Person, Culture & Religion Group

The post-9/11 age of anxiety is characterized by no shortage of pressing concerns that will demand our and our children’s and their children’s undivided attention for years to come. For example, the assumption that we are immune to acts of terrorism, that terrorism occurs anywhere and everywhere but the United States, no longer holds true. Before, we could see acts of terrorism reported on the evening news, but these violent actions were always far removed, geographically “over there” in some distant part of the world. Now, we are all too aware that acts of terrorism can be perpetrated anywhere and at anytime, even in America on a gloriously beautiful September morning. Nor is there any ambiguity when it comes to the reality of global warming. Credible scientists, in a virtual spirit of unanimity, are warning that the earth has surpassed the point of no return, that we must begin preparing ourselves for the effects of long-term atmospheric change. However, as we have seen, this is easier said than done; our thirst for and dependency on oil keeps us from developing alternative energy sources. The irony is that by some estimates we have already “peaked” in terms of worldwide oil discovery and production, and are therefore on the down slope, facing the beginning of the end of oil (Maass, “The Breaking Point”). And, issues having to do with the new immigration and multiculturalism confound and divide us. Many of us wonder if and how the new wave of ethnically and culturally diverse groups of people can be assimilated into the mainstream of American society, particularly when some or perhaps many do not appear very motivated to do so.

All of this, of course, is without even factoring in what is the most pressing issue for many at the moment, namely, the changing landscape of American economics and employment. There has been emerging, for some time now, a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, manifested in the steady decline of the American middle class. As more and more jobs are being outsourced to other parts of the world, there is a sense that American life as we have known it is now a thing of the past. The issue of the economy, to be sure, has single-handedly altered the trajectory of the 2008 United States presidential election. Even white Americans who had reservations about voting for an African American candidate for president have been rethinking their initial assessment of Barack Obama. As the numbers on Wall Street shift erratically and wildly from day to day, in certain cases hour by hour or even minute by minute, there is a growing sense that the candidate who will lead this nation must fundamentally understand that the United States economy is not, at the moment, on solid ground. As reported recently in the Agence France-Presse, “U.S. seniors are having to put off their golden years of retirement as the global economic slump affects their savings and pensions and the cost of living climbs.” According to Deborah Russel, director of workforce issues for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP),

Not only those who are close to retirement are looking at their 401 K (pension fund) and recognizing that they simply don't have enough money to retire, but also those who are retired, are looking at their portfolios and recognizing that, in fact, they may have to go back to work (Montet, Economic Slump Delays Ride Into Retirement Sunset for U.S. Seniors”).

The anxiety that we feel is compounded daily or in some cases hourly by skilled fear entrepreneurs and neuromarketers who know how to push our buttons. We are bombarded by news of real and imagined crises that keep us constantly on edge. Our psychological and spiritual capacities are saturated by the onslaught of “breaking news.” When I was a young child this only occurred once in a while: “We interrupt this television program to bring you a special report.” Now it is unrelenting: “Breaking News,” “This Just In,” “News Alert,” and so on depending on the cable news network. When this is combined by the savviness of skilled neuromarketers, who know how to keep us on edge by eliciting the startle reflex in the brain, we are left in a state of high anxiety. Neuromarketing is designed to “manipulate viewers’ attention mechanism and ‘downshift’ the brain, that is, activate the emotional midbrain and the instinctive reactive centers” (Schor, 111). To be sure, vast sums of money are paid to neuroscience consultants, who study how to keep us glued to cable news, talk radio, the Internet, and computer blog sites. There is a double-edgedness to being informed and keeping up with the latest news:

On the one hand, people crave understanding and explanations for the things that have happened to us. They also want to know what might be coming next so they can plan their activities accordingly. Information in times of crisis is essential to the development of understanding. On the other hand, most people can readily assimilate only so much information. And much of the information presented is redundant and not of much real use in helping to make sense out of the many facets of the events with which we are struggling. Thus although some level of exposure to the news regarding terrorist attacks and other crises seems essential in facilitating coping, overexposure to the news can actually overwhelm the individual’s ability to cope and can lead to exaggerated feelings of fear and hopelessness (In the Wake of 9/11, 136).

Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent, points out “that many people believe they live in frightening times because other people want them to feel that way.” This would most certainly apply to the nighttime cable news channels, who stay in business to the extent they can get us to buy into the premise that the times in which we live are uniquely dangerous and frightening. The better to keep members of the viewing audience on the edge of their seats and therefore glued to the television set where each evening they get a full and complete recap of clear and present dangers as well as potential dangers that happen to be lurking on the horizon. Thus, one of the reasons we are so anxious and fearful is because of the “fear entrepreneurs” who sell us their product through scare tactics. “Politicians, the media, businesses, environmental organizations, public health officials and advocacy groups are continually warning us about something new to fear….The activities of these fear entrepreneurs serve to transform our anxieties about life into tangible fears. Every major event becomes the focus for competing claims about what you need to fear….” Furedi sees an alternative to this climate of anxiety and fear:

The precondition for effectively countering the politics of fear is to challenge the association of personhood with the state of vulnerability. Anxieties about uncertainty become magnified and overwhelm us when we regard ourselves as essentially vulnerable. Yet the human imagination possesses a formidable capacity to engage and learn from the risks it faces. There is always an alternative. Whether or not we are aware of the choices confronting us depends upon whether we regard ourselves as defined by our vulnerability or by our capacity to be resilient (3).

Anxiety and fear are very hot commodities, as illustrated by the preponderance of fear entrepreneurs. We have already identified the media as agents of fear, most notably in the form of nighttime cable television news. There are, however, as Furedi makes clear, other fear entrepreneurs who capitalize on the anxiety and vulnerability of Americans. Take politicians, for example. Since 9/11, the political rhetoric has focused to a large extent on America’s sense of anxiety, vulnerability, and victimization, but in ways that are quite different from those of the past. Americans, it is true, have lived through anxious times before. But what is missing from the political rhetoric, post-9/11, is a sense of hope and resilience. Franklin Roosevelt’s, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” John F. Kennedy’s “Ask what you can do for your country,” and even Ronald Reagan’s reference to America as “a shining city on a hill,” all conveying the spirit of hope and resilience, have given way to a politics of vulnerability and victimization. Americans feel anxious and vulnerable, and supposedly to bolster our confidence we hear our elected officials assuring us that they intend to keep America safe by, for example, stemming the flow of illegal immigration and taking the war to the terrorists in such locations as Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet, the politics of fear do little to make Americans feel more hopeful and less anxious. They are designed to keep political fear entrepreneurs in elected office, pure and simple.

Not that the new wave of anxiety that Americans are experiencing is entirely a figment of imagination. The coordinated terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington, and in the fields of Pennsylvania, was very real, as is the potential for future terrorist attacks on American soil. Moreover, the images and recorded messages from Al-Jazeera, that we see and hear on our televisions and computers, would seem to reinforce the potential for and inevitability of future terrorist acts. It is, in other words, not a matter of if but when. Americans can strive to be brave and resilient in the face of this potential danger, yet at the same time it is quite understandable if we still feel rather anxious and vulnerable. From a sociological standpoint, maybe we can define the choice as one or the other, as either-or: either we regard ourselves as defined by our vulnerability or by our capacity to be resilient. But, if we view the present situation through other lenses, say, psychological and theological, we begin to see more of the complexities inherent in the human heart and mind. In an age of anxiety, the choice is not simply to regard ourselves as defined by our vulnerability or by our capacity to be resilient. Rather, the more fundamental issue is defining ourselves as genuinely hopeful and resilient, our anxiety and vulnerability notwithstanding.

