The Psychology of Unity After Tragedy

Instead of portraying the conflict of emotions inherent in all human relationships, such movies restrict love, compassion and generosity to their heroes    and paint their villains with a broad black brush. By cheering on the good guys, we (the audience) identify with their goodness, believing our emotional    support proves that we are good people, too. The appeal of such films is obvious; they often succeed in evoking the predictable teary-eyed response even    when we know we’re being manipulated. We often want to be manipulated.

In times of fear and stress, we welcome the kind of speeches delivered by Presidents Bush and Obama because we find them comforting, even if we might    consider them sentimental under less traumatic conditions. Today, when the surviving terrorist-brother has only just been apprehended, when families are    still grieving for those who died or were injured by the Boston Marathon bombings, most of us accept            Secretary of State Kerrey’s view  that these events constitute “a pretty direct confrontation with evil.” We tend to forget the irritations and resentments that might have preoccupied us    just last week, feeling solidarity with our fellow Americans. At least for now, it’s us-versus-them.

Of course, we’re not as uniformly good as we like to feel; the Tsarnaev brothers, though undoubtedly dangerous, will probably turn out to be confused young    men escaping alienation, shame and a sense of inferiority via    identification with a politically violent cause. This conviction of our own goodness is not hypocrisy, however; the unity we presently feel doesn’t    represent a kind of self-deception. Splitting under these horrific conditions allows us to weather the immediate trauma. Not all psychological defense    mechanisms are pathological. Sometimes they’re simply necessary to cope with overwhelming pain.

In a month or two once the fear has abated, most of us will relinquish splitting. We’ll abandon black-and-white and return to the land of gray. The emotional sense of unity will inevitably abate and instead of hating those evil terrorists, we’ll go back to bickering.

Article Appeared @http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/the-psychology-of-unity-after-tragedy/275158/

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