TOPICS AND PRESENTERS
Presenter: Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. Title: THE POETRY OF RECOVERY The hardest challenge for action-oriented people trained in emergency rescue work is to respond to a disaster from which there are no survivors. When rescue becomes recovery, many workers find their internal psychological mechanisms tuned to an unfamiliar frequency, filled with static. They feel urgency, but no staisfaction. They continue to work as professionals, feeling helpless all the while. As recovery proceeds, the burden of helplessness increases. Emotions become confusing and volatile. Small events take on large meaning. A worker calmly and stoically gathering bits of disconnected human body parts can become undone when an intact teddy bear is recovered from the sea. Emotional life at the site of an airline disaster has a language and rhythm of its own. Like poetry, it expresses a great deal with an economy of sound and movement. In order to be effective in this setting, a mental health worker needs to learn to read and interpret the poetry, and respond to its message. Examples will be taken from the 1996 Valuejet and TWA flight 800 airplane crashes.
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