How do we understand the nature of the new anxiety, which is so central to life in a post-9/11 world? And, how do we distinguish it from a more generalized form of anxiety? For example, the hallmark feature of generalized anxiety is, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), “excessive and uncontrollable worry” (Rygh & Sanderson, 1). Moreover, anxiety that reaches levels of clinical concern is, as Donald Capps has pointed out, “disproportionate to environmental threats” that may or may not occur in the present or in the future. Anxiety, therefore, is anticipatory in nature, an unconsciously preemptive strategy to maintain a semblance of control by, as it were, heading the potential threats off at the pass before they ever occur. At bottom, “anxiety is an anticipatory emotion” that “is felt in anticipation of real or imagined future events” (Capps, 12). To what extent, then, are the two forms of anxiety - generalized anxiety and a post-9/11 form of anxiety - the same or at least similar in nature? To what extent are they different? Both, for example, are anticipatory in nature, intended to head off, preemptively, or at least prepare for an oncoming threat or crisis. The difference between the two, I would argue, has to do with the proportionality or disproportionality of the anxiety to the perceived environmental threats and dangers. Generalized anxiety, on the one hand, is recognized most notably by “the cardinal feature of….apprehensive expectation” (Barlow, 572) or excessive uncontrollable worry that, as Capps suggests, is disproportionate to potential threats and dangers. In contrast, the new anxiety may not be so disproportionate to the possibility of further terrorism, global warming, the beginning of the end of oil, immigration and assimilation, the dangerously widening gap between the economic haves and have-nots, and the vanishing American middle class. Obviously, a great deal of worry or apprehensive expectation characterizes the new anxiety, but it is not necessarily disproportionate to a nation and world that is in a state of tremendous flux and transition as well as economic crisis. The threats and dangers that we are facing as a nation are of an urgent nature, as the fear entrepreneurs are all too happy to remind us of on a daily basis. The fear entrepreneurs notwithstanding, the new anxiety may not be so disproportionate after all, particularly when we contextualize it in a post-9/11 world.

In terms of a therapeutic approach to the new anxiety, I would argue that the treatment of choice, just as with generalized anxiety, is cognitive therapy. With a proven track record, cognitive therapy is the psychosocial treatment that meets “criteria as an empirically supported treatment for (Generalized Anxiety Disorder)” (Rygh & Sanderson, 194). This may take a certain suspension of judgment from those of us who practice out of other therapeutic frameworks. Personally, I am not a cognitive therapist, but rather would situate myself within a psychodynamic and systems framework. One colleague, a psychoanalyst, upon learning of my research, remarked, “Don’t you worry that cognitive therapy won’t do justice to the human person?” I remember thinking to myself that of course I am very much concerned about the depths of human personhood. Another colleague remarked that perhaps I was simply latching on to the therapy du jour, which I found to be rather startling. Therapy du jour? By most estimates cognitive therapy is viewed as one of the major historical revolutions in the field of psychology. It therefore becomes necessary for clinical practitioners, at any time but even more in an age of heightened worry, to pay very close attention to empirical research and findings. We may have, for example, an approach to therapy and counseling that is perfectly fine in theory and in practice with various mental disorders and yet when applied to other disorders is not as effective. Whatever our therapeutic orientation, it should be remembered that for anxiety cognitive therapy is supported by considerable empirical research. This is not to suggest that we all become cognitive therapists. What it does mean is that we give the application of cognitive therapy to the treatment of anxiety our open-minded consideration. Cognitive therapy addresses, apropos to the reality of a post-9/11 world, what an individual believes about the present state of the nation, the future state of the world, the new global economy, and so on. Therefore, the goal in working with the new anxiety would be to get to the core beliefs and, in many cases, the core spiritual and theological beliefs of anxious individuals, all the while remembering that it is not so much life and world events that make people anxious as it is what they believe about these events. Rian McMullin, one of the founders of Cognitive Restructuring Therapy, puts it this way:

Events are not critical because of what happened to clients but rather because of what they concluded about what happened. They may recover from a traumatic event like the death of their grandmother if they conclude that Grandma had a full, rich life and is living with God in heaven. But they may never get over the death of their pet goldfish if they conclude that God shouldn’t let goldfish die since he didn’t create a goldfish heaven for them to go to.

It’s not the strength of the experience that makes the event critical; it’s the brute force of the client’s conclusions. Clients’ deductions about tiny things can be enormous. It’s as if they are walking down one path in life when they trip over a pebble and suddenly turn down a totally different road. These conclusions become life themes that serve as road maps guiding them through life (80-81).

We have, in many ways, awakened to a world that we have not even begun to know how to look at. At the risk of oversimplification, it is reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle: if we had fallen asleep prior to September 11, 2001 and now would just be waking up from a prolonged slumber, we would feel utterly disoriented. What happened? How do we make sense of this strange new world? But, finding our bearings in the present age of anxiety has its own unique set of challenges. There is, as I have been noting, no shortage of crises that we are facing as a nation and as a world. What does it all mean? In many ways we do not know. Some would attribute this to the collapse of meaning brought on by postmodernism. Postmodernists, for some time now, have been hard at work critiquing and deconstructing any and all systems of meaning, including and especially those of a religious and theological nature. The postmodern critique suggests that we can no longer look for absolute truth or grand metanarratives of meaning; truth and the narratives by which we live are deeply infused with personal and institutional and social biases. That said, the British psychoanalyst Stephen Frosh urges caution, lest we become too enamored with this deconstructivist modus operandi: “Postmodernism,” argues Frosh, “as an alternative response to the contradictions of modernism, is too intellectual and too incoherent (and too intellectually incoherent) for everyday practice” (114).

The context for the present age of post-9/11 anxiety is one that does not seem all that conducive to meaning-making. Viewed through a postmodernist lens, the situation reflects the collapse of meaning. Yet, is it really the collapse of meaning that is responsible for exacerbating our anxiety? We only reach this conclusion when we are viewing the situation through a postmodernist lens. Viewed through another lens, however, supermodernity, it is less about the collapse of meaning and more about the rapid acceleration of meaning and the challenge of making sense of the overabundance of crisis events and issues ever before us thanks to the steady barrage of “Breaking News.” Supermodernity is a hermeneutical lens put forward by the French anthropologist, Marc Augé, who points out that

it is the face of a coin whose obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of a negative. From the viewpoint of supermodernity, the difficulty of thinking about time stems from the overabundance of events in the contemporary world, not from the collapse of an idea of progress which - at least in the caricatured forms that make its dismissal so very easy - has been in a bad way for a long time…. (30).

If we look at the contemporary world form the standpoint of supermodernity, the fundamental issue is perhaps diametrically opposite to what we might have expected. It would do us well, therefore, to bracket any assumptions about people being anxious because of the loss of meaning, the loss of modern values, and/or the loss of traditional forms of religious faith. In Augé’s estimation, the new wave of anxiety stems from the bombardment of current events that are too often fleeting in nature. Indeed, they are discussed on cable television and talk radio and blog sites today with considerable urgency, only to give way tomorrow to other “Breaking News” and unsettling crises. This, in turn, leads to the real and/or perceived acceleration and impermanence of human life and history, which makes our attempts at infusing the present with meaning more difficult. The acceleration and impermanence of life, however, is not only a reflection of the barrage of information about national and world events. It also has to do with the context of life in the present, with what Augé describes as the appearance and proliferation of “non-places.” He points out that “the hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places….” It is “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral….” Non-places, Augé goes on to say, are

the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified - with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance - by totaling all the air, rail, and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself (77-79).

The painful paradox is that at a time when we are always connected with friends, family, colleagues, and so forth due to the rapid expansion of cyberspace, at a time when we are consistently “wired,” we are feeling less connected and more disoriented. Surfing the Internet, blogging, emailing, and text messaging have fast become the primary means by which we get our news about the world, not to mention the way we attempt to stay meaningfully connected with one another. However, because of the disembodied nature of cyberspace, spending a significant portion of our lives “surfing the Web can be as much an experience of profound isolation and alienation as one of connection” (Cooper-White, 185).

Contrary to postmodern interpretation, we are not talking about the collapse of meaning, let alone its disappearance. Rather, viewed from the standpoint of supermodernity, the more fundamental issue is attempting to invest an overabundance of national and world events and crises with meaning before we are bombarded the very next day with a whole new set of crises. We do not have time to process the information, let alone make sense of it in any meaningful and lasting way. As Robert Kegan has suggested, and he was noting this phenomenon well before September 11, 2001, we are “in over our heads.” It is difficult to keep up with the present pace of life unless we have a place where we can go to reflect on what we believe about the particular issues germane to the current events and crises. What is most fundamentally exacerbating the new anxiety is the “overinvestment of meaning,” the fact that human life and history have accelerated to such an extent that we have so little time to invest crisis events with any kind of lasting meaning. As Augé writes,

what is new is not that the world lacks meaning, or has little meaning, or less than it used to have; it is that we seem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning: to give meaning to the world, not just some village or lineage. The need to give a meaning to the present, if not the past, is the price we pay for the overabundance of events corresponding to a situation we would call “supermodern” to express its essential quality: excess” (28-29).

The seductive nature of supermodernity or, more precisely, of supermodern non-places, is that we are perpetually connected when in reality we are profoundly disconnected. It is, according to Augé, a world that has surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting and temporary and ephemeral. And yet, the illusion we embrace if not live by is that we are in a state of perpetual connection with one another, permanently tethered to this person and to that event. Life is “meaningful” to the extent we show up to the chance-meeting places or non-places to see, collectively, the parade of current events and the rapid acceleration of information directly before us. The reality, however, observes Augé, is that we are not connected at all, or at least not meaningfully. As the theologian, Paul Tillich, pointed out some years ago, the feeling of alienation goes hand in hand with the feeling of anxiety. Only now, in the age of supermodernity, we are seduced into believing that we are perpetually connected or “wired,” when in reality we feel more isolated and more anxious than ever. Put another way, the paradox of supermodernity is that at a time when we as a people are more connected and better wired than ever before, we are simultaneously more disconnected and alienated and anxious. Our disconnectedness is reflected, not only in the overabundance of information and the acceleration of human life and history, but even more so in the proliferation of non-places that are inherently impersonal and impermanent in nature. The painful irony is that in this present age of anxiety, the places where we seek connection and comfort and even refuge are the very places that reinforce our feeling of solitary individuality. Furthermore, we are left with the sense that we are on our own when it comes to getting our bearings and reorienting ourselves to a world that is very different from what it was even a few years ago.

The paradox of non-places is that we are surrounded by them, immersed in them, and yet they do little for us when it comes to assuaging our anxiety about the present and future state of the world. They are a temporary distraction that offers immediate gratification and a fleeting sense of connection, here this particular moment, gone and barely remembered the next. The accelerated pace of human life, the overabundance of information, the growing tangle of global interdependencies, and our tendency to seek comfort and connection in the context of non-places have the potential for heightening, rather than lessening, our feeling of apprehensiveness about the present and future. Because of the accelerated pace of living, which certainly characterizes supermodernity, there is simply not enough time to get our bearings let alone invest current events with any sort of substantive and lasting meaning. Even if we did have the luxury of more time for reflecting on the urgent matters of the day, the context for doing so at present, i.e., non-places, is simply not conducive to the task of meaning-making.

It is important to note that the post-9/11 age of anxiety, situated fundamentally in the context of supermodernity, the challenge is to find a place where we can be guided in our attempts to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Yet, as we have discovered, the supermodern world makes this difficult and perhaps nearly impossible because of the proliferation of non-places. Like eating cotton candy at a summer fair or carnival, which gives us little more than temporary pleasure and satisfaction, non-places give us temporary comfort and solace. We even seek a certain “refuge” in the non-places of the present, for they do at least feel familiar and they offer us a brief diversion or escape from the complexities of supermodern life. We do our banking at the impersonal ATM machine where we do not have to see anyone or talk to anyone. We do our shopping at what Augé calls the “large retail outlets,” otherwise known as the shopping mall, where again, we do not have to talk to anyone unless of course we need to make a purchase. And, even then, we do not have to say much of anything to the clerk at the cash register, nor does she have to say anything meaningful to us. It is at bottom a business transaction. As it is in the supermarket checkout line, only today we can avoid human interaction altogether by proceeding to the self-checkout to tally our own bill and to settle accounts with a machine. Nor do we have to interact with the talking heads on the television; they inform us what we need to pay attention to in the world of current events, what we need to fear, and, for good measure, what it all means. We can sit back like passive spectators and easily let the purveyors of fear and alarm on the television do our meaning-making for us. In cyberspace, there is the potential for more interaction, but, as we have noted, it is interaction characterized by considerable anonymity and disembodiedness.

Obviously, Augé has Europe in mind as he describes the impact of supermodernity on the human individual. His assessment, however, is also applicable to Western culture in general and to American society in particular. The acceleration of human life, the overabundance of current events, the growing tangle of interdependences in the emerging global world system, and the centrality of non-places can all be seen in a recent New York Times editorial, “Fries With That?:”

Sometimes it’s all too easy to lose perspective in the modern world….The Times reported that McDonald’s has begun experimenting with a new way of routing menu orders at the drive-through window. The voice you hear at the squawk box comes not from an employee inside the restaurant but from a call center hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. The order is then relayed to the front of the very restaurant where you are bodily present and filled as usual. A man who wants a Big N’ Tasty in Wyoming and a woman who wants an Egg McMuffin in Honolulu may be placing their orders with the same teenager in California. Several customers, told of the fact, seemed taken aback.

And yet, where is the surprise? There you sit, perhaps miles from home, idling in a car that was manufactured almost anywhere, burning gasoline refined from a substance pumped out of the ground who knows where and shipped, in all likelihood, across the ocean to be trucked to the station where you last filled up. Meanwhile you’re talking to your best friend on your cell phone - and who knows how that works or where those signals go? - or listening to satellite radio beamed down from space. Yet what’s really on your mind is the food they’re getting together for you inside that McDonald’s, made from cattle that once lived anywhere and potatoes that grew someplace else, all of it relayed from some way station in the McDonald’s supply chain (A-22).

Life, in America, has reached such an accelerated pace that we are often left breathless and bewildered. Such is the state of existence in the context of supermodernity. But that is not all. The current state of bewilderment just so happens to coincide with a new age of anxiety having to do with the pressing issues of terrorism, global warming, the urgent need for alternative fuel sources, immigration, economic disparity, globalization, a growing sense of unpredictability when it comes to employment and retirement, and the outsourcing of American jobs. As Augé points out, life is moving at such an astonishing breakneck pace that we have little time to make sense of it. However, even if we did have the time for more in-depth reflection, it would not be a guarantee that we would put it to good use unless we locate a place for doing so in the midst of the proliferation of non-places. In the past, communities of faith have been the definitive place to which Americans have turned to make sense of anxious times. Now, more and more Americans are classifying themselves as “spiritual,” or, more to the point, “spiritual but not religious.” While there has been a significant decline in religious practice in America during the past several decades, there has been, simultaneously, a deep spiritual hunger on the part of many Americans. The problem is that contemporary spirituality is less and less anchored in any particular religious or theological community, and has therefore become rather amorphous and free-floating, often an undefined phenomenon. Moreover, “spiritual but not religious” connotes a solipsistic approach to meaning-making that is removed from the relational, historical, and collective-identity dimensions of spiritual formation. The irony is that contemporary spirituality becomes something of another non-place where we go to find temporary comfort and refuge. Because so many Americans are resistant to situating their spirituality in the context of religious faith communities, the place for spiritual development and meaning-making becomes, almost by default, the counseling or therapy session. In the context of a therapeutic relationship built on trust and hope, the counselor or mental health practitioner becomes, to some extent, a spiritual guide, ready to assist the client in reflecting on the meaning and purpose of life (Wiggins Frame, 18).

While it is true that formal organized religious practice has been in steady decline for sometime, it is equally true that a deep spiritual hunger and quest to find new forms of meaning pervade American society and the lives of those in our care. But, again, contemporary spirituality, in its myriad individualistic forms, does not always have the capacity to sustain us, particularly at a time when there is no shortage of confusion and disorientation. It becomes yet another non-place, an end in itself that gives us a “fix” of temporary relief from the travails of supermodern life. Without an overt connection to a core faith community, personal spirituality has the potential of muddying the water of meaning-making even further, exacerbating the particular individual’s disorientation. Augé writes that “in Western societies, at least, the individual wants to be a world in himself; he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.” He adds:

Sociologists of religion have revealed the singular character even of Catholic practice: practicing Catholics intend to practice in their own fashion. Similarly, the question of relations between the sexes can be settled only in the name of the undifferentiated value of the individual. Note, though, that this individualization of approaches seems less surprising when it is referred to the analyses outlined above: never before have individual histories been so explicitly affected by collective history, but never before, either, have the reference points for collective identification been so unstable. The individual production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever (37).

Individual meaning-making, however, will not and cannot occur in a solipsistic vacuum or non-place. Rather, the individual production of meaning, more necessary than ever, requires the context of a relational “place.” In the past, the relational and historical place of choice for so many Americans was organized religion, where issues of ultimate meaning and collective and individual identity could be addressed intentionally and ongoingly. But now, with the decline in religious practice, we are left with a void that makes meaning-making a more challenging and urgent matter. As Augé points out, even religious believers who remain connected to a particular faith tradition do so in a way that is highly individualistic and singular in character. Even the spirituality of religious believers, who embrace a core faith tradition, can become, paradoxically, something of another non-place. Whether organized religion can transform itself and become, once again, the definitive place for meaning-making remains to be seen. In the meantime, because of the relational nature of the work, therapy and counseling are poised to pick up the slack and fill some of the void left from the decline of religious practice. This does assume a willingness on the part of practitioners to think outside the box of conventional psychotherapeutic paradigms, which have tended to leave discussions of ultimate meaning, including and especially those having to do with God, to the priest or rabbi or minister. Obviously, this is not a new idea for pastoral psychotherapists. That said, it is important to remember that even still “clinical treatment programs typically do little to prepare their students for professional roles with people who vary widely in their spiritual and religious backgrounds, an oversight that has been pointed out for decades (Integrating Spirituality Into Treatment, 254). As Mark Gerig points out, from his own clinical training,

