into psyche and politics, Wirth explores the relationship of xenophobia and violence; the story of Jewish analysts who emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States; the idea of man in psychoanalysis; and the family dynamics that sustain the AIDS phobia. These wonderfully illuminating essays, both cautionary and constructive, show how clinical experience with the unconscious processes of violence, traumatization, and destructiveness can be foundational to new political strategies for dealing with collective violence.

Hans Juergen Wirth, a leading German psychoanalyst and editor of the journal Psychosozial, brings cultural breadth, historical perspective, and analytic astuteness to bear in considering the "collective trauma" of 9/11. His meditation, which brings into its compass the psychic structure of suicide bombers and the psycho-political causes and consequences of the Iraq war, is especially insightful in considering the psychological meaning of 9/11 for the world outside the U.S. In complementary forays into psyche and politics, Wirth explores the relationship of xenophobia and violence; the story of Jewish analysts who emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States; the idea of man in psychoanalysis; and the family dynamics that sustain the AIDS phobia. These wonderfully illuminating essays, both cautionary and constructive, show how clinical experience with the unconscious processes of violence, traumatization, and destructiveness can be foundational to new political strategies for dealing with collective violence.

While current literature stresses the importance of teaching about the 9/11 attacks on the US, many questions remain as to what teachers are actually teaching in their own classrooms. Few studies address how teachers are using of all of this advice and curriculum, what sorts of activities they are undertaking, and how they go about deciding what they will do. Arguing that the events of 9/11 have become a "chosen trauma" for the US, author Cheryl Duckworth investigates how 9/11 is being taught in classrooms (if at all) and what narrative is being passed on to today’s students about that day. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered from US middle and high school teachers, this volume reflects on foreign policy developments and trends since September 11th, 2001 and analyzes what this might suggest for future trends in U.S. foreign policy. The understanding that the "post-9/11 generation" has of what happened and what it means is significant to how Americans will view foreign policy in the coming decades (especially in the Islamic World) and whether it is likely to generate war or foster peace.

The Impact of 9-11 on Psychology and Education is the fifth volume of the six-volume series The Day that Changed Everything? edited by Matthew J. Morgan. It features forewords by Robert Sternberg and Philip Zimbardo.

In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

Collective Trauma, Collective Healing is a guide for mental health professionals working in response to large-scale political violence or natural disaster. It provides a framework that practitioners can use to develop their own community-based, collective approach to treating trauma and providing clinical services that are both culturally and contextually appropriate. The classic edition includes a new preface from the author reflecting on changes to the field and the world since the book’s initial publication. The book draws on experience working with survivors, their families, and communities in the Holocaust, post-war Kosovo, the Liberian civil wars, and post-9/11 Lower Manhattan. It tracks the development of community programs and projects based on a family and community resilience approach, including those that enhance the collective capacities for narration and public conversation. Clinicians and community practitioners will come away from Collective Trauma, Collective Healing with a solid understanding of new roles they may play in disasters—roles that encourage them to recognize and enhance the resilience and coping skills in families, organizations, and the community at large.