Creative Performances: Horror and Human Destructiveness in Psychoanalytic Writing

This essay brings together the work of two analysts writing about the performative dynamics of terrorism, while staging a creative act of their own. To illustrate the psychoanalyst’s writing process as a creative performance, I examine Shatan’s (1989) “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and Chassay’s (2006) “Death in the Afternoon,” both addressing unassimilable loss, psychical annihilation, and massive destruction. Beyond exploring these topics, these articles call for a witness to bear the dread that they represent. At a deeper level, Shatan’s and Chassay’s writing is also an act of working through their own experiences as bearers of atrocities. To conclude, I propose that immersing readers in the raw imagery of analysts’ suffering carries healing potential, yet it puts the analyst at risk of being silenced by the repudiation of the image that she is unveiling.