I was serving as co-therapist in an internship setting. My supervisors were sitting behind the one-way mirror doing live supervision. I was gathering information in an intake session with a family who was presenting with an adolescent boy described as being “out of control.” The mother had just finished commenting on how God and her church have been important sources of support for her when the telephone rang. At the other end was the familiar voice of my supervisor saying,“Get your client off of the God-thing….he is much too big for our counseling room” (83).

In the post-9/11 age of supermodernity, therapy and counseling have a unique opportunity to offer more to clients than they have ever offered before. Put another way, in the context of a new age of anxiety, compounded by the reality of supermodernity, helping our clients with the task of finding meaning, purpose, and something to ground their lives in is not optional. Many Americans are feeling particularly anxious about the present and future state of the nation and the world, and, at the same time, they feel as if they are on their own to make sense of the myriad dramatic changes they read about in the newspaper or on the Internet or hear about nightly on cable television news. The feeling of being on our own to find our way through this time of great change and transition is in keeping with the nature of supermodernity, which, as Augé suggests, subjects “the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked with the appearance and proliferation of non-places.” Indeed, our preference for and dependency on non-places to give us at least a temporary feeling of comfort, refuge, and familiarity creates, as it were, a “solitary contractuality.” As Augé sees it,

alone, but one of many, the user of a non-place is in contractual relations with it (or with the powers that govern it). He is reminded, when necessary, that the contract exists. One element in this is the way the non-place is to be used: the ticket he has bought, the card he will have to show at the tollbooth, even the trolley he trundles round the supermarket, are all more or less clear signs of it. The contract always relates to the individual identity of the contracting party (93, 94, & 101).

It is important to keep in mind that we are not simply talking about, as Augé points out, “a postmodern form of alienation” from the familiar grand narratives and traditions of the past. On the contrary, “the world of supermodernity does not exactly match the one in which we believe we live, for we live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at.” (35 & 118). The application of a supermodern lens suggests that the fundamental issue is not so much the loss or even the collapse of meaning, as postmodernism would have it. Rather, the core issue is trying to find meaning in the overabundance of daily events that are literally here today and gone tomorrow, having given way to a host of other events and information and commentary by the following morning. But, because of the ordeals of solitude lived out in the context of non-places, our attempts at making sense of the dramatic changes to our nation and world, of finding and making meaning, will be highly individualistic in nature. We are, in many ways, on our own in terms of navigating the world that we are only beginning to learn how to look at. To be sure, it is not simply the overabundance of world and national events that makes meaning-making so difficult. The proliferation of non-places, which seductively offer us temporary relief and refuge from our worries and cares, makes finding a Winnicottian and therefore relational holding environment, where we can intentionally explore issues of belief and meaning and purpose, even more challenging.

The new anxiety, then, has less to do with any collapse or lack of meaning and more to do with finding the requisite time and place needed for reorienting ourselves to the new world that has thrust itself upon us. Nor will our fascination and preoccupation with non-places bring us any sense of lasting peace and comfort, for non-places, as we have seen, have to do with “solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation (all it takes is a notice or a screen) between the individual and the public authority….What is significant in the experience of non-place is its power of attraction, inversely proportional to territorial attraction, to the gravitational pull of place and tradition. This is obvious in different ways in the weekend and holiday stampedes along the motorways, the difficulty experienced by traffic controllers in coping with jammed air routes, the success of the latest forms of retail distribution.” At the moment, there is simply little time and not enough meaningful collective space for reorientating ourselves to the dizzying supermodern world. All of which, according to Augé, comes at a rather steep price:

A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver. Perhaps he is still weighed down by the previous day’s worries, the next day’s concerns; but he is distanced from them temporarily by the environment of the moment. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself with more or less talent or conviction, he tastes for a while - like anyone who is possessed – the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.

What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others. The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude (103 & 118).

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