Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses

Charles B. Strozier's college lost sixty-eight alumni in the tragedy of 9/11, and the many courses he has taught on terrorism and related topics since have attracted dozens of survivors and family members. A practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan, Strozier has also accepted many seared by the disaster into his care. In some ways, the grief he has encountered has felt familiar; in other ways, unprecedented. Compelled to investigate its unique character further, he launched a fascinating study into the conscious and unconscious meaning of the event, both for those who were physically close to the attack and for those who witnessed it beyond the immediate space of Ground Zero. Based on the testimony of survivors, bystanders, spectators, and victim's friends and families, Until the Fires Stopped Burning brings much-needed clarity to the conscious and unconscious meaning of 9/11 and its relationship to historical disaster, apocalyptic experience, unnatural death, and the psychological endurance of trauma. Strozier interprets and contextualizes the memories of witnesses and compares their encounter with 9/11 to the devastation of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Katrina, and other events Kai Erikson has called a "new species of trouble" in the world. Organizing his study around "zones of sadness" in New York, Strozier powerfully evokes the multiple places in which his respondents confronted 9/11 while remaining sensitive to the personal, social, and cultural differences of these experiences. Most important, he distinguishes between 9/11 as an apocalyptic event (which he affirms it is not;rather, it is a monumental event), and 9/11 as an apocalyptic experience, which is crucial to understanding the act's affect on American life and a still-evolving culture of fear in the world.

Biographies & Memoirs

Strozier, Charles

Historical

Columbia University Press

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said $17, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. Thus began what would become one of the most important friendships in American history. Speed was Abraham Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of the making of the sixteenth president.

Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history. Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.

"Surpassingly eloquent."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"This is a remarkable book with extraordinary insights about the inner life of Abraham Lincoln. It will be read and studied for years to come, for Charles Strozier brings to every chapter the very qualities that Lincoln himself possessed—empathy, wisdom, balance, and creativity."—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Author of No Ordinary Time
"When Lincoln's Quest for Union was first published, it was immediately recognized as the best-informed and most perceptive analysis of Lincoln's inner life. This new edition, extensively revised and expanded, is even more rewarding. This is a basic book in the Lincoln canon—a work of great intelligence, written with sensitivity and literary grace. I cannot recommend it highly enough."—Prof. David Herbert Donald, Author of Lincoln
"Provocative and persuasive when it originally appeared in 1982, this new edition is even better. Strozier incorporates recent scholarship, fortifies his arguments, answers his critics, and offers a compelling psychological portrait of our most admired and enigmatic president."—Cullom Davis, University of Illinois at Springfield
"Eighteen years after it first appeared, Lincoln's Quest for Union still does what only the very best books about Lincoln do: It makes us think afresh about how so great a man could have grown from such meager beginnings."—from Geoffrey Ward's Foreword
In Lincoln's Quest for Union, Charles Strozier gives the most probing account available of Lincoln's inner life—from the time he was a young man in Illinois, just finding himself, through his ascent to the presidency when he guided the nation and articulated for the country the meaning of the Civil War. With the probity of an open-minded historian and the skills of a trained therapist (he is both), Strozier examines Lincoln's relationships to women: his mother, stepmother, two young loves, and Mary Todd. He also considers Lincoln's feelings toward his father and male friends and colleagues.
For this revised edition, Professor Strozier has incorporated new sources—most important, the writings of William Herndon, Lincoln's long-time law partner—to update and expand his psychological portrait of our 16th president.
Charles B. Strozier, a historian and practicing psychoanalyst, is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and faculty and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at TRISP in New York. Strozier is the author of Until The Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses; Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst; and Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America, among other books. His forthcoming book is Young Man Lincoln: Joshua Speed and the Crucible of Greatness.

Lincoln's Quest for Union

Strozier, Charles B.

Paul Dry Books

Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) stood at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the most creative figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is now remembered as the founder of 'self psychology' whose emphasis on empathy sought to make Freudian psychoanalysis less neutral. Kohut's life invited complexity. He obfuscated his identity as a Jew, negotiated a protean sexuality, and could be surprisingly secretive about his health and other matters. In this biography, Charles Strozier shows Kohut as a paradigmatic figure in American intellectual life: a charismatic man whose ideas embodied the hope and confusions of a country still in turmoil. Inherent in his life and formulated in his work were the core issues of modern America. The years after World War II were the halcyon days of American psychoanalysis, which thrived as one analyst after another expanded upon Freud's insights. The gradual erosion of the discipline's humanism, however, began to trouble clinicians and patients alike. Heinz Kohut took the lead in the creation of the first authentically home-grown psychoanalytic movement. It took an emigre be so distinctly American. Strozier brings to his telling of Kohut's life all the tools of a skillful analyst: intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface.

Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Professionals & Academics

Other Press

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Books by Strozier, Charles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Strozier, Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses

Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses

Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses

Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

Lincoln's Quest for Union

Